An Amazon warrior for land rights

Goonengerry solicitor Melissa Begg was a true friend, keen traveller, loving partner and a brilliant, gutsy lawyer who dedicated a large part of her working life to the advancement of Aboriginal land rights in NSW.

Born in Rockdale in Sydney’s southern suburbs on the fourth of July, 1967 – a birthday she hated – Melissa Begg was educated at Arncliffe Public School and the Methodist Ladies College in Burwood, which instilled a staunch feminism and an ambition for a successful career. Her father, John, was a high-flying partner at big accounting firm Deloitte while mother Rae stayed home – mostly at Caringbah, in Sydney’s notoriously insular ‘Shire’ which Melissa recalled fondly but also escaped as soon as possible – she left home at 16 and never went back. Growing up with older sister Leanne, home life for the Begg kids was warm and supportive, but regimented. After school, John would always ask Melissa: ‘did you win?’

Mind expanding

‘Liss’ was cool: she smoked pot, loved her two-stroke motorbikes, and hung out with the ‘unconscious collective’, a sprawling bunch of musos and artists from Sydney’s inner city in the mid-late ‘80s, before gentrification. She enrolled in communications at the University of Sydney, hoping eventually to become a journalist, doing late shifts at 2SER and Radio Skid Row in Redfern.

Instead she got a job at the headquarters of the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC), in Liverpool. At NSWALC she came to a realisation – ‘land rights means land claims’, as she said often – and went back to UTS to do law part-time. In the era when NSWALC was run by late Indigenous activist Tiga Bayles, Melissa saw that for all the success of the Land Rights Act introduced in 1983 by the Wran Labor government, and growing funding through a share of annual land tax, nobody was doing the mechanical work of scouring the gazette on a weekly basis to identify and properly claim vacant Crown land.

With solicitor and colleague Stephen Wright, and with the support of colleagues including the former Labor mayor of Liverpool, Mark Latham – whose political star was then rising – Melissa started doing the hard yards, lodging thousands of claims on behalf of local land councils all over the state.

Driving land rights

Outraging conservative politicians, shock jocks and cockies alike, NSWALC became the bane of the Crown Lands department and local councils who repeatedly tried to claim that vacant land was needed for the essential public purpose of future town expansion.

Wright recalls Melissa convincing one NSWALC boss, former state Labor MP Maurie Keane, to set aside a million dollars to take on important land rights cases, to ‘get the jurisprudence right’ and make it progressively harder for the Crown to knock back claims.

‘Mel just kept pushing that land claims agenda, as the beating heart of land rights,’ he says. ‘Mel was an Amazon warrior for land rights.’    

At one point, Melissa and NSWALC’s external solicitors took on the big end of town, claiming the empty sandstone Department of Education building on Bridge Street, which took up a prime CBD block – estimated land value $70 million! The Greiner government went into meltdown, Crown Lands hit the panic button, and NSWALC fought hard through the Court of Appeal. The NSW Solicitor-General had to appear to give evidence as to why Sydney’s original inhabitants could not claim title to this particularly valuable piece of vacant Crown land. NSWALC lost narrowly, but kept going, building up a vast property portfolio with an undeveloped value of more than a billion dollars.

Moving to the country

In 2000 Melissa and her lifelong partner Joffre Salkeld left Sydney, moving into a charming old weatherboard with wraparound verandas on a rural block at Goonengerry, outside Mullumbimby, where they would make a home together for the next 25 years – a base for expeditions all over the world, from the Caucasus to Bolivia, and every part of Asia. Melissa spoke Bahasa Indonesian and loved the whole archipelago, visiting a dozen times. 

Starting out in a local legal practice, Melissa soon peeled off setting up her own firm, Hinterland Legal, and got a Master’s Degree in intellectual property law. The landmark land rights work continued, strategic and deliberate. One claim upended the controversial Fingal development at Tweed Heads – a project that wound up before ICAC – and delivered seven kilometres of beachfront back into Aboriginal hands. With Indigenous ecologist and former Goonengerry ranger Dr Chels Marshall, Melissa spent the next ten years fighting for Aboriginal rights in marine and terrestrial space. She represented Nambucca Heads Aboriginal Land Council in Federal Court native title proceedings and Indigenous land use agreement negotiations with the state government, for the South Beach /Gagaal Wangan co-management National Park and Warrell Creek and Gumma Indigenous protected area, and was brainchild for the testing of an accord that paved the way for co-management of conservation lands in NSW and Australia.

‘She was gutsy as,’ says Marshall. ‘Her tenacity in taking up the fight for marginalised people made her feared by others but loved by the Aboriginal community. Rest In peace my dear friend and comrade, let our ancestors embrace you in this new domain.’   

Feisty and fun

Melissa was also fun, happy to leadfoot her NSWALC Commodore anywhere in the state. Eminent native title lawyer Andrew Chalk, founder of Chalk & Behrendt, recalls Melissa as tenacious and dedicated, without being a zealot. ‘She always met people where they are,’ he says.

Mel was feisty, too, and would not be told. Insisting on fanging her Prelude the backway home one night from a party near Mullumbimby – undoubtedly over the limit – she said no cop in Byron would dare give her a ticket! Two old friends literally lay across the bonnet in an attempt to stop her driving off.

Backpacking through Flores with Joff in 2022, Melissa felt a lump in her shoulder blade. She and Joff spent the next two years battling through surgery and chemotherapy and radiotherapy as doctors tried to treat her cancer of unknown primary origin. She died peacefully on Saturday, May 31, and is survived by Joffre, Leanne, her niece and nephew, and their kids.