Aggressive words. Imperative orders. Implied criticisms.
Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister’s acceptance speech began by acknowledging the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Anthony Albanese went on to say:
‘(A)ll of us ought to be proud that amongst our great multicultural society we can count the oldest living continuous culture in the world.’
Yet legislation for the protection of that oldest living culture in the world remains deeply flawed.
‘Never again can we allow the destruction, the devastation and the vandalism of cultural sites as has occurred with the Juukan Gorge – never again’[i].
Aboriginal people – with supportive whitefellas alongside – over lifetimes, got up, stood up and showed up. Vilified and threatened by white and, sometimes, black, they cannot let it go.
There is a cost. Wiradjuri poet, Associate-Professor Jeanine Leanne describes it:
‘I’m trying to write about hope – slow hope. A quiet radicalism or radical conformism – like my Aunties practiced.
‘Act/appear very quiet, non-questioning on the outside and on the inside build a store of radicalism and among those close.
Activism is not about knocking down the walls in one fell swoop of drama – the cost of that is too high for those on the front line. Activism is about finding the smallest cracks and chips to infiltrate and work from the ground up.[ii]’
The ‘quiet radicalism’ of the Aunties is the story of Purple Threads[iii], Jeanine’s book about her Gundagai childhood that describes the Murrumbidgee Valley town, that’s a world away from the tourist Dog on the Tucker Box. She edits poetry by Aboriginal people[iv], teaches Indigenous Studies and Creative Writing at Melbourne University and contributes to Red Room Poetry whose vision concerns the future of Australian literature and supporting First Nations[v]. She was a Festival Ambassador for the 2022 Emerging Writers Festival.
Leonie read her poem, Native Grasses, to Arabunna Elder Reg Dodd. Climate change is ending ancient natural cycles. Birds and animals disappear, unable to live. Injustice besets him. He wearies.
‘Go on, as you can’ says Jeanine’s poem. ‘You can’t stop native grasses. Native grasses just keep growing. They can’t be stopped. They just appear. They sprout up wherever they can. Native grasses just appear whenever they can. They bob up just how and when it’s possible. But they never stop.’[vi].
‘Don’t lose heart. Keep putting up your head. Keep speaking up. It’s ok. You’re native grass. Nothing can stop you. Don’t stop yourself.’
‘Yes yes, them native grasses.’ He gestures to his wide desert Country.
‘That’s right, them native grasses. When they get a little bit of rain, then they’re growing thick over there. That’s all they need. And the others beside them that don’t get that rain’, he gestures aside, ‘nothing happens there.
‘It’s that mix of things. When the rain falls, just there, when that sun shines, just into there, on that day. It’s when you have all them things just happen all together’.
Reg Dodd’s stories of his cultural heritage inspired Frances Ring of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Choreographer, Frances Ring takes over later this year from Stephen Page as the Artistic Director of Bangarra Dance Theatre. Her 2012 ballet Terrain[vii] responded to the Arabunna spiritual stories. Surrounded by twisted desert bushes, Reg told of the magical umbugga spirits who travel across time in Country and Terrain gathered up contorted spirit women suspended in time waiting for the waters to transport them.
In another space and time, Burchell Hayes, a Juukan descendant, told the Juukan Gorge Inquiry of the spirit influence on a spirit ceremonial language:
‘The Juukan Gorge is known to be a place where the spirits of our relatives who have passed away, even recently, have come to rest. It is a place that the very, very old people still occupy. Purlykuti has been specifically referred to by the old people as a place of pardu, which refers to the special language only spoken during ceremonies in the Pilbara. Our elders state that it is certain that the spirits are very disturbed, and their living relatives are also upset at this. This is why Juukan Gorge is important. It is in the ancient blood of our people and contains their DNA. It houses history and the spirits of ancestors and it anchors the people to this country.[viii]’
William Brian (Badger) Bates from the Barkandji People of the Barka (Darling River) gave evidence to the Murray Darling Basin Royal Commission:
‘Our Barka means everything to us. It is our mother. It is who we are[ix].’
‘When the MDBA and NSW DoI consult with Aboriginal people around the basin, rarely they come to Broken Hill, Menindee and Wilcannia. It is usually the same old thing. They give us hardly any notice or any agenda, they turn up with maps and charts and want us to give them feedback on things without being able to think about it and understand it. They hold separate colour coded meetings for the whitefellas and blackfellas. We never get any feedback, or minutes, so they could be reporting anything, we wouldn’t know. And they never seem to take what we say into account. Like we have been telling them for years especially since 2012 that our river is dying for lack of water, so what do they do? Change the basin plan so they can take out an extra 70GL for the irrigators upstream. So whatever consultation they did with Barkandji people they just ignored what we said anyway.[x]’
Young people at Victoria’s Aboriginal Justice Caucus carry the baton onward. Their role is to give a strong Aboriginal community voice for those actually living that old continuous culture.
‘The foundation of the Australian nation-state on the dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples indicates that European repressive structures are at the core of the imagined nation. The most recent update to the Colonial Frontier Massacres Project has uncovered “that around half of all massacres of Aboriginal people were carried out by police and government forces”’[xi].
The Law Council of Australia (LCA) notes that most Australian First Nations parties lack a process that ensures meaningful consultation. LCA has repeatedly ‘got up’, ‘stood up’ and ‘showed up’, advocating that cultural heritage reform must be underpinned by proper recognition within Australia of the right to self-determination. It points out that international customary law forms part of Australia’s binding international treaty obligations.
The primary reason First Nations cultural heritage sites are considered significant in Australia is because they are part of the very living culture of First Nations peoples. Our new PM understands this. His new government needs now to stand up and take action.
[i] Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, Never Again: Inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (interim report, December 2020), v.
[ii] Personal communication – Jeanine Leane email exchange with Leonie Kelleher, 21 April, 2022.
[iii] Leane, Jeanine, 2011, Purple Threads, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland.
[iv] Leane, Jeanine (ed.), Guwayu – For All Times – A Collection of First Nations Poems, 2020, Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome, Western Australia.
[v] Red Room Poetry, ‘Jeanine Leane’, <https://redroompoetry.org/poets/jeanine-leane/> (accessed 4 July 2022).
[vi] Jeanine Leane reads her poem: https://soundcloud.com/user-400964186/native-grasses-by-jeanine-leane (accessed 28.6.2022).
[vii] Celebrating the 10th anniversary of its first production, Terrain has completed a season in Sydney and tours Canberra and Brisbane in July and August 2022.
[viii] Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, Never Again: Inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia (interim report, December 2020).
[ix] Bates, William Brian, 2019, Statement for Murray Darling Basin Royal Commission, https://cdn.environment.sas.gov.au, 1.
[x] Ibid., 4.
[xi] Arapakis, Daphne, Kimberley Duggan and Zach Smith, 2022, In the face of injustice, Law Institute Journal, July, 37, citing Hogg, R (2001), “Penalty and Modes of Regulating Indigenous Peoples in Australia”, Sage Journals, USA, Punishment & Society-international Journal of Penology, https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/pun/3/3 “Almost Half the Massacres of Aboriginal People Were by Police or Other Government forces, Research Finds”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/16/almost-half-the-massacres-of-aboriginal-people-were-by-police-research-finds.
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