The other day, I started my day in Sydney. I went for an early morning walk, down to the harbour, passing by the Hyde Park Barracks, the Supreme Court of NSW, the Parliament of NSW, the State Library of NSW, the Botanic Gardens, and ultimately the Opera House.
And it struck me that I was walking down the original Invasion Row.
The people of my genetic lineage arrived. They landed with guns. And with blankets loaded with smallpox. They took this land. Under the international law of the 18th century “colonising powers” could “take possession” of another country if it was uninhabited (the original lie of terra nullius which ignored 60,000 years of living on country); they could seek permission from the inhabitants of the land to purchase land (treaty, has anyone seen a treaty??); or they could invade, declare war.
And so, I passed the Hyde Park Barracks. Here are our guns. They are more potent than your weapons. We mark ANZAC Day. We mark Remembrance Day. For empire, for a “just war”, for values we hold dear, many men (mostly men) fought and died. And as young ones we are taught of these battles in lands a sea and a sea and a sea away. And yet, seldom are we taught the foundation war of our country.
And then I walked past the Supreme Court and the Parliament. These buildings which imposed invader laws on the laws already in place. And past the State Library of NSW, celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare. Four hundred years of glorious words that move our soul, in a language mostly lost to our modern times. And yet, through my Australian education I know more of his roses than I know of the songlines of our 60,000 year history or the up to 750 languages spoken before we arrived.
And down to the harbour and the Opera House, which from time to time presents Indigenous culture, and back through the Botanic Gardens, celebrating 200 years of beauty and botanic colonisation. But, nowhere, in the streets I walked or the statues I passed was there any presence of Indigenous Australia. What does it feel like, to move through lands that your people have walked for thousands and thousands of years, and see buildings named for the people who consciously sought to destroy your culture with their laws, their guns, and their religion? To struggle to find buildings or streets named in your tongue?
I walked the Original Invasion Row. But in any city or town around this country you can walk the local Invasion Row.
This year we mark twenty-six years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Over 330 recommendations. Precious few implemented. And since then, there has only been one year where the number of deaths in custody has been lower than the nine deaths that triggered the Commission.
From Invasion Row to Incarceration Row. It’s not something we can be proud of.
Last year, Four Corners explored the death Hamid Khazaei in an offshore detention centre. A death that, from what the doctors interviewed on the program said, should not have happened.
And in both instances, private operators (whether of jails or immigration detention health services) bring shareholder returns for the investors of late-capitalism.
The same late capitalism that continues to thrive under the Corporations Act that legislates that Directors must act in the best interest of the company, which is sometimes quite narrowly construed. There is a growing engagement of corporate Australia in social and environmental issues, for example, leadership in the marriage equality debate, but as we’ve seen, that can be tested in the face of religious pressure.
But, presently, the end game is still maximising share-holder profit. Even if the economic model refuses to fully calculate the cost of environmental, social, cultural harm done along the way.
Or seek deep-seated normative change to challenge the endemic sexism that continues to drive so much of our culture and contributes to everything from the pay gap to 23.4% female leadership on ASX200 boards; to underrepresentation of women in parliament, to the appallingly low rates of successful prosecutions in rape cases.
I know that there are folk out there who join the dots. That the original act of violence has created a country somehow smaller than we should be. That, a century and a bit on from that original act of invasion, our federation was predicated on racism and sexism (which wasn’t (at least legally) remedied until the 1960s and 1970s when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were finally granted a vote with the 1967 referendum and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was finally dismantled). That the invader violence means that this country carries in it a susceptibility to politics of belligerence and injustice.
And as we come to 26 January again, still our official national day. It’s time that we chose not to mark this day on which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples entered into an undeclared war with the colonising power that killed them, took their land and did everything in their power to destroy their culture? Surely we can do better, we can honour the ongoing custodianship and leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have maintained their culture and knowledge in conditions of occupation? Surely we can change the date?
Stardust Becoming 