Landing in Vincent Lingiari's palm, was his country. The red earth passed through Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's fingertips as he handed back 1250 square miles of Wave Hill Station to the Gurundji people.
It was 1974, and a watershed moment that sparked a transition of Aboriginal land rights in the nation's colonial history.
As the Central Land Council celebrates 50 years, chairman Warren Williams told AAP he is most proud of the things achieved during the organisation's first decade.
The four land councils were established to bring together witnesses and evidence for the 1973 Woodward Royal Commission, and since, have returned more than half of the Northern Territory to Aboriginal traditional owners.
An effort labelled as "enduring".
After Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser toppled the Whitlam government, he passed the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1976.
But the political climate echoing the call of Aboriginal people and a need for self-determination had changed.
"I think Gough Whitlam was a person that, you know, stood out in the community for getting land rights back, he was one of the best Prime Ministers we had," Mr Williams said.
"Then (Malcolm) Fraser came in and he, sort of, weakened that proposal."
When passing the new laws, the Fraser Liberal government refrained from supporting a national system of land rights.
According to the federal Parliamentary Library, the words "self-determination" were dropped from the government's vocabulary and replaced with "self-management" and "self-sufficiency".
Furthermore, the Fraser government made amendments to the land rights proposal, most notably the provision for some mining sites to go ahead without the consent of traditional owners.
Despite the opposition of Mirarr people, the Ranger Uranium Mine - Australia's largest uranium mine in the heart of Kakadu National Park - was exempted from the NT Land Rights Act.
Fifty years on, the Central Land Council is celebrating its past, present and future.
The organisation has fostered nationally renowned leaders, including activist Charlie Perkins, who became the council's first chairman in 1975, and artist Wenten Rubuntja, who was Dr Perkins' deputy.
A year later, the council published the first edition of Land Rights News, now Australia's oldest Aboriginal-owned newspaper.
Reflecting on her father, film and television director Rachel Perkins said it was disappointing that Mr Fraser and successive governments failed to create a national land rights act.
"One of the great tragedies of his (her father's) life was that it didn't come to fruition ... he put years of work into that. And I remember going to protests about it," she said.
She said that, despite the knockbacks, a defining feature of her father's leadership was it came from the grassroots.
"True leadership is bringing your community with you, being a grassroots organiser, knowing the people that are prepared to walk alongside you," she said.
"And he knew everybody. He knew families from right across the country, personally and his network extended, over decades of life. He understood that our people respect and regard, the personal interaction, the personal touch."
She recalled travelling with her father, at the age of six, along the old dirt tracks by car from Alice Springs to Canberra for meetings with politicians.
"He was a radical, he spoke out, he was always ruffling feathers and getting in trouble for calling out racism where he saw it, and demanding that the status quo wasn't enough," Ms Perkins said.
It was that leadership, and the many hands that "make change", Ms Perkins explained, that led to the Warlpiri Kartangarurru-Gurindji land claim, which was the Central Land Council's first successful claim in 1978.
In the decade that followed, Aboriginal people displaced by colonisation won back their homelands and with that came the right to infrastructure and water.
"A lot of our people were living on their land well before land rights came," Mr Williams said.
"So they were fighting whilst they were still living on the land, bringing something to their country, like water, electricity, shelter, that's made it home now."
In 1983, the council hired a young Yawuru man from the Kimberley, Patrick Dodson.
He would go on to become the organisation's first director two years later and eventually a Labor senator for Western Australia.
The council opened offices in seven communities across the red centre, and in 1985 Mr Dodson's work made history when Uluru-Kata Tjuta was handed back to Anangu people. Traditional owners then leased the it back to the federal government for 99 years, making it one of the nation's first co-managed national parks.
Soon after Jakamarra Nelson, who's considered an architect of the organisation's community development programs, joined the board.
After he passed, the council remembered him as "a champion of Aboriginal-led economic development".
Today, the Central Land Council's community development programs are amongst some of the most influential in Australia.
They have helped Aboriginal communities create circular economies on their land through pastoral leases, land conservation, tourism and resources.
Mr Williams acknowledges that the work of the council - which is made up of 90 men and women from communities across the central desert - has expanded beyond getting land back to "keeping Country strong" with its ranger program.
With 14 groups across the region, it both employs and educates people while helping them to stay on Country.
"The rangers are being taught on the land whose country that is, the people who are on it and lie within it - it's an education," he said.
"I think it's significant when you learn something from people's land like that, you seem to spread it out ... you say to people 'we've been to this land here, and it belongs to this group of people'."
Mr Williams described it as a form of organic truth-telling.
In recent years, land councils and their access to up to $1 billion in federal funding have come under fire from Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has called for greater "transparency and accountability".
Last year, the federal Labor government earmarked $665 million in funds, under the NT Land Rights Act, to the newly formed NT Investment Corporation led by Barb Shaw, the current deputy chair of the Central Land Council.
"We are an Aboriginal-led organisation, which is now taking on and having Aboriginal hands control Aboriginal monies that have been locked away in federal treasury in Canberra for decades," she said at the corporation's recent strategy launch.
Ms Perkins reflected that leadership of the Central Land Council is a tough burden to carry.
"I saw my father carry it, and I see what the leaders who put their hands up to go and be part of the land council do just to prove this always was and always will be Aboriginal land," she said.
"It's no easy task, it takes a lifetime of work."
