It’s been over 30 years since the high court acknowledged that terra nullius was a lie, that this country was not empty – that Indigenous Australians had an ongoing claim to the land beneath our feet.

But still today, officially, large swathes of Australia are held as what’s called ‘crown land’. What is it? And what do the assumptions about crown land say about the attitude to land ownership in modern Australia?

On Invasion Day, Wirlomin Noongar author Claire G. Coleman discusses how tokenistic gestures from our federal government have replaced the real change demanded by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.