The Gurindji people had lived on their traditional lands in the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory for tens of thousands of years. European contact began around 1844, when explorer Augustus Gregory crossed into their territory. By 1883, Wave Hill Station had been established as a cattle run, and Gurindji people found their country carved into pastoral leases controlled by outsiders. The Vestey Group, a British conglomerate owned by Lord Vestey, purchased Wave Hill in 1914 and ran it for decades. A 1945 inquiry found that Vesteys was not even paying Aboriginal workers the five-shillings-a-day minimum wage mandated under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918. A 1946 report by anthropologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt documented illegal child labor, sexual abuse of Aboriginal women, inadequate food and housing, and no safe drinking water. Workers lived in corrugated iron humpies without floors, furniture, or sanitation. Lord Vestey refused to pay any wages at all to his Aboriginal workers, even after the 1959 Wards Employment Regulations set out an official pay scale, albeit at rates up to 50 percent lower than those paid to non-Aboriginal workers.

The strike began on 23 August 1966, led by Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari. Two hundred people -- stockmen, domestic workers, their families -- left the station. Initially, most white observers interpreted the action as a straightforward labor dispute over wages and conditions. The reality ran deeper. In March 1967, the Gurindji moved from their initial camp in the dry bed of the Victoria River to Wattie Creek, an important sacred site they called Daguragu. It became clear that what they demanded was not simply pay equal to that of white stockmen. They wanted their land back. Pincher Manguari put it plainly: "We want them Vestey mob all go away from here. Wave Hill Aboriginal people bin called Gurindji. We bin here long time before them Vestey mob. This is our country, all this bin Gurindji country." When the Vesteys offered to slaughter two cattle and raise wages if the workers returned, Lingiari refused. The Gurindji stayed at Daguragu from 1967 through 1974, an occupation that was technically illegal under Australian law but which the government proved unable or unwilling to end.

The seven-year standoff attracted allies from across Australian society: the North Australian Workers' Union, the Communist Party of Australia, church groups, civil rights organizations, and writer Frank Hardy, who published The Unlucky Australians in 1968 to bring national attention to the Gurindji cause. In 1968, sixty Aboriginal workers at Limbunya, another Vestey property, joined the strike. The ripple effects reached nearby stations, where owners preemptively raised Aboriginal wages to prevent similar actions. The political breakthrough came when the Australian Labor Party won power in December 1972 under Gough Whitlam, who established the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights headed by Justice Woodward. On 16 August 1975, Whitlam traveled to Daguragu and, in a ceremony that has become one of Australia's most recognizable historical images, poured a handful of red soil through Vincent Lingiari's outstretched fingers. "Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof, in Australian law, that these lands belong to the Gurindji people," Whitlam said. The land was formally returned.

The Wave Hill walk-off did not end with the handover ceremony. The Whitlam government drafted the Aboriginal Land Rights Bill before its dismissal in 1975, and the subsequent Fraser government passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, the first legislation in Australia allowing Indigenous people to claim freehold title over traditional lands based on evidence of traditional connection. The walk-off route from Wave Hill Station to Daguragu was heritage-listed in 2006 and placed on the Australian National Heritage List in 2007. Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody immortalized the story in their 1991 song "From Little Things Big Things Grow," which was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry in 2010. Each August, more than 1,000 people travel to Kalkarindji for the Freedom Day Festival, which commemorates the walk-off with music, sport, the Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture, and a recreation of the walk itself. In September 2020, the traditional owners were granted native title over 5,000 square kilometers of Wave Hill Station land. Lingiari's vision of cultural and political autonomy for his people remains unfinished, but the legal foundation he helped create endures.