Fame and fortune

Eddie Koiki Mabo

Eddie Koiki Mabo

Eddie Koiki Mabo was an ordinary man from the Torres Straits who ended up changing the laws of Australia, even though he had little education. He was born on the island of Mer in June 1936. His mother died in childbirth, and he was adopted by his uncle. As an adult he moved to Queensland, worked on boats and the railways, and then became a gardener. He got married, and he and his wife had seven children and adopted three more. An ordinary man, an ordinary life.

In the late 1960s, however, he started campaigning for a better health service for the Torres Strait Islanders. He also helped found one of Australia’s first “black” community schools. Then one day he was told that, as an Islander, he had no rights to the land that his family had lived on for thousands of years. He felt this was very wrong, and decided to start campaigning for change.

One day a lawyer heard Mabo holding a speech on Mer land rights, and said he would take his case to court. Australian law had always been based on the idea of “terra nullius”, meaning “land belonging to nobody”. This meant that the Islanders and Aboriginal people did not have any rights to the land they had lived on long before the British arrived. The law said that the land belonged to Britain, then to the Australian state.

Mabo’s court case certainly hit the headlines! Against all odds, his lawyer won the case, and as a result the law was changed. Sadly, Mabo had died in January 1992, five months before the Australian High Court came to its decision. But the effect of his campaign lives on. All Islanders and Aboriginal people now have a legal right to the land their families have lived on for centuries. An ordinary man like Mabo with a strong sense of justice managed to change history.

Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett is a world-famous actor and theatre director, born in Melbourne in 1969. Her mother is Australian and her father was American. He died when she was 10 years old. Blanchett has said that when she was younger, she was “part extrovert, part wallflower". As a teenager she was into goth and punk culture, and even shaved her head for a while.

After studying drama in Sydney, she worked in the theatre and in TV. She made her feature film debut in 1997. Since then she has had major roles in both film and theatre, such as the murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin, the musician Bob Dylan and the Elf Queen Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Blanchett has received two Academy Awards (Oscars) and very many other awards for her work in films and the theatre.

Although she has mostly lived in Australia, Blanchett has also spent extended periods of time in the USA. This has partly been for work, and partly to get to know the culture of her father’s home country. She and her husband have three sons and also have an adopted daughter.