The program starts with images of a river and haunting music.
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A woman’s voice speaks.
“This is Yorta Yorta Country — the land of my ancestors.”
She continues: “When the British arrived, my people were murdered here by settlers and even by police.”
It’s with these chilling words that the recent ABC TV Four Corners program, Truth/ Yoorrook is introduced.
The area that the journalist, Bridget Brennan, is speaking about is the Barmah/Moira Lakes area on the Murray — not so far from here.
The chilling aspect about these comments is that, as the truth about the settlement of this country is uncovered, the story they tell is repeated, time and time and time again, across the entire continent.
This was not an isolated event or outlier, but part of a systematic and deliberate attempt to “cleanse” the country of the “troublesome blacks”.
To take the land by any means.
As Brennan went on to say: “These atrocities spread all over Australia, and the violence and the seizure of land was how our country was formed.”
“When these lands were colonised, a violent invasion began.
“Tens of thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed.
“They were shot, raped and poisoned across the frontier.”
Many of us have grown up with the story of the heroic settlement of Australia.
The brave settlers who have defied the odds to carve out a new nation.
We also learnt about the impact of European diseases.
But as Brennan noted, this is only one side of the story.
The British settled Australia as a penal colony: a penal colony in a new and unknown foreign land on the other side of the world.
Fear, brutality, violence, uncertainty and privation were characteristics of those early years.
This brutal start helped shape the subsequent actions of many who came to New Holland as it was then known: the convicts, guards, police, even the settlers, many of whom had experienced — or meted out — harsh treatment as part of the ‘taming’ of this land.
As settlement spread across the continent, and the increasing demand for more and more land for sheep and cattle played out, this brutality was turned against the original inhabitants.
This is the part of the story of Australia’s history that is so often characterised by a determination to not only ignore the atrocities of our past, but to believe they did not exist — a collective forgetting or the “Great Australian Silence”.
This led to a different coloniser history taking its place in the collective Australian memory — a history with negative stereotypes of First Nations peoples that entrenched an ongoing experience of marginalisation and systemic discrimination.
A coloniser history that was taught in schools, based on the concept of terra nullius and, for the most part, ignoring the reality of the acquisition of land.
So, for many, it can be a shocking realisation that the colonisation of these lands was so brutal and came at such an enormous ongoing cost to the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait nations across the continent.
For others, there is an unwillingness to accept this other side of our nation’s story — that our country is founded on a brutal and bloody history of dispossession and violence.
For them, holding on to the more familiar coloniser narrative of a relatively peaceful settlement, is an exercise in determined, and at times aggressive, avoidance.
So why is it so hard for so many Australians to acknowledge this difficult truth?
We have our recognition ceremonies and memorials for wars fought far away on foreign soil, but there is still a gap in acknowledging wars fought here, on Australian soil.
These were wars fought over decades to protect country, communities and culture.
These wars even have names. The Black War in Tasmania; the Eumeralla Wars on Gunditjmara Country around Portland in Victoria’s south-west — the place where white settlers first landed; the Frontier Wars — the collective term for the ongoing battles, skirmishes and other actions that characterised the settlement of this country.
Aboriginal people know this period of our history as “The Killing Times” and have long called for non-Aboriginal people to come to terms with the way Australia was settled — to acknowledge the truth of colonisation.
Yorta Yorta Elder Uncle Paul Briggs, speaking on the Four Corners program, said: “I think it’s too horrific for people to take on board, that their ancestors — non-Aboriginal ancestors — were a part of this.”
In a recent interview on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live, author Kate Grenville also reflected on the struggle by Australians to acknowledge what happened in the past.
She spoke about how important it was “to allow those feelings in and not be overwhelmed by them and push them away, but to accept the feelings of sorrow and grief and horror”.
“We can’t go on as if all that stuff didn’t happen. The more we try to hide it and not think about it, in a paradoxical way, the more potent it is.”
We, non-Aboriginal people, also have a responsibility to do our own truth-telling.
To acknowledge those truths from the past so they lose the negative potency, and we can finally start to step out of the dark shadow of denial.
To do otherwise is to continue to carry a huge burden of, amongst other things, guilt, grief, sorrow, and fear.
Australia’s first formal truth-telling process, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, was created to establish an official record of the impact of colonisation on First Peoples in Victoria.
To ensure that both sides of the story are told.
In the words of Yoorrook, over the past four years the commission has “heard powerful truths from people right across the state, giving evidence on the impacts of colonisation, including systemic injustice, as well as the strength, resistance and achievements of First Peoples. These truths form the basis of Yoorrook’s final reports, documenting the past and providing a roadmap to transform the future.”
The question for non-Aboriginal people is, now that we know how the taking was done, what do we do with that knowledge, how do we move forward, knowing we are all on stolen land?
One step is to listen and learn from Yoorrook’s work by taking up the invitation to be part of the Walk for Truth.
To join the Yoorrook deputy chair, Commissioner Travis Lovett, Kerrupmara Gunditjmara, as he walks from Portland, where colonisation in Victoria began, to Victorian Parliament, where “we can all transform the future”.
As the invitation says:
“Yoorrook invites everyone to join us on this powerful journey, to walk together toward truth, to be part of the positive change for Victoria and Australia, to celebrate the strength and resistance of Aboriginal people and to be proud to have the oldest living culture in the world as ours.
“We can’t change the truth of our past, but by accepting and understanding it, we can walk together to a better shared future.
“For First Peoples and for all Victorians.
“The true path forward starts here.
“We invite you to join it.”
Starting on Sunday, May 25 on Gunditjmara Country at Portland, the Walk for Truth will finish at Parliament House on Wednesday, June 18.
To find out more about how you can join the Walk for Truth, go to yoorrookjusticecommission.org.au/events/walkfortruth/
To watch the Truth/Yoorrook episode on ABC TV’s Four Corners go to ABC iview
To listen to Kate Grenville’s interview on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live go to abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/late-night-live/105084016
Reconciliation column