History

I was three at the time, so I don’t remember any of it, but the impacts on my life are profound. 27 May 1967 is widely understood as the day Australia stood as a nation almost unanimously in support of Aboriginal people and their right to be citizens of this country.

Australia ‘has systematically implemented policies that are born of a rhetoric suggesting that the state is somehow protecting Aboriginal children better than their families’.

Grandmothers Against Removals say too many Indigenous children are being removed from their culture when Aboriginal family or community members would be able to care for them.

In the aftermath of the referendum, there was a belief among the younger black activists in Redfern that the Commonwealth Government was disinterested in the result.

As we commemorate Sorry Day on 26 May, it is vital to also recognise that 20 years has passed since the release of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing Them Home report.

My grandfather, Colin Walker, is a Yorta Yorta man born on the banks of Dhunagla (the Murray River) at Cummeragunja in a small tin hut with a dirt floor, no windows – a corrugated iron structure that is long gone. A stone’s throw from the site of Pop’s birth is the Cummeragunja School House where my mother May went to school.

If the recent skirmish over federal arts funding teaches us anything, it’s that even the best-laid plans are not set in stone. With a change of government or the swearing in of a new minister, an entire ecology can be swiftly placed in a precarious position. If the foundations are unstable, it can all come tumbling down.

The Converge on Canberra demonstration against the Northern Territory intervention was held a day before the 2008 National Apology. 

Australian likes to see itself as the Lucky Country, the land of the fair go, home of the ‘Aussie battler’, but does it live up to the hype?

Last week a number of major national and international media outlets were outraged at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) for “re-writing history.” Although this claim was completely unfounded, it did spark a much-needed dialogue about the true identity of Australia.

It has been 21 years since the launch of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, and 17 years since the release of the inquiry’s final report –now commonly known as the Bringing Them Home report– which concluded with the troubling finding that a generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders “endured gross violations of their human rights. These violations continue to affect Indigenous people’s daily lives. They were an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out Indigenous families, communities, and cultures”.

The invasion of Australia started 200 years ago, but it never ended.

That slogan is decades old, and its meaning hints at white Australia's long standing reluctance to reconcile with the truth.

How can you say the Stolen Generations ended when Australia never stopped taking kids?

This week marks the 8th anniversary of Kevin Rudd's Apology to the Stolen Generations. I am hosting @IndigenousX this week and as part of that was fortunate to be able to speak to Mr Rudd in person about his speech and about his National Apology Foundation for Indigenous Australians.

Today is Invasion Day for my people, officially known as Australia Day, an anniversary of the day when white Australia began its occupation of this country and commenced its mass genocide of the first peoples of this land. There isn’t much I can say that hasn’t already been said by countless others, but I grow tired of and frustrated by the relentless calls for our silence about this countries horrific history; particularly at this time of year.

Every ‘Australia Day’ it all starts again… no, that’s not right. It doesn’t ‘start again’ because it never stopped. It never stops. Ever.

According to the Australia Day website: “The tradition of having Australia Day as a national holiday on 26 January is a recent one. Not until 1935 did all the Australian states and territories use that name to mark that date. Not until 1994 did they begin to celebrate Australia Day consistently as a public holiday on that date.”