In his book, Killing for Country David Marr relates his frustration when trying to find indigenous voices while researching the history of the frontier wars. An Indigenous colleague told him: “You mob wrote down the colonial records, the diaries and newspapers. You do the work. You tell that story. It’s your story.” (p. 409)
In the raw wake of the Referendum result, I felt as if I just wanted to curl up and have it all go away, and I can’t begin to imagine how First Peoples felt. Surely if people knew, there would have been a different result, wouldn’t there? (Would there?) I thought back to the sessions I attended in the local Aboriginal meeting place where we set out timelines and participated in activities- but how every single person there was already committed to ‘yes’. But this is our work: making the dispossession, massacres and injustice part of our (i.e. non-Indigenous) history. Our history generally- not just for the already committed but the sceptical and cynical and antagonistic as well. I don’t know how you do that- a public information campaign perhaps? The first step is right here with this official publication, in writing, with the authority of First Peoples themselves, to be put alongside with the Convicts-Squatters-Gold-Anzac trope of the textbooks and curriculums we grew up with.
In our post-truth zeitgeist, where we all have our own ‘truths’, it seems incongruous that when it comes to ourselves personally, as individuals, we want ‘the’ truth. It seems to draw on a long-buried childhood urgency to assert that you are right, and the other person is wrong. In insurance claims, in relationship breakdowns, in autopsies, we want someone to take our side, we want to know what really happened, and we want ‘them’ (a parent, a counsellor, the media, a court) to take our side. While I was reading this report, I listened to an interview with William Dalrymple on Global Roaming. He pointed out that two opposing facts can both be true: for example, Israel was formed in 1948 and was a haven for post-Holocaust Jews AND hundreds of thousands Palestinians were rendered stateless in the Nakba that followed the establishment of Israel. The Yoorrook Report is the definitive attempt to put the Aboriginal truth on the record so that it stands alongside and is interwoven with the convicts-squatters-gold-ANZAC arc. As the First Peoples’ Assembly stated in establishing Yoorrook:
The Yoorrook Justice Commission was not established to find the truth: the truth was never lost. It was established so the state might finally learn to hear what had long been spoken among First Peoples. It was established to gather the stories that had been scattered by centuries of violence and denial and to give them shape, force, direction—and, crucially, an equal place in the historical record (p.140)…Our peoples will no longer have to carry the pain of these stories alone—this history and these truths become everyone’s history and truths. (p144)
The report is long: far longer than I expected because I didn’t realize that each PDF page actually contained two pages. It starts with a preamble and introduction by both former premier Steve Bracks, and chairperson of the Yoorrook commission, Professor Eleanor Bourke, and then has a lengthy timeline of colonization in Victoria.
Part I ‘The Jagged Line’ is about 100 pages in length, and is divided into chronological chapters:
- Sovereigns, squatters and settlers
- Massacres and the dawn of injustice
- Gold Diggers and the ‘Aboriginal Problem’
- Letters, petitions and deputations
- Protection, assimilation and the Stolen Generations
- Thinking Black, fighting back
- The Edge of Something New and Ancient.
There was little here that was new to me, although I hadn’t seen the Gold Rush and the establishment of missions linked like this. It was the Gold Rush that brought in the money that financed the creation of the State Library and Museum and the University of Melbourne, which in turn played their part in scientific racism and the ‘collection’ of artefacts. The missions, which were established in the 1860s, were deliberately placed far from the main gold field sites. The text is supplemented by a map which shows the rapid alienation of traditional lands through surveying and appropriation as Crown land for sale or lease. The section on letters and deputations highlighted the importance of Victoria in particular as the site for protest and organization, and I did raise an eyebrow at the explicit acknowledgement of the Communist Party as allies in this fight.
Part II The Silence and the Telling is a 40 page explanation of the establishment of the Commission in the context of previous commissions, and the explicit actions undertaken to ensure the embedding of Indigenous Data Sovereignty into the testimony. Some of these stories had been told previously, but others not. Truth Receivers were appointed to make contact with 9000 First Peoples, and evidence was received from 1500 people. More than 200 witnesses appeared as part of the four year enquiry. The Enquiry itself faced its own problems: firstly finding somewhere appropriate to hold it (they settled on Charcoal Lane in Collingwood- a site that has resonance amongst Koories in Melbourne), and then gaining the cooperation of government agencies in getting information to the commission in a timely manner. It is striking how much care was taken in ensuring that it was not another white-fella commission of enquiry. There is a series of photographs showing various encounters and bestowal of gifts on various dignitaries, reflecting both the generosity of the First Peoples and also the need to have relationships enshrined in ceremony and ritual.
Section III is the longest part, where selected witnesses tell their stories. Some of the names are familiar: actor Jack Charles, or Paul Briggs, but others will only be familiar to people in contact with the Koorie community in Victoria and who will recognize the leadership role that many of these witnesses play in different organizations, denoted by the title ‘Uncle’ and ‘Aunty’. There are non-Indigenous witnesses too, including the Premier, the Minister for Education, The Chief Commissioner of Police, the Anglican bishop of Gippsland. Suzannah Henty, descendant of the Henty family who appropriated lands at Portland also appeared. Again and again the same themes arise: the heartlessness and pettiness of bureaucracy, the pain of the Stolen Generation and a sense of betrayal.
The report closes with the key findings and a long list of recommendations compiled from the different reports issued throughout the life of the commission. Will they just gather dust, as was feared? Well, the recommendation of Treaty was taken up with alacrity (reflective perhaps of the fear of electoral defeat of the Labor Party next year?) but already is mired in party politics with the Victorian Liberals vowing to scrap it should it win power.
I’m really pleased that I read this report, and I hope that more Victorians do so as well. In places it is beautifully, lyrically written and underpinning it is a quiet, determined insistence and persistence.
Sourced from: The Yoorrook website as a PDF. Free. https://www.yoorrook.org.au/reports-and-recommendations/reports/yoorrook-official-public-record
Read because: my UU Fellowship committed to read it and discuss it.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 