What's on TV: Sunday, July 8

Wik v Queensland

NITV, 8.30pm

A "human zoo" in Cape York, where American tourists could mount viewing platforms to observe Aboriginal people in their natural habitat? That's just one of the proposals that galvanised the Wik people to launch legal action for control of their land.

Tonight NAIDOC kicks off with this exceptional documentary examining the High Court decision to recognise Indigenous rights on Queensland pastoral leases, the background to the decision – including the Mabo judgment and Paul Keating's Redfern speech – and the absolute cataclysm Mabo, Wik, the Keating government's Native Title legislation, and the ascension of John Howard to Prime Minister unleashed.

Beautifully produced with archival footage from the 1990s of those early land rights meetings around Arukun (including a baby-faced Noel Pearson, fresh out of law school) it also includes plenty of contemporary talking heads, from Noel Pearson to the legal team who brought the action on behalf of the Wik peoples, and descendants of the original activists. Confronting and moving, it's a sobering reminder of how far race relations in this country have to go. MH