My people were rounded up and put on missions, from where, if you escaped. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with instruction ‘bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’. We were fly blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used.Ĭharles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said ‘it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth’. And when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder. A land for the taking.Ī people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind.Ī people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics, none of it mattered.īecause our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. The Australian dream is rooted in racism. Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.
Martial law was declared, and my people could be shot on sight. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time, go to the Sydney Gazette, and look it up, and read about it. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains, we were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school. We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons, and if you are a juvenile it is worse, it’s fifty percent. My people die young in this country, we die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free. We sing of it, and we recite it in verse.Īustralians all let us rejoice for we are young and free. We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you’re not welcome. We heard a howl that of humiliation has echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard a sound that is very familiar to us. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos. I can’t speak for the what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. Thousands of voices rose to hound an indigenous man, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year.Īnd they hounded that man into submission. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstand.
It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Who are we? What sort of a country do we want to be.Īnd this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. it looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. Thank you so much for coming along this evening, and I'd also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people. For the negative was Jack Thompson and Rita Panahi. Also for the affirmative was Pallavi Sinha. This speech was delivered in an IQ2 debate with the topic, 'Racism is destroying the Australian dream'. 27 October 2015, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Australia
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