A remarkable campaign is underway by the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council (W&J). This group of Traditional Owners has gained both national and international attention on the basis of their opposition to a large-scale coal mine proposed by Indian industrial conglomerate, the Adani Group, in Central Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

We are witnessing an extraordinary moment as the W&J challenge Australia’s native title system and the notion that compliance with industrial projects is the pathway to development for Indigenous people.

The W&J are Traditional Owners and Native Title Applicants over a large area of land in Central Western Queensland, including the land Adani needs to secure for its mine operations. The W&J contend that if this mine were to proceed, it would destroy Wangan and Jagalingou ancestral homelands, thereby irreversibly devastating culture, customs and heritage.

Opposition to the mine is palpable across the legal and other fights in which the W&J are engaged. As Murrawah Johnson, elected W&J Youth Spokesperson, says of her involvement in the campaign: “This is our future, and our world. And it’s our duty. I am part of a 60,000 year old legacy, of the greatest sustainability that this world has ever known. I refuse to be the broken link in the chain”.

Since Adani secured the coal tenements for this mine site in 2010, the project has become the focus of intense debate as Indigenous rights, as well as environmental, economic, social and other impacts and issues have come under national and international scrutiny.

However, it is the W&J who currently hold the last line of legal defence against this mine proceeding. Without a legally recognised land use agreement with the Traditional Owners who hold or claim native title, and with related court proceedings pending until at least March 2018, the efforts of Adani and government backers of the project continue to be frustrated by the W&J.

This report is the first of a series to be prepared by The University of Queensland researchers collaborating in a research project with the W&J and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights (ALHR) (see Appendix One for Research Approach and Methods).

As part of this project, the W&J have provided access to their files, and we have undertaken preliminary analysis of key political, social and economic contexts for, and dynamics of, the W&J’s campaign. Our scoping, summarised in this report, reveals the strength of the W&J’s resolve, the highly inequitable environment in which they are working, and the depth and breadth of institutional forces arrayed against them in their pursuit of their rights as Indigenous people.