The Mabo decision
A court ruled Australia was never "nobody's land"
On 3 June 1992 the High Court of Australia ruled six to one against the doctrine of terra nullius, under which the continent had been treated as belonging to no one before the British. The case was brought by Eddie Koiki Mabo of Mer Island in the Torres Strait, defending his family's land. He died months before the verdict. The ruling led to the Native Title Act of 1993.
Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 12 years earlier
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 16 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 3 years earlier
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 3 years earlier
- 1990 German reunification — 2 years earlier
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — 1 year earlier
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — same year
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1980 Solidarity — 12 years earlier
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 7 years earlier
- 1986 Chernobyl disaster — 6 years earlier
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 3 years earlier
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — 1 year earlier
Middle East
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 13 years earlier
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 12 years earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 2 years earlier
Africa
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 25 years earlier
- 1967–1970 Nigerian Civil War and Biafra — 25 years earlier
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 18 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 9 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 2 years later
Asia
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 17 years earlier
- 1989 Tiananmen Square protests — 3 years earlier
- 1991 Eruption of Mount Pinatubo — 1 year earlier
- 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami — 12 years later
- 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami — 19 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 23 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 22 years earlier
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 9 years earlier
- 1990 Launch of the Hubble Space Telescope — 2 years earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 9 years later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 74)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 62)
- Mother Teresa (aged 82)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 81)
- Richard Nixon (aged 79)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 73)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 68)
- Fidel Castro (aged 66)
- Elizabeth II (aged 66)
- Gabriel García Márquez (aged 65)