Good morning and welcome to the Centre for Aboriginal Studies and it is great to see
so many of you here and many of you are first years and second years and hopefully we will
see a lot more of you over the next three years as you complete your degrees.
My name is Simon Forrest.
I'm the Director for Aboriginal Studies at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies here.
I'm a Whadjak Nyungar man, from Whadjak country.
This is my mother's maternal country and we can trace her family back to her great grandmother
living in Middle Swan and her name was Mary Ah Tsing.
She was the child of an Aboriginal woman and a Chinese market gardener and my mother grew
up at her great grandmother's camp up in Middle Swan just to the north of Perth.
Kaya wanju, kaya whanju, whajak nuwak pujeh.
That's welcoming you to my mother's country and my country here on the Swan Coastal Plain
which stretches Whadjak country from about 50 kilometres to the north of Perth to about
50 kilometres to the south and about a hundred kilometres to the east.
Moulak just flying over us just then - a white tailed black cockatoo to welcome you too to
the Centre for Aboriginal Studies.
So part of my welcome ceremony is the smoking and I acknowledge my father's country by using
some sandalwood from his country, as part of the smoking.
My father's country is Yamtjewongoy country to the north and the east.
So I will put some sandalwood on there and I will take some gum off the balga or grass
tree as you see as you enter through the door.
The crushed up gum is part of the smoking.
Come on down.
Come and get some smoke on you.
Opari is singing out too to you fellas.
The Centre for Aboriginal Studies is an Aboriginal place, a Nyungar place for us fellas and we
are in an educational institution that is mainly a non Aboriginal place and we come
to this learning.
What you are coming here to get is to learn and do things and basically you are learning
about whitefellas and how they do business and what I say is that so we can infiltrate
and get the best of what we can from the whitefella system for our people whatever way that is.
And in terms of this rope, you come to this place iwth a set of knowledge and values and
ways of knowing and doing for over 50,000 years before present.
This rope helps to explain that.
It is 25 metres long, this rope, and at this end there is 50,000 years before present at
the Escarpment in Arnhem Land.
This is 40,000 years before present - this is Middle Swan - this is my mother's people.
This is land in the Swan Valley here, 40,000 years before the present.
And we go along here and there is various things along this timeline.
The earliest cave paintings in France, 30,000 years ago.
The earliest evidence of the Indigenous people of Japan, the Haiynu people.
And you keep going along this rope till we come up to here, 2,000 years ago, the life
and times of Christ.
1788, the First Fleet arrived here in Australia over on the Sydney coast.
So here's us and here's our knowledge system and our culture.
That's what we have got.
That's what we have in our values and in our knowledge system.
This institution here represents this and the building behind me represents all of that.
So you are here and you are bringing all this knowledge, all this collective knowledge for
over 50,000 years and use it to your benefit.
We are here, we are the dominant force in this place in the Centre for Aboriginal Studies,
we are.
black people, we are the dominant force.
So use that to your advantage and welcome to the Centre for Aboriginal Studies.
Thank you.