The decision of Justice Richard Blackburn ruled against the Yolngu claimants on a number of issues of law and fact, rejecting the doctrine of Aboriginal title.

The Yolngu people, the traditional owners of Arnhem Land (which includes the Gove Peninsula), had petitioned the Australian House of Representatives in August 1963 with a bark petition after the government had sold part of the Arnhem Land reserve on 13 March of that year to a bauxite mining company, Nabalco without consultation with the traditional owners at the time.

[1] In December 1968, the Yolngu people living in Yirrkala, represented by three plaintiffs, obtained writs in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory against the Nabalco Corporation, which had secured a 12-year bauxite mining lease from the Federal Government.

[2] The applicants asserted before the Court that since time immemorial, they held a “communal native title” that had not been validly extinguished, or acquired under the Lands Acquisition Act 1955 (Cth), and should be recognised as an enforceable proprietary right.

[2] Blackburn rejected the claim on the bases that: The terms "settled" and "desert and uncultivated" included territory in which resided "uncivilized inhabitants in a primitive state of society".

[4] Milirrpum led to the establishment of the Woodward Royal Commission by the Whitlam government in 1973–4, and the eventual recognition of Aboriginal Land rights in the Northern Territory.

In 1975, shortly before he was dismissed, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam drew up the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 which was later passed (in a slightly diluted form) by the conservative Fraser government on 9 December 1976.