I don’t want my rights shackled to appeasing conservatives
Columnist
F
I have been thinking a lot about my dad this past week. He’s a Wiradjuri man, he lives on Wiradjuri country, he speaks Wiradjuri language. He is a man who lives his sovereignty.
White Australia pushed him to the margins, locked him out of education, at times locked him up and physically beat him down. White Australia tried to take everything from him but it could not take who he is.
I have been thinking about him after last week’s High Court decision that said simply: Indigenous connection to our land is bigger than citizenship.
I have been thinking of him listening to the white backlash. The scared, timid or just plain bigoted voices who somehow feel like the judges have stolen their country.
What an irony. Hey, we know the feeling.
What the majority decision of the High Court has done is recognise something we First Nations people have always known: this is our home. It was our home before the British claimed it and pushed us from our land, and it still is. We cannot ever be from anywhere else.
We have survived the massacres and the poisonings, the small pox, the segregation, the stolen children, and we are still here. We have never ceded sovereignty. When we say "always was, always will be, Aboriginal land", we mean it.
Don’t ask us to welcome you to country and then expect we don’t have rights to this country. Rights that no other Australian has, because we were here first. Sixty thousand years first. That matters.
The High Court decision has not opened hornet’s nest. Terra nullius is the hornet’s nest.
This nation was founded on the great lie that this was an empty land. A lie can’t stand forever.
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Just like the 1992 Mabo decision, this latest High Court ruling shatters the terra nullius lie.
It draws back the curtain in this country, to widen the horizon of understanding what it is to belong; truly belong.
As Justice Edelman wrote: "The sense of identity that ties Aboriginal people to Australia is an underlying fundamental truth that cannot be altered or deemed not to exist by legislation."
Critics of this judgment fall into two camps: white allies who worry about the implications of this for blackfellas and white triumphalists who would wish us gone.
The allies like Jesuit priest Frank Brennan are concerned that this ruling makes it harder to achieve Indigenous constitutional recognition. He says it will spook conservatives who can’t accept that Australians might have separate or distinct status.
Personally, and I say this to Frank with love and respect, I don’t need you to be concerned for me. I don’t want my rights and hopes for my people shackled to appeasing conservatives.
I have walked that road and it steals my soul. Better we aim high and true and raise Australia with us than lower our sights to appeal to those who wish to shrink our country to make us all fit.
The triumphalists lord their whiteness over us. They are the philosophical descendants of the founding fathers who wrote Australia’s constitution to exclude us. They are the assimilationists who still dream of our absorption into mainstream Australia.
They would rather we weren’t here. We are a reminder of Australia’s great sin.
These triumphalists are the people who preach the glory of Western civilisation; who extol the virtues of British law. Then when the highest court in our land makes a ruling that they don’t like they denounce it as heresy. The judges tantamount to traitors.
These people hide behind their liberalism, but it is a pinch-nosed 19th century white imperialist liberalism that is incapable of dealing with the complexities of a diverse, pluralist 21st century. Their liberalism is not my liberalism.
Yes, the High Court ruling challenges us. Yes, it takes us into uncharted waters. A nation can’t run from itself forever.
How we respond to this moment, that will determine whether we truly can be a nation steeped in 60,000 years of tradition or one wrapped in 200 years of whiteness.
First Peoples' triumph or two-edged sword?
This past week my father taught Wiradjuri language to a new intake of students at Charles Sturt University. A man talking back to this country in a language Australia sought to silence.
He probably didn’t pay much attention to the High Court. He doesn’t need the constitution to recognise him. He doesn’t need white allies to worry for him. He has outlived the white triumphalists. He is doing what he does: giving back to our country.
When I think of him; when I think of this past week, I think of the words of the rock band Midnight Oil after visiting central Australia – after leaving white Australia to sit in timeless Australia. "We carry in our hearts the true country and that cannot be stolen."
