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Marcia Langton
Melbourne’s historic native title claim

The Statewide Treaty with the First Peoples of Victoria is law. The truth of colonisation has been revealed. The Yoorrook Justice Commission has amassed a library of documents, witness statements and submissions about the impact of colonisation on Victoria’s First Peoples. Now the Wurundjeri people, Traditional Owners of the land on which Australia’s second-largest city stands, have embarked on the nation’s most ambitious urban native title claim, seeking recognition of their enduring connection to 10,420 square kilometres of Country that stretches from the Werribee River’s western banks to the alpine reaches of Mount Baw Baw.

The case unfolds against the backdrop of Victoria’s historic Treaty negotiations. As the governor prepares to sign into law the state’s first Treaty, the Wurundjeri are pursuing a parallel course through the Federal Court. This dual-track strategy speaks to both pragmatic calculation and deeper frustrations with the limitations of state-based processes.

While Treaty talks offer negotiated settlements and ongoing relationships, native title provides the fundamental bedrock of legal recognition: an acknowledgement in Australian law of what has always been true in Indigenous law. Rather than viewing Treaty and native title as competing pathways, the Wurundjeri demonstrate how these mechanisms can work in tandem to strengthen Indigenous legal positions and create multiple avenues for rights recognition.

Rivers are at the heart of this claim and represent something more profound than mere territorial assertion. This is about their relationship with their land and waters. The Wurundjeri seek not simply recognition of their connection to land but, crucially, their rights to the waterways that flow through the very soul of their cultural identity. This is the real meaning of sovereignty in the Indigenous world. The Yarra River, known in Woi Wurrung language as Birrarung, and the Maribyrnong River represent far more than geographical features; they are the arteries through which cultural knowledge, spiritual practice and ecological wisdom have flowed for millennia.

The Wurundjeri claim significantly overlaps with existing native title applications by the Boonwurrung people, creating the potential for two Indigenous groups to find themselves in legal opposition – a bitter irony that both communities are determined to avoid. This assertion of ancient rights is a challenge that illustrates the complex legacy of colonial disruption and calls for both traditional and modern laws to resolve.

The territorial complexity stems directly from one of colonisation’s most insidious legacies – the historical policies that systematically displaced Aboriginal people from their traditional lands, scattering communities and disturbing the intricate systems of law and custom that had governed territorial boundaries for thousands of years. The challenge now facing both the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples is to reconstruct these relationships within the constraints of a legal system that demands clear boundaries and exclusive rights.

Should they succeed in their claim, the recognition of their rights will be limited, even while the possibilities for their future are more visionary. The claim has already achieved something significant, however: it has forced a reckoning with the foundations of colonial settlement and the persistence of Indigenous law in Australia’s urban heartland.

For property owners across Melbourne, who might view this claim with alarm, it is crucial to understand both what native title can and cannot achieve. The Native Title Act 1993 established clear parameters: where freehold title exists, native title is extinguished. This fundamental principle means private property remains untouched by native title recognition.

Instead, the Wurundjeri claim targets the substantial areas of public land that thread through Melbourne’s urban fabric. This means parks and reserves, vacant Crown land and the waterways that remain under government control. Success in this claim would not grant the Wurundjeri ownership in any conventional sense but rather recognition of their continuing rights and interests in these spaces. Similar claims have been made successfully in Adelaide and Perth.

The Wurundjeri claim’s environmental dimensions carry particular urgency in the context of climate change and ecological degradation. The research by Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung elder Uncle Dave Wandin and Professor Michael-Shawn Fletcher, a Wiradjuri paleoecologist, at Bolin Bolin Billabong provides compelling evidence of the environmental consequences of removing Aboriginal land management. Their sediment core analysis reveals a stark contrast between healthy brown earth from the Aboriginal management period and black, polluted sediment from postcolonial times.

The implications for the people and fragments of natural environments in Melbourne are enormous. Before the British invaded the area now called Victoria, the streams and billabongs were the waypoints for the masses of short-finned eels migrating from the Coral Sea in the far north to their southern breeding grounds. The eels became a food source over thousands of years, harvested seasonally, and farmed in channels and ponds.

The Bolin Bolin Billabong, in what is now known as Heidelberg, was a significant ceremonial gathering place that could support 300 to 500 people who fished for the eels by burning reeds to create warm shallows.

Fletcher has studied the deep strata under many landscapes, uncovering evidence of the removal of Aboriginal land management after colonisation, leading to megafires and radically altered ecosystems, less diverse and less healthy, and the loss of native flora and fauna. His concerns were vindicated when the royal commission established after the devastating Black Summer of 2019-20 recommended further research and the implementation of collaboration between Indigenous knowledge and science. This has led to Fletcher becoming a global figure in understanding the impact of colonisation on Indigenous management regimes and their environments.

The practical implications of the recognition of Traditional Owner rights to care for Country could be transformative. The Wurundjeri would gain significant influence over land and water use decisions across Melbourne’s green spaces, ensuring that development and management decisions incorporate Indigenous knowledge and respect cultural values. They would have enhanced capacity to protect sites of cultural significance that might otherwise be vulnerable to development or inappropriate use.

Recognition would enable the Wurundjeri to contribute their traditional ecological knowledge to contemporary environmental challenges. Their expertise in traditional fire management could prove invaluable in protecting the Dandenong Ranges from catastrophic bushfires, for instance, while their understanding of river systems could inform sustainable water management across the catchment.

The evidentiary requirements for native title recognition demand proof of historical connection and demonstration of the continuity of law and custom despite the disruptions of colonisation. For the Wurundjeri, this means weaving together oral histories, anthropological evidence and historical records to construct a narrative that satisfies the exacting standards of Australian courts while remaining true to Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

This claim signals a broader strategic shift among Victorian Traditional Owner groups. By pursuing native title recognition before entering individual treaty negotiations, these communities are consolidating their legal positions and establishing clear foundations for future negotiations with the government.

Increasing scepticism about the adequacy of state-based alternatives has led the Wurundjeri to finally use the federal native title processes, more than 30 years after native title was legislated. While treaty negotiations offer the promise of negotiated outcomes and ongoing relationships, they cannot provide the fundamental legal recognition that native title represents.

The Wurundjeri still face the diplomatic challenge of negotiating boundary agreements with neighbouring groups, including the Dja Dja Wurrung, Taungurung and Gunai-Kurnai peoples. The success of these negotiations may well determine whether Melbourne’s native title claim becomes a precedent for collaborative Indigenous assertion of rights or a cautionary tale about the dangers of legal fragmentation.

Each successful claim strengthens the legal and political foundation for others, creating momentum that could fundamentally reshape the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Australian state.

The Yoorrook Justice Commission’s documentation of colonisation’s impact provides crucial evidentiary support for both treaty negotiations and native title claims. This convergence of truth-telling, treaty-making and native title recognition represents an unprecedented alignment of Indigenous rights mechanisms in Australian history.

Whether this claim succeeds or fails in the courts, it has already succeeded in demonstrating that Indigenous sovereignty and connection to Country persist even in Australia’s most urbanised landscapes. It challenges all Australians to reconsider the foundations upon which our cities are built and the relationships that must be restored for genuine justice to emerge.

The claim’s larger significance lies in the Wurundjeri path to justice, using multiple strategies and working in concert to enjoin native title and treaty rights, law and politics, traditional knowledge and contemporary science. In this convergence, the Wurundjeri offer a model for how Indigenous peoples might navigate the complex terrain of rights recognition in 21st century Australia.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "Claiming native title on Australia’s second-largest city".

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