Word.ws English Dictionary

traditional owner

traditional owner noun: a descendant of the tribe or ethnic group that occupied a particular region before European settlement, especially when that occupation is recognised by Australian law.

Noun

traditional owner (plural traditional owners)

  1. (Australia) A descendant of the tribe or ethnic group that occupied a particular region before European settlement, especially when that occupation is recognised by Australian law.
    • The Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 (ALRA) has provided an avenue for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory to come to a court and give evidence to a Commonwealth appointed judge, known as the Land Commissioner, as to why he should ‘find them’ the traditional owners of certain tracts of...2005, John Bradley, Kathryn Seton, “2: Self-determination or ‘Deep Colonising’: Laind Claims, Colonial Authority and Indigenous Representation”, in Barbara Hocking, editor, Unfinished Constitutional...
    • During the 1950s, all of the remaining Aboriginal traditional owners were removed to a government settlement on nearby Croker Island. In 1981, the establishment of Gurig National Park was agreed to by the Northern Territory government and the Aboriginal traditional owners in order to resolve a...2006, Dermot Smyth, Case Study 20.9: Garig Gunak Barlu National Park, Australia, Michael Lockwood, Graeme Worboys, Ashish Kothari, Managing Protected Areas: A Global Guide, page 539

Forms of traditional owner

pluraltraditional owners

Questions about traditional owner

What does traditional owner mean?
Traditional owner means a descendant of the tribe or ethnic group that occupied a particular region before European settlement, especially when that occupation is recognised by Australian law.
What part of speech is traditional owner?
Traditional owner is a noun.
What is the plural of traditional owner?
The plural of traditional owner is traditional owners.

Words near traditional owner in the dictionary

  1. Traditional Latin Masses
  2. traditional marriage
  3. traditional marriages
  4. traditional medicine
  5. traditional medicines
  6. traditional owner
  7. traditional owners
  8. traditional publisher
  9. traditional publishers
  10. traditional right
  11. traditional rights

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: traditional owner (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-traditional owner.ogg.

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