Mary Crooks: 'We can forge a new compact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians', Women for Yes launch - 2023

13 August 2023, Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne, Australia

Introduction

Mary Crooks AO is the Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust.

Thank you, Emily Carter, Jackie Huggins and Marcia Langton, for enabling us to create this powerful video. We admire your life-long courage and leadership.

We pay tribute also to the leadership of Indigenous women past and present and in terms of the referendum effort, we acknowledge Indigenous women including Linda Burney, Megan Davis, Pat Anderson AO, Rachael Perkins, Sally Scales and Kara Keys for their campaign leadership.

The video you have just watched in its first showing. We are now in the process of translating it into eleven community languages – Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Hindi and Punjabi. These will be ready within a fortnight for us to distribute around the country, to help reach the hearts and minds of migrant and refugee women, up until polling day. We will do the same with the Open Letter launched today.

My role is to provide some context to today’s launch of our new campaign initiative, Women for Yes; to provide a perspective on the no case and to present you with our Open Letter. I need to warn you that my energy reserves are down, having been almost depleted by last night’s magnificent quinella, the win by the Matildas AND my beloved Blue Boys.

Pushing back, with respect

Last November, Guardian Australia ran a piece about our Together, Yes campaign. Soon after, I received an email from an older gentleman. He had a Physics degree some years earlier from the same University I had attended.

He attached his long essay arguing that what happened to ‘The Aborigine’ in Australia was simply a defeat of a people by a technologically superior society. The British claiming of Australia was legal and absolute. Intergenerational trauma was a myth.

The idea of a Voice was a ‘racist abomination.’ He urged me to reconsider our support for the Voice; and withdraw from the Yes campaign.

I pushed back, respectfully. I told him that it had taken me until my fifties to learn of the Eumeralla Wars in the Southwest region of Victoria where I had grown up and been schooled. Beginning in the 1830s, they lasted for over twenty years in which more than 7,000 Indigenous men, women and children were killed.

He replied, telling me these were not ‘wars’ – they were simply skirmishes, payback killings. Communication stopped at that point.

However, I am sure you will appreciate the delicious irony to this story. Here I was, proud feminist, Executive Director of the Victorian Women’s Trust, being mansplained on the Voice to Parliament – and, told what to do.

The Great Australian Silence

Bill Stanner was a towering Australian intellectual, an acclaimed anthropologist. He died in 1981. With great regard for his expertise, he was one of three men appointed by prime minister Holt to form a new Commonwealth Council for Aboriginal Affairs. He served successive political regimes, including the Whitlam Government.

In the handover of the first native title grant to the Gurindji people at Wattie Creek in the Northern Territory, it was Stanner who suggested Whitlam perform the symbolic act of pouring earth through the hands of Gurindji leader, Vincent Lingiari. In 1968, Stanner gave the ABC Boyer Lectures. Entitled After the Dreaming, they drew together the major themes of his anthropological work, capturing unparalleled insight into Aboriginal Australia. This still stands.

Stanner was disturbed by the prevailing anthropology which he believed dehumanised Aboriginal people. It was an impertinent, condescending world view which denied any sophistication to Australian Aboriginal people, asking them instead to ‘un-be,’ to relinquish what it was that made them, through his eyes, a distinctive, specialised and successful civilisation.

He rejected as naïve the assimilation views of colonial administrators and settlers – because they falsely presumed that Aboriginal people could be treated as individuals rather than as tightly bonded members of a network of kinship groups. The destruction he witnessed was not merely the consequence of British settlement — but its price. So how did he see these British colonists responding?

In the main, Stanner argues that they responded with contemptuous indifference to the fate of Aboriginal Australians, seeing their extinction as inevitable. Brutal and barbaric massacres, violent bloodshed and atrocious, ugly deeds would help racial extinguishment on its way.

Stanner acknowledged there were people anguished by the bloodshed and treatment meted out to Aboriginal people, who bravely challenged this prevailing colonial thinking, in the face of scornful criticism and derision. He understood that it couldn’t have been easy for some people, especially Christians, to accept what they had done – that in the birth of the Australian nation, no sin was committed.

His central argument was that rather than acknowledge complicity in the attempted destruction of Aboriginal society, it was easier to hold that the fatal impact of the spread and growth of a pastoral economy was a morally neutral fact – and then avert one’s gaze.

This grew into a ‘cult of forgetfulness’ or as Stanner otherwise called it, the Great Australian Silence. He argued that this almost total muteness on the fundamental matters of race relations worked itself through the 19th and 20th centuries — silent on the brazen territorial appropriation of land, genocide, the forcible removal of children from their families around the nation, the forcible displacement of Aboriginal people from their homelands onto missions and reserves, the destruction of their culture, the forbidding of languages spoken, the denial of basic human rights and decimation through introduced diseases and alcohol.

This Great Australian Silence was not just absentmindedness, Stanner says, but a structural matter, a view from a window which had been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. It became a habit and — over time — a practice on a national scale. But this was much more than noticing, seeing and recording. It cloaked a fundamental moral and ethical dimension: the systematic suffocation of national conscience.

Stanner’s Boyer Lectures stopped people in their tracks. The idea of the Great Australian Silence stabbed at our national consciousness, drawing plaudits as well as to-be-expected, defensive rebuttals.

Paul Keating’s Redfern Address

In 1992, almost a quarter of a century after these Boyer Lectures, Paul Keating delivered his famous Redfern speech. Keating was Australia’s 24th Prime Minister (i.e., close to a century of national leadership) yet this particular speech was the first acknowledgment by any Australian government of the colonial reality of violent dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous people:

…it was us who did the dispossessing he said.

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases…. We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded us all.

In the years since Keating’s milestone speech, we have seen a nation slowly but surely come to terms with the past, to be less at odds with itself, keener and more committed to reconciliation.

Reconciliation Australia was established in 2001 as the national body. In 2006, Reconciliation Plans began to be adopted by Australian organisations. Today, there are over 1,100 organisations with a Reconciliation Action Plan. There are 1,500 schools and early learning services with a RAP aimed at fostering high levels of knowledge and pride in Aboriginal histories, cultures and contributions.

Constitutional Recognition and a Voice to Parliament

So, here we are now in 2023, with an historic opportunity to markedly progress the cause of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The Question to be put to the Australian people will be:

A Proposed Law: to alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. Do you approve of this proposed alteration?

By answering Yes, we will loosen much, much more the suffocating stranglehold of denialism. It means we can forge a new compact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, building on the impressive reconciliation work done so far by so many.

The Voice is a simple, straightforward and practical idea. It has been conceived over many years of thoughtful design, and impressive standards of consultation. It enjoys the support of more than 80% of Indigenous Australians.

The Voice will be an Advisory body, allowing the experience, knowledge and wisdom of Indigenous communities to be heard, and reflected, in the development of policies and programs which can positively affect their lives. The design of the Voice will be determined by our elected representatives.

Crucially, once established, it also enshrines a greater level of political accountability from our elected representatives. If they listen, and then choose to disregard sage advice, they must be able to account for this – to us as electors. Continuing to ignore recommendations from such reports as Deaths in Custody and Bringing Them Home, will be at their peril.

Dismantling the “no” case

And so, to the no case. Let’s not be distracted or spooked by the sound and the fury out there; by some loud negative voices, and sections of media that chase conflict and create sideshows.

Let’s not allow ourselves to be dragged into a vortex of misinformation and lines of argument straight from the same playbook which proclaimed the end of the world with the Mabo judgment; and which questioned the methodology and truth-telling involved in the Stolen Generations Report.

Let’s have some perspective here:

It is said we need more details. No, we don’t. A mountain of detail exists, including the 262-page design report from Marcia Langton and Tom Calma. It was delivered in 2021 which means all senior political figures have had at least two years to read it.

We were taken into a war with Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction — people did not say, we need more detail. The Labor Opposition went to the polls last year with a policy to create an Anti-Corruption Commission — people did not say, we need more detail.

It is said that the Voice is a danger to our system of government and our democracy. No, it’s not. It is an Advisory Body. It will enhance our democracy. Media concentration in our country and undisclosed political donations are the sorts of things that compromise our system of government and endanger our democracy.

It is said that it’s discriminatory. No, it’s not. It starts to end over 200 years of discrimination against First Nation peoples.

It is said that Indigenous people do not support it. Some don’t. The overwhelming majority do. With every Federal and State election, there is never voter homogeneity so why do we insist otherwise in this case. If the majority of Indigenous Australians were opposed, it would be different.

It is said it is dangerous to extend giving advice to Executive Government. No, it’s not. Ministers’ diaries are filled every week with representations from individuals, representatives of organisations and lobbyists.

It is said that the Voice accords special privileges and rights to Indigenous people over others. No, it doesn’t. When egregious harm has been committed against Indigenous Australians, we need to do something special to redress that harm. We acknowledge it and seek to right the wrong. A mature democracy does this, as well as addressing other inequities across our society.

It is said that the Voice creates an added expense to the already large amounts spent on Aboriginal programs and services. No, it won’t. The Productivity Commission has recently affirmed the importance of listening and understanding the lived experience of Indigenous communities. Place-based solutions that overcome past failures of government will be money better spent.

It is said that this introduces race into the Constitution. No, it doesn’t. Since the very beginning the 1901 Constitution has included race-based powers and racial exclusion. This is about recognising the original inhabitants of our country by adding them to the birth certificate of modern Australia.

It is said that the whole thing is divisive. No, it’s not. It will help further heal the deep wound created by our troubled past.

The Power of Women’s Activism

Ever since winning the vote in the late 19th century, in the face of stiff opposition within a patriarchal world, women have muscled in as reformers and nation-builders, despite not having the numbers in our parliaments, until more recently. Indeed, on the polling evidence, the Federal Govt changed last year in large part due to women’s agency and insistence on doing politics differently. This is no flash in the pan. This particular cultural shift is real and lasting – thank God.

Our Kitchen Table Conversation model was first employed in 1997 in Victoria at the time of the Kennett government. We partnered up with Voices for Indi in 2012/2013, tailoring our model to help Cathy McGowan achieve a 9% swing and become the Independent member for Indi. In 2023, through our Together, Yes campaign, we now have literally thousands of Conversation Hosts around the country, the majority of whom are women, bringing others less certain perhaps into supported and constructive conversation about the referendum.

These women know, as do we, that safe and respectful discussion is the best social medicine, especially in the face of vitriol and bigotry. There is still time for you to take part in Together, Yes if you have yet to do so.

We have a unique opportunity before us — to help create a more forward-looking Australia, one less at odds with itself over the past treatment of Indigenous Australians, one that faces more squarely the problem of acute inequality affecting the lives of many Indigenous Australians, while at the same time celebrating their culture and contribution.

In the earlier video, in response to the impending referendum, Emily Carter asks herself what will she tell her grandchildren; and she asks, what will you tell your grandchildren?

Here is what you can tell them – that you decided to stand with Emily, Marcia and Jackie and the majority of Australians on this fundamental question of recognition, respect and fairness; that you had the courage of your convictions; that you signed the Women for Yes Open Letter; and that you helped bring the referendum home.

We will do everything in our power to build momentum for Women for Yes over the next two months or so. We will also make sure that this Open Letter – with its multitude of signatories – is then stored in the national archive covering this defining historical moment.

So here it is for your consideration:

WOMEN FOR YES: OPEN LETTER

We are from all walks of life and experience. We speak with our own voice. We understand as women what it means to struggle for our human rights. And we know from the public record that women have made lasting differences on much-needed social and democratic reform.

We acknowledge the historic wrongs committed against Australia’s First Nations people over two centuries and more. We pay tribute to the past and present leadership of Indigenous women across Australia in their long, courageous struggle for justice for their families and communities.

Most of us can only imagine what it has been like for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families – dispossessed of traditional lands and brutally killed in large numbers; adult men and women removed to reserves; children taken away, removed from family; children jailed for minor offences; language and culture destroyed.

Generations of ongoing trauma, discrimination and hardship play out today, affecting the lives of too many Indigenous Australians, their children, and grandchildren.

Trust has been broken. We can rebuild it.

The Uluru Statement From The Heart graciously invites us to walk with Indigenous Australians toward a better future for all. We ache to do so. We take pride in what Australian women have achieved in terms of civic action and nation-building. But we can do so much more.

We want to be part of a hopeful, forward-looking Australia, a nation prepared to forge a new compact between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. We want to be part of a new understanding and practical approaches that are underpinned by recognition, respect, and fairness.

Such a new accord starts with the meaningful recognition of First Peoples in the Australian Constitution; and enshrining a Voice to Parliament.

We see the Voice to Parliament as a simple, positive and practical proposal. When Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a say in policies affecting their lives, we can be more confident that their experience, knowledge, and wisdom will be heard, valued, and fashioned into more appropriate policies and programs which make a real difference to their lives as well as benefitting our entire nation.

We see the forthcoming referendum as a once in a lifetime chance to bring about an historic reform, by voting Yes in the referendum. Women for Yes. Let’s make it happen.

Neville Bonner: 'Once again you are telling us that you know better. How dare you!' Constitutional Convention - 1998

4 February 1998, Canberra, Australia

This is a part transcript . The full transcript is pasted below.

My heart is heavy. I worry for my children and my grandchildren. I worry that what has proven to be a stable society, which now recognizes my people as equals, is about to be replaced. How dare you. I repeat, how dare you.

You told my people that your system was best. We have come to accept that. We have come to believe that. The dispossessed, despised adapted to your system. Now you say that you were wrong and that we were wrong to believe you.

Suddenly you are saying that what brought the country together, made it independent, that ensured its defence, saw it through peace and war, and saw it through depression and prosperity, you are saying all this must go.

I cannot see the need for change, I cannot see how it will help my people. I cannot see how it will resolve the question of land and access to land that troubles us.

Fellow Australians, what is most hurtful is that after all we have learned together, after subjugating us and then freeing us, once again you are telling us that you know better. How dare you? How dare you?

I look across this chamber and cannot fail to see the very rich amongst you … what reason do you have now in 1998 to tell the indigenous people that we must accept what you have decided about our country again. Why are you doing this?

Malarndirra McCarthy: 'Let the people of the Northern Territory have a say', maiden speech - 2016

15 September 2016, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia

Yuwu bajinda nya-wirdi kulu kirna-balirra yinda nyawirdi nyuwu-ja barrawu, bajirru yiurru wiji marnajingulaji ngathangka, bajirru yirru li-wirdiwalangu ji-awarawu li-Ngunawal Ngambri barra jina barra awara yirrunga, bajrru li-ngaha li-malarngu marnaji anka nya-ngathanya bii, li-ngatha kulhakulha, li-ngatha li-nganji karnirru-balirra.

Yes, let us begin. You are there, senior one—Mr President. We have no word for ‘President’ in Yanyuwa, so I refer to you as ‘senior one’. And I thank you for this place, and for all you others also here with me, and you, the traditional owners, the Ngunawal and Ngambri, for this country. This is your country.

To my family and friends who are here today: thank you. Thank you for making the journey. I especially acknowledge my father, John McCarthy, and my son Grayson, who are here with me. And I know my son CJ is watching from his university room in Dallas, Texas; a big hello to you, my son. And to Adam, sitting for his year 11 exam: good luck to you, my son.

I am here today starting off with Yanyuwa, the language of my mother’s families in Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria, nearly 1,000 kilometres south-east of Darwin. My families, they gave me this language, the language of my country. I am a woman whose spirit has come from the salt water, and we are known as li-antha wirriyarra, which means our spiritual origin comes from the sea—from the sea country. And I welcome my Kuku, John Bradley and Nona. Thank you. Bauji barra.

The old people would sing the kujika, the songline. They would follow the path of many kujika, the songlines, like the brolga, the kurdarraku, of my grandmother’s country—the beautiful brolga country; the country where my spirit always returns to. They would sing of the shark dreaming, and how it travelled from Queensland all the way down the coast to the gulf country and out to the islands of my families. And we dance the dance of the mermaids, the ngardiji, the ngardiji kujika of the Gulf and Barkly country, linking so many of our first nations peoples.

I grew up with the old men and women, the marlbu and barrdi bardis, and I am here thinking about them now, and I am thinking about my own path. My road has been a long road like the song, the kujika, that belongs to the old people. And I am standing here in this place, the Australian Senate, in the place of the people, to represent not just my own people—the Yanyuwa, the Garrwa, the Mara and the Kudanji peoples—but to stand for all people of the Northern Territory: all clan groups, all families who call the Northern Territory home, whether they live on the vast cattle stations of the Northern Territory or whether they have travelled from countries like Asia, Africa or the Middle East to forge a new life for their families away from strife-torn lives that offered no future. I stand here for you, too.

In 1842, my McCarthy ancestor sailed the seas from Ireland aboard the ship Palestine to Australia. And he did not come as a convict like hundreds of others before him; instead, he came as a free man. He chose to come, to make this country his home, not just for him but for his young family, to live in Australia, to build his future, his dream, in the land of opportunity, an unknown land yet filled with much hope and prosperity.

It was on the north coast of New South Wales that he made his home as the local magistrate. In the years and decades that followed, his descendants would toil on the land as farmers and timber-getters before my grandad, Alf McCarthy, then moved to Sydney to work in a box factory at Chiswick and then became a tram conductor on the Sydney trams. Along with my grandmother, Mary, they would raise their three sons: my dad, John McCarthy, who is here today; my Uncle Ray, who is also here, with Aunt Angela, and their children and grandchildren; and my Uncle Kevin, along with his wife, Regina, who are sending all their love now as I speak. I am deeply thankful for the love, support and richness in wisdom of my McCarthy families, as I am of my Yanyuwa and Garrawa families. Yo yamalu bingi; it makes my spirit feel really good.

I share with you all my kujika, my songline that weaves its way from the gulf country across the first-nation’s lands of Aboriginal people in Australia. As a journalist, a storyteller for 20 years—for the ABC, for SBS and for the much-needed NITV—I was able to tell the stories of the lives of thousands and thousands of Australians, and even internationally, with the World Indigenous Television Broadcasters Network, trying to improve the lives of Indigenous people the world over through Indigenous media. I commend wholeheartedly the work of Indigenous media in Australia. Our country needs you. I especially want to acknowledge amazing women journalists, like those in the gallery today: the ABC’s Lindy Kerin, NITV’s Natalie Ahmat and the awesome, inspiring Caroline Jones.

I am honoured to be elected to represent all people of the Northern Territory in this chamber—to the Australian Senate—and to do so as a member of the Australian Labor Party.

As my McCarthy ancestor sailed his way across the seas to Australia, my Yanyuw ancestors sailed their way across the northern seas from the gulf country, to the land of the Macassan, Sulawesi, to the Torres Strait through to Papua New Guinea. The Macassans traded with the Yanyuwa, as they did with the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land and the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt and the Nungubuyu people of Numbulwar. All of us are interconnected through kujika, through songline. For example, the brolga kujika connects the families of Numbulwar and Groote Eylandt with our families in the gulf country. That is the law of the first-nation’s peoples that defines our connection to country and culture and kin.

In the eyes of first-nation’s people, cultural exchange both amongst clan groups within Australia and with people outside Australia was a natural part of life well before Captain Cook arrived in 1788. There was already a thriving economic foreign trade occurring between Australia and with countries to our north. It is Aboriginal people who were the diplomats with foreign countries, the trading partners who shared knowledge and exchanged agriculture and marine sources of food and tools in the form of harpoons for hunting and knowledge of carving canoes to set sail in the unpredictable wet season seas. Only last month, in the landmark native title hearing in Borroloola, this diplomatic mission between the Yanyuwa and the Macassans was formally recognised in the Western system of law. The Federal Court recognised this relationship. Yet Aboriginal people have always had a system of governance here, and in Yanyuw we refer to it through the kujika.

In 1966, when Vincent Lingiari led the Wave Hill Walk-Off, demanding equal pay and equal rights for his country men and women, my families in the gulf country supported his fight for justice and that of the Gurindji people. So too did thousands of other Australians across the country who believed in a fair go for all. In recent weeks the Gurindji commemorated 50 years since the walk-off and recognised the important role Australian unions played in the late sixties supporting those Australians who could not win their battle for equal pay alone.

Still today the union movement stands beside those who push for a better way of life. I acknowledge in particular the support of those in the gallery today, such as Kay Densley, with the CPSU NT, and her team. Special thanks to Joseph Scales of the Australian Services Union, the MUA and, yes, the CFMEU, as well as United Voice, the ETU, the AMWU and the ACTU. The Turnbull government’s decision to go to an early election in the hope of diminishing the role of unions in this country spectacularly backfired when the Australian people moved away from his vision in their thousands. They recognise that trade unions continue to play a vital role in ensuring justice and equity for all Australians, for we all know that pay equity is not fully enjoyed by all Australians, and homelessness has a human face, and sometimes it is much of my family’s.

In the kinship way, it is my brother, who prefers to sleep in the long grass in Darwin city because it all becomes too hard. At other times the human face is one of someone who has just given up trying to exist between dispassionate laws and the high expectations of those whose job it is to carry them out. The town of Katherine in the Northern Territory has the highest rate of homelessness in the Territory, while Alice Springs is in desperate need of a visionary future that inspires our youth and lightens the load on families. It is a vision I so much want to work on with my fellow federal colleagues: the member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, and the member for Solomon, Luke Gosling, in paving a future for the Northern Territory filled with much hope and opportunity, and my fellow Indigenous colleagues, Senator Pat Dodson and Linda Burney.

I congratulate Chief Minister Michael Gunner and his NT Labor caucus on their recent victory in the Territory, and I certainly look very much forward to working closely with his team. I thank all the NT Labor branches and party members for your overwhelming support in my election to the Senate. Your faith in me helped to also restore my faith that serving the people of the Territory, and indeed Australia, is an honourable path and one that has ignited my spirit once again after the loss of my seat in Arnhem in the 2012 Territory election.

I sincerely congratulate the new member for Arnhem, Selena Uibo, for restoring this beautiful bush seat back to Labor. I acknowledge most sincerely, too, former senator Nova Peris and, before her, former senator Trish Crossin. Both women have supported me in my road to the Senate here today. For their graciousness, patient advice and respect for the challenges I have had to face to get here, I say a heartfelt thank you. To my staff, Mandy Taylor and Charlie Powling, thank you for joining me on this journey.

When the Commonwealth parliament passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976, it was the Yanyuwa people who stepped up to claim back our land. As a young girl, I watched my grandparents, my elders, as they prepared to give evidence about how the Yanyuwa cared for country, especially the islands north of Borroloola. They gave evidence in an old police station, and they could pretty much only speak in Yanyuwa. They were difficult times, and trying to give evidence was something that we had to continuously learn from. In that time, we found that we could not explain things as well as we would have liked to the Western understanding of Aboriginal culture.

It was to be another four decades of litigation—in Borroloola, in Darwin and in Melbourne. It was litigation that passed on to us, the Yanyuwa descendants, to continue to fight for recognition of who we are, li-antha wirriyarra, a people whose spiritual origin comes from the sea. But we did not walk that journey alone. It was only possible with the steadfast support of the Northern Land Council, and I acknowledge all those staff and council members over those 40 years who walked with my families.

We talk about recognition of Australia’s First Peoples in the Constitution, and I pay tribute to all those in the campaign to support recognition. It is most certainly way overdue, and I say these next sentences without any disrespect to those of you. I urge parliamentarians in both houses to understand this: the Yanyuwa are a people whose struggle for country and recognition took nearly 40 years, and so many elders died well before such recognition and, most importantly, any respect ever took place. Such long, drawn-out legal battles have wearied many families of so many first nation peoples, constantly trying to defend their sense of self, identity and country, who have fought for land rights. Maybe that was the intention; I do not know. Battle fatigued, perhaps we are better to acquiesce. But we are still here, and we are not going to go away.

So I understand fully the impatience and, in some cases, total rejection felt by so many first nation peoples towards the Australian parliament’s push for recognition. It is a difficult pill to swallow, as first peoples, to yet again have to ask others to respect us—our place, our culture and our families—in this country, when we know we have been here well over 60,000 years.

With nearly 30 per cent of the Territory population Indigenous, we will only have half a vote in any referendum, let alone a referendum on recognition, because we are not a state. Is it not time to consider seriously a vision for the north and a vision for the future of all our territories such as Christmas and Cocos Islands? We need a vision that unites over 100 Aboriginal language groups just in the Northern Territory alone, the multicultural communities who have made it home and the descendants of the Afghan cameleers and early pioneers.

It is time the Commonwealth encouraged more seriously the growth of the Northern Territory as perhaps the seventh state in the Australian Federation. Allow the people of the Northern Territory to fully make our own decisions, determine our own future, by engaging in a fair partnership so that we, who have won our lands back—nearly 50 per cent of the landmass—and the young people of the Territory feel they have solid employment, a future filled with shared prosperity and hope.

The Commonwealth must prepare a way for the inclusion of more senators and more members of the House of Representatives so that the people of the Territory can become not just a state but an equal state here in the Australian parliament. It might be 10 or 20 years, but let there be a vision that at least starts.

The Mabo court ruling in 1992 overturned terra nullius. Let the people of the Northern Territory overturn the disbelief that even treaties are unattainable in Australia. Let the people of the Northern Territory have a say. In the year of the Mabo decision, I was questioned over my identity as a Yanyuwa Garrawa woman in the Borroloola land claim process. I found the interrogation focused more on how it could be that an educated Aboriginal woman must somehow not be quite real as a traditional owner of country. How could it be possible to be highly educated in the Western world and still live with a deep sense of cultural understanding in a culture thousands of years old?

It was thanks to the firm belief of my father, a school teacher from Sydney who inspired my educational upbringing, both in the Western ways and in maintaining a strong understanding of Borroloola families, kinship and culture shared by my mother—bless her soul—and shared by my maternal grandparents. I was educated in Borroloola, in Alice Springs and in Sydney, and all the while travelling backwards and forwards to the families in the Gulf Country. It was as a little girl in primary school in Alice Springs that I first saw the man who I would one day sit here in the Senate with—Senator Pat Dodson—when he worked with the Catholic Church in Alice Springs.

I would like to acknowledge the staff and students of St Scholastica’s College, my former high school, who are present in the gallery today. In 1988, I became the first Aboriginal student to become college captain, and I acknowledge my schoolmates who are here, in particular Yvonne Weldon of the Wiradjuri people of New South Wales and her family, Aunty Ann and the Coe families of Cowra. I pay my respects to the memory of the late great Mum Shirl, who was witness to ensuring that both Yvonne and I would finish well with the Good Sams. Today, another Indigenous student sits in the gallery who will be the 2017 college captain: Alice Dennison. I sincerely wish you all the best. I also acknowledge the students and staff of Saint Ignatius’ College, in particular the first nation’s students who danced Senator Dodson and I into the Senate on our first day with our fellow senators.

I now ask Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: please reconsider your plebiscite bill. Please pull back from this brink of public vitriol and make marriage equality a reality in this parliament. We need only be reminded of the hateful and hurtful commentary on race that ended the career of an AFL hero in Swans legend Adam Goodes—do not let that happen here to any of these families in Australia.

My kujika has allowed me to see both worlds—that of the Western world view and that of the Yanyuwa/Garrawa world view. I am at home in both. I am neither one, without the other. But what of those who cannot balance the two and what of those who do not have the same?

I think of the women in my life struggling still just to survive—I call them my mothers, sisters, my friends—who endured tremendous acts of violence against them, with broken limbs, busted faces, amputations and sexual assaults. I stand here with you. My aunt who lost her job that she had had for 10 years without warning simply because she spoke out about the lack of housing for her families, I stand here with you. To the descendants of the stolen generation still seeking closure, I stand with you. To the people with disabilities forever striving for better access to the most basic things in life, I am with you.

And then there is my young cousin-sister who struggled with her identity as a lesbian in a strong traditional Aboriginal culture. Her outward spirit was full of fun and laughter, yet inside she was suffocating from the inability to find balance in her cultural world view and that of the expectations of the broader Australian society around her. So one night she left this world, just gave up, at the age of 23.

To the sista girls and brutha boys who struggle with their sexual identity, I say to you: stay strong, I stand here with you. To the people of the Northern Territory and the Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands, I stand here with you.

Bauji Barra. Thank you.

Paul Keating: "I was determined to say something which transcended the kind of lip service which normally informed speeches of this kind", Redfern Reprise - 2015

9 December 2015, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia

Paul Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia. His Redfern speech, acknowledging dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal Australians is a political classic.

My father and I spent a long lonely day at the Bankstown South polling booth in 1967 handing out pamphlets in support of the referendum to grant the Commonwealth an express constitutional power in respect of the Australian Aboriginal community and its welfare.

Two years later, I was a member of the House of Representatives.

This was the election where Gough Whitlam had made his greatest gains and there was hope amongst many of us that he had enough momentum to win. As it turned out, John Gorton was able to hang on, with Bill Wentworth as Australia's first minister for Aboriginal affairs.

Wentworth, who had played a leading role in the 1967 referendum, had his heart in the job and it was the hope of many that he would succeed in moving the Aboriginal agenda forward, employing the Commonwealth's newly found power.

At the heart of these amplified expectations was the hope of finding some real if late basis for a reconciliation between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and the nation in the broad.

The debate in those earlier days tended to centre on matters relating to welfare and to land, as much as it did the much deeper notion of reconciliation.

The first positive expression of Commonwealth power turned out to be under Gough Whitlam's government in 1975 with the Northern Territory's Aboriginal land rights act. An act actually promulgated by Malcolm Fraser under his government in 1977.

Seven years after the passage of the referendum, this act was the first real and tangible acknowledgment of the dispossession which had occurred at sovereignty in 1788. In those days, the prevailing legal orthodoxy was that Aboriginal and Islander people possessed no ownership of the land – the land which became the Commonwealth of Australia and flowing from that, that Australia was the land of ‘no one’.

While the 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth parliament power to make special laws in respect of Aboriginal and Islander people, including land across the States, because of political opposition and the complexity of issues, the Whitlam government confined its land rights initiative to Territories under Commonwealth control. Hence the origins of the Northern Territory land rights act.

And this remained the sole initiative of the Commonwealth in respect of Aboriginal and Islander land until the Native Title Act of the Keating government in 1993 - just on 20 years later.

It was the national policy of the Australian Labor Party and of its parliamentary party, under the 1967 constitutional power, to legislate land rights across all the States and Territories. And the first time that this policy had been formally considered was in 1986 by the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Hawke government, Clyde Holding.

Holding, to his chagrin, discovered almost immediately how difficult implementation of such a policy would be even in a Labor party which philosophically supported it. Holding ran into trenchant opposition from the states, most particularly the State of Western Australia, led by its then Labor premier, Brian Burke. Burke was a leading member of the national right faction, across the country, a faction then spoken for by Graham Richardson a then senator and former party secretary from NSW.

Faced with this broad opposition from Western Australia and from the right faction of the party, Holding was stymied, relying then on Bob Hawke as Prime Minister to break the impasse. It never happened. So uniform land rights for Aboriginal and Islander people fell from the Hawke's government's agenda.

I told Bob Hawke at the time that even if he and I alone were prepared to argue the case for land rights before a national conference of the Labor party we would win, notwithstanding broad opposition from the right faction.

Nevertheless, the whole momentum for land rights dissipated - notwithstanding that the Hawke government had belatedly put together a Council for Reconciliation in September 1991.

And this is where the difficult issue of land rights remained until the High Court handed down its decision in Mabo No 2 on 3 June 1992.

By this time I was Prime Minister and I issued a statement saying, in overturning the concept of terra nullius, the High Court had presented the country with an opportunity to find a new and just way of remedying the original colonial grievance - the dispossession and that this opportunity could bring with it a new and lasting basis for a genuine reconciliation.

As it turned out, the United Nations International Year for the World’s Indigenous People began in December 1992, so I took the opportunity to say something definitive about the general plight of indigenous people around the world and most particularly of our own.

But in deciding to say something definitive I was determined to say something which transcended the kind of lip service which normally informed speeches of this kind. So, notwithstanding I was three months from a national election, I decided to lay waste to the ambiguity and humbug that had forever compromised this topic. I wanted to deal in truths, historical truths, ones that made clear above all else that it was we who did the dispossessing and that it was we who had taken the lands and brutalised the traditional way of life.

I said at Redfern Park on 10 December 1992 that our starting point had to begin with an act of recognition, the very same point President Barack Obama made recently following the Atlanta church massacre where he said ‘recognition precedes justice’.

I said at Redfern we could not sweep injustice aside and that by bringing the dispossessed out of the shadows, we were extending our own idea of social justice and of social democracy. And that our failure to recognise our callous disregard of Aboriginal and Islander people and of the truth of their loss and circumstance had degraded us all.

I have said in other circumstances, that ‘there is in public life no more beautiful a characteristic than truth’. That truth is, of its essence liberating, as it is possessed of no contrivance or conceit - that it provides the only genuine basis for progress and that the future can only be found in truth.

Nowhere was this sentiment more apt than in the vexed issue of Australian society coming to terms with its origins.

And I wanted, as Prime Minister, to lay out the truth unambiguously, once and for all. For once a Prime Minister had spoken the truth, the truth could never become unsaid - no matter how jarring and objectionable these views were likely to be to conservative Australia. And as it eventuated, the views were jarring to many, spawning the black armband brigade which then fought this issue right throughout the 1990s.

But significant as were the articulation of these truths and sentiment and especially in respect of prejudice, of themselves they could not deal in a material way with the dispossession and all that had flowed from it.

Indeed, at Redfern I said we had to give meaning to ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ and that we could only give such meaning when we committed ourselves to achieving concrete things. That when we see improvement, we see a lift in dignity, confidence and happiness. And I instanced the Mabo judgment as one of the opportunities that presented itself as a building block in a more practical partnership towards justice and equity.

I made clear at Redfern that I saw Mabo as an historic opportunity – a potential turning point, one that could provide a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Remarkably, the High Court of Australia had found that a title of an ancient kind had survived the act of sovereignty in 1788 and to the extent that subsequent grants of interest were consistent with the title, the nature and content of the title could be determined by the character or the connection to or occupation of the land under traditional laws and customs.

The notion that Aboriginal and Islander people had a private property right to their own soil opened up what I thought was an entirely new and opportune pathway to land rights, one superior to land being conferred upon indigenous people by the act of an Australian parliament.

And so, I set about enshrining these principles and modalities in a major piece of cultural and property law which is now known as the Native Title Act 1993.

While the principles laid out in the High Court’s Mabo No 2 decision could never deal with the original dispossession, for much of the land granted since 1788 had had the effect of extinguishing native title, they did have the possibility of making good on the dispossession otherwise across vast tracts of the continent.

So while we could not make reparations, we could make amends. We could reverse the dispossession for those people who still lived on or had a traditional connection with the land.

So the notion of Aboriginality and all that that meant became central to native title and I was determined that it be central.

We have to remember that native title is not a creature of the Australian common law but an ancient title recognised by the common law. A title of ancient antecedents which gives recognition to culture, customary tradition and nature - to the relationship between Aboriginal people and the landscape; the relationship to their songs and dances and to the birds and the animals – to their storytelling.

Is it any wonder then that this culture, the longest with a collective memory of any in continuous existence, with its originality and creativity, is now pointing the way for our own culture – an essentially European one but one under constant renovation, not least at the incidence of indigenous inspiration?

Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.

At its best, Aboriginal art carries sacred messages through its symbols and materials yet manages to hold its secrets while speaking to a broader audience. More than that, it has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent.

Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share.

So I think there is a lesson in this: we may reach a point where Aboriginal art and culture become so integral and so central to Australian art and culture that each melds into the other.

Whatever our identity is today or has become, it is an identity inseparable from Aboriginal Australia. For their fifty thousand years here has slaked the land with their resonances, their presence and their spirit. Our opportunity is to rejoice in their identity, and without attempting to appropriate or diminish it, fuse it with our own, making the whole richer.

Australia is positioned in the fastest growing, most dynamic part of the world. Indigenous cultures exist all around it. And in the largest countries on earth.

Our two hundred year occupancy of this vast continent, in terms of long history, sits at odds with the settled old societies near us and around us.

But this is not the case with our indigenes.

They were never at odds with what surrounded them nor indeed with their own land. They are entirely at home with it and in it.

But as it turned out, their home is now our home and the more we rejoice in their identity - and their one-ness with the country, the more the country will become ours as we become nearer its spirituality and its meaning.

The more we view the country through the prism of Aboriginality, the more likely we are to get the angle right.

Similar to this: Paul Keating, Redfern Speech, 1992.

'John Howard': 'I am sorry. We are sorry', Apology to aboriginal people, 'The Games' - 2000

3 July, 2000, Sydney, Australia

This speech was written by actor & comedian John Clarke for 'Sorry' epiosode of comedy television show 'The Games'. It is read by the actor John Howard, namesake to the non-apologising Australian Prime Minister of the time.

Good evening. My name is John Howard and I'm speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host city of the year 2000 Olympic Games.

At this important time, and in an atmosphere of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia - all of us - would like to make a statement before all nations. 

Australia, like many countries in the new world, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years. We are a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world's biggest island. We have the world's longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two thirds of the world's birds are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it is this that gives us our strength.

However, these achievements have come at great cost. We have been here for 200 years but before that, there was a people living here. For 40,000 years they lived in a perfect balance with the land. There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America. These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They did not even have a common language. Yet they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding.

We destroyed this world. We often did not mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault-lines. Aboriginal families were broken up. Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have still yet to address successfully.

I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand, that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.

Josie Farrer: 'We are one step closer to recognition of all Aboriginal people in our State's Constitution' WA Parliament - 2015

VIDEO of this speech can be accessed here

17 June, 2015, Parliament House, Perth, WA, Australia

Madam Acting Speaker, I seek leave to pay my respects in the Gidja language, which will contain nothing unparliamentary. I will then provide the house with an English translation.

[Leave granted.]

Ms J. FARRER: Thank you.

[Words spoken in Gidja language — Kilingen jarrak ngenen ngenengka, Noonga-m pe taam warringarrem-pe — ngarri / ngayen kulu kulu ngenan perrem purru marnum.
Ngayen ngarra ngenau Gidja-m warringarrem-pe jijiyilem-pe, ngali ngalem pe of Western Australia.]

In English, I said —
I pay my respects to this land and to the Noongar people, the original inhabitants and traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today.

I also acknowledge my people the Gidja tribe in the East Kimberley, and all the Aboriginal nations of Western Australia.

I stand here today with mixed feelings. I am happy that we are one step closer to recognition of all Aboriginal people in our state’s Constitution. I feel buoyed by the findings of the Joint Select Committee on Aboriginal Constitutional Recognition that my original 2014 bill was correctly drafted. I thank the members of that committee for their hard work and, in particular, for their support of me. I feel encouraged by the indications of bipartisan support from government members for this Constitution Amendment (Recognition of Aboriginal People) Bill 2015 and feel that we are moving closer to us not being timid and reaching out to be magnificent. But there is also a feeling of frustration that it has taken more than a year since I introduced the 2014 version of this bill to get to this point. However, if this new bill is passed, the wait will have been worth it.

The human history of Western Australia commenced between 40 000 and 60 000 years ago with the arrival of Indigenous Australians to our north west coast. My ancestors expanded the range of their settlement to the east and south of the continent. They were visited time and again over the last 500 years or so by your mob, although your history says a white explorer, Dirk Hartog, was the first recorded contact in 1616. Let me make this clear: this is your mob’s version, not my ancestors’ history. I always laugh when some scientist claims to have made a “new” discovery such as a lily, a plant or an animal or some rangeland feature. But seriously, our history, our cultures, will remain separate forever until we recognise who was here first. This is what this bill does. It means that once we have amended the Constitution to recognise the original people who occupied this land—so long ago that we could walk here—our collective history joins at that point and history becomes our history from now on. We can join and walk together—all of us.

As a reminder to members of where this journey has taken us, I introduced the 2014 bill on 11 June 2014. My colleagues and I then began extensive consultation, contacting more than 400 stakeholder groups and receiving feedback that extended into October 2014. On 12 and 19 November we debated that bill in this house. Some members opposite gave expressions of support, for which I congratulate them. However, the Parliament also expressed concern that the bill may not be properly drafted and there may be legal ramifications. On 26 November 2014, this house passed a motion directing the matter to a joint select committee. On 2 December our colleagues in the other place appointed their members to that committee. The committee met through the summer and tabled its report on 26 March this year. The report’s 16 findings concluded that the words in the 2014 bill were a suitable starting point for considering an appropriate form of words for constitutional recognition in Western Australia and recommended some minor amendments to improve readability. The report supported the removal of section 42 of the Constitution Act 1889 (WA). In addition, the report recommended the amendment of section 75 to remove the definition of the Aborigines Protection Board. The report found that the continued presence of these spent provisions within the Constitution Act 1889 would be inappropriate and inconsistent with the spirit of reconciliation inherent in a statement of recognition by the Parliament.

The report contains two recommendations: first, some minor amendments to the 2014 bill’s wording for the Constitution Act 1889 preamble; and, second, that the 2014 bill appears to be an option available to the Parliament should it wish to consider a bill to recognise Aboriginal people in the Constitution Act 1889 (WA).

I would just like to say that the Constitution was formed back in 1889. My mother’s grandmother, her dad’s mother, was alive then. So we have had 126 years to be the subjects of this Constitution.

Importantly, the report found that if the 2014 bill were passed, the risks of unintended legal consequences appear to be negligible. As I pointed out when I tabled the bill a few months ago, the report provides strong reassurance on the following points: firstly, it finds that the addition of these words of recognition could be enacted by ordinary legislative procedures—in other words, we do not need a referendum; secondly, it finds the suggestion that such an addition could limit the legislative power of the state can be discounted; thirdly, it finds that the risk of the addition having any impact on the interpretation of other Western Australian legislation or legislative powers is exceedingly low or negligible; fourthly, it finds that the addition will not have any substantive effect on native title law or pastoral leases, and I think we need to be clear on that; and, finally, and very importantly, the report finds that a non-effects clause should not be incorporated into any statement of recognition and notes that a non-effects clause would undermine the spirit in which the statement of recognition is made. As a result, this 2015 Constitution Amendment (Recognition of Aboriginal People) Bill 2015 is substantively the Constitution Amendment (Recognition of Aboriginal People) Bill 2014 with the Joint Select Committee on Aboriginal Constitutional Recognition’s recommended changes incorporated.

In opening this debate I will reiterate some of what I covered in my second reading speech on the 2014 bill. It is worth restating for the sake of posterity and should be included in the second reading speech for this amended 2015 bill. Early in 2014, I raised the issue of official constitutional recognition of Western Australia’s Aboriginal people and invited the Premier and the Leader of the Opposition to step forward with me and deliver a great act for all Western Australian Aboriginal people. Today, I ask again that all members of this Parliament also step forward and provide their support to pass this bill. This bill amends the Western Australian Constitution Act 1889 to officially recognise Western Australia’s Aboriginal people as the first people of this land. Make no mistake, this is important. Recognition, acknowledgement and acceptance are necessary steps to true and lasting reconciliation, and this bill is just one of those steps. In a way it is more than a step, it is a confident stride forward. As I said earlier, when European settlers came to Western Australia, there were people here before them; people with rich, beautiful languages, culture and art, people who had complex laws and protocols, and people who fought wars and negotiated peace. These people—my people—had been here for thousands of years.

This year will mark 126 years since the Constitution Act was passed and so it is long overdue that recognition is given to Australia’s first people. The Constitution Act 1889 has been amended 24 times in the last 126 years. Until the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal Australians were excluded even from being counted in the tally of citizens under section 127 of the Australian Constitution. Moving forward in an equal future together we must all remove acts of discrimination against one another. We are a strong and vibrant people and we share with you a beautiful country and unique culture and languages. However, we continue the pursuit of true reconciliation. Other mainland states have provided constitutional recognition of Aboriginal Australians as the first people of our country. We heard South Australia was the most recent state to recognise Aboriginal people in its Constitution through the Constitution (Recognition of Aboriginal Peoples) Amendment Bill 2012, which was introduced into the South Australian Parliament on 29 November 2012, passed on 5 March 2013 and assented to on 28 March 2013. The New South Wales Parliament introduced the Constitution Amendment (Recognition of Aboriginal People) Bill 2010 on 8 September 2010, passed the bill on 19 October 2010 and it received royal assent on 25 October 2010. Queensland introduced the Constitution (Preamble) Amendment Bill 2009 on 24 November 2009, which was passed on 23 February 2010 and received assent on 25 February 2010. The first state in Australia to give constitutional recognition to Aboriginal people was Victoria, which introduced the Constitution (Recognition of Aboriginal People) Bill 2004 on 26 August 2004, passed the bill on 4 November 2004 and it received assent on 9 November 2004. At a federal level, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill 2012 was passed by the House of Representatives on 13 February 2013 and read into the Senate on 25 February 2013. Passing this bill will make Western Australia the last mainland state to recognise Aboriginal people in its Constitution.

This Western Australian bill recognises that Aboriginal people are the original custodians of Western Australia. I will not reiterate the 2004 Solicitor General’s advice on the lack of unintended legal consequences. The joint select committee’s findings endorsed that advice by coming to the same conclusion. Recognition of Aboriginal people as the first people of Western Australia through our Constitution is vital in addressing the ethical issues that face all Australians. The task of government is to show leadership and advocate unity; acknowledgement is not a distraction. I agree with Paul Keating who spoke about these ethical and moral issues when he said —

The distraction comes when we fail to address them, when we avert our eyes from these core moral issues of national responsibility and pretend we can shuffle towards the future without acknowledging the truth of our past. That is what impedes our ability to move forward as a nation. And none of these issues is more central than addressing the place in our society of indigenous Australians.

I say to my fellow members of Parliament here today that this is the opportunity for us to stride into the future, not to shuffle forward with eyes closed from the truths of the past. This is the chance to come together as a Parliament and as a community in a sincere, mature, heartfelt spirit of reconciliation. Members, I said earlier this year that true reconciliation means bold action, brave people and meaningful dialogue. I also challenge members to not be afraid—do not be timid just be magnificent! Despite all our differences, I believe that Western Australian people, and, for that matter, all Australian people, will understand better than anyone the need for the recognition, acknowledgement and respect of ancestral lands. Today, I am asking all of you who like to reminisce about your connections to Australia and your ancestral links overseas, wherever that may be, to join me to seize this opportunity before us as parliamentarians to do something remarkable.

Members, when this bill is passed by this Parliament, I believe an appropriate acknowledgement of the significance of this bill needs to be held here in the Parliament building. The event should include the traditional owners, the Noongar people, and other representatives. I will be writing to the Presiding Officers and the Premier about this event in due course. So please assist me with passing this bill and let us make history in Western Australia by acknowledging Aboriginal people as being the first people of Australia. I invite you again members to be magnificent and support this bill. I would like to now commend the bill to the house.

[Applause.]

Debate adjourned, on motion by Mr A. Krsticevic.

Paul Keating: 'We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life', Redfern Speech - 1992

10 December, 1992, Redfern Park, Sydney, Australia

Paul Keating was the 24th Prime Minister of Australia. See his entry at Museum for Australian Democracy. This is perhaps his most famous speech, and one of the most famous in Australian history. 

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous People.

It will be a year of great significance for Australia.

It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed.

Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.

This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly the land of the fair go and the better chance.

There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.

It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia.

Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things.

Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure.

More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all. In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us are insulated from it. But of course, while all the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from contained. We know the same dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia.

This is perhaps the point of this Year of the World's Indigenous People: to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity - and our own humanity.

Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than in Australia.

We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. Even if our own conscience allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people of our region would not. There should be no mistake about this - our success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world.

However intractable the problems may seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.

That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.

We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year. The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and injustice in the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with guilt. Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.

I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.

All of us.

Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done - the practical things.

There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. The council's mission is to forge a new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia's indigenous people. In the abstract those terms are meaningless. We have to give meaning to 'justice' and 'equity' - and, as I have said several times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results.

If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another. If we raise the standard of health by 20 per cent one year, it will be raised more the next. if we open one door others will follow.

When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more happiness - we will know we are going to win. We need these practical building blocks of change.

The Mabo judgment should be seen as one of these. By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice. It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the case in the past.

For this reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months. Mabo is an historic decision - we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians.

There is everything to gain.

Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They are there in the wars. In sport to an extraordinary degree. In literature and art and music.

In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity. They are there in the Australian legend. We should never forget - they helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.

As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years - and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.

Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice.

I say that for two reasons: I say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice. And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity over the years to go on extending the realism of participating, opportunity and care.

Just as Australian living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the goals of reconciliation into reality.

There are very good signs that the process has begun. The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself. The establishment of the ATSIC - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission - is also evidence. The Council is the product of imagination and goodwill. ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and self-management. The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners determining priorities and developing their own programs.

All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are taking charge of their own lives. And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways developed by the communities themselves. If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of Australians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and achievement, and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before.

We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. We are beginning to learn what the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years - how to live with our physical environment.

Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story.

I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart.

I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view.

It can't be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.

There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through 50 000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation.

We cannot imagine that.

We cannot imagine that we will fail.

And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't.

I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.

Thank you.

Kevin Rudd: 'For the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry' Apology to the Stolen Generations' - 2008

13 February, 2008, Parliament House, Canberra, Australia

Kevin Rudd was rthe 26th Prime Minister of Australia. He delivered this famous apology to the Stolen Generations after the long standing Liberal government of John Howard refused to for many years.

Mr Speaker, I move:

That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations - this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.