The starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal
Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.
Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases.
The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.
I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.
All of us.
Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common it might help us if we non-Aboriginal
Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for fifty
thousand years - and then imagined ouselves told it was never ours.
Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless.
Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land,
and then were told in history books that we had given up without a
fight.
Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and
were then ignored in history books.
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.
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 disposession
and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern
Australian nation.
We cannot imagine that.
More, I think, than most Austrlaian recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affetcs
us all.
We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached
out for us.
Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish?
The poor of Britain?
The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of
Europe and Asia?
Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious
multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to
the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has
been done.
And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't fail.
I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.
Thank you very much for listening to me.