Thank you very much Professor Rufus Black
I acknowledge with profound respect
that we gather today on aboriginal land
The lands of the Muwinina people.
I pay my respects to the many elders here.
And all I have to say today is really an extended acknowledgment.
I feel deeply privileged to be able
to offer these words as a white man at this gathering.
And I'm not here today because this is the politically correct place to be.
Not because I don't value the Western culture, of which I'm a product.
Not because I don't love Australia.
I'm here because in the end, a nation can only be securely founded
on a true telling of its history
and celebrations that embody values
that unite us rather than those that divide us.
And if that is to happen we need to keep momentum
in the national conversation about this day.
I know it's a deeply uncomfortable conversation.
We have to talk about troubling
truths in our national narrative.
Or one of the other truths that makes this a special country
is that we cherish the freedom to
respectfully have those most difficult of discussions.
And the troubling truth, which we need to begin is that the
formal proclamation of British sovereignty on 26 January 1788,
was also a formal proclamation of invasion.
It was the moment when the intent to dispossess
without treaty or agreement was made legally and administratively unambiguous
And, integral to that dispossession
was the immoral and illegal use of force.
We know that all too well here in lutruwita, Tasmania
that the attempt to take country from Aboriginal people,
and impose on it a western concept of property
was resisted by force and by war.
In turn, that resistance was met with military action.
Here and in other places around the country, citizens and the
constabulary backed their dispossession
with firearms, force and even poison.
The scale and nature of that violence
descended into the moral darkness of massacres,
which stain our national soil and our soul with blood.
In time invasion became part of genocide.
When you stand on land, as we do today
where there are no living descendants
of the people who cared for this country
For tens of thousands of years,
it is hard to find another word.
There are those who contest the use of words of invasion and genocide
almost as though in doing so, they might reduce the
gravity of what occurred.
But, perhaps the reverse is true.
The systematic multi-generational dispossession of an entire continent
and its islands by force, policy, economics and disease
taking it from the world's oldest continuous culture
seems to be a wrong in a category all of its own.
We need to remember in the 20th Century the world had to
invent the word genocide to describe what Churchill called
crimes without a name.
I do wonder when we look around the world at similar wrongdoings
done to indigenous peoples in many lands
whether we still confront a crime without a name.
And if we are to be a nation truly founded, we have to give
an accurate name, and an honest accounting of what occurred
and we have to find a way forward.
I think a clue lies back on that day
in the Western reckoning of time
on 26 January 1788
and in that proclamation of sovereignty.
We need to recognise that this claim
was made out of an understanding of concepts of law, land, and property
which belong to a very particular civilisation.
I think contrary to what the High Court
concluded in the Mabo case.
It concluded that the understanding of this particular civilisation
and the acts that followed.
I think it was wrong.
I don't think anything that followed took away anything
from the aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or their lands
They have a completely different understanding of
country and the relationship between people country and what
we might crudely translate as law
To impose by force one understanding of land
does not remove the existence of the other understanding or
the relationship created by it.
What we have is two whole systems
sitting, of knowledge and relationship to country
and land, sitting side by side.
We have 2 realities, 2 worlds, 2 systems
and we cannot build a future built on just one of them.
And this is especially so where the best we can do in that one system
that dominates is to give original owners of the land
what slipped through the history of invasion and dispossession
that serves to build our future on the wrongs of the past,
it fails to honour a civilisation,
a system of knowledge of countless generations
and more than ever the future of this
continent depends on honouring that knowledge.
These are the people who lived on this continent
without empire or ecological collapse
and recent days have reminded us,
they knew how to make fire the servant to the care of this country,
not an enemy that destroys it.
How many lessons have we still to learn?
Where there are two completely different civilisational systems
neither reducible to the other
both occupying the same space
in my view, the only way forward is treaty.
Together we need to create a new understanding.
A new imagining
About how we have two systems in one place.
We can anticipate how hard that will be.
The ambitions, the hopes, the tears, the anger, the disappointments,
the breakdowns, the makeups and then the moments of magic
when we break the bonds of the past and we build the future,
and we build from the future back.
I have confidence that we would finally fashion,
something worthy of the best of the histories
and hopes of all of those involved.
And when that treaty was signed and sealed
with ceremonies, it would be our 4th of July.
Our declaration of interdependence
of the kind of nation we'd chosen to be.
It would be a true national day
we would join our cousins in Aotearoa
New Zealand across the waters.
They used to celebrate the founding of a colony on 29 January
the date when William Hobson arrived
in the Bay of Islands to proclaim his appointment.
Today their national day is Waitangi Day sixth of February
the day when Maoris signed the Waitangi treaty with the British
Such a treaty and a day would not just unite two worlds
It would provide us with a day where belonging in Australia
was about what you believed not when you arrived.
It would honour values we have chosen
not celebrating our role as a location
for someone else's penal colony.
It would celebrate a national moment, not just the story of a single state.
As a nation, we would become not just a federation of states,
but a Federation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
as well, sovereignty intact.
I know that some will say this day lies far in the future.
But for the sake of the health of the soul of the nation
we need to hasten that day
to change the date.