Blak History Month: The hidden history of Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen.

This is a story that doesn't get told nearly enough — the hidden history of Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen, and the back-breaking, brilliant, largely unacknowledged role they played in shaping rural Australia as we know it.

From the earliest days of European pastoral expansion, Aboriginal people didn't just work the land — they made the industry possible. Station owners conceded they could not survive without Aboriginal knowledge and labour — pastoralists were even willing to pay more for land that came with an Aboriginal workforce. Think about that for a moment. The land was stolen. And then the people of that land were leveraged as a selling point.

By 1886 in Queensland, over 55% of the pastoral workforce was Indigenous. By 1937, 3,000 Aboriginal people were employed on cattle stations in the Northern Territory alone. They weren't just ringers and drovers — they were camp cooks, fencers, shearers, saddlers, mounted messengers, boundary riders. They worked the vast open spaces of the big stations, sheared 200 sheep a day in the Riverina, and were dairymen on the south coast of NSW and in the Atherton Tablelands in Queensland. Everywhere the pastoral industry went, Aboriginal people were doing the work.

And then there were the women. Their story is even less known.

Aboriginal women made a significant contribution as stockwomen — mustering, yard work, drafting, processing cattle, riding as boundary riders, and accompanying drovers across the country. Some Aboriginal women in the late 1800s and early 1900s disguised themselves as men just to do the work — binding their chests, cutting their hair short, masquerading as male riders to evade laws that specifically banned women from stock work. They were that good. And the system was that determined to exclude them.

When the nearest store was 500 kilometres away by horseback, it could be months before a station accessed basic necessities. Aboriginal women supplemented the station's food sources with bush tucker — knowing where to find water, identifying gnamma holes, keeping people alive. That knowledge saved lives. It rarely made the history books.

For much of this history, Aboriginal station workers were paid nothing at all — given rations of flour, sugar, tea, salt beef and tobacco instead of wages, and forced to live in substandard conditions with severely limited personal freedom. In 1925, WA's Chief Protector Neville described the situation as a system of "semi-slavery" — and those are his own words.

The resistance came. And when it came, it was extraordinary.

On 1 May 1946 in Western Australia, one of the longest and most significant industrial actions in Australian history began — the Pilbara Aboriginal Stockmen's Strike. Hundreds of Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers, and station hands across the Pilbara walked off in protest, defying the Aborigines Act 1905 which granted pastoralists permits to employ Aboriginal workers who were not legally allowed to leave without permission. They walked off anyway. It lasted three years.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

On 23 August 1966, Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari led more than 200 Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers and their families in a walk-off from Wave Hill cattle station in the Northern Territory — owned by British multinational Vestey Brothers — in a demand for equal pay, decent conditions, and the return of their Country. White workers at Wave Hill were earning £2-8 a week. Indigenous workers were paid less than the legal minimum — often just rations.

They walked off and they didn't go back. They camped at Wattie Creek on their own Country and they waited. Nine years. In August 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam travelled to Daguragu and poured a handful of Gurindji soil into Vincent Lingiari's open hand — the first ever act of transferring the title of land from the Commonwealth of Australia to an Aboriginal community.

Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody turned that moment into the song From Little Things Big Things Grow.

The cattle industry of northern and remote Australia was built on Aboriginal hands, Aboriginal knowledge, and Aboriginal Country — with wages withheld, freedom denied, and recognition long refused. These were the ringers, the stockmen, the jackaroos, the camp cooks, the drovers, the fencers, the shearers and the saddlers. They are part of Australia's soul.