Can Australia afford not to be reconciled?

Programs were designed and delivered for our people as though we were still mendicants in our own land. Departments with benign titles were created to replace the old “welfare, native protector agencies,” but still the anchor of subjugation prevented us from moving out into the deep channels where the fish are plentiful, where we could determine our own fate based on access to an equitable share of the resources being enjoyed by the settler society.

And then there was John Howard, who as Prime Minister always considered the notion of reconciliation to be purely a personal matter. Howard believed the resolution of practical matters regarding health, housing and education would ultimately deliver national outcomes from governments, and reconciliation would thus be achieved. This attitude made me despair of national reconciliation ever being achieved. So, in October 1997, I declined reappointment as chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

Reconciliation had been initiated by the Federal Parliament, with the support of all parties. My issue wasn’t with parliament’s good intentions. My immense personal despair was with the direction that the government of the day was taking the reconciliation process.

At the end of 1997, safe in the embrace of my own Yawuru world in my hometown of Broome, I had time to reflect on people’s inability to understand what Gandhi and Martin Luther King had instinctively understood: that while the battle for peace and justice might have a local or regional context, the impact of that battle has global consequences. In other words, we cannot stand in our own land and demand truth and justice when others in the world are being denied the same outcomes.

Today our world is confronted with the consequences of our failed stewardship – the crisis of climate change means our nearest Pacific neighbours are watching their island states literally disappear beneath rising oceans. Or consider the disparity between a minority of the Earth’s people who control the majority of the wealth and resources on this planet, and those who live at the low-water mark of overwhelming poverty. Our responsibilities as Australians – with our great resources and great wealth – cannot be ignored.

But as, in twenty-two decades of European intervention, we have managed to destroy or damage almost every forest, almost every river, and almost the entire landscape of the island continent of Australia, perhaps it is time to ask ourselves how the Aboriginal peoples managed for millennia to maintain a balance between sustaining our societies, feeding our people, and living within our lands, sea, and waters without destroying another species of bird, fish or animal.