National Reconcilation Week Australia
When we were growing up, Aboriginal history was not taught in schools. There was only the story of the primitive tribe of people looking threatening with spears as Cook landed with black boots at Botany Bay, supposed founder of the new world and the beginning of White Australia.
It was books, at first, that began to turn the focus rings on the understandascope.
Down here in Victoria, we didn't know much about 'them' and nor were we given opportunity to, until Year 12 when we read Sally Morgan's 'My Place', the story of a indigenous woman who didn't even know her true identity until she was 15. The autobiography confronts us to assess the past and whether the true stories of Aboriginal histories have been told in this country. The book was released in 1987 and ended up in school curriculums, opening our eyes to the experiences of the First People in the land we called home.
These days, it's mandated that Year 12's study at least one Australian text, but I do wish they'd mandate studying more Aboriginal texts. Through books, films and stories, we start to see the similarities between us and 'others' rather than differences. Black Diggers, Mabo and One Night The Moon are three texts about indigenous experience that have been on our VCE curriculum, but it's often the first time students really encounter Aboriginal stories and it comes as a shock to them.
I remember one boy refusing to believe that Australia had massacred so many people in the past. It just didn't fit with his version of history. He ended up incredibly moved by it and wrote a creative piece exploring the research he undertook of his own accord. I believe he had a heightened sense of empathy because of it. His understandascope had made a blurry, indistinct history sharp and poignant, and I imagine it would affect his relationships with every single Aboriginal person he met.
If you'd like to understand a little more about Indigenous experience here, try watching this. I dare you not to cry. Grant gained legitimacy in White Australia as a TV reporter and presenter, and it wasn't til later in life that he truly embraced his culture and now advocates strongly for it. I find it devastating that legitimacy is only gained in ways that white Australia approves of: 'he's alright, for an Aboriginal' - but that's for another discussion.
Here is an exerpt from this speech, but I really hope you watch it:
The Australian Dream.We sing of it, and we recite it in verse. Australians all, let us rejoice for we are young and free. My people die young in this country. We die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free. We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons and if you are a juvenile, it is worse, it is 50 percent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges.It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820's, the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time. Go to the Sydney Gazette and look it up and read about it. Martial law was declared and my people could be shot on sight. Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.The Australian Dream.
You Can Read the Transcript Here
It's stories like this that have been swept under the proverbial rug of Australia's history for far too long.
Thus, Ecotrain's question of the week is timely for Australians as we consider Reconciliation Week in this country:
"Name one small change you have made or could make to your life that would be of great benefit to the world if everyone did the same"
By always working toward real understanding, we can change the world dramatically.
By understanding the multitudinous stories that make up Australia (and indeed the world, especially as many rally against asylum seekers with little understanding of why they're seeking refuge in this country in the first place) we can create a world based on sameness, rather than difference. We connect through empathy, rather than dehumanising people who appear 'different' because we have been told a lie about who they really are, where they've come from, where they really belong.
Sally Morgan's book was the beginning of the idea of understanding, for me. You can't really know a people until you are well informed and this information can't come from speculation, media demonisation, anecdotes about criminality and alcoholism, politicising them as the 'other', terrible stereotypes that demean them as second class citizens.
These single stories, I'm ashamed to say, made up my whole view of Aboriginal Australia. Even reading one story - Morgans - wasn't enough. Yet learning about and talking about these stories can change Australia just as it can the world - Australia's treatment of Aboriginal people is not unique to our country, after all.
The following ad for Reconciliation Week asks us to talk about the past so that we can move forward to a stronger future together. I was really moved this week when the school I work at had an assembly with Aboriginal people from the Wathuraroung speaking about what this would mean to them, as well as stories about their ordinary, and not so ordinary lives. It was an assembly of inclusivity that just wasn't part of my experience as a student in the 1980's.
We invite and welcome indigenous kids into our school on scholarships, which goes a long way toward bridging culture. I teach L., who's from Arnhem Land. He got up on that stage and told his story and I don't think any of the teachers had dry eyes. L. got up and sung a dual language song about his elders as he played the guitar with a group of other students on bass, keyboard and drums. It brought the house down.
The school offers a trip to Central Australia for Year 10's, and I wish it was compulsory for all of them, because many come back with their eyes truly opened, understanding so much more about what it means to be Aboriginal - far more than what I knew as a kid.
The following advertisement for this year's theme of 'Don't keep History a Mystery' asks us all to understand the fact that we're all in this together. It asks Australians to consider who we are and what we want to be, to fill in the missing stories in the histories of this country. It begs that all our stories are told and celebrated so we're stronger together, all woven tightly into a fabric of a united country.
Our history, our story, our future. It's not just a message for Australia, but for the world.
If we all can make that small change individually, together we make a huge difference. We must be willing to listen, acknowledge, talk about and understand others rather than judge on the tattered threads of a past we really know nothing about.
If the goals of reconcilation are truly reached, that's how we change the world.
I'm also totally honoured to be a passenger on the #ecotrain - check out this hashtag for some pretty amazing posts permaculture to meditation, environmental issues to food forests - I highly recommend checking out this tag as you're guaranteed of sweeeetness!