Despite his six years as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission regional councillor, Mr Wolf has been knocked back for an indigenous fishing licence in his native Tasmania – on the grounds he is supposedly not Aboriginal.

Mr Wolf told The Australian he was devastated by the rebuff, confirmed in a letter from former premier Paul Lennon and since repeated by his successor, David Bartlett.

“When Lennon sent that, I was absolutely devastated – it was worse than when I was diagnosed with cancer,” said the fisherman, 58, from the village of Stanley, northwest Tasmania.

“My spirituality, my heart, everything in me is Aboriginal. It’s my culture, it’s my belief.

“Why should I buy a fishing licence when they are granted free to Aboriginal people? I am Aboriginal.”

Mr Wolf traces his ancestry to an Aborigine known as Pleenperrener, or Mother Brown.

Mr Lennon, as Aboriginal affairs minister, informed Mr Wolf in March that he was not eligible for indigenous fishing rights because a search of state archives was unable to prove he was a descendant of Pleenperrener.

Mr Bartlett is standing by the decision, which contradicts rulings by the Federal Court and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that Mr Wolf is an Aborigine.

Mr Wolf believes his great-great-grandmother, Mary Ann Potter (nee Brown), was Pleenperrener’s daughter with sealer James Brown.

The Office of Aboriginal Affairs says there is no evidence Mary Ann Potter was the same person as Pleenperrener’s daughter, Mary Ann Brown.

“The onus of proof is on the applicant to establish their eligibility. Mr Wolf has not been able to provide sufficient evidence of Aboriginal descent,” a government spokeswoman said.

It is a maddening situation for Mr Wolf, whose Aboriginal descent was challenged and upheld in the Federal Court in 1998 and in the AAT in 2002, when the right of hundreds of people to vote in ATSIC elections was unsuccessfully challenged.

In the 1998 case, involving Mr Wolf’s brother Charles, judge Ron Merkel ruled that a family letter showing the Wolfs were descendants of an Aboriginal woman who had a daughter with Brown was authentic.

In the 2002 case, the AAT said this letter and supporting oral histories were “potent proof of (Aboriginal) descent”.

The problem for Mr Wolf, who is a board member and elder of his local Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation, is the different approaches taken to the issue of Aboriginal descent by the federal and state governments.

Both governments apply the same three-point test – descent, self-identification and communal recognition – but Tasmania takes a narrower approach, rejecting the claim unless state archives contain supporting evidence.