Yoorrook ran for four years and produced masses of evidence and now a massive report.The responsibility for implementing Yoorrook's 100 recommendations now rests with the Victorian government and the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria.
Yoorrook has more than Victorian relevance, however. Its summary descriptions of the effects of colonisation describe our shared Australian history.
Shared history
There were 50 reported massacres in Victoria between 1831 and 1854, in which at least 978 First Nations people were killed (Summary Report, page 32). The longer lasting effects were more profound:
First Peoples’ lives are profoundly shaped by the enduring impact of colonial invasion and contemporary policies that continue to exclude and harm First Peoples. Yoorrook heard how successive Victorian Governments have enacted laws, adopted policies and engaged in practices that rob First Peoples of access to lands and waters and deny equitable access to social services and resources. Yoorrook heard that this legacy lives on in inequitable health and wellbeing outcomes, home ownership, employment, education outcomes and economic prosperity for First Peoples today ...
Colonisers forced First Peoples off their Country and onto reserves and missions where they controlled First Peoples’ lives, separated children from their families and suppressed cultural practices, spirituality and language. Colonisers and their descendants cleared the land to make way for farming, mining and development. In doing so, they damaged the land and waters and destroyed cultural heritage and other sacred sites. Non-Aboriginal farming practices, the prevention of firestick farming and the neglect of ecosystems and waterways increased environmental degradation and the risk of bushfires and floods. Yoorrook heard that some waterways have been mismanaged to the point of ecological collapse. While First Peoples have been locked out of building intergenerational wealth including from lands, waters and resources, Yoorrook heard how the State, churches and private landowners all profited and continue to profit from the atrocities of dispossession.
From 1834, mass killings, disease, sexual violence, exclusion, linguicide, cultural erasure, environmental degradation, child removal, absorption and assimilation combined to bring about the near-complete physical destruction of First Peoples in Victoria. Yoorrook found that the decimation of the First Peoples population in Victoria [to] between 1 per cent and 5 per cent of the pre-colonisation population by 1901 was the result of ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups. This was genocide.' (Summary Report, pages 30, 32)
It was also our shared history - shared by Blacks and Whites but playing very different roles.
Shared responsibility
Secondly, the responsibility for coming to terms with and making reparations for that shared history is also shared - across governments, public institutions, companies, families that have profited from stolen land, indeed, across all of us, Black and White. Eualeyai-Kamillaroi historian, Larissa Behrendt, wrote in 2017:
These continuing, two-and-a-quarter-century old tensions lie beneath policy questions (Closing the Gap, dealing with incarceration, education, domestic violence, drugs and alcohol) and constitutional options (Recognise or Treaty or both). For the rest of Australia, there is the challenge of how the dominant national narrative – the story the nation tells itself – deals with the invasion moment ... Until we bury the myth that Australia was "settled", we can never become a country where all Australians see Indigenous history and culture as a key part of the nation’s history and culture – and until we do that we will never have found a way to truly share this colonised country. (pages 238-39)
It is more than 30 years since Prime Minister Keating at Redfern put shared responsibility in these terms:
Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians, the people to whom the most injustice has been done. And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
Keating's speech did not go into the specifics of where and how recognition should happen.
Recommendation 15 from Yoorrook is the only one in the report that mentions commemoration but it nails it down:
Recommendation 15
Led and decided by First Peoples and Traditional Owner groups, the Victorian Government and local Government authorities must provide resources and support to establish markers, memorials, signs and information acknowledging relevant First Peoples’ histories and perspectives at culturally and historically significant sites, including:
a. Sites of historical injustice;
b. Massacre sites;
c. Former missions and reserves;
d. Sites relevant to frontier wars and First Nations people who served in war;
e. Sites relevant to First Peoples’ leadership; and
f. Other sites as determined by Traditional Owners or Aboriginal Representative Bodies.
(58; emphasis added.)
'Historical injustice', 'massacre sites', frontier wars and service in wars. If those initiatives are being proposed in one Australian jurisdiction, will other jurisdictions follow suit? More importantly, will all jurisdictions follow through and actually do something? Will we see markers, memorials, signs and information acknowledging First Peoples’ histories and perspectives?
At the Commonwealth level, the Australian War Memorial has an advantage in that its governing Council is independent. Section 9(2) of the Australian War Memorial Act 1980 says, 'The Council is responsible for the conduct and control of the affairs of the Memorial and the policy of the Memorial with respect to any matters shall be determined by the Council'.
So, the Memorial has the power to take actions that would recognise and commemorate the Australian Wars, the injustices, massacres and resistance that took place during them. The Memorial Council has a share of the responsibility; it should exercise it - now.
Much of the Defending Country website provides supporting arguments. See particularly the posts under the drop-down headings 'About', 'Australian Frontier Wars', and 'News'.
Earlier posts on Yoorrook: use our Search engine.
Picture credit: Lake Condah Aboriginal Mission [Gunditjmara Country, Budj Bim Cultural Landscape, near Heywood, Western Victoria]. Originally published, Illustrated Australian News for Home Readers, 1874, State Library of Victoria. Shows the Aboriginal settlement, with a cricket game in progress in the foreground.
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