Aboriginal heritage and truth-telling

On Robbins Island, off Tasmania's remote north-west coast, survey crews walked narrow transects across a fraction of the island in the months before turbines arrived. In that short survey they logged twenty-four Aboriginal heritage sites — seal-hide camps, stone-artefact scatters, shell middens, a probable rock shelter. The Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation, whose members trace their connection to the region's Aboriginal families, had argued for years that the island — known to Aboriginal people as pilitika — was an entire living cultural landscape, not a set of isolated relics to be counted and cleared. In August 2025 the wind farm was approved regardless, its Aboriginal heritage survey assessed under the same Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 that the Tasmanian Government had already, more than four years earlier, accepted was too weak to do the job it was written for (National Indigenous Times; RenewEconomy, Aug–Sep 2025). Twenty-four heritage sites found almost by accident, under a law everybody in Tasmanian politics agreed needed replacing — that gap, between what the state has said about protecting Aboriginal heritage and what it has actually protected, is the subject of this piece.

This is not the story of a government that has done nothing. Tasmania was among the first states to formally begin a truth-telling and treaty process, and the Aboriginal Lands Act has returned more Crown land, in absolute terms, than most Australian jurisdictions have managed. But five years after the review that called the Heritage Act inadequate, the replacement law is still a consultation draft. The treaty half of the 2021 promise has been formally abandoned. And a long-running dispute over who is entitled to speak for Tasmanian Aboriginal people keeps supplying the government a reason to defer almost everything else. This piece sets out what the Rockliff government did, states its strongest case, tests that case against the primary record, and asks what continued delay costs a community that has already waited two centuries for its heritage to be taken seriously.

What the government did

Tasmania's modern Aboriginal land and heritage framework began under a Liberal government: the Aboriginal Lands Act 1995, introduced by Premier Ray Groom, returned an initial 3,800 hectares including putalina (Oyster Cove) and Risdon Cove, with Wybalenna on Flinders Island following in 1999 and Cape Barren and Clarke Islands in 2005. Across those three tranches, 55,617 hectares of Crown land — under 1% of the state's land mass — passed to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania (ALCT), which holds it in trust for all Tasmanian Aboriginal people (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania; Aboriginal Lands Act 1995 land-return record). No further tranche has followed since 2006.

The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975 — Tasmania's operative heritage law, originally the Aboriginal Relics Act — was amended in 2017 to raise penalties for damaging a relic, remove the "ignorance" defence, extend the window to prosecute from six months to two years, and create a statutory Aboriginal Heritage Council to advise the minister. A government-commissioned statutory review reported in March 2021 that the Act, even as amended, remained inadequate and recommended it be replaced entirely (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania, Review of the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1975, Mar-2021). Separately, from July 2021 the government engaged former Governor Kate Warner, law professor Tim McCormack and Fauve Kurnadi to consult Tasmanian Aboriginal people on a pathway to truth-telling and treaty. Their November 2021 report set out 24 recommendations, including reforming the Heritage Act "as a matter of urgency," extending Aboriginal land title to the low-water mark, and joint management of Crown reserves (Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty Report, DPAC, Nov-2021).

What followed those two 2021 reports moved on separate, slow tracks. In 2022 the government formed an Aboriginal Advisory Group to co-design truth-telling and treaty, and began a parallel review of the Aboriginal Land Council's governance, releasing a consultation paper in 2022 and draft legislation in 2023. That same year, Tasmanian Aboriginal representatives, through the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, submitted their own draft treaty bill to government and waited eighteen months without a formal response. In October 2024 the government shelved the Lands Act governance bill outright, citing "continued and significant differences of opinion" among Aboriginal organisations (National Indigenous Times, 11-Oct-2024). In May 2025 it went further, announcing treaty would not proceed at all, redirecting the commitment into Truth-telling and Healing Commissioners funded at $4.4 million over four years in the 2025–26 Budget (Premier of Tasmania, 27-May-2025; Tasmanian Budget Paper No. 1, 2025–26). And in April 2026, almost five years after its own review called the Heritage Act inadequate, the government finally opened public consultation on a replacement Aboriginal Heritage Bill, with Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Bridget Archer describing the aim as "striking the right balance" between heritage protection and development (NRE Tasmania, Aboriginal Heritage Bill 2026 consultation, Apr-2026).

The evidence

The primary record shows a government that talks in the language of urgency and moves at the pace of caution. Four figures capture the gap.

Land return is the starkest number. The Aboriginal Lands Act has not returned a single hectare since the Cape Barren and Clarke Island transfer in 2005 — meaning the current government, like its two immediate predecessors, has presided over two decades without a new land parcel, while the one attempt to modernise how the Land Council operates was shelved in October 2024 rather than resolved (National Indigenous Times, 11-Oct-2024). Heritage law tells a similar story from a different angle: the government's own reviewers called the 1975 Act inadequate in March 2021, and by the time a replacement bill finally reached public consultation in April 2026, several major projects — the Robbins Island wind farm among them — had already been assessed under the law everyone agreed was not fit for purpose.

Two heritage fights, one 1975 law

Takayna/the Tarkine, in Tasmania's north-west, holds what the Australian Heritage Council has called one of the world's great archaeological regions — the Western Tasmania Aboriginal Cultural Landscape, National Heritage-listed for the largest concentration of Aboriginal hut depressions in the country, alongside middens, rock engravings and stone tools spanning tens of thousands of years. Two threats sit inside it at once. Off-road vehicles have repeatedly driven through the closed Arthur–Pieman Conservation Area — most recently reported over Easter 2023 — damaging midden and hut-depression sites that cannot be rebuilt once disturbed. And mining company MMG has proposed a new tailings storage facility near Rosebery, inside takayna, that would bury roughly 140 hectares of rainforest containing Aboriginal cultural material under tens of metres of mine waste; the proposal remains under assessment by the state and federal governments, with Aboriginal heritage impact listed among the community concerns still to be resolved (EPA Tasmania, MMG Australia Pty Ltd, South Marionoak Tailings Storage Facility assessment).

Robbins Island shows what that same 1975 standard produces in a live approval, not a retrospective review. The Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation (CHAC), which says it represents around 8,000 members with documented connection to the region's Aboriginal families, led community opposition to the wind farm on heritage grounds; the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre separately wrote to the federal environment minister seeking intervention. The two organisations sit on opposite sides of the deepest fault line in Tasmanian Aboriginal politics: the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and the Aboriginal Land Council hold that Aboriginality in Tasmania traces to three ancestral lines — Fanny Cochrane Smith, Dolly Briggs, or the Furneaux Islands sealing families — and do not recognise CHAC's members as Aboriginal on that basis; CHAC and allied regional corporations say that test is too narrow. The dispute has run for more than a decade, prompted a walkout from a 2022 State of the State address, and was referred toward the Australian Human Rights Commission in December 2023 (The Examiner, 5-Mar-2022, updated 5-Oct-2023). The Slow Decay takes no position on that definitional question — it is not this publication's to adjudicate — but notes that both sides of it separately judged the Robbins Island heritage assessment inadequate, which suggests the law's failure runs wider than any one organisation's grievance.

A heritage law both sides of Tasmania's deepest Aboriginal political divide agree has failed is not a case for more time to decide who is right about anything else.

The critique

The government's implicit defence — that Aboriginal heritage and treaty reform are moving cautiously because the community itself is divided — does not hold up against its own timeline. The Heritage Act review reported in March 2021 that the law was inadequate; the government took until April 2026, more than five years later, to put a replacement in front of the public, and even then only as a consultation draft rather than a bill before Parliament. In that gap it allowed major projects — Robbins Island among them — to be approved under the exact law its own reviewers had already discredited. Urgency does not sit well with a five-year gap between diagnosis and draft.

The treaty retreat compounds the problem rather than resolving it. Tasmanian Aboriginal representatives submitted a draft treaty bill in 2023 and, on the public record, waited eighteen months without a formal government response. When the government finally answered, in May 2025, it was not with a counter-proposal but with the announcement that treaty would not proceed at all — replaced by Truth-telling and Healing Commissioners funded at $4.4 million over four years, a modest sum against the scale of the task. A government can legitimately decide treaty is not achievable on its current timetable; what it cannot credibly claim is that four years of consultation, an Aboriginal-led advisory group and a facilitator-drafted report left it needing still more time before it could say so.

The representation dispute, meanwhile, has become a convenient reason to defer rather than a problem the government has tried to solve. It shelved Aboriginal Lands Act reform in October 2024 citing "differences of opinion" between the same two camps that have disagreed since at least 2016. It insists, reasonably, that it will not itself define Aboriginality — but has offered no visible process, beyond a referral toward the Australian Human Rights Commission, for resolving a dispute that now stalls land governance, heritage reform and treaty design simultaneously. Declining to adjudicate is defensible; declining to fund or facilitate any resolution, while citing the resulting deadlock as the reason nothing else can move, functions as a veto dressed up as neutrality.