“I was never taught about Aboriginal history at school.”
How often have we said those words ourselves or heard them in conversations?
The recent launch of the website Towards Truth is another step in our nation’s journey to understanding.
To understanding the full history of the colonisation of this continent.
And just as importantly, to understanding the intergenerational impacts of successive laws and policies on Aboriginal communities, families and individuals.
Laws and policies that were targeted and designed to force assimilation, often using coercive powers to ensure compliance.
Towards Truth is a joint initiative between the Public Interest Advocacy Centre and the University of NSW Indigenous Law Centre.
With significant support from pro bono partners providing legal research and analysis, Towards Truth, is the first attempt to map out in detail, how the decisions of Australia’s parliaments and governments have worked to dispossess and disempower First Nations people, and also where they have attempted to protect and provide for reparation.
As the Towards Truth website explains, much of the NSW research to date has had a historical focus, in response to the desire for truth-telling expressed during the Uluru Dialogues in the lead up to the Uluru Convention.
But the project also aims to include all laws and policies that have had an impact on First Nations peoples, including those still in force today.
The long time-frame of the information included gives an indication of the extent of control exerted — it reached into every aspect of First Nations people’s lives — and why the impacts of this control have been so pervasive.
The research does not just compile all the relevant laws and policies that have impacted First Nations people, but also the parliamentary debates that give information about what was intended when the laws were passed.
To provide greater background, any articles and reports that discuss and analyse how the laws operated in practice and case studies that demonstrate the practical impacts are also included.
While the initial focus of the work is NSW, there are plans to extend it to other states and territories.
This work shines a light on the deliberate, systematic way all governments used these laws and policies to dispossess First Nations people of their lands, remove their children, and to attempt to eradicate language and Culture.
“Australia’s archives are full of laws and policies that show the damage of legal exclusion and control,” Professor Megan Davis, the Balnaves chair in Constitutional Law at UNSW, said.
“It highlights how the law has been weaponised against Indigenous culture.’’
This new initiative provides the context for so many things that are playing out today, including how the attitudes and laws of governments since colonisation shaped the common narrative around the First Peoples of this continent.
“The website’s work provides context to individual experiences and histories by shining a light on how formal legal processes and bureaucrats drive the direction of communities,” Prof Davis said.
How, what Yunupingu, the late influential Aboriginal leader, described as “the determined control exerted on us to make us like you”, was interwoven into so many of the laws, policies and attitudes of our nation.
But also, how this view came to permeate the public view of the “Aboriginal problem”.
The problem was theirs not ours.
“If only they were more like white people” was a common refrain over the decades since Federation, with little understanding of the punitive effects of the ongoing repressive laws and policies.
As PIAC chief executive Jonathon Hunyor explained: “Towards Truth helps to explain the generational impacts of more than 200 years of laws and policies forced upon First Nations.”
Mr Hunyor goes on to say that the site “compels us to reckon with our past and understand the deliberate systematic choices that robbed so many First Nations people of their land, families and culture”.
But the impacts of the Towards Truth website are more widespread.
The stories of Captain Cook ‘discovering’ Australia, brave white explorers ‘opening up the land’ and the dismissal of the native population as primitive savages, were taught in schools across the country.
For many First Nations people, the history they learnt in school was very different from their own community’s experience.
Understanding the connection between the many restrictive laws and policies and the impact this had on Aboriginal communities has the potential to be transformative.
Towards Truth project co-ordinator, Corey Smith commented: “This isn’t the history we learnt in school.”
“Before working on Towards Truth, I didn’t have an understanding of the pervasiveness of laws designed to erase First Nations’ culture.
“From voting rights to participating in court, child removals and suppressing languages, our work shows a history of harmful government decisions that have a lasting impact on families and communities.
“My work has helped me understand the pressures my own family were under to hide or diminish their Aboriginality.
“We want to help young First Nations people answer any questions they have about their identity, why they can’t speak their language – questions that I had when I was younger.”
These comments were echoed by law firm Herbert Smith Freehills’ pro bono solicitor Kishaya Delaney.
“Being able to connect the dots between my family’s history and the legal reality at the time has had such a profound impact on me and my sense of identity,’’ she said.
“Truth and storytelling for a lot of First Nations people is so crucial for healing.
“Being able to understand the huge breadth of the database and just how much First Nations’ lives have been legislated will help people understand why a Voice is so important.”
Decisions were made by governments.
Historically, First Nations people were not listened to or ignored, despite decades of activism calling for representation and a say in decisions that affect them.
This led to insidious, long-term intergenerational impacts – impacts the Towards Truth site is now highlighting as part of its role in truth-telling.
“Towards Truth will allow people and communities across Australia [to] come to terms with our history and understand the state-sanctioned injustices that have led us to where we are today,” Ms Delaney said.
She noted the website’s content “warns about what happens when First Nations people are not involved in the creation of law and policy, and helps us imagine what could happen if it were”.
As Professor Davis noted: “The database speaks to the need for structural reform and the power of law and policy making, to make a difference.
“Without the kind of structural reform the Uluru Statement from the Heart envisages, truth-telling is meaningless.”
There will be no real change, no move towards self-determination.
It will be a continuation of the same, with the same risks to communities and individuals.
A powerful reminder of why First Nations voices must be heard if we are to make a better future for us all.
The knowledge and information collected by the site is also testament to the long history of First Nations Peoples’ resistance and endurance in the face of overwhelming adversity.
As Yunupingu, reflecting in his Rom Watangu essay in 2016, explained: “We have survived the worst the past has thrown at us and we are here with our songs, our ceremonies, our land, our language and our people – our full identity.”
This is indeed a tribute to the strength, tenacity and leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
To find out more about Towards Truth, visit https://www.towardstruth.org.au/
To read Yunupingu’s Rom Watangu essay, visit https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/july/1467295200/galarrwuy-yunupingu/rom-watangu