8.15 Sarah, NSW Sarah is a Dharug woman from Western Sydney. Sarah’s native title group’s claim was lodged in 1995 and settled in 1999. That native title claim over the area now known as Bidjigal Reserve was ultimately withdrawn, with an agreement reached between the local council and the Dharug people. The parkland was renamed Bidjigal Reserve and the Dharug people were to have a say in how the reserve is managed. Text Box 8.3 provides the historical legal context for the connection requirements under the Native Title Act and the court’s interpretation of how they apply to the heavily colonised southeast of Australia in the Dharug case. It highlights the limitations of native title as a means of redress for dispossession. Text Box 8.3: Early Dharug native title decision The 1999 Dharug Native Title claim was determined via an agreement that the Dharug claimants withdraw from further participation in the case in exchange for an undertaking by the Deerubbin Local Aboriginal Land Council and the NSW Government that they would not claim any issue in estoppel in relation to another application that the claimant had filed separately over another parcel of land.79 In relation to that claim, Justice Madgwick said: it appears that the claimants have viewed their claimed authentic descent from Aboriginal people who were identified in viewing written records very soon after British colonisation, together with the survival of vestigial elements of traditional culture, as more or less sufficient to show both (a) the survival of a people, rather than of descendants of one or more peoples, and (b), in large part, continued connection for the purposes of establishing legal recognition of their claimed native title in respect of the claimed and associated lands. Rather, what those things may well show, along with the facts of uncompensated historical dispossession, is a claim telling in fact and morality for due recognition as the historical descendants of the original owners and occupiers, in a generic sense, of the lands that have become greater Sydney, and for reparation for the effects of that dispossession. However, the fact of Aboriginal descent, either alone or taken with the survival of some remnants of Aboriginal people’s pre-1788 culture, falls both wide and short of showing the survival of a people with live traditional laws and customs stemming from any such original people.80 Justice Madgwick went on to say: The decision in Mabo was regarded in various quarters as heralding a new dawn for at least a modest degree of reparation to Aboriginal people generally, by way of according them an ability to reclaim unalienated Crown lands. The decision in Yorta Yorta has confirmed that such was not the effect of Mabo. The ability to obtain a declaration of native title under the Native Title Act is, at least after Yorta Yorta, strictly limited. The reality seems to be that the present idea of a Dharug land-owning polity is an aspiration which arose, after Mabo, out of the process, more generally, of the Dharug Link group’s earlier efforts, in rather less of a ‘land rights’ context, to recover some of their lost history and to have public recognition of and respect for their ethnic and cultural roots and their historic losses and injustices.81 96 Women in Native Title: Native Title Report 2024