December 11.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
“We are beginning to learn...”
Continuation of: Excerpts from a speech delivered by Prime Minister Paul Keating in Redfern Park, Sydney, on 10 December 1992, ostensibly to mark the Year for the World's Indigenous People.
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 we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice...
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.
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 fifty thousand 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...
Acknowledgment: Sally Warhaft, Well May We Say – The Speeches that made Australia, pp. 355-356.
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Conference Statement on Native Title approved at plenary session of the Martung Upah Indigenous Conference 11 December 1993.
We, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates and participants of the national Martung Upah Indigenous Conference who convened at Wesley College, University of Sydney, 5-11 December 1993, make this unified statement.
We require of the Federal Government and Senators holding the balance of power in the Senate, to listen to the voice of Indigenous Australians when we say we want justice in our own right and for them not to be influenced by paternalistic notions which may from time to time beset them.
We remind governments of Australia that since time immemorial Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have occupied, enjoyed and used this land to the exclusion of the whole world under the will of God.
We therefore insist political parties give immediate passage to the commonwealth native title legislation.
In future we urge the federal, State and Territory governments to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are fully represented and consulted on a national scale so that issues of justice that affect indigenous people in Australia are appropriately recognised and addressed.
Acknowledgment: Anne Pattel-Gray ed., Martung Upah – Black and White Australians Seeking Partnership, HarperCollinsReligious, Blackburn, 1996, p.302.