Despite the failures to close the gap, hope grows step by step

Education, equality, care, treaty … our graduates will be part of the change, says Greg Lehman

IT would be interesting to know how many people in Tasmania are aware that they have just lived through 2020 NA I DOC Week. Certainly, each year that goes by, the involvement of print and electronicmediaincreases.So, it’ s getting increasingly hard to miss.

What would be more interesting is to know what it means to Tasmanians.

Do people realise that NA I DOC is an acronym that stands for National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee? Most would not realise that, perhaps ironically, NA I DOC shares its origins with what we call Australia Day!

On January 26, 1938, Australia first celebrated Anniversary Day in ac know led gm ent of 150 years of British colonial presence. William Cooper, a Y or ta Y or ta man who had first petitioned the N SW governor for land rights in 1887, recognised Anniversary Day as an opportunity to shift the national focus. After leaving Cum me ragunja Mission and moving to Foot sc ray, he began gathering signatures for a petition to King George V to create dedicated Aboriginal seats in federal parliament. His petition was blocked by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons (w ho referred Cooper to the attention of the Federal Police).

In response, Cooper organised Australia’ s first national Aboriginal congress at Sydney Town Hall to coincide with Anniversary Day, declaring instead that it should be known as a national Day of Mourning for the “callous treatment of our people by the white men in the past 150 years ”. Are solution, passed unanimously, called for the commonwealth government to make new laws guaranteeing education, equality and full citizenship for Aboriginal people. It took 30 years for this demand to be realised thorough the famous 1967Referendum.

For Aboriginal people, NA I DOC’ so rig in sin the national Day of Mourning maintains our focus on the unfinished business of recognition of Indigenous rights in Australia. For too many others, the occasion of Anniversary Day has changed little since 1938. Rebadg ed as Australia Day, it continues to celebrate colonisation and all its injustices.

Something of William Cooper’ s vision for a better Australia was crystallise data small gathering at the University of Tasmania’ s new West Park campus in Burnie this week. Five Aboriginal students graduated from the M uri na program, a higher education enabling program delivered by the Riawun na Centresince1992.

Graduates of M uri na have gone onto undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in diverse disciplines including law, fine arts and history. They take their experience at the

university back to their families and their communities as an empowering encounter with an institution that, for too many Aboriginal people, is a place that was never imagined as apart of their future.

Speaking at the ceremony, Vice Chancellor Rufus Black reflected on this year’s NAIDOC theme of “Always was, Always will be ”, and perhaps unknowingly called up the spirit of William Cooper. He noted that the words of the theme directly acknowledge the en during sovereignty of Aboriginal people, but in away that Western systems of law never could. Aboriginal connections to Country go beyond ownership or possession. They are not disposable.

“How can the Western system presume to extinguish something that it does not understand, or even recognise?”

I wish Joseph Lyon s could have been thereto consider the moment, although it would most likely have been lost on him—a man of his time. But the M uri na graduates were there. It was a moment that William Cooper, also am an of his time, would have understood deeply.

For all the continuing reluctance of the Australian government to accept the generosity of the Uluru Statement of the Heart. For all the heart break of accelerating rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth incarceration and Black death sin custody. For all the failures to close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage, there is hope.

For me, this is the meaning of NAIDOC Week. It is the hope that William Cooper’ s vision will continue, step by step, to be realised. Education, care, equality. Seats in federal parliament. A treaty. The M uri na graduates will live into this future and be part of making the change that will follow. I invite you to join with them.