Stan Grant UNSW Wallace Wurth Speech Excerpt
This week, my people know what Australia looks like.
This week, Australia is a boy in a hood, in a cell.
This week, Australia is Aboriginal boys tear gassed, locked down and beaten.
These are the images on our television screens.
The boys who look like my boys.
And I watch my teenage son as he saw this unfold before him.
I saw him lose his place in the world, with each scene of horror he became less sure of
his country.
For he is not being raised to believe in our worst, he is being spared the fate of many
of his people but on that night, I know that he wondered about the difference between himself
and the boys on that screen.
For in those boys,�I know that he can't help but see something of himself and ask
how this country can allow it?
When�I saw the boys,�I saw a tragedy that my sons have escaped but�I saw a reminder
of the brutality that their grandfather and my grandfather had endured.
I saw in those boys on my television screen the broken bones and stab wounds and dark-ink
tattoos scratched into the skin of my father on those long nights of jail lock down.
I recalled the story of my father, mother's father, dragged from his bed by police, accused
of drinking.
That same man arrested and tied to a tree like a dog so that his children would pass
by as they went to school.
There are those who would rather�I not speak of these things.
There are those who accuse me of having a nostalgia for injustice, a nostalgia for injustice.
As if these wounds on the body and soul of my mother and father are things of memory.
As if we choose to cling to suffering, as if this injustice is a thing recalled and
not a thing lived.
A nostalgia for injustice.
Such a charge could be levelled only by someone certain of his place in his country.
A certainty denied to our people, the first people still searching for our place, estranged
in the land of our ancestors.
It could be levelled only by someone who sees injustice and brutality as something to be
pondered and not endured.
It's a charge brought by people comfortable in their own history while they tell us to
forget ours, to get over it.
These are people who value their traditions, exalt their heroes and deny us ours.
I wonder, would they dismiss the memories of the Jewish people so lightly?
Are the Jewish memories of suffering too, merely a nostalgia for injustice?
These are people who proclaim themselves conservatives but their meanness debases the very traditions
they claim to uphold.
These people who seize on difference, gay, Muslim, Asian, black,�[00:04:38 inaudible],
divide and demonise, all the while reserving for themselves the right to define our country
and set the price of inclusion.
Well they don't define my country.
These are people who wrap their words in civility to mask the beating heart of their bigotry
and they tell me�I have a nostalgia for injustice.�
No.
We have no nostalgia for injustice because we have not yet had the chance to forget.