Traditional Aboriginal owners of Muckaty Station – a pastoral property about 1400 kilometres south of the Northern Territory capital – are in Darwin seeking support for their campaign against the federal government’s plans to establish Australia’s first nuclear waste dump on their land.

The group – led by traditional owners Dianne Stokes and Mark Chungaloo – have met with local government and trade union representatives as well as environmentalists during their visit.

All were asked to support a planned rally against the proposed “dump” in Tennant Creek next month.

Mark Chungaloo has challenged the Northern Land Council’s nomination of the Muckaty site as a nuclear waste dump in the Australian Federal Court and the hearing of his objection now scheduled for August.

Melbourne-based law firm Maurice Blackburn will represent the traditional owners and argue that the Northern Council –an umbrella indigenous organisation that oversees the administration of Aboriginal land in northern Australia – did not consult with all the traditional owners as required before nominating the site.

Aboriginal opponents of the “volunteering” of the land say the process was based on a secret anthropological report that both the Northern Land Council and the Australian government have refused to make available to the traditional owners.

The land was “volunteered” as part of legislation the Australian parliament passed during the stewardship of John Howard’s conservative government in 2006.

Its successor – an Australian Labor government of first Kevin Rudd and then Julia Gillard - was to have abandoned the legislation but instead replaced it with the National Radioactive Waste Management Bill.

The House of Representatives has now passed the legislation, which is the responsibility of Resource Minister Martin Ferguson, and it is now expected to go to the Senate during May.

The Northern Land Council’s sister organisation, the Central Land Council has opposed the legislation as had the powerful maritime and transport worker unions.