Lake Tyers Campaign Continues

Lake Tyers ABC News Report - Day 9

LAKE TYERS PETITION Download and Print

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Shareholders and residents protest at Lake Tyers
(Jem Wilson - ABC Gippsland, 2011)

The people of Lake Tyers have been strong and vocal in their struggle to retain their land for many years.

'Bung Yarnda' is the true name of the community known as Lake Tyers in Victoria's Gippsland region. It is a small parcel of land surrounded by waterways and coastal bushland.

Lake Tyers Reserve had been set up on 1861 at the suggestion of the Victorian Board for the 'Protection of Aborigines'. It was located on the land of the Gunai/Kurnai people and became home to Indigenous people from all over the state who were forcibly removed from their homelands.

By the early 1950s, only Lake Tyers Reserve and Framlingham Station remained of the Victorian Aboriginal land base.

The Victorian Government's assimilation policy after 1957, encouraged the relocation of rural reserve dwellers to towns and cities and some of the families were forced to leave.

In 1962, the Government announced that no resident could remain after March 1965.

The media reported sympathetically when residents (and ex-residents) protested this decree. Protesters included Pastor Doug Nicholls who urged the Government to transfer Lake Tyers' title to its residents.

In 1970 their fight was rewarded with the handing back of 'Bung Yarnda' to the people.

The Victorian Government passed the Aboriginal Land Act 1970 which created two Aboriginal Trusts - one for Lake Tyers and one for the only other extant Victorian reserve, Framlingham - to own and manage the surviving land base of the Victorian tribes.

For the past six years, Lake Tyers has been run by an administrator, rather than an elected council. The administrator is a consultant hired from the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu company with wide-ranging powers and financial control.

See: Campaign to save Lake Tyers www.indigenousrights.net.au