Finding humanity in darkness
LIFE is precious and life is fragile. These phrases have stayed with me for the past week.
The news cycle is so quick and so full that it seems much much more than a week ago that eight innocent lives were taken when a van ploughed into crowds on London Bridge.
It seems more than eight days ago that Khai Hao was shot dead in cold blood in Melbourne.
And I can’t imagine what time has done for friends, family and colleagues of Senior Constable Brett Forte. I imagine that each day they feel like they will awaken from the nightmare and he will walk back in through the door.
I went back through time last Sunday when I joined hundreds of others to remember the Myall Creek Massacre in Northern New South Wales. On June 10, 1838, 28 children, women and elderly men of the Wirrayaraay people were murdered at Myall Creek station.
There is little to be gained in comparing atrocities, but all of the above mentioned crimes were acts of premeditated violence.
No respect or thought was given to the lives that were taken and in the case of Myall Creek it took two court cases for our legal system to conclude that the victims were even human.
It is impossible to make sense of the senseless and it is hard to sit in the darkness with what has occurred. I find myself yearning to find hope, to find humanity to find some light in the darkness.
And it is there. Australian nurse Kirsty Boden ran towards danger on London Bridge and her instinct to help others led to her death.
It was the same motivation to protect and to help that led to Senior Constable Forte’s death.
These are tiny rays of light.
The response of Brett Forte’s father when questioned by the media about his feelings towards the person who took his son’s life. “We don’t hate. We protect…I don’t have room for that feeling right now.” Or something along those lines – except better articulated. More light rushing in.
Sometimes the light can take centuries to make its way into a human experience.
In today’s terms the massacre at Myall Creek was a war crime, an act of ethnic cleansing. It has taken 162 years for healing to come to that place. And this healing could not have occurred without justice.
The Myall Creek legal case put the whole of Colonial Australia on trial. It posed the question as to whether all life is precious, whether black lives matter.
It was the first time that white men were tried and found guilty of the murder of Aboriginal people. In the year 2000, descendants of the murderers and descendants of the slain met at Myall Creek as an act of reconciliation and healing. To witness that act of powerful love again as part of the annual memorial last Sunday was truly inspiring.
It is naturally symbolic as Myall Creek is just one of 1194 documented sites of frontier violence dating from 1770 to the 1940s.
In the midst of this barbarous cruelty there were also acts of decency and humanity. These were early shards of light. Police Captain Edward Denny Day pursued the Myall Creek killers without fear or favour. Aboriginal witness Davey risked everything to bring the truth to light. Attorney General of New South Wales, John Hubert Plunkett was tenacious in overcoming the vested interests that called for the Myall Creek murderers to be exonerated.
Nothing can ever truly take away the pain of those who were taken from us from London, from Melbourne, from Toowoomba or from Myall Creek. But somewhere in that pain and that darkness the light still manages to creep in. We Will Remember Them.