Photo: Organisers from a number of activists groups recently met with Black Lives Matter Founders Patrisse Cullors and Rodney Diverlus at the Aborigines Advancement League in Thornbury, Victoria. Photo: Jack Latimore

Malcolm Turnbull’s flat rejection of the Uluru statement hung absurdly and deplorably over our visitors’ time here

The visit of the founders of Black Lives Matter to accept the Sydney peace prize should be leveraged by First Nations, indeed by all people of colour in Australia plus our allies and advocates, as a mechanism to have our agendas infiltrate mainstream forums at an international level and work towards redressing the raft of issues that affect us.

Rather than a crescendo doused in limelight, the presence of Black Lives Matter in Australia should be viewed as a starting point. It has provided a perfect opportunity for community program practitioners, activists and advocacy groups to come together, form stronger alliances and both expose and progress broader public understanding of the complex of race-related (and gender-related) disadvantage and discrimination in this country. These firmer connective networks can and will contribute to delivering a more participatory form of democracy than Australia is used to.

Last Friday I met Patrisse Cullors and Rodney Diverlus from Black Lives Matter at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport and flew to Mildura to hear from local mob there about community efforts to improve issues such as family violence and overrepresentation in the justice system. The objective of the trip was for IndigenousX to provide Black Lives Matter with an understanding of what is happening on the ground in Indigenous communities, outside the inner-city metropolitan areas that their itinerary had otherwise confined them to.

In Mildura we gave them a glimpse of the potential of community-led programs so they could take that knowledge with them into a week packed with media appearances and meetings. Cullors and Diverlus also heard from community about their lived experiences, past and present, to provide them with a better understanding of the persistent issues impacting Indigenous communities more broadly.

Together we heard from elders and respected community leaders about the role they play within Victoria’s Koori court and how that program aims to reduce recidivism and overrepresentation within the state’s justice system.

We visited the Meminar Ngangg Gimba women’s shelter and listened to the elders who work there around the clock to assist families escaping domestic violence. We sat with representatives of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and heard what it’s like growing up in Mildura and the state of relationships between the region’s Indigenous youth and police. These conversations, as well as others with different community members, revealed a common thread: self-determined programs that provide Indigenous decision-making roles work better than those not being led by mob.

The cruel irony of Malcolm Turnbull’s flat rejection of the Uluru statement’sproposition for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament hung absurdly and deplorably over each of these exchanges.

Driving back into town after listening to that Murriwarra elder Aunty Margrett Handy-Mitchell recount her experiences growing up in the region, Guardian Australia’s videographer David Fanner asked Cullors and Diverlus if they understood what was meant when Aunty Margrett told them that as a child she used to find her shoes at the “tip”.

“That’s only one generation back,” Fanner said in amazement. We were following Uncle Peter Peterson towards Dareton’s Namatjira mission. “Nama”, as locals refer to it, is an Aboriginal settlement established in 1968 to wipe out the multiple shanty towns that surrounded Mildura. Nama had electricity and water connected in 1992.

During our time in Mildura, and briefly in the video we produced, Cullors and Diverlus explained their perspectives of the black diaspora to me. It was a tale of urgent inequality and disadvantage, of black fear and the violent erasure of diverse culture and diverse bodies. First Nations peoples in this country haven’t escaped that conceptualisation of diaspora either. In fact it’s an ongoing project. The dispersals perpetrated on our old ones during the frontier wars, and again notably in the first half of last century under the banner of the assimilationist white Australia policy, have simply been working more quietly, more insidiously recently. Here too, the state-willed erasure persists unabated.

The bestowing of the Sydney peace prize on the Black Lives Matter movementshouldn’t be interpreted as ignoring any of our domestic race-related human rights issues. It has provided a space to amplify these issues into dominant forums, but more importantly, it has presented the opportunity to draw together and form stronger strategic alliances across our diverse advocacy groups, to form a collective to push back against the commonwealth’s ongoing colonial project, to form a network of resistance operating on many fronts simultaneously.

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Four years ago, three American women started a hashtag, #BlackLivesMatter, after a white neighbourhood watch volunteer was acquitted over the death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Since then, the movement has morphed into a global network with chapters all over the world leading campaigns, rallies and calls for law reform.

“I helped create the #BlackLivesMatter because I was angry, I was fed up with the ways that the United States was treating black people,” co-founder Patrisse Cullors said.

I think the intention was to give a new generation of black people a voice, and to reignite the long-standing movement for black liberation.

Ms Cullors and Canadian chapter leader Rodney Diverlus are in Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize — the first time the award has honoured a movement, not individuals.

In Australia, the pair have heard about over-incarceration, violence and child removals from Aboriginal communities in regional Victoria, and in Sydney.

“It’s really startling to me that anti-black racism and anti-black violence is a global phenomenon,” Mr Diverlus said.

“When we were here, we were hearing a lot from Aboriginal folks, South Sea Islanders, Torres Strait Islanders, hearing about their history and current realities of anti-blackness.”

“We come in really as strangers but in deep solidarity with the people here, with the Indigenous people of Australia, and want to make it known that we see the struggle and we are in solidarity with these folks,” Ms Cullors said.

“I’m learning from folks, what can we bring back Stateside.”

Joe Williams, mental health advocate

Photo: Joe Williams, Mental Health Advocate. (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Wiradjuri man Joe Williams is a former NRL star and now a mental health campaigner, who believes the Black Lives Matter movement has helped underrepresented Australians.

“It’s having a huge effect for our people out here in Australia, First Nations People are starting to speak up about it. We’re gaining confidence in our everyday living and how much our lives actually matter. For a long time we were told they don’t,” Mr Williams said.

Every time we see a person of colour throughout the world, and particularly in Australia, killed, locked up, in a jail cell, that affects us because it takes us back to our ancestors.

“We now have a voice online. Now we have people of colour speaking out about injustices for our people that have happened for hundreds of years in [the US] and our country.”

Keenan Mundine, justice worker

PHOTO: Keenan Mundine, justice worker (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Keenan Mundine was in and out of jail during his teenage years growing up in Redfern, but now works to help other Indigenous offenders rehabilitate and turn their lives around.

He said social media and the Black Lives Matter movement is giving the powerless a voice.

“We can inspire these people who are on social media every day to start their own movement. We can show them the actual bigger understanding of the movement around Black Lives Matter,” he said.

“People are coming from the front line who are being exposed to these traumatic events and having their voices heard, no matter who you are or where you are from.”

Jody Pitt, #justice4Tane

PHOTO: Jody Pitt, #justice4Tane (ABC News: Jack Fisher)

Jody Pitt’s family was touched by tragedy earlier this year when her cousin, Tane Chatfield, died in custody in Tamworth in regional New South Wales.

Ms Pitt’s Facebook post about her cousin’s death was shared thousands of times, and her family has used #justice4Tane to speak up about his untimely death.

“It was a mutual decision from the immediate family that we would spread word about Tane’s death on social media. The first post I wrote went viral and I was quite surprised by how quickly it got out there,” she said.

“We can relate to the issue — our black women and more particularly our black men being abused or intimidated by our corrective services or police officials.

“I just feel like we need more Aboriginal youth fighting for this.”

Additional credits: Photography: Jack Fisher and Isabella Higgins. Producer: Anisha Khopkar

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In Australia to accept the Sydney Peace Prize on behalf of her movement — the first time the 20-year-old award is being bestowed upon an organization — Patrisse Cullors said Australia’s racial problems mirrored those of the United States, where Black Lives Matter began four years ago after the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

In an address to journalists at the National Press Club in Canberra, Cullors said Black Lives Matter had grown from a hashtag in the United States to a group with more than 40 chapters worldwide.

“We stand here today as a Black Lives Matter global network committing to be a part of a long legacy of a global black struggle and solidarity with the indigenous peoples of Australia, South Sea islanders and Torres Strait Islanders,” Cullors said.

She urged the Australian government to heed the demands of its indigenous communities because too often people found the government to be a silent bystander or perpetuator of the atrocities black people faced.

“We, black people, we’ve been courageous. Our ancestors have been courageous. We need you — elected officials, appointed officials, and journalists — it’s your turn to be courageous. We need you to make a choice to heal this country, we need you to believe, to listen to the community in Australia, because silence, that’s the silence that often gives way to more murder … more disadvantages.”

Jackie Huggins, co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, said Black Lives Matter resonated with many Aborigine and Torres Strait Islander people, who comprise less than 3 percent of Australia’s population but more than 25 percent of its prison population — 33 percent in the case of women.

“Many people know about the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States, but most aren’t aware aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the most incarcerated in the world,” Huggins said.

Cullors said while in Australia she had learned about its racist past and heard from indigenous people about their own experiences of violence and harassment at the hands of authorities.

“For those of us who experience this type of devastation every single every day, we don’t have a choice,” Cullors said. “When everyone else fails to carry the weight with us, the complicitness, and the benefiting from anti-black racism, the refusal to name anti-black racism, the erasure of our devastation, we are expected to carry that failure, to carry their inability to recognize that freedom for us means freedom for everyone,” she said.

“If you don’t see yourself as an active participant in the liberation of black people, now is the opportunity. All our lives depend on it.”

Australia remains the only former British colony to have never signed a treaty with its indigenous people, which critics say has led to a damaging history of policies being forced on them from the government rather than allowing them greater self-determination.

Cullors’ fellow co-founder, Toronto-based Rodney Diverlus, told the gathering that Black Lives Matter was “a political home for black folks around the world.”

“Wherever you go and see black folks, anti-blackness exists,” Diverlus said. “The systems are failing us. Our governments are not intervening.”

Diverlus related Australia’s racial picture to that of Canada, saying much of Black Lives Matter’s work in his home country was done “to dispel the myth of Canadian benevolence.”

While Canada was “internationally known as the champion of human rights”, Diverlus said, Canada’s black and indigenous people were disadvantaged across the board — “whether it’s in incarceration, racial profiling, employment, education, (or) access to services.”

Still, Diverlus said now was “a particularly exciting time because black folks across the globe are now sharing.”

“We’re sharing resources, we’re sharing tools, we’re sharing organizing tactics, we’re coming together to recognize that as our governments and as our countries suppress us, we have a global obligation to support our own people,” he said.

“We are building an inter-generational movement never seen before … one that is intersectional and fights for all black lives.

“We are energetic, we are vibrant, we are militant, we are unapologetic, we are unconventional. We are online and in the physical.”

Black Lives Matter is being awarded the Sydney Peace Prize “for building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism,” the Sydney Peace Foundation — part of the University of Sydney — said in a statement.

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The government must stand on the side of the original people of this land, and challenge the idea that their lives don’t matter

Of the many remarkable moments on our Australian trip so far, there’s one that stands out.

On Tuesday night, we visited the Redfern community centre to meet with local Indigenous people and hear their stories.

After playing the didgeridoo, Nathan Scott stood up, opened up his notebook and read out his father’s story. He was only six months old when his father Douglas Scott was found hanged in his cell in Berrimah prison in Darwin. The family was told he had killed himself, but Nathan’s mother refused to believe this. For 20 years, his mother fought for justice for his father, but she never found it. The police harassed and surveilled the family when they asked questions, but there were no answers.

And yet, although the family never received justice and it was a great sacrifice for everyone involved, Nathan Scott said he wouldn’t have done anything differently. For him, his fight for his father was a fight for all Indigenous Australian people.

As a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, this was powerful because people often say to us, it’s been four years and police are still killing black people, do you think your movement has failed? My answer is always the same: this has just begun. There is a long road to undo colonialism and racism. It is going to be a long road to achieve the things that we want but it doesn’t mean you stop, it doesn’t mean you give up.

When we started Black Lives Matter, we understood that this movement wasn’t just for the United States but one that could centre black communities around the globe. We don’t see this as a civil rights movement, we don’t see this as relegated to the United States but as a human rights movement which allows us to have a broader conversation about anti-black racism across the globe.

So we have travelled to the UK, through the Americas, to Palestine and now to Australia. Throughout our travels we have seen that black people and Indigenous people are suffering, and, despite that suffering, local governments aren’t standing up for us. Wherever black people are, there is racism and the impacts of racism. Yet wherever black people are, there is resistance. We are still resisting and we are still calling for new ways of relating to us, we’re still calling for care and for dignity.

Black Lives Matter is in Australia to accept the Sydney peace prize, and meet with black Australians. During our trip, the thing that stands out to us most is that Indigenous Australians are facing some of the most horrendous living conditions in the world, sadly similar conditions to those in the US and Canada. Black Lives Matter is pertinent here in Australia and as we have conversations with people, we are realising that.

We have heard about the high incarceration rate of Indigenous people and Torres Strait Islanders. We have heard about the impact that colonialism has had on the family unit and how this has contributed to family violence. We’ve heard about the deaths in custody, and the families who have lost their children held in custody. Many of these family members are calling these murders, because when they are finally able to see their children, they were bruised and battered, with broken bones.

Local government must hold law enforcement accountable for these atrocities. The government can no longer be silent, it must stand on the side of the original people of this land, and challenge the idea that their lives don’t matter.

In the long term, the only way to change the living conditions of Indigenous communities is through divestment – and then reinvestment. Over the years, local governments have completely divested from caring for our communities, so we are calling for a reinvestment in black and Indigenous communities. We’re calling for divestment from resourcing agencies and local public agencies that cause harm and violence to our communities.

What makes our communities safe is for us to have access to healthy food, to feed our communities, to access jobs, and to be able to access public education. This can be achieved through reinvestment in Indigenous communities.

This is a long term struggle against racism. We stand on the shoulders of giants, of black leaders from across the globe, who have put their lives on the line to fight for not just the survival of black people but the thriving of black people.

We see our work as part of a much needed resurgence of a human rights movements in our country, in the US, but also abroad. We are not the first ones to do this, we know we are not going to be the last, we are part of a legacy of freedom fighters.

And while there is heartbreak, there is also hope. I am never numb to the impact racism has on my communities across the world. As I listened to the families that shared their stories on Tuesday at the Redfern community centre, I cried because that could be my family, that has been my family, and so my heart is with the Indigenous people of Australia.

But there is a growing desire for a broad base movement for Indigenous communities across the country. There is a desire to have a conversation in Australia that doesn’t end with talking but that really catapults a new practice in how this country relates to its original people. That is really inspiring. It’s inspiring to talk about how we’ve changed the landscape for our communities in the US and in Canada, and what might be possible here in this country. And this gives me hope.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network is in Australia to receive the Sydney Peace Prize. They will be awarded the prize at the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture on 2 November and appear In Conversation in Melbourne on 4 November.

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The co-founders of the global Black Lives Matter movement have met with Australia’s Indigenous community and say there are parallels between the experiences here and in the United States.

Since it began in 2013, Black Lives Matter has been on the frontlines of protests across the US, leading the fight against police brutality and high incarceration rates among the country’s black community.

Driving the now-global campaign is its co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, who says the struggle is not unique to the US, citing the experience of Australia’s Indigenous community.

“Similar poverty rates, similar mass incarceration rates, the deaths in custody that are being swept under the rug – these are all things we feel in the US so there is a deep affinity around this resistance and this struggle,” she said at an event in Sydney on Tuesday.

Ms Cullors is in Australia with her Canadian counterpart, Rodney Diverlus. They are here to accept the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s leading award for global peacemakers. It marks the first time the prize has been awarded to an organisation rather than an individual.

Mr Diverlus says the visit has another purpose.

“I think it’s time for us, as brothers and sisters, to stand together in the global fight,” he says.

“We are invested in having a global conversation on the ways we can resist these atrocities and the ways we can fight for human rights for our people.”

The pair will be meeting leaders and advocates from Australia’s Indigenous community.

“What I am excited about is meeting the Indigenous communities here that are fighting, that can see victory in sight and I think that’s powerful,” said Ms Cullors.

Cheryl Axleby is the Co-Chair of the Change the Record Coalition, which calls for urgent action to close the gap in imprisonment rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

She says discussions are looking at the challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, not just in the Australian context but from a global perspective.

“Having our brothers and sisters here is going to give our communities great insight in what they’ve been doing in their own countries and to look at what we can do from here on,” she said.

Antoinette Braybrook, also a Co-Chair of the Change the Record Coalition, says the two communities will be exchanging ideas and experiences.

“We might share different strategies and find different solutions on how to tackle that systemic racism and discrimination.”

Nathan Moran is the CEO of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

He’s hoping the support of the Black Lives Matter campaign will add momentum to the Australian movement.

“Considering our reality – we are three per cent of the population. To achieve any influence we need other brothers and sisters around the planet of a similar background.”

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We say “Black Lives Matter” but shit, the fact that matter is, we just Black matter to them, this shit keep happening.

In a uniquely Aboriginal articulation of the global Black Lives Matter movement, Batdjala rapper Birdz sings not of Rice, Garner, Martin or Bland. Instead he sings of Mulrunji, Elijah, Yock, Hickey and the Bowraville children – each of whom died in seemingly different circumstances.

What ties them together, however, is the indifference to their deaths and the apparent disposability of Black lives in Australia.

Birdz performs his song Black Lives Matter for NAIDOC Week live on triple j.

Much of the media attention in Australia surrounding the US-led Black Lives Matter movement has focused on police brutality and the murder of young African-American men on public streets, captured on smartphones and dashboard cameras.

Meanwhile, the murders of Aboriginal people in Australia have been less visible. If mentioned at all, Aboriginal deaths at the hands of the state are variously framed as “suspicious”, “unknown”, “accidental” or “inevitable”, despite the presence of CCTV footage, protests, perpetrators, witnesses, coronial inquiries and a royal commission.

Further reading: Deaths in custody: 25 years after the royal commission, we’ve gone backwards

Where murder is not even considered manslaughter, where Black witnesses are deemed “unreliable”, where royal commission recommendations aren’t implemented, where coroners refuse to exercise their power to make recommendations, and where White murderers of Black children enjoy the privilege of being unnamed for their own protection, it is blatantly clear whose lives really matter in Australia.

A print ad for GenerationOne that was released in March 2010. GenerationOne/Coloribus

And there really is nothing mysterious about the deaths of Aboriginal people in Australia, either.

The settlers have long insisted that our death was destined, that our race was doomed, and that we, as a people, were vanishing. Our disappearance was

inevitable because it was necessary to sustain terra nullius, the foundational myth of Australia. Black deaths rationalised White invasion and land expansion in Australia.

In a little over 100 years of White presence, they did not feel it was necessary to include us in their Constitution. Having been so successful in their work, they were anticipating our imminent departure – not to another land, but rather to be buried in our own lands.

In our dying, rather than in our living, our bodies mattered most to the colonial project.

Black lives matter: in death and deviance

White indifference to Black suffering has a long tradition in Australia. It remains ever-present, even in the supposedly benevolent contemporary policy agendas of “Indigenous Advancement” and “Closing the Gap”.

We are told by the Australian government:

The Australian government made Indigenous affairs a significant national priority and has set three clear priorities to make sure efforts are effectively targeted – getting children to school, adults into work and building safer communities.

Clearly, what is actually targeted here are Black lives and the unsafe Black body – which, we are told, are incapable of working or attending school. We see the gaze transfixed not on the systems that create disadvantage, but on remedying the behaviours of Black people through compliance to systems that have always failed us – and, let’s be honest, have deliberately excluded us.

Focusing on Black lives in this instance both lays blame on, and makes claims of, Black deviance from White norms, values, standards and expectations. The deviation from Black lives to White lives sanctions a “new” targeting of Black lives by the state, and necessitates the continuation of White control over us and our lands.

Black deviance (statistical or otherwise) has been a useful narrative device for the settlers.

Black deviance supports claims of White benevolence, in which White people are simultaneously positioned as our aspirational goal and saviours. It suggests to us that Black lives matter to them. Yet in emphasising our deviance, the sins of a system that White people uphold and benefit from remains unnamed and unnoticed.

Only last month we witnessed the routine deployment of Black deviance to sustain White virtue in the Queensland Department of Education and Training’s own marketing.

The Black lives we see are not her students, but they need not be. Black lives only matter when they prop up claims of White intellectual and moral superiority, and it is in a state of deviance that our bodies, that our troublesome children and their neglectful parents, are suddenly hyper-visible.

But Black deviance doesn’t just make settlers look good: it rationalises them taking greater control over the lives and lands of Aboriginal people. Let’s not forget that it was via mythologies of Black deviance that the Northern Territory Emergency Response (otherwise known as the Intervention) was introduced and the Racial Discrimination Act suspended.

Despite the Intervention’s inherently racist nature, it was framed as a benevolent act to Black women and children. Through the narratives of Black deviance and allegedly neglectful #IndigenousDads, attention was shifted away from the actual abuse of Aboriginal children within the youth justice system in the Northern Territory.

Further reading: Ten years on, it’s time we learned the lessons from the failed Northern Territory Intervention

Black deviance has worked well for the Australian health system too, in rationalising the enduring and appalling health inequalities that Indigenous peoples suffer. Much like the education system, the health system asserts a public moral stance of benevolence to avoid scrutiny over its ongoing refusal to care properly for Aboriginal people.

The coronial inquiry into the tragic death of Ms Dhu in police custody ruled that it was also medical staff who “disregarded her welfare and right to treatment during her three visits to hospital in as many days”.

The failure of the health system to provide care to Aboriginal people is nothing new. And access to basic health care has been a long and hard-fought battle led by Indigenous activists across Australia over many decades. It was not until 1989, after two centuries of invasion, that the first National Aboriginal Health Strategy was devised.

Since 2013, the current National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan has had, as its vision, a health system free of racism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But a cursory glance at coronial inquiries into Aboriginal deaths in hospitals in recent years reveals any number of preventable deaths that came about through an indifference to Black lives and Black suffering.

From the excessive use of restraints to the refusal to provide appropriate health care, the names of the deceased remain unknown to most Australians – as do the crimes of the healthcare professionals responsible, thanks to the health and justice systems that protect them.

Even in death, descriptions of Aboriginal victims at the hands of the state frequently focus on Black deviance as a mitigating factor.

Vernon Ah Kee/Milani Gallery

Black deviance operates as an alibi for racism and White supremacy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, where Black deviance was successfully deployed to deflect attention away from the role of police brutality.

The inquiry found that not one of the 99 Aboriginal deaths investigated was a result of “unlawful, deliberate killing of Aboriginal prisoners by police and prison officers”.

Instead, we were told that 37 of these deaths were attributable to disease, while 30 were self-inflicted hangings and 23 were caused by “other forms of trauma, especially head injuries”. Another nine were associated with dangerous alcohol and drug use.

Consequently, much of the attention around Black deaths in custody has focused on the apparently inevitable deaths of sick Aborigines rather than the violence of the state. But when police officers threaten Aboriginal men with tying a noose around their neck and publicly mock Aboriginal people who have died in custody as a result of alleged “self-inflicted hangings”, it is little wonder that Aboriginal people are sceptical.

Black lands matter

White benevolence really does feel brutal for Blackfullas in this country. So, it is hardly surprising that the Black Lives Matter movement, with its emphasis on countering racism and White supremacy, has a certain appeal for Blackfullas.

Co-founder Alicia Garza explains that the movement seeks to tackle the “deep-seated disease” of racism through a deeper conversation around citizenship:

We really need to be talking about this question of citizenship, which I think is huge. I feel like what Black folks are fighting for in this moment is what we’ve been fighting for the whole time – which isn’t citizenship, like papers, but it’s citizenship like dignity. Like humanity. Right? And access.

Despite the promise of Black Lives Matter, it has not been taken up as a central political movement by Blackfullas in Australia. Perhaps it is because, as a people who are both Black and First Nations, we cannot embrace an emancipatory agenda that is silent about the significance of the relationship between Black lands and Black lives.

Blackfullas are not seeking a revitalised citizenship that recognises our dignity and humanity – we are insisting upon our sovereignty as First Nations peoples.

We refuse to talk about our lives independently of our land. We remind them every day that we are still here in this place – and it is their presence on our lands that poses the real problem, not our lives.

We refuse to appeal to the benevolence of the colonisers for our lives to matter, because we know that their existence on this continent remains legally predicated upon our non-existence.

That’s why I’m with Birdz on this one:

Shit. The fact that matter is, we just Black matter to them.

You can read the first article in the series here.

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In the US, the Black Lives Matter campaign is forcing a long-overdue reckoning with that country’s history, with (in the wake of the Charleston massacre, in particular), activists launching a new conversation about the Civil War iconography that litters much of the South.

Already, the Confederate flag’s gone from the South Carolina state house. In Kentucky, talk’s turned to the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue. In New Orleans, pressure is building on the memorial to Robert E Lee while Memphis ponders the future of its multiple statues of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. In communities across the south, public history is suddenly up for debate.

The fissures revealed by the Adam Goodes controversy suggests the need for a similar project here. As it happens, in his new book Australian Confederates, journalist Terry Smyth draws out some fascinating connections between Australia and the American south.

myth focuses, in particular, on the 42 Australians who, in 1865, secretly enlisted to fight for the slave-owning states when the Confederate ship Shenandoah docked in Port Phillip Bay. In passing, however, he acknowledges the broader significance of the Civil War, which opened sudden opportunities for another nations to export agricultural crops.

As historian Kay Saunders has said, the northern blockade of Confederate cotton and sugar meant that “Queensland was regarded potentially as a second Louisiana”.

Aspiring local planters tried to seize the moment, inducing British mill workers to immigrate and establish a local cotton industry. But they quickly discovered that men from England’s industrial towns would not accept the conditions prevailing on plantations in the Australian rural north.

“In 1863,” Smyth writes, “shipping magnate and entrepreneur Robert Towns established a cotton plantation on the Logan River, in Queensland. Convinced that the venture would never turn a profit if he paid white man’s wages, he sent a schooner to the South Pacific to recruit Islanders. The ship returned with 67 Melanesian men who were put to work picking Towns’ cotton. ‘Kanakas’, they were called – originally Hawaiian for ‘free man’ but used by whites as a derogatory term akin to ‘nigger’.

“Although Towns’ islander labourers were offered wages, food and housing and a promise they could return home if they wished, the practice of so-called indentured labour, as it spread throughout eastern Australia, soon degenerated into a form of slavery called ‘blackbirding’.”

Australian South Sea Islanders at Farnborough, Queensland, circa 1895.

Between 1863 and 1904, 62,000 South Sea Islanders were brought to Australia, landing in Brisbane, Maryborough, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Bowen, Townsville, Innisfail and Cairns. The majority of the indentured labourers came from today’s Vanuatu, with a substantial proportion from the Solomons, as well as smaller islands. Some came voluntarily (even accepting multiple trips). Others did not – and varying degrees of deception and outright coercion were used by blackbirders to persuade them.

By the 1890s, the so-called “Kanakas” were providing 85% of the workforce for the sugar industry.

The conditions the Islanders faced in Australia were extraordinarily harsh.

Smyth describes a notorious case in which “a certain John Tancred was charged with stealing an islander boy named Towhey, the property of Arthur Gossett. The complainant swore he could prove his ownership of the boy because he had branded him not once but twice – on the leg and on the side – which he demonstrated to the court. The judge fined Tancred 10 pounds for theft, and Gossett walked way with his young slave in tow.

“The press report of the case heartily approved of the outcome, helpfully suggesting: ‘perhaps it may not yet be too late for the Assembly to insert a ‘branding’ clause in the Polynesian Labourers Bill.’”

Not all sugar growers conducted themselves like southern slave owners. But, by definition, indentured labour in Queensland was, as the academic Tracey Banivanua Mar argues, “a legalised system that bound mainly young men to three years of coercive labour under physical conditions considered to be fatal to Europeans, and in standards of accommodation and care that were largely negligent and often fatal”.

Between 1868 and 1889, Islanders’ mortality rate in Queensland was something like 19%. There’s no mystery as to why. In a July 1880 discussion of high death rates on plantations owned by R Cran and Company, the liberal Queenslander newspaper explained that the “the islanders were being killed mainly by overwork, insufficient or improper food, bad water, absence of medical attention when sick, and general neglect”.

If this history isn’t generally known, we shouldn’t be surprised.

At federation, the fate of the Islanders – many of whom had by that time lived in Australia for decades – was hotly contested. Edmund Barton, the first prime minister, argued for their deportation in order to preserve the racial purity of White Australia. In doing so, he explicitly referenced the experience of the American south.

“The negro cannot be deported now because of his numbers, and because his race has become rooted in American soil,” he said. “We do not propose that either of these conditions should ever arise in Australia.”

Thus a key piece of legislation in the first ever parliament was the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901, which mandated the forcible deportation of 7,500 Pacific Islanders and banned the entry of any other Islanders after 1904.

“The country did not feel the need of the imported nigger before he came and his loss will not be felt when his gone,” explained the West Australian Sunday Times.

“We do the nigger no injustice by deporting him to his native land in better condition than when he left it.”

What does this have to do with Adam Goodes? A recent survey by regional newspapers in Victoria showed a great majority of respondents saw nothing racist about the hostility directed by fans at Goodes.

Godfrey Charles Mundy’s depiction of the 1838 Slaughterhouse Creek massacre. Illustration: Godfrey Charles Mundy/Australian War Memorial

In the US, many whites have reacted to the Black Lives Matter campaign with similar incomprehension. They’ve never had any trouble with the police – and they don’t see why the experiences of African Americans should be any different.

The debate about southern history taking place across America matters because it provides that missing context.

As Brent Staples says in the New York Times, the confederate monuments were mostly erected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the period in which the former slave states were introducing, usually with great violence, so-called Jim Crow laws to abolish voting and other rights for African Americans.

The statues, in other words, were an adjunct to a racialised terror enforced by the police as much as by the KKK. That’s what Angela Davis means when she says “there is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan”.

In the same way, white Australians might think nothing of being called an “ape”. But Goodes’s response to the taunt arises from a history that shares far more with the US south than we’d like to think.

In 1960, Faith Bandler, who would become a crucial campaigner for Aboriginal rights, met the legendary African American singer and polymath Paul Robeson during his only Australian tour. Robeson was the child of a slave.

So, too, was Bandler. Her father had been blackbirded from his island in the New Hebrides and then had escaped deportation by fleeing to northern NSW. Faith grew up in a country town shaped by de facto segregation – and, because of that, always identified with Robeson and other American civil rights activists.

She later recalled her meeting with him:

I had an occasion to … show him a film that was made on the Warburton Ranges. And I shall never forget his reaction to that film, never. It was a film taken on a mission station where the people were ragged and unhealthy and sick, very sick. And we took this film and we showed it to him. [A]s he watched the film the tears came to his eyes and when the film finished he stood up and he pulled his cap off and he threw it in his rage on the floor and trod on it and he asked for a cigarette from someone. Well a lot of people smoked in those days so there was no shortage of cigarettes and [his wife Eslanda] said to me, ‘Well it’s many years since I’ve seen him do that’. He was so angry and he said to me, ‘I’ll go away now, but when I come back I’ll give you a hand’. He was beautiful, but he died and he didn’t come back.

Robeson was a long-time campaigner for African American rights. He knew the appalling conditions in the deep south – but the situation facing Indigenous Australia still moved him to tears.

Indeed, historically, the local press openly acknowledged that Aboriginal people were treated far worse than even the Islanders imported to make Queensland a “second Louisiana”.

For instance, in 1880, the Queenslander launched a campaign against what it called “the sickening and brutal war of races that is carried on in our outside settlements”. This, it said, “is how we deal with the aborigines: On occupying new territory the aboriginal inhabitants are treated exactly in the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there.”

‘It’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.’ Photograph: Nla

A prolonged debate ensued in its pages, with some correspondents minimising or justifying the violence, and others providing astonishingly frank accounts of frontier atrocities.

On 2 October 1880, for instance, one contributor wrote:

I am no sentimental black protector, and have lived in this Cook district since 1873, when it was first settled. … We are in this district in a state of open warfare with the natives, and if I met a mob anywhere in the bush I should feel justified in firing on them. But there are things done to blacks and black women by some of the police which equal the Bulgarian atrocities that thrilled Europe with horror. In this district a cattleowner who often has to do his own ‘dispersing’ made a raid about a year ago on the blacks, and captured a young gin. She was brought home to the station, and was employed carrying water from the river to the house during the day, and at night was chained by the leg to a verandah post, to prevent her escaping and to ‘civilize’ her. One of the boys employed on the station took a fancy to her, and she was looked on as his wife.

He goes on to outline, in the polite euphemisms of the 19th century, a horrific account of sex slavery and gang rape.

The series of articles concluded on 20 November 1880 with the editorialist writing:

[P]roperty acquired by conquest, no less than that which is transmitted by inheritance, has its duties as well as its rights, and … we, in common with the other States on this continent, have shamefully fallen short of our duty towards the inferior race whom we have dispossessed. That it should be necessary for any section of the Press, in order to ensure a hearing at all, to argue on purely utilitarian grounds against the policy of deliberate extermination that has been unremittingly pursued hitherto; that it should have been incumbent on us to lay stress, not so much on the wickedness and cowardice as on the unprofitableness of shooting down like vermin the helpless savages whose homes we have invaded – all this is evidence of a blunting of the moral perceptions of our own community such as would appear morbid and unnatural if manifested in any other sphere of human relations.

The peculiar reference to “unprofitableness” probably harks back to a debate in the Queensland parliament in the previous month.

There, on 21 October, the MP John Douglas (who would later go on to become premier), had explained, as Hansard put it:

The colony was now introducing Polynesians, and he did not believe that there was any such great distinction between them and the aborigines of Northern Australia as to prevent the hope that some use might be made of the latter. In Western Australia the natives had been, he believed, in some cases captured, and as prisoners of war had been compelled to submit to a period of pupilage, afterwards becoming useful settlers. … It would be quite possible to take the natives prisoners, instead of shooting down and killing them, though he doubted whether the House would sanction a law by which these people, taken in open warfare, might be kept in a state of captivity. At all events, that would be a more benevolent process than shooting them down and taking their lives. No doubt to shoot them down was the easiest way of getting rid of them.

Here, then, was the liberal position: Queenslanders should cease murdering Indigenous people. Instead, they should enslave them, thus sparing themselves the necessity of blackbirding indentured labour.

That’s the context in which a racialised insult flung at Goodes possesses rather more power than, say, the mean remarks that Andrew Bolt sometimes finds in his comments threads.

In his recent book Forgotten War, Henry Reynolds notes the obvious disparity between Australia’s commemoration of the first world war (something that has now cost nearly half a billion dollars) and the almost complete indifference shown to the frontier wars fought by settlers against Indigenous people, even though the latter possesses far more significance in the development of the nation.

Just as most towns in the American south boast a cairn to the Confederate dead, every tiny community in regional Australia has its a shrine to the dead of the Great War. But it’s very rare – indeed, almost unheard of – for towns to acknowledge the men, women and children killed not in France but here in Australia defending their land against settlement.

As Reynolds says, the Australian War Museum honours farcical engagements like the Sudanese war but makes no reference to the “sickening and brutal war of races” the Queenslander so openly discussed, even though the frontier war was clearly the most important conflict in Australian history.

Tony Abbott famously thinks that, before the arrival of Europeans, Australia was “nothing but bush”. It would be foolish indeed to expect the prime minister to commemorate people he seems to believe never existed.

But what’s fascinating about the debates taking place in the US is that they’re driven by ordinary people rather than politicians. The Confederate flag at South Carolina’s State House was first lowered not by a legislator but by African American activist Bree Newsome, who went to jail as a result. All across the country, it’s Black Lives Matter campaigners who are insisting on a discussion of the nation’s history, precisely because that discussion necessarily intersects with politics today.

The Frontier Wars in Australia were fought out with different tactics in different places at different times. Remembering the conflict thus necessitates localised histories, specific accounts of what was done in specific places. An official statement about the past is all too likely to dissolve into platitudes and empty symbolism.

But a grassroots campaign to identify and commemorate particular histories would take on a different dynamic. It would necessitate an engagement with the community, for a start: a serious public debate about historical injustice. It would also link the past with the present, inevitably posing questions that go beyond the treatment of Adam Goodes into the shocking statistics about, for instance, Indigenous unemployment and incarceration.

Australian history and American history are not the same. But it’s very hard to read, say, Amy McQuire’s account of the death last year of Julieka Dhu in police custody without asking the questions currently being posed in the US: do black lives matter or not?

This articles is written by Jeff Sparrow and first appeared in the Guardian on 7 August 2015.

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As the Sydney Peace Prize is awarded to the Black Lives Matters movement, Cullors discusses the formation and philosophy of the movement while Rule explains how the group resonates with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, and how it has influenced their campaigns for Indigenous justice. Latoya’s brother Wayne Morrison died in custody in South Australia last year.

Latoya and Patrisse speak about the problems their communities face with policing, surveillance and jailing; the harmful stereotypes that see Black and Aboriginal people as deviant, criminal, violent or needy; how the movement’s campaign #SayHerName stood in support and solidarity with the family of Ms Dhu, who was killed in 2014; and their resolve to use Black Lives Matter as a global intervention to change culture, affirm black humanity, reimagine what a world looks like where all black lives matter, and build the power needed to create change.

For me, seeing the Black Lives Matter movement coming up was quite refreshing and exciting for where we can take it here in Australia. As Aboriginal people we identify as black people as well, so I love that it crosses over boundaries and tries to incorporate what I would call indigenous and native voices. This is very important for our movement against colonial white patriarchy and genocide in Australia. It’s really important to adopt a little bit of the Black Lives Matter movement for our struggles as well.”

Latoya Aroha Rule

The conversation about our movement is global: We have to talk about our global movement. We have to talk about our relationship to Black folks in Brazil, we have to talk about our relationships to Aboriginal and Maori folks, we have to talk about our relationships to Afro-Latino folks who are undocumented. And we are. We are doing that both in or theory and our practices. An that’s powerful. It’s powerful when you get to be a part of a movement that’s trying to make global connections.

Patrisse Cullors

This Podcast was published by The Guardian on May 23, 2017.

Read more about Latoya Aroha Rule’s journey here.

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The Sydney Peace Prize is an initiative of the Sydney Peace Foundation, a foundation of the University of Sydney. Previous recipients of the prize have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Senator Pat Dodson. The prize “recognises the vital contributions of leading global peacemakers, creates a platform so that their voices are heard, and supports their vital work for a fairer world.” Winners receive $50,000 to help them continue their work.

The Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year old Trayvon Martin. The campaign was launched by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi and it focused on police violence and systemic racism targeting the black community.

Garza, Cullors and Tometi will travel to Sydney later this year to formally accept the prize.

The movement has had an enormous impact on US culture and prominent artists including Beyonce, Rihanna and Alicia Keys have paid homage to it in recent years. The issues raised by Black Lives Matter have resonance beyond the US. Indigenous activists in Australia have pointed to the parallels between the persecution of the black community in the US and the structural racism and violence experienced by Indigenous Australians.

Last year, Alicia Garza delivered the keynote address at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas, alongside journalist Stan Grant. Her talk discussed the origin of the Black Lives Matters movement, placing it squarely in the context of hundreds of years of oppression and resistance, as opposed to something that has only emerged due to the rise of social media.

The Sydney Peace Prize jury citation for Black Lives Matter reads “For building a powerful movement for racial equality, courageously reigniting a global conversation around state violence and racism. And for harnessing the potential of new platforms and power of people to inspire a bold movement for change at a time when peace is threatened by growing inequality and injustice.”

Patrisse Cullors, one of the movement’s co-founders, told Junkee that “When we started Black Lives Matter we called for it to be something that translates outside of [the US]. We understand anti-black racism is actually a global crisis. And we see the consequences everywhere.”

“Black Lives Matter was trying to intervene on was this idea that we were living in a post-racial society,” Cullors said. “Obama had been elected, it was still his first term and then Trayvon Martin was murdered. At the beginning of his next term George Zimmerman was acquitted. We knew as black folks that we weren’t living in a post-racial world, so Black Lives Matter became an intervention.”

But the movement has always been about transforming the way activism is done. “Internally, Black Lives Matter was about intervening into this idea that only black, male, Christian pastors could lead a movement,” Cullors said. “We knew the workers and strategists of the movement were black women. Black, queer women in fact. We wanted them to be the faces of the movement.

That’s what’s most exciting about this movement. We could talk about statistics all day, like the fact that out of the 2.3 million people in prison in America, one million are black. But we could also talk about imagining a new world. Imagine if we actually lived in a world where black lives matter. What would it look like, what would it take?Imagine if we actually all lived in a world where black lives matter. What would it look like? What would it take?

Patrisse Cullors, Co-Founder Black Lives Matter

“There was no need to have a single leader. Even the three of us don’t represent the movement. There’s thousands of leaders inside of it. The chapter structure of our network — which is made up of 39 chapters –means we’re really autonomous and linked under a set of guiding principles that we’ve created.”

Cullors said that the election of Donald Trump had shaken Americans out of their “post-racial” naivety. “People are awakened to the gruesome reality of America. An America that is steeped in poverty, racism and capitalism. As a result of those three things we are unfortunately bearing witness to some of the ugliest parts of America,” she said.

“I’m an artist and part of my work is about exposing the reality of anti-black racism. But another part is about deepening our engagement with, and understanding of, black people’s resilience. We clearly wouldn’t be here, and there wouldn’t be a vibrant movement, if black people weren’t a resilient people.

“That’s what’s most exciting about this movement. We could talk about statistics all day, like the fact that out of the 2.3 million people in prison in America, one million are black. But we could also talk about imagining a new world. Imagine if we actually lived in a world where black lives matter. What would it look like, what would it take?”

This article, written by Osman Faruqi,  first appeared on Junkee on 23 May 2017

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Patrick Dodson looks intently into the lens, his brown eyes focused as they peer over a pair of spectacles. Camera lights hit his beard, giving each strand its own tone of grey. Unchanging, however, are the iconic red, black and yellow colours around his wide-brimmed hat.

On a shelf in his parliamentary office is a biography, Paddy’s Road, written more than a decade ago. The book’s cover is black and white, save for the cotton band and its colours of the Aboriginal flag. Senator Dodson was Australia’s first Aboriginal Catholic priest and then “the father of reconciliation”, thanks to his chairmanship of the former Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

He has been in the public eye for more than a quarter of a century, but the 68-year-old novice frontbencher never imagined he would hold public office. “Not in my wildest dreams,” he says about an hour before his first speech.

I’ve been so used to screaming from the outside of the Parliament or trying to lobby ministers to get their ear on some matter.

This afternoon, the lobbying is being done from Australia’s Senate chamber. The latest version of the inaugural address is drenched in yellow highlighter and laid out on his thinly-populated desk. I immediately notice the first words.

PHOTO: Senator Dodson’s inaugural address is drenched in yellow highlighter. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

Ngaji mingan, Mr President (How are you Mr President?)

Gala mabu ngangan (I am good)

Janu buru Rubibi. Yawurugun (I am from Broome)

Ngayu nilawal Djagun (My name is Djagun)

Ngayu Banaga wamba (I am a Banaga man)

The opening will be in Yawuru and Senate President (equivalent to the Lower House’s Speaker) Stephen Parry will also be speaking the language of the Kimberley region traditional owners. “I just walked up to him in the corridor and said: ‘I’d like, if you wouldn’t mind, if you respond in Yawuru to a couple of things that I’ll say to you in Yawuru’,” the senator for Western Australia recounts. “And he said: ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be interested in that, but you might have to give me some coaching.’ “So I said: ‘Well that’s fine, we’ll organise that.’ “That’s the spirit that a lot of Australians don’t see about this place.

Unfortunately we perform, I think, under-par when it comes to Question Time and that’s what most Australians see.

PHOTO: Supporters from all corners of the continent enter Senator Dodson’s office. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

PHOTO: Pat Dodson’s brother was 2009 Australian of the Year. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

As it creeps towards 5:00pm, more and more supporters, from all corners of the continent, enter the office. One is Mick Gooda — one of two royal commissioners investigating the Northern Territory’s scandal-saturated youth justice system. Mr Gooda has become a royal commissioner 25 years after Senator Dodson was one. Then, he was probing Aboriginal deaths in custody. Sadly, problems inside prisons persist and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people encounter justice systems far too often. And you only had to glance at the office coffee table to see that. “Race Riot”, The West Australian’s Wednesday front page said, after a protest over the death of an Aboriginal teenager in Kalgoorlie turned violent.

Senator Dodson emerges from his private office after one final run-through.

He shakes hands with his brother Mick — 2009 Australian of the year and former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner — then walks to the chamber.

Apprehensive. You’re never comfortable when you walk into that Senate,” he says.

At 5:01pm, Senator Dodson begins in Yawuru before acknowledging local Ngambri and Ngunnuwal peoples, elders and “emerging leaders”.

PHOTO: Pat Dodson makes his maiden speech in the Senate. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

PHOTO: Senator Dodson’s speech opening is in Yawuru. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

On the left side of his jacket is a badge featuring a red ‘R’ — the logo representing the Indigenous constitutional recognition campaign. The badge nearly did not make it — it seemed broken just minutes ago — although the oratory would have compensated for any absent accessory. Senator Dodson says constitutional change is needed to overcome a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale”, as William Edward Hanley Stanner once described Australia’s neglect of its first peoples and their history.

Senator Dodson, one of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s closest advisors on Indigenous affairs, talks of “the need for meaningful discussions with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on a treaty or treaties”. He acknowledges sovereignty is something “many Aboriginal people argue has never been ceded or surrendered”.

Some of Senator Dodson’s new Upper House colleagues hold constitutional recognition in low regard. Some also want to dilute sections of the Racial Discrimination Act. Some though have been elected on platforms which I will undoubtedly find challenging,” he says. But he warns them against taking Australia’s statue books backwards, in the direction of bygone laws that “were genocidal in intent, application and consequence”.

“Such views and laws led to the horrors of Soweto and Robben Island and even the hate crimes of Nazi Germany,” he says. “These laws and regulations cannot be permitted to emerge once more in our precious democracy. Senator Dodson hopes, with a record number of his Aboriginal brothers and sisters on Capital Hill, Australia’s race hate laws will remain intact.

Finishing his speech, Senator Dodson magnetically pulls senators towards him from every direction in the chamber. Malarndirri McCarthy — Labor’s other Aboriginal senator — is among the first to congratulate him. Others filter through.

But one stands out. Her smile is beaming. Pauline Hanson extends her hand to Senator Dodson. We do not know what they said, if anything. But the Queensland senator’s mere presence in the chamber for this Aboriginal champion’s first speech might be a step towards the recognition and reconciliation he wants to see between black and white Australia.

This article, written by Dan Conifer, first appeared on ABC News on September 2nd, 2016.

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Lamenting that the situation has deteriorated since the landmark royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991, Professor Dodson has called for a formal engagement between Indigenous Australia and the Parliament on a new approach in an impassioned speech to mark the 25th anniversary of the report:

Accepting the status quo permits the criminal justice system to continue to suck us up like a vacuum cleaner and deposit us like waste in custodial institutions. We need a smarter form of justice that takes us beyond a narrow-eyed focus on punishment and penalties, to look more broadly at a vision of justice as a coherent, integrated whole.

Professor Dodson was one of the commissioners who investigated 99 Aboriginal deaths in custody between 1980 and 1989 and made 339 recommendations. Since the report was tabled in Parliament in May 1991, the rate at which Indigenous people are imprisoned has more than doubled, raising questions about how effectively the recommendations have been implemented:

Certainly, one has to wonder what happened to the principle of imprisonment as last resort and the 29 recommendations relating to this issue.

Professor Dodson, who is set to become a Labor senator next month. He said mandatory sentencing, imprisonment for fine defaults, “paperless” arrest laws, tough bail and parole conditions and punitive sentencing regimes had all contributed to high incarceration rates, along with funding cuts to frontline legal services and inadequate resourcing for much needed diversionary programs. This suggests that legislators in some jurisdictions have not learnt from the past, and are still intent on arresting their way out Indigenous disadvantage.

Professor Dodson cited the “devastating” case of 22-year-old Ms Dhu, who died in the Port Hedland lock-up in 2014, but said her story “could have been plucked at random from almost any moment in the modern story of Aboriginal injustice”.

Ms Dhu died after she was held at South Hedland police station in WA. Photo: ABC News

For our communities, the storyline is all too familiar: the minor offence; the innocuous behaviour; the unnecessary detention; the failure to uphold the duty of care; the lack of respect for human dignity; the lonely death; the grief, loss and pain of the family.

A quarter of century after the report, Indigenous people were more likely to come to the attention of police, more likely to be arrested and charged and more likely to go to jail, he said. “The statistics speak for themselves and the cold hard facts remain an indictment on all of us,” he said.

In the past decade, the incarceration rate for Indigenous men had more than doubled; Indigenous youths now comprised more than 50 per cent of juveniles in detention; and, for Indigenous women, the rate of imprisonment was accelerating even faster – a 74 per cent increase in the past 15 years.

If we are to disrupt current trends, we must invest in rebuilding the capacity of families and communities to deal with the social problems that contribute to these appalling indicators.

Professor Dodson stressed the need to develop preventative programs that engage the community in winding back “the ravages of drug and alcohol abuse, the scourge of family violence and welfare dependency”. “We will not be liberated from the tyranny of the criminal justice system unless we acknowledge the problems in our own communities and take responsibility for the hurt we inflict and cause to each other.”

Professor Dodson appealed to governments to embrace the royal commission’s call for a response based on a philosophy of empowerment. “The Australian Parliament needs to be more open to the idea of engaging in a formal way with Indigenous people on matters that affect our social, cultural and economic interests as well as our political status within the nation state,” he said. Professor Dodson said he hoped to play a constructive role in advancing solutions in his new role as a senator.

This article by Michael Gordon appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 13, 2016

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All of Australia has since got a look at Patrick Dodson, the bloke with the waist-length beard and the hat with its band of black, yellow and red, who has spent much of his life working for a better deal for Australia’s First People. We’re about to see more of him, for he’s Labor’s new senator for Western Australia. It’s a bit of a surprise to those who’ve known him for a while.

Politicians tend to be a bit tentative,” he told me a few years ago during a long yarning session. “They see life in terms of three-year brackets, not in terms of history.”

Pat Dodson is known as the Father of Reconciliation. Photo: Peter Eve / Yothu Yindi Foundatio

Paddy Dodson, however, has always been capable of surprising, and at 68, he might be able to teach politicians a bit about seeing things in longer time frames.

Those curious boarding-school kids way back in the 1960s learned pretty quickly that the first Aboriginal student at their school was much more than they imagined. He didn’t know what a bread plate was, or a butter knife, but life had already thrown bigger and harder lessons at him. Born in Broome to an Irish-Australian father, Snowy Dodson, and an Indigenous mother, Patricia, his family had fled across state borders to Katherine, in the Northern Territory, when Pat was a two-year-old baby.

Pat Dodson will become Labor’s Senate candidate for Western Australia. Photo: Andrew Meares

The hounding laws of Western Australia had become too much. Even love was a crime. Snowy had been jailed for 18 months, years before, for “cohabiting with a native woman”, Pat’s mother. Pat had to grow up fast. Aged 13, he and his brothers and sisters – seven of them altogether – were orphaned. Their father died first, and then their mother, three months later. Pat and his brother Mick, who was aged 10, were in danger of becoming “stolen children”. Their aunt and uncle came and collected the children and took them to Darwin on the back of their Chevy truck.

“The protector of native affairs in the Northern Territory, a fella called Harry Giese, was poised to send me to one of the Catholic Missions,” Pat told me.

“Unfortunately the church, as often happens, couldn’t find the necessary resource to send me over the Strait (from Darwin to the Garden Point Mission on Melville Island) as the boat that was supposed to take me had sunk.” The Dodson children’s aunt and uncle, both of whom knew firsthand about life on missions, battled the authorities in and out of court to keep the little family out of the clutches of authority.

Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Pat Dodson lights a candle with former prime minster Howard at a luncheon in the Great Hall of Parliament House to mark the start of Reconciliation week. Photo: Mike Bowers

Pat and Mick, however, and a brother and sister, Patricia and Jacko, were declared “wards of the state”, but in the care of family, though they were split up. Eventually, a couple of priests from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart stepped in and decided to help the orphaned Pat and Mick to get as far away from the Northern Territory as possible. They arranged scholarships for Pat (and later Mick) to fly south, to Hamilton in far-west Victoria, to board at Monivae College, run by the MSCs.

And so, in the early 1960s, an Aboriginal boy found himself in an alien world, trying to hide in his bed down the end of a dormitory as 200 boys jockeyed to get a look at the most exotic student they could imagine. Paddy, as he quickly became known, didn’t hide away long. He emerged as a hard-studying and quietly powerful character, aware of high expectations thrust upon him at a time when no one knew anything about Indigenous affairs.

“There was always the search as to who was going to be the ‘first’ of this and the ‘first’ of that as if that was going to be the only ever achievement in this country,” he remembered.

He won the diligence prize five out of the six years he was at Monivae, became a middle-school prefect before Australia had even held a referendum concerning recognition of Indigenous Australians and formed tight friendships that endured.

By the time I arrived as a student at Monivae in 1967, Pat Dodson was captain of the school, captain of the all-but unbeatable First XVII and Adjutant of the Cadet Corps. He was an undisputed leader.

Pat and Mick (another leader, who became vice-captain and a House Captain) had no money. It didn’t matter. A fellow named Bill Walsh – the father of Phil Walsh, who became coach of the Adelaide Football Club and who was killed in tragic circumstances last year – ran Thompson’s Department Store in Hamilton. He simply provided the Dodson boys with uniforms, footy boots, casual outfits and sports gear. Other parents took the boys to their farms for holidays. Everyone knew the Dodson boys would make a name for themselves. But we couldn’t have guessed that Pat would become known as the Father of Reconciliation and win the Sydney Peace Prize, or that Mick would become Australian of the Year, and much, much else.

From little things….

This article, written by Tony Wright, first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 5th, 2016

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At 8am on Friday 21st September, 2012 the Sydney Peace Foundation, with the United Nations Information Centre, hosted a unique Breakfast Forum at Sydney’s Customs House to discuss the ideals of a common good and how to achieve them, focusing on the critical topic of “Stronger Futures for Australia’s Indigenous People”.

UN International Day of Peace 2012: Sydney Peace Foundation Breakfast Forum from Sydney Peace Foundation on Vimeo.

You can also read Mr Tukaki’s speech which made a compelling case for the increased role of big business in ensuring and promoting universal access to our inalienable human rights. To download the PDF click here

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The Foundation is aware of Aboriginal Elders who feel strongly that the consultation with them and their communities has been rushed, and that in consequence the Government representatives have not heard what communities have said, in particular about the security of Homelands.

Chair of the Foundation Professor Stuart Rees says, “We agree with Patrick Dodson’s conclusions, ‘Five years on, the intervention, for so many Aboriginal Territorians, still hangs like a veil of exclusion from the same rights and privileges available to every other citizen in this country.’”[1]

Dodson points to the recommendations of Tony Fitzgerald and the Anti-Discrimination Commission’s submission to the Review of the Intervention in 2008 which stressed the ‘return the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory to their proper status as citizens, with equal standing and quality of life with all other Australians.’[2]

Rushing the “Stronger Futures” legislation through parliament and thereby prolonging John Howard’s interventionist policies for another 10 years is unwise and remains discriminatory.

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