I think it's important to remember that Cathy Freeman's win came at a time when we were
as a country finishing up ten years of a reconciliation process.
And so what she was doing was in a way her actions was symbolising what the country was
actually trying to do.
In May of 2000, a quarter of a million people marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
And there was a cry for an apology, a plea for a formal apology.
So only months before Cathy ran that race, the nation was marching all around the country
actually, to make a statement about history in this country.
Very different times to now in terms of the visibility of First Nations and what First
Nations' relationship to the rest of Australia is.
I don't think even at that moment when Cathy Freeman won her gold medal, I fully appreciated
how important a moment like that would have been for her, for young Aboriginal people,
for young girls, for young people of colour.
I didn't grasp it fully as much as I do now.
She made a significant contribution to giving white Australia just one peek at what an Indigenous
woman can do.
Because I'd grown up never seeing Aboriginal people on television, and I grew up getting
lots of negative views and opinions about Aboriginal people, and there was very little
in any of that that assumed that Aboriginal people could achieve.
Lighting the torch, or lighting the flame, and then running in the key event that everybody
wanted to see was such a wonderful expression of what Australia could be rather than what
Australia is.
That says a celebration of her culture, the land on which she ran, and for the cause to
show people, other Olympians from around the world, just what a little slip of a woman,
of a Aboriginal woman can do.
And so yeah, she showed the world.
She showed us, and she showed the world.
It would've meant that a lot of Australians who held those negative views about Aboriginal
people felt that here was somebody that they could embrace and they felt proud of her success.
Now, did they go far enough with thinking that through?
Probably not, but I think there is something just about that moment that was really ground-breaking
and that she actually was a symbol of Australia, I think was really significant.
I'd like to think now that Australia is having a more honest and open conversation about
issues of race and privilege and what it would have meant for someone like Cathy Freeman
to overcome all that.
To mark not only an enormous victory for herself, but also to make an entire nation so very
proud of her.
So 2020, two decades since Cathy won gold, we still love her, we still talk about her.
Just recently we've had off the back of the Black Lives Matters movement, the Aboriginal
Lives Matters and Stop Black Deaths in Custody movements.
We are seeing this enormous change nationally where tens of thousands of people around the
country, literally on a daily basis, are trying to change their ways.
To learn, to understand, to listen to Black Australians for the first time for many people.
They're walking with us for the very first time and we're taking baby steps with them
because that's what we do.
I'm not Indigenous and so I'm going to make the same mistakes as other non-Indigenous
people and sometimes get the questions wrong, and use the wrong language, and am not sure
how to broach specific conversations.
But surely at some point there has to be a reckoning in Australia where we don't see
a group of people who were here first as something other than the rest of us.
: I think Australia has always had a difficult
relationship with race by nature of the way we've all come together to be on this land.
I think that tension continues to exist.
It changes, it's not the same as it was 20 years ago, but it's changed.
And I think we'll know we've made it when we can recognise Indigenous people for all
the culture that they bring, but at the same time, not only want to know them, or talk
to them, or have them in our media when we're talking about Indigenous issues.
We have to have faith that we can change as a nation.
And we have to have hope and we have to believe that those moments like Cathy Freeman had
that brought us all together can still impact and make changes as we move forward.