This portrait by Gordon Bennett (John Citizen) features Eddie Koiki Mabo (1936–92), one of Australia’s most important historical figures. Mabo was a Meriam Mir man from Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait, who, in 1982, along with fellow Meriam men James Rice and Doug Passi, initiated a legal case against the state of Queensland for title over their lands. Mabo was convinced that he owned his family’s traditional land on Mer, only to discover in the mid 1970s that it was annexed by the government in 1879.

In 1992, the High Court found 6 to 1 in favour of Mabo and his co-plaintiffs, overturning the accepted view that Australia had been terra nullius (uninhabited land) before white settlement. The decision lead to the Native Title Act of 1993, and permanently altered the way Australians conceive of Aboriginal land ownership.

For Gordon Bennett, who learned of his Indigenous heritage in his early teens, Eddie Mabo was a person he knew only through news reports. In making this portrait, he used a newspaper image combined with headlines generated by the Mabo case. According to Bennett: ‘To me the image of Eddie Mabo stood like the eye of a storm, calmly asserting his rights while all around him the storm, a war of words and rhetoric, raged.’