Keynote speech
Monica Morgan
I
am an Indigenous Woman, of the Yorta Yorta people, situated in South
Eastern Australia. I facilitate the activities of the Yorta Yorta Nation
Aboriginal Corporation, a non-governmental representative body. Our
charter is to advance our sovereignty and self-determination - to be
the authoritative voice responsible to and representing our sixteen
Family Groupings on matters of land, cultural and environmental heritage
and compensation.
I
am the sixth generation to "Undarnying,' a Yorta Yorta woman who
was present at the time of colonisation of our territory by the English
in the early 1800'. Since that time until today, our people have struggled
to survive the attempt at genocide by all the instruments of oppression
made possible by the coloniser, men who held a self-righteous, ethnocentric,
possessive and controlled view of the world. The suppression of Yorta
Yorta people, occurred by way of massacres, poisoned water holes, introduced
diseases, dispersal, the abduction and systematic rape and torture of
women and children these and many
more acts of violence led to the great land theft by the British. This
theft is today entrenched within Australian law. Before contact with
European settlers, mounted police, missionaries and convicts, the Yorta
Yorta population was estimated to be in the thousands. Our population,
by the close of the 1800's was less than 100 persons. Today we number
over 4,000. The national indigenous population is estimated to be just
2.5 percent of the overall Australian population.
During
the course of the last two centuries, the Yorta Yorta have used whatever
actions were and are available for our survival. We have called for
justice and recognition through the use of resistance to noncompliance,
by petitions, occupations, strikes, political and legal actions. Always
the actions of the governments, landlords and traders are the same:
to suppress, restrain and reshape the tools of the Indigenous peoples
so as to make their resistance ineffective. The latest ploy to render
our calls for justice redundant was by enacting amendments to certain
national laws. Legislation, established as a result of the High Court
decision within Australian legal system, declared that the term "terra
nullius" was a fallacy and that the rights of Indigenous Peoples
to land lies within the Common Law - this law being known as Native
Title.
The
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
recently held the Australian Government to account for their violation
and erosion of the rights of Indigenous Peoples through the passing
of special legislation amending, thus winding back any justice that
may be derived form this law by the Indigenous People.
What
makes life of my people a special case is the result of the Yorta Yorta
Native Title Application in which a single Judge to the Federal Court
of Australia, assessing evidence from 56 Indigenous witnesses out of
a total of 250 witnesses who were represented by 500 respondents and
which produced 10,000 pages of transcript and took fourteen months of
court time, made a ruling on the 18th December, 1998 that the:
It
is ironic that the interpretation of history as told by the Yorta Yorta
people, as one of survival resulting form an adaptation to the effects
of colonisation should be used as the reasoning for denying our identity
and existence. That the judge relied on the writings of an English squatter
who gained land from the dispossession of the Yorta Yorta people; writings
that held an ethnocentric and racist evaluation of our customs, beliefs
and traditions, that these writing were taken as the basis of the judge's
decision; that the oral evidence of the Yorta Yorta witnesses was not
given equal weight can only be interpreted as an act of genocide. Genocide
being the ultimate and final act of racism - denial to the existence
of a people.
Today
my people live in a state of trauma; this is result of the collective
effect racism over the last 214 years. Many generations of my people
have witnessed the emergence of policies that legalised the forced removal
of over 100,000 children from their indigenous families within Australia;
children known as the "Stolen Generation". Incarceration rates
for Indigenous persons is twelve times higher that that of the rest
of Australia; 22 percent of Indigenous youths are in juvenile justice
centres, and black represent a disproportionate number of deaths in
custody. The prevalence of substance abuse, metal illness and family
breakdowns together with a life expectancy twenty years below the national
average are all indicators of the racism and marginalisation we continue
to endure.
The
Yorta Yorta will continue the struggle for recognition and to be afforded
the right to land and self-determination. There are a number of strategies
that we have established in which to strive for our place: through governance
that empowers our traditional systems of decision making, by taking
control of the education processes of our people, through the development
of social and economic autonomy, and by engaging and networking with
political allies in the wider Australian and global society.
The
real solution rests with Federal Government taking real leadership,
leadership that can acknowledge the past not to evoke guilt but to advance
real reconciliation outcomes that will lead to the special measures
designed to achieve equality for Indigenous Peoples.
There
is recognition in many streams of Australian society today that justice,
peace and the continuance of humanity lies in recognising, respecting
and advancing the rights of the Indigenous or First Peoples. Only by
writing a history of a country that is honest, reflective and inclusive
can society hope to achieve laws that are made for all and rooted in
equality.
I
speak not only for my ancestors and my people but also for all peoples
who are denied their inherent right to land and an identity.
