"I'd like it to be noted that we're not after people's backyards or their farms," says Hart, chairman of the Southwest Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, representing 30,000 Noongar people, or half the state's indigenous population.

"We're after recognition and if we get any type of benefit, it's to run businesses and train our people."

The 50-year-old admits few negotiating opportunities arise in Perth's metropolitan area, where almost all land is excluded from claim because of its freehold or leasehold status.

But last week, Hart signed an agreement on behalf of Noongar claimants with a mine in the state's southwest region, which is covered by a much larger - and still pending - Noongar land claim.

Boddington Gold Mines will offer apprenticeships and 100 jobs to Aboriginal people over the life of its new mine, in a deal with mine owners Newmont-Anglogold Ashanti that arose out of 12 months' negotiation with local Noongars.

Hart, a father of two, is proud that a handful of local indigenous schoolchildren have already begun pre-apprenticeship training as part of thedeal.

"This is for the sceptics - it shows we're not using that goldmine as a pot of gold," Hart says, alluding to yesterday's comment by Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox that Perth's native title claim was "not a pot of gold" for indigenous claimants.

"We're using it as a resource to better ourselves."

Hart says he was touched when Wilcox candidly admitted in his finding that "surprisingly to me" the court had gathered compellingly strong evidence of Noongar families clinging tenaciously to each other, their culture and language.

Hart's personal history bears it out: his grandparents were held at the grim Moore River Settlement, made famous in the film Rabbit-Proof Fence. "If they were caught out teaching their kids Noongar language, they were chastised and locked up," he says.

His parents were subject to a curfew in the 1950s that forced them out of town centres after dark, and Hart himself grew up on the poor fringes of a country town.

"They used to put all the Aboriginal people on reserves about 3km out of town," he says.

Such vicissitudes make Tuesday's victory, and the judge's comments about the surviving strength of Noongar culture, all the more sweet, Hart says. "We've always had people call us half-castes, that you've got to be from the desert to be a true Aborigine. This claim shows them that we are Aboriginal people."