Reflections on the Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action Symposium
Readers please be advised this article contains mentions of racism and historical crimes such as massacres against First Nations peoples.
Last week I attended the Unifying Anti-Racist Research and Action Symposium hosted by QUT’s Carumba Institute. I know there has been a backlash from individuals, politicians and entities that were not in attendance, but I was. I was there to witness intellectual and practical anti-racist work by experts from across institutions, organisations, locations, and generations. What I experienced was the sharing of experiences with people who demonstrated respect and integrity for each other and the issues that brought us together. It is deeply disturbing that such precious moments have been met with vicious condemnation from people who were not there or were there, with the sole intention of causing us harm.
I’d like to explain to you why I attended because I was initially hesitant to participate. You see, in my community of Rockhampton I have grown up my whole life visiting the sites where people who still live in my community massacred my family members. Some of these sites we visit occasionally, others we drive past every day. I work next door to a building that hanged my relatives, and I park my car beside a drain that my old people walked through after they were taken off the ships where they had been held after being kidnapped from islands in the Pacific. My usual route to work has me stopping at traffic lights next to a facility where my family members were sold. As a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman, I live in a regular Qld town that has completely erased from its memory the treatment of people who helped raise my own parents.
My ‘history’ is all around me and I live it every day. In the 1990s we dealt with Ku Klux Klan members in our community. These days we deal with white extremist vigilantes who terrorise our Elders and children. Regional Queensland is a war zone and as Traditional Owners we stand between those who do us harm and those who live in relationship with us whether they are Indigenous or not. This is our Darumbal responsibility that comes from our Darumbal law. The reason I hesitated to attend the Symposium last week is because it is extremely rare to discuss the issues of my community outside of it without those discussions being co-opted or coalesced into theoretical ideals about what is and what is not ‘decolonisation’. I refuse to waste my time and my spirit bringing myself into spaces that do not understand my reality. However, this was not the case. The Symposium was attended by and coordinated by people who understand and live the reality of genocide and terror, of police harassment and deaths in their custody. It was a gift to sit, listen and learn about where we’ve come from and what is possible – to imagine our communities free from racism and liberated through relationships.
The focus of media and political attention on Jewish and Palestinian presences at the Symposium is diabolical. These relationships were held with care last week. The Symposium offered a moment of liberation where we could be together in all our diversity and sameness. This is what I took from the event – for the first time in all my professional life, I experienced the intellectual freedom to just ‘be’. I commented with others that love underpinned everything that was said and felt at the event last week. I am reinvigorated with a clear vision of what I want to see on my Country as a Custodian of it. I know what I will and will not accept as the standards for my community organising and I am more determined than ever that my academic and activist work will align to fight against racism in all forms and against all people on my Lands.
I am appalled that to be anti-racist is now condemned (e.g. Jim Chalmers’ statement). In terms of ideologies, these should be debated and contested. A blanket acceptance and defence of any ideology almost guarantees complete erasure of us as individuals and as marginalised people. If this is the standard we accept then I fear that the consequences we suffer will be irrevocable and felt by ourselves and generations to come.
To end on a positive note, I want to commend the leadership of the Carumba Institute, especially Professor Chelsea Watego and her staff and the broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander portfolio under the leadership of Professor Angela Leitch for hosting the Symposium. They are an exceptional team, and their influence and work set them apart and above everyone else in the sector.
