A 2024 determination granted non-exclusive native title rights over an 365,345-hectare (902,790-acre) area of land and waters on the Sunshine Coast.

[12] There have been a number of native title claims by various groups of contemporary Gubbi Gubbi/Kabi Kabi people, all through the same representative body, the Southern and Western Queensland Region.

[14] This claim covers an area from Redcliffe, not far north of Brisbane to around Isis Junction, in the Bundaberg region,[17] but excluding Maryborough.

The Sunshine Coast Council hopes to increase public access to culturally significant land, and provide educational tools such as signposts and information boards on walking trails.

[19][20] The Dictionary of the Gubbi-Gubbi and Butchulla languages, compiled by Jeanie Bell, with assistance from Amanda Seed, was published in 1994.

The dictionary includes both Gubbi-Gubbi and Butchulla language vocabularies with an English finder-list; sources of words given; and notes on phonology, morphology, and syntax.

[21] During the colonisation of Queensland, there were particularly bloody frontier wars as settlers moved onto land that had been occupied by Aboriginal peoples for millennia.

[25] As colonial entrepreneurs pushed into their territory to establish pastoral stations, they together with the Butchulla set up a fierce resistance: from 1847 to 1853, 28 squatters and their shepherds were killed.

During his time there he met Kabi bushranger Johnny Campbell, and described their society in a 1910 monograph, Two Representative Tribes of Queensland.

[34] The Kabi Kabi people he grew up with numbered no more than a score by the early 1880s,[35] and by 1906, after they had been forcibly removed to the Barambah reserve (an Aboriginal reserve created under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897), he stated that only 3-4 full-blooded members of the group remained among the "remnants".