Hello everyone, my apologies for the absence of writings over the past few weeks since creating this Substack, as I have been busy with building my portable small home and finishing my first album of original music. Below is my first Substack piece, a short reflection on Sorry Day and Reconciliation Week which began last Saturday and ends today. I am still working on a longer piece on the crisis in progressive politics that I hope to publish in the coming weeks. I will also be progressively publishing here some of the writings that I shared via email last year so that newer readers can see them. I hope that you enjoy this piece - feel free to leave a comment and share with others.
Friday 26th May, Sorry Day: I join a small crowd of adults and schoolchildren meeting on an oval in my home town in central Victoria to commemorate Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008. It is a sad and sombre day – there is warmth and support among the crowd for the Aboriginal elders and community members of our local Djaara people who are leading the ceremony, but the pain and frustration among the Djaara present is palpable, and not just from the impact of past wrongs, but due to the continued failure of our dominant whitefella culture to address the wrongs of the present. The weather is reminding us that the cold of winter is not far away, and the chill in the air mirrors the bleakness in my heart as I reflect on the unfinished business we have as a culture to make things right with the First Nations peoples of this land.
Among white Australians, especially the less educated (and in this I’m mostly thinking of those of Anglo-Saxon heritage, though these attitudes could also apply to any of the settler peoples who came here since colonisation), many feel that Aboriginal people are given special favours, are irresponsible, dysfunctional and even backward – views that have been fanned by some in the media over the years to serve their own political agendas. For an ordinary, working-class person who is battling to survive in a profoundly unequal society, it is not surprising how easy it can be to generate a sense of anger against anyone who is perceived as getting an unfair advantage, and especially one who is seen as not playing by the accepted social ‘rules’.
Yet the truth is that such views are only possible because of the profound ignorance most Australians still have about Aboriginal culture, and about the reality and consequences of colonisation. A few years ago, I watched a beautiful, moving documentary called ‘Kanyini’, in which Yankunyitjatjara elder Uncle Bob Randall from central Australia spoke about the beliefs and practices that were the foundations of his people’s culture, and then how these were systematically destroyed by the European colonialists, who stole their land, stopped them from practicing their traditional way of life, rounded them up to live in missions and then tried to expunge their most important spiritual beliefs. Were these evil people who did this? No, but the consequences were undoubtedly evil: a profound collective trauma that the community was still struggling to come to terms with decades later. With this background, problems such as alcohol and drug addiction and family violence can be seen, not as signs of weak character, but for what they truly are: symptoms of a deeply distressed and traumatised people whose culture and way of life has been violated, and continues to be violated, albeit in less overt ways.
Many may shake their heads at this, saying that such talk is promoting a ‘victim mentality’, and that all people are equal under the law in Australia, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike. But whose law is it? And whose values and beliefs shape that law? This is not to dismiss the progress that has been made in changing the laws and acceptable behaviours in this country to give recognition and respect to Aboriginal peoples. Where once whitefellas casually saw Aboriginal people as being subhuman, we have by and large come to accept them as fellow Australians and even to value many aspects of their culture. Yet most of us still have not really made the journey to learning about the worldview and values of those who cared for this country for tens of thousands of years, nor to truly facing the reality that our country has been built on the back of invasion, wholesale land theft and attempted cultural genocide. Both of these steps are surely necessary if we are to have any hope of finding a just way forward together, and of creating a shared cultural and legal framework that embraces both of our cultures.
One of the community leaders on Sorry Day expresses her frustration at the ongoing failure of our education system to meet the needs of Aboriginal youth, a system whose rules, expectations and values continue to invalidate Aboriginal knowledge and culture. Again, this is not meant to be a uniform condemnation of whitefella education, rather I want to draw our attention to our casual colonial attitude of cultural superiority, and above all our failure to put aside our preconceptions and really listen to Aboriginal people.
This failure is made all the more galling for those of us who recognise how much we as a culture are losing by not listening to Aboriginal people. Despite our much-vaunted technological brilliance, on a deeper level our culture is fundamentally immature; we are mired in a morass of individualism, disconnected from each other and from Country, and also by and large disconnected from any form of spirituality. We have substituted ‘more’ for ‘better’ and material wealth for the wealth of community, of loving hearts and wise minds. And because of this, we are busily going about destroying the Earth on which we depend for our life. We have an incredible gift on our doorstep: the gift of an ancient culture that cared for the land over thousands of years, that lived out of reverence for the Earth and the Law given by the Creator Spirit and the Ancestors, a culture with the knowledge and awareness we need to help us heal our lonely, divided hearts, and turn us back from the precipice we are running blindly towards.
On Sorry Day, it is important that we face these painful truths, otherwise we cannot move forward, cannot find true reconciliation. Yet I must also report that I see signs of hope on this day, and at the Reconciliation Week opening ceremony I attend the following day. I see real love, compassion and support flowing, heart to heart, from whitefellas to blackfellas and back again. I see hugs of warmth and compassion, shared tears and shared affection. At the Reconciliation Week opening, there seems to me to be a real sense that at least some of our whitefella community truly value and respect our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and with a greater depth of understanding than in past years. The work of Djaara elders and community leaders and of some local councillors in past years has grown a Tree of Shared Understanding and Trust that, although still young, is bearing fruit. This event celebrates the strength and resilience of the local Djaara community, and in particular their young people, whose words and presence were inspiring to all those who were there to listen, truly the leaders of tomorrow. I see the pride in their culture, and I see the connections of respect and trust between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, connections that are slender but growing, one relationship at a time, connections that are more than skin deep.
At this event, I am also moved by the CEO of our local shire council, who speaks of the shire’s achievements in working towards reconciliation and inclusion for the Djaara community, and then says bluntly and with humility: ‘it’s not enough’. He is right – it’s not enough, there is such a long way still to go, but acknowledging this from the heart, as he does, shows that we are starting to understand what is needed. So on this Sorry Day, I add my voice to the crowd in saying ‘Sorry’ for the wrongs of the past and the present done by us whitefellas to our blackfella brothers and sisters, acknowledge that just saying sorry is not enough, and resolve to do my bit to help right those wrongs, through listening, dialogue and heart-centred action, so we can truly walk together towards reconciliation.