If a determined group of indigenous people get their way, the world's newest country won't be in Africa or the Balkans but on the eastern periphery of Australia's outback. A bleak, foreboding, flood-prone savannah the size of Austria 750 km northwest of Sydney, the Murrawarri Republic was home to an Aboriginal nation that lived in the Culgoa River region of the state of New South Wales (NSW) tens of thousands of years before the arrival of British settlers. On March 31, they took the first step in ending more than 200 years of colonial rule when they sent letters to Queen Elizabeth II and the Australian government demanding evidence of either a treaty or deed of cessation. When those parties failed to respond to the Murrawarri's 28-day deadline, they issued a Declaration of the Continuance of the State of Murrawarri Nation. "When Captain Cook arrived here in 1770, he said he was claiming the continent in the name of the Crown. But on what legal grounds did he take our land?" asks Sharni Gibbons, daughter of Fred Gibbons, chairman of the Murrawarri People's Council. Australia's Aboriginal-sovereignty movement can be traced back to 1972. That year, on Jan. 26 — celebrated nationally as Australia Day — a group of black militants planted a tent on the lawns of the Old Parliament House in Canberra. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy galvanized support for indigenous land rights and thrust its ambassador Michael Anderson into the international spotlight. A former cotton worker, Anderson went on to study law and work as a public prosecutor, becoming the first indigenous Australian to address the U.N. in 1981. In 1999, he traveled to London as tribal leader of the Euahlayi nation and threw a spear wrapped in the Australian flag over the gates of Buckingham Palace in a symbolic rejection of colonial oppression. Today he is convener of the First Nations Interim National Unity Government — an umbrella group representing the sovereign aspirations of members of Australia's 300-odd Aboriginal nations. "There is nothing in Australian law that shows how(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=88215&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
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