Western Australia’s Strelley school, in the Pilbara region, was the first Aboriginal controlled school in the state. The little examined story of the school’s foundation arguably represents the temporal, geographical and political flow of the Aboriginal rights movement from the end of the Protection era through to the late 1970s. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with some of the school’s founders, and on documentary research, this paper establishes how the school's roots formed in the Pilbara strike, which influenced the 1966 Gurindji strike. The ideas of self-determination articulated by the Gurindji fed into the national land rights movement and then fed into a myriad of local battles for land rights and localised Aboriginal control. One aspect of this movement was the emergence of bilingual education in the Northern Territory in 1973—which in turn inspired the community of Strelley to push for their own bilingual and Aboriginal-controlled school over the border in 1975. Uncovering this history can contribute to our understanding of the significance of Australia’s bilingual education movement, and its anchoring within ideas of self-determination that emerged through the battle for Aboriginal land rights.