8.10 Sarah Addo, QLD Sarah Addo is a Kunggandji Gurrubuna woman and traditional owner of Yarrabah Country in the Cairns area (Kunggandji Gurrabuna People of Kamoi – traditionally known as ‘Geemooiburra People’). She is a Director (Cairns Ward) on the Board of the North Queensland Land Council and a Director and Treasurer of the Wuchopperen Medical Centre. At the time of speaking, Sarah had spent around seven years working on her native title case virtually full-time and had only recently been able to take up paid employment again. Sarah described how her native title journey began when she was asked by her Elders to help contest native title claims over their Country made by other groups. In 2012, after being asked several times, Sarah says she felt a spiritual calling compelling her to respond – to protect Country and defend her people’s rights and responsibilities for Country into the future, for her children and grandchildren. By the start of 2013, Sarah had left her well-paid, full-time administrative job to be able to give more time to the native title case. She took up studies at TAFE and was able to get Abstudy for the next three to four years, during which time she studied and researched the native title case, and somehow still managed to provide for her children. Over close to a decade, Sarah has conducted extensive research, drafted many affidavits and court documents, applied many times (mostly unsuccessfully) for funding for legal representation from the North Queensland Land Council (NQLC), and is still fighting in the courts for her Country today. The background to Sarah’s story is that in 2012, Justice Dowsett of the Federal Court granted native title rights to the Mandingalbay Yidinji-Gunggandji Peoples in Cairns.76 According to Sarah, this claim was fraught with evidentiary errors which have had lasting impacts for her people – the Kunggandji. Sarah explained that the NTRB used a joint connection report for the Mandingalbay Yidinji and Kunggandji tribes for this claim, despite both tribes recognising that the Kunggandji People lived on the land prior to the Mandingalbay Yidinji Peoples. The Kunggandji objected to the way the anthropological report was done without their knowledge: according to Sarah, this has given rise to genealogical inaccuracies and a conflation by the court of ‘historical’ rights of the Mandingalbay Yidinji tribe with the traditional ownership rights of the Kunggandji tribe. Sarah further explained that due to that 2012 judgment accepting the inaccurate connection report, she has been locked out of other claims over her Country and denied cultural heritage consultation rights. Complicating her native title journey, also in 2012, the ‘Gimuy’ Waluburra Yidinji Peoples and the Yirrigandji Peoples gave notice that they were going to claim native title over land in the Cairns area, which Sarah and her Elders consider to be Kunggandji traditional country. Without legal representation, Sarah lodged a Form 5 in the Federal Court to join the claim as a respondent and attended court hearings and mediations. From 2013–2018, Sarah conducted research to find written evidence to ‘prove’ the oral history of her Elders. In that time, Sarah told of putting in numerous funding applications to the NTRB and all were denied. Sarah felt that the NTRB directed funding disproportionately to the Mandingalbay Yidinji tribe. She also told us that there are connections between decision-makers in the NTRB and the Mandingalbay Yidinji tribe suggesting the potential for conflicts of interest. 86 Women in Native Title: Native Title Report 2024