There is a particular kind of obligation that accumulates when an institution occupies land with deep cultural continuity. It is not the straightforward obligation of a contract or a charter. It is something older and more persistent — the obligation that comes from presence on Country, from conducting the daily business of research and education on ground that carries the knowledge, law, and memory of peoples whose connection to that place reaches back tens of thousands of years. James Cook University carries that obligation in full. It operates from Townsville and Cairns — two cities whose surrounding Country belongs, in the deepest sense, to the Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples in the south, and to the Djabugay and Yirrganydji peoples in the north. It extends its reach to Mount Isa, Mackay, Thursday Island, and the Cape. Everywhere it goes, it is a guest on Country that was never ceded.

Understanding what JCU owes to Indigenous North Queensland requires understanding what kind of institution it is, and what kind of region it inhabits. North Queensland is not a homogeneous entity. It contains dozens of distinct language groups, hundreds of communities, and one of the most concentrated encounters between formal Western institutional structures and living Indigenous cultures anywhere in Australia. The Torres Strait alone encompasses more than a hundred islands and a maritime civilisation of extraordinary depth. Cape York contains some of the most continuous Indigenous land ownership on the continent. To speak of “Indigenous North Queensland” is to gesture at a complexity that no single university program — however well-intentioned — can fully address. But the question is not whether JCU can resolve that complexity. The question is whether it is engaging with it honestly, structurally, and with the intellectual seriousness the task demands.

THE MABO FOUNDATION.

No honest account of JCU’s relationship with Indigenous Australia can begin anywhere but with Eddie Koiki Mabo. Edward Koiki Mabo was born on 29 June 1936 and grew up on Mer, part of the Murray Island Group in the Torres Strait. In 1959, he moved to mainland Queensland, working on pearling vessels and as a labourer. He eventually settled in Townsville, where his life became inseparable from the intellectual and legal community forming around the fledgling university in that city. While working as a gardener at James Cook University, he found out through two historians that, by law, he and his family did not own their land on Mer. That discovery — made in the shadow of the very institution whose campus he was tending — became the spark for one of the most consequential legal proceedings in Australian history.

Mabo worked as a groundsman on campus as the library building was being constructed, and planted many of the trees and shrubs in the original landscaping — some of which are still there today. Mabo went on to work as a research assistant and taught classes at JCU. He later gave a presentation at the ‘Land Rights and the Future of Australian Race Relations’ Conference hosted by the JCU Student Association that outlined many of the arguments that became part of his case. The university, in other words, was not a passive backdrop to the Mabo story. It was the environment in which the intellectual and legal foundations of the case were shaped, argued, and refined.

Eddie Koiki Mabo’s campaign for Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights led to a landmark decision in the High Court of Australia on 3 June 1992 that overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius, which had characterised Australian law with respect to land and title since the voyage of Captain James Cook in 1770. Mabo died of cancer on 21 January 1992, less than six months before the High Court handed down its ruling. He did not live to hear the verdict that bore his name transform Australian law. The irony is sharp and permanent: the university named for the captain whose voyage first inscribed terra nullius onto the continent was the place where the man who dismantled that legal fiction sharpened his arguments, used the library, and planted the trees.

In 2008, James Cook University named its library in Townsville the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library, and it also supports the Eddie Koiki Mabo Lecture Series. JCU celebrates the history-making Mabo decision with the long-established Eddie Koiki Mabo Lecture Series, an annual public commemorative presentation by a prominent person who has made a significant contribution to contemporary Australian society. The lecture takes place on Mabo Day, 3 June each year. These gestures of commemoration matter, but they are also incomplete in themselves. The Mabo legacy is not a trophy to be displayed once a year. It is a permanent demand: that the institution think clearly about what it means to do scholarship on Country, and to do it in relation to living communities whose rights and cultures are not historical curiosities but present-tense realities.

NAMING THE GROUND.

One of the more significant acts a university can perform is to name its places honestly. For most of its history, JCU named its campuses by suburb: Douglas, Smithfield. These are European impositions on Country that had been named, inhabited, and known through language systems far older than any settler map. The decision to give JCU’s campuses their Indigenous language names, carried out during the university’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2020, represented a genuine shift in how the institution understands its own geography.

To honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ continuing contribution to the university, JCU gave Indigenous names to a number of its locations. The Townsville (Douglas) campus was named Bebegu Yumba, meaning “Place of Learning” in the Birri-Gubba language. The Cairns (Smithfield) campus was named Nguma-bada, meaning “Place for tomorrow’s learning, knowledge and wisdom” from the Yirrgay (Yirrganydji) coastal dialect of Djabugay. The Cairns City campus has been named Bada-jali, meaning “Flowering of the Cocky Apple tree: Place and time for new beginnings and growth,” also from the Yirrgay (Yirrganydji) coastal dialect of Djabugay. The Mount Isa campus received the name Murtupuni, meaning “come together, gather together” in the Kalkadoon language.

To celebrate the university’s deep connection with First Nations people, Indigenous names were gifted to campuses in Townsville, Cairns and Mount Isa during the university’s 50th anniversary celebrations in 2020. In 2021, the Thursday Island Study Centre (AITHM Clinical Research and Training Facility) received its traditional name as an act of reconciliation, respectfully acknowledging the many generations that have gone before and recognising the Traditional Owners of the place.

These naming decisions followed a formal process of consultation. Consultations were held with Traditional Owners and Indigenous communities regarding Indigenous language names for each of JCU’s northern Australian campuses. The Thursday Island campus is now known as Ngulaigau Mudh. The internal roads and waterways of the Townsville campus have also been renamed. Two thoroughfares at JCU Townsville, Bebegu Yumba campus have been given Indigenous names. Mount Stuart Street has the Indigenous name Mandilgun and the CPD Service Road is also known as Yunbenun. The names come from one of the Dreamtime stories of the Bindal people. Mount Stuart Street and the CPB Service Road sit at the margin of Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples’ lands.

The creeks on the Douglas campus in Townsville were named Wadda Mooli Creek and Goondaloo Creek. Wadda Mooli is a salutation in the Birri Gubba language spoken by the Bindal people and means both “hello” and “goodbye”. Goondaloo is “emu country” in the Wulgurukaba language. Both creeks are part of a seasonal fish migration route and support many native species. These are not decorative additions. They are acts of cartographic reckoning — a concession that the places on which a major institution stands have prior names, prior meanings, and prior owners, and that those facts belong in the everyday language of the campus.

THE INDIGENOUS EDUCATION AND RESEARCH CENTRE.

The naming of campuses is symbolic. The work of genuinely embedding Indigenous knowledge, supporting Indigenous students, and building Indigenous research capacity is institutional and structural. At JCU, that work centres on the Indigenous Education and Research Centre — the IERC — which operates across both the Bebegu Yumba campus in Townsville and the Nguma-bada campus in Cairns.

In 2017, a building on JCU’s Nguma-bada campus was allocated to the IERC staff who were originally located around the university. In 2018 the Bebegu Yumba campus had a new building constructed for the IERC. Both campus centres were designed to promote collaboration between students and staff, bringing together research, teaching and support facilities, and supported more than 500 Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. This number has since increased to almost 800 students who have 24/7 secure access to study nooks, private tutorial rooms, group work resources and kitchen facilities. Today, the IERC continues to thrive, celebrating a graduation rate of 120 Indigenous students annually, making it the fourth highest in the country.

The IERC operates within a broader institutional framework anchored by JCU’s Reconciliation Action Plan. The original Reconciliation Action Plan was developed following a May 2013 commitment by the JCU Vice Chancellor to develop the first action plan. The plan has since been extended and deepened. It addresses not only student support and cultural engagement but the procurement practices of the institution as a whole. The JCU Reconciliation Action Plan requires anyone involved in procuring goods or services on behalf of JCU to investigate and promote supplier diversity opportunities to increase the number of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses within the JCU supply chain. Indigenous businesses are significantly more likely to employ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, relative to non-Indigenous businesses. Growing Indigenous businesses is a viable pathway to create employment and increase the economic participation of Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The governance structure of Indigenous engagement at JCU includes a dedicated senior executive role. In their capacity as a key figure within the university’s executive team, the Deputy Vice Chancellor for Indigenous Education and Strategy assumes a position of senior leadership. The DVC is tasked with engaging across all facets of university planning, playing a pivotal role in championing and advancing the institution’s objectives and core values. JCU appointed Professor Ngiare Brown as its sixth Chancellor — the first female and first Indigenous Chancellor of the University. That appointment, confirmed in 2023, placed Indigenous leadership at the very head of the institution. Its significance, in a university whose history is so deeply entwined with the story of Indigenous rights, should not be understated.

COUNTRY AS CLASSROOM: THE CAIRNS CAMPUS AND ITS OBLIGATIONS.

JCU’s Cairns campus — Nguma-bada, “belonging to tomorrow” — sits in Smithfield, in the northern suburbs of a city that is surrounded by communities with some of the highest proportions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residents in urban Queensland. The campus name itself was drawn from the Yirrganydji language of Djabugay country, the coastal dialect spoken by the people on whose land the campus stands. Located in Smithfield, the campus is named Nguma-bada, a Yirrgay (Yirrganydji) word from the Djabugay language. It means “belonging to tomorrow” — a place for tomorrow’s learning, knowledge, and wisdom, reflecting JCU’s deep respect for Country and commitment to future-focused education.

The Cairns campus offers the physical and intellectual gateway to some of the most significant Indigenous landscapes on the planet. The Daintree rainforest — one of the oldest continuous tropical rainforests on Earth, and Country of the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people — is within reach of campus research facilities. The Great Barrier Reef, whose Traditional Owners hold native title over sea country, is the subject of sustained JCU scientific work. The Torres Strait, accessible from Cairns and home to a distinct maritime civilisation, anchors the northernmost dimensions of the university’s regional mission.

The obligation the Cairns campus bears is therefore both educational and ecological. It is the obligation to understand Country not as a research subject external to the institution but as a living system in which the institution itself is embedded — and to pursue that understanding in genuine partnership with the custodians of that Country. This means engaging not just in research about Indigenous communities but in research with them and, increasingly, research led by them.

THURSDAY ISLAND AND THE TORRES STRAIT COMMITMENT.

No account of JCU’s relationship with Indigenous North Queensland is complete without attention to Thursday Island. JCU’s presence in the Torres Strait represents its most geographically remote and most culturally specific commitment. Thursday Island is home to the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine (AITHM). Perched next to the Torres Strait Hospital, the centre supports healthcare students through immersive learning and meaningful research.

AITHM and JCU researchers utilise the facility as a research base for a number of health issues, including infectious, chronic and parasitic diseases, that threaten Torres Strait Islander communities. JCU researchers are collaborating with local health professionals on research projects investigating a range of issues including: the prevention and management of chronic disease; the prevalence and potential risk of dementia in Torres Strait communities; tuberculosis infection in the Torres Strait; and the impact of the design and implementation of Torres Strait primary health services on community health knowledge and behaviours. Through these collaborations, researchers and health professionals are investigating ways in which research findings can be translated into improved health practice and policy to benefit local communities.

What distinguishes the better examples of this work is the deliberate effort to build research capacity within communities rather than simply extracting data from them. A ground-breaking JCU initiative is helping Torres Strait Islander and northern Cape York communities develop skills to conduct their own frontline health research projects. The Thursday Island-based Capacity Strengthening Initiative has generated more than 12 studies, currently being conducted across the region by first-time researchers with a professional interest in community health and wellbeing. The participants in this program are not research subjects; they are the researchers. “It is important to encourage people on the ground to use their local knowledge to develop tools for initiating and pursuing their own research.” That principle — that communities should be agents of their own inquiry — is not merely good methodology. It is an expression of respect for sovereignty.

A James Cook University-based health research team received a grant to collaborate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities seeking to create their own culturally appropriate tools to assess risk of chronic disease, and then develop their own prevention strategies based on existing community strengths. The Healthy Aging Research Team has embarked on a project with communities in the Torres Strait region to co-design both individual health screening tools and community-level interventions, incorporating 21st century technology and Indigenous research methods — apps and yarning. The phrase “apps and yarning” is not a slogan; it captures something genuinely important about the challenge of conducting research that is simultaneously rigorous and culturally grounded.

THE UNFINISHED WORK OF KNOWLEDGE SOVEREIGNTY.

It would be comfortable, but misleading, to present JCU’s relationship with Indigenous North Queensland as a resolved matter — a story of past wrongs acknowledged, infrastructure built, names given, reconciliation underway. The structural reality is more complex. Universities are institutions whose core practices — the production and transmission of knowledge — were developed within a specifically Western intellectual tradition. The standards by which knowledge is validated, the journals through which it is disseminated, the hierarchies by which academic credibility is assigned: all of these carry embedded assumptions that are not neutral with respect to Indigenous epistemologies.

The deeper challenge for JCU — a challenge it shares with every research university that operates on Country — is to become an institution where Indigenous ways of knowing are not merely accommodated alongside the Western tradition, but genuinely engaged with as intellectual frameworks of equal standing. This is not a matter of curriculum decoration. It requires rethinking what counts as evidence, what counts as expertise, and who gets to ask the questions that drive research. It requires understanding that the Elders of the Bindal and Wulgurukaba peoples in Townsville, the Djabugay custodians on whose Country the Cairns campus stands, and the Meriam and other island peoples of the Torres Strait are not stakeholders to be consulted — they are knowledge holders whose intellectual contributions to understanding Country, ecology, health, and law are irreplaceable.

JCU’s formal acknowledgement reads: “At James Cook University, we acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this nation. We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which our campuses and study centres are located and where we conduct our business. We pay our respects to ancestors and Elders, past, present and future. JCU is committed to honouring Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ unique cultural and spiritual relationships to the land, waters and seas and their rich contribution to JCU and society.” That acknowledgement carries weight only insofar as it is enacted — in hiring practices, in research partnerships, in curriculum design, in the governance of the institution itself. The words are a commitment. The work is the measure of whether the commitment is kept.

The legacy of Eddie Koiki Mabo is a permanent reminder that JCU’s relationship with Indigenous Australia is not a recent programme or a post-Reconciliation addition to the institutional agenda. It is foundational. It precedes almost every formal gesture the university has since made. Mabo planted the trees that still stand on the Townsville campus. He used the library that now bears his name. He gave the talks that helped construct the legal arguments that changed Australian constitutional history. The institution did not create that legacy. It is called to honour it.

PERMANENCE, COUNTRY, AND THE CIVIC RECORD.

There is a quiet relationship between institutional identity and the infrastructure through which identity is recorded. As Queensland builds out its civic memory for the digital era — anchoring institutions, places, and communities onto permanent onchain layers — the question of how a university like JCU is represented in that infrastructure carries weight. Its research traditions, its relationship with Indigenous Country, its physical presence on lands whose names are now formally carried in multiple language systems: all of this belongs in a record that does not expire.

The namespace jcu.queensland serves as one such permanent address — a civic marker that connects the institution to the broader Queensland identity layer being established through this project. It exists not as a commercial proposition but as a form of institutional continuity: a recognition that JCU’s presence in North Queensland is not a transient arrangement but a long-term civic fact, and that this fact deserves a stable, verifiable identity in the emerging permanent record of Queensland’s institutions.

What that record should ultimately contain — for this university, on this Country — is not only the scientific output of research programs, the enrolment statistics of the IERC, or the architectural details of new facilities. It should carry the full weight of the Mabo connection: the knowledge that the most significant legal transformation in Australian history was shaped, in part, by a man who gardened the grounds and used the library of this institution. It should carry the names — Bebegu Yumba, Nguma-bada, Bada-jali, Murtupuni, Ngulaigau Mudh — because those names are not branding exercises but acts of acknowledgement, and acknowledgement is where responsibility begins.

The university that occupies Country in North Queensland bears obligations that no reconciliation action plan can fully discharge, because the obligations are not primarily administrative. They are obligations of intellectual honesty, of genuine partnership, and of continuous reckoning with the meaning of place. jcu.queensland as a civic identifier should eventually point not only to an institution’s web presence but to the accumulated record of how that institution met — or fell short of — those obligations. That is the civic test. It runs across decades, not semesters.