"Our 'blackness' does not derive purely from physical appearance but a constellation of factors: family, kinship, traditions, history and country among them. In any Indigenous family there will be the full range of complexions but we are all united in a deep sense of belonging." ~Stan Grant
"The main reason why I agreed to do it is that I don't want to do it just for myself, I want to do it for young people all over Australia. That means black or white. I grew up both ways, the Yolngu way, and the balanda way, which is the white man's way, the western way."'~Magnolia Maymuru (Maminydjama Maymuru is set to make history this year when she becomes the first Aboriginal woman to represent the Northern Territory at Miss World Australia 2016)
"The idea of bringing life into the world is amazing, and I'd wanted to be apart of that." ~Muriel from Broken Hill found school tough but now she's following her nursing dream to become a midwife. (ABC Indigenous, June 25, 2020)
"Respect is something I always give whether I get it or not. Because after a while, they'll start to respect me. Kill 'em with kindness." ~Preston Campbell, Gold Coast Titans, National Rugby League Player
“We are people of the land and our language expresses this. Our knowledge is held in our languages and our languages express our cultures.” ~Veronica Perrurle Dobson, educator, author (Australian Geographic) on Aboriginal Languages
"We are trapped in the imaginations of white Australians. These are attitudes shaped and hardened by history, racism and discrimination; to many we remain remote if not invisible. Like everything this is changing as our voices are heard and the rest of Australia becomes more familiar with us, but the process is slow." ~Stan Grant
“We live on the veranda of the world's greatest island. It's our birthright to have a clean ocean, to catch a feed, to interact with nature. And, like any birthright, we have to safeguard it.” ~Tim Winton, Australian author and Patron of the Australian Marine Conservation Society (SEA AND ME BY BLUEBOTTLE FILMS CHANNEL)
“We sit around and tell little ones stories in the sand." ~April Pengart Campbell (Australian Geographic on Aboriginal Languages
"We use leaves to represent people, and sticks, rocks and, sometimes, small animals like witchety grubs. We show the kids how to do body painting and signs connected to our country.” ~April Pengart Campbell (Australian Geographic)On Aboriginal Languages
“When I started talking and remembering again, it was like turning back the hands of time. Once you learn a language, it stays with you always.” ~Gladys Miller, Scotdesco elder (Australian Geographic) on Aboriginal Languages
DEAR ANCESTORS
When I'm tired and
weary, give me rest…
When I'm weak, You
be my strength;
When I'm disappointed,
help me to put my trust
in You,
When I'm hurting,
please heal me,
When I lost sight of life,
restore your spirit within
me; and
When things seem
impossible, Let Your
will be done.
~Muja Mundu Creations
RACISM and THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM
By Stan Grant on IQ2 Racism Debate 2015
“Thank you so much for coming along this evening and I would also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.
In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. It looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of country do we want to be? And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened in the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstands.
Thousands of voices rose to hound an Indigenous man. A man who was told he wasn’t Australian. A man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year. And they hounded that man into submission.
I can’t speak for what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos. We heard a sound that was very familiar to us.
We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.
The Australian Dream.
We sing of it, and we recite it in verse. Australians all, let us rejoice for we are young and free.
My people die young in this country. We die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free. We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons and if you are a juvenile, it is worse, it is 50 percent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.
I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges.
It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains.
I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820’s, the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time. Go to the Sydney Gazette and look it up and read about it. Martial law was declared and my people could be shot on sight. Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.
The Australian Dream.
The Australian Dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation. It is there in terra nullius. An empty land. A land for the taking. Sixty thousand years of occupation. A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind. A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics. None of it mattered because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law.
And when British people looked at us, they saw something sub-human, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder. We were fly-blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used. Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said “it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth.” Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so-called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with the instruction, “Bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers.”
They were smoothing the dying pillow.
My people were rounded up and put on missions from where if you escaped, you were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here. It happened on the mission that my grandmother and my great grandmother are from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River.
Read about it. It happened.
By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the Constitution, save for ‘race provisions’ which allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.
The Australian Dream.
By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon, an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes and they burned those homes to the ground and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as the ‘Night of the Burning’.
In 1963 when I was born, I was counted among the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.
Now, you will hear things tonight. You will hear people say, “But you’ve done well.” Yes, I have and I’m proud of it and why have I done well? I’ve done well because of who has come before me. My father who lost the tips of three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table because he was denied an education. My grandfather who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.
My great grandfather, who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson (my father). Jailed for it! My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there.
That’s the Australian Dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian Dream, not because of it, and I’ve succeeded because of those people.
You might hear tonight, “But you have white blood in you”. And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.
The Australian Dream.
We’re better than this. I have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I spent a decade in war zones from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country. We are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I was sitting here where my friends are tonight, I would be arguing passionately for this country. But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.
The Australian Dream.
We have our heroes. Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation. Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers and say, “This is my country.” Cathy Freeman lit the torch of the Olympic Games. But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s history. Of course racism is killing the Australian Dream. It is self-evident that it’s killing the Australian dream. But we are better than that.
The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, “No more,” they are better than that. The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that. The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that. My children and their non-Indigenous friends are better than that. My wife who is not Indigenous is better than that.
And one day, I want to stand here and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone else in this room, Australians all, let us rejoice.
Thank you.”
Source: The Ethics Centre
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
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RELATED Quotes
"Many indigenous people have been displaced in colonial societies, their cultures often ignored or written into insignificance. Their history written and interpreted by white man. Australia is a prime example of this. Through this western gaze indigenous culture is often misinterpreted and framed in stereotypical images. Most Australians know very little about Australian indigenous culture. It's quite tragic. Identity and a sense of place is vital for all people and this is what many indigenous people here struggle with." ~Maria Lund Christensen
“For Aboriginal people, resolving who is Aboriginal and who is not, is an uneasy issue, located somewhere between the individual and the state." ~Professor Marcia Langton, Indigenous academic
Source: The Guardian 14 December 2015
"You've got to slow down and listen. Dadirri gives us the opportunity to walk together in peace." ~Miriam-Rose.
VERSES AND SENTIMENTS
"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."
~Laurence Binyon, FOR THE FALLEN, 1941
🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂🍂
I'M DOING MY PART!!!
Charity starts at home!
The poem that's gone viral after NSW farmer Joanna Collett posted it on the Prime Minister's facebook page:
G’day Mr Morrison, I trust that you are fine,
Sorry to be bothering you, but there’s something on my mind
I listened to a bloke last week; he had a bit to say
You lot may have heard of him? He delivers all that hay?
He spoke of countless hours and the distances they drive
Feeding starving stock, to keep bush hopes alive
They do not get assistance from your tax funded hat
They do it on their own, all off their own bat
I’m not politically minded and I don’t have any clout
And I know you’ve done a tour, to learn about the drought
But there’s just some burning questions, that have left us feeling beat
Why did we fund a foreign land, to learn to cut up meat?
And what about those soccer boys, who went and got all lost
You pulled out all the bloody stops, plain just showing off
You’ve bigger problems here at home, there’s drought up to our necks
So what does your mob go and do? Give them big fat cheques!
Don’t they have a government to deal with all this stuff?
Why should it be up to us, what’s with all your fuss?
Should we not be reigning in and look after our own
Have you never heard the phrase “charity starts at home”?
I realise there’s many things, that need an allocation
And I also can appreciate, complex trade relations
I’m not sure if you realise, but if our stock all die,
There won’t be any trade you see, your deals will all run dry
As a rule we’re not a whinging lot, our requests are but a few
Most of us who work the land, are tested, tried and true
We respect that we are guardians, and sustain it for the kids
But I often have to wonder, what future will it bring?
I guess all that I’m wondering, is “where’s the Aussie aid”?
Wrapped up in a swag of tape, only then to be repaid!
There’s Aussie blokes and chicks out there, putting you to shame
Helping fellow Australians, in their time of pain
I’m just a simple farmer, grazier, wife and mum
And even though we’re feeding stock, we’re better off than some
I’ve never had to shoot a cow, who could no longer stand
But many have before me, and I pray, I’m not dealt that hand
So will you take another look; admit that we’re in strife?
And do more than bloody empathise, before another farmer takes their life?
I’d like to think you’ll do what’s right and put Australia first
And help your own damn country, before this drought gets any worse.
Joanna Collett
Wee Waa NSW
If you would like to spread this message wider, please copy it and share it.
Don't let those who are doing it tough in rural areas just get forgotten in the news cycle.
Charity starts at home!
Source: FB/Lee Tate
19-20 September 2019
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THANK YOU
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You've got to slow down and listen. Dadirri gives us the opportunity to walk together in peace. Miriam-Rose.
"You've got to slow down and listen. Dadirri gives us the opportunity to walk together in peace." ~ Miriam-Rose.
