NEW edition out on Wednesday

By Allan Clarke

Karen Williams was just 16 years old when she went missing after a night out in Coober Pedy, NSW, in 1990. Her mother Eva is still hoping for justice, 36 years later.

COOBER Pedy sits on scorched earth, a place where the sun burns the world white and red and the only relief is found beneath the surface. From above, the landscape is pockmarked with thousands of mullock heaps, white mounds of excavated dirt, detritus from opal mining, that look like a city of ghosts from the air.

This is the traditional land of the Antakirinja Yunkunytjatjara people, the town itself takes its name from the Kokatha word kupa-piti, which translates to “white man in a hole”, a direct reference to the miners who carved their lives into the ground to escape the searing heat and find their fortune.

It was a place where people from all over the world came to bury their pasts, and become someone entirely new. During the eighties and nineties, Coober Pedy was booming but was also known as a lawless place, a place where the vast isolation and thousands of open-mine holes made it easy for things and people to disappear.

By Todd Jigarru Condie

Aboriginal soldier, Private William Allan Irwin captured three machine gun posts during a fierce battle in France during World War 1 and was struck down attempting to silence a fourth. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal – the second-highest award for bravery at the time. Yet in the same battle, another Australian soldier – Private George Cartwright – received the Victoria Cross, the nation’s highest military honour, for capturing a single machine gun position.

This edition, number 876, marks 35 years since the Koori Mail began. What started as a seed of an idea to ‘provide a voice for Kooris everywhere’, has grown and flourished to become a much loved newspaper across the country, with the honour of being the first in Australia to be fully digitised as a national resource by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

During the years, the Koori Mail has only missed being published twice, following an historic flood events in 2022, when its office as destroyed, along with the homes of key staff.

By Aaron Bunch (AAP)

An Aboriginal community awarded $150 million in compensation in a battle with a mining giants says it is a win for First Nations peoples, but the group says its disappointed with the size of the payout after Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group built lucrative mines on its lands without agreement and destroyed cultural sites.

Yindjibarndi Ngurra Aboriginal Corporation had submitted Fortescue should pay $1.8 billion after mining without fee, prior and informed consent.

The Federal Court on Tuesday determined it would receive a fraction of the amount, with $150 million awarded in compensation for Yinjibarndi’s cultural loss and $100,000 for its economic loss.

Outside the court, Yindjibarndi Nation chief executive Michael Woodley said the group had stood up for its right to protect its culture and its belief that First Nations people should be compensated for mining on its land.

By Christian Morrow

The Koori Mail spoke with Phoebe Marson Gulpilil, daughter of David Gulpilil, who is actively involved in preserving her father’s legacy through the film Journey Home, David Gulpilil. As a policy maker at Djarrka, a Yolŋu-led consultancy focusing on strategic policy and community impact, Phoebe works across First Nations organisations, bridging two worlds – the old and the new – just like her father before her.

Read the full interview in the latest edition.

By Ali Mc