I WAS particularly impressed by last month’s Herald editorial ‘An inconvenient truth’ and I hope this is the beginning of much more commentary on that topic.
I’ve met so many people lately who, like me, are proud to walk in the footsteps of the oldest culture in the history of humanity.
And like me, they are also acutely conscious of how close we all still are to the difficulties and wrongdoings of the past.
I’m 70 years old and know many other women my age who wear the label ‘great grandmother’.
They live among us, have clear memories of growing up with previous generations and can relate personal family stories about the challenges their parents and grandparents faced during their lifetimes.
It’s all that recent.
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To put it into perspective, even though it sounds such a long time ago, my great grandmother was born in Australia in 1855 – two years after her parents fled a potato famine that killed a million Irish people.
Many of today’s First Nations Australians would have great grandparents who were born at around the same time.
What we need to understand is that in 1855 their families were being massacred and driven into exile across Australia to make way for others arriving from overseas to take over their ancestral lands.
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, children were still being forcibly removed from their homes and placed in foster care never knowing their true cultural identity, heritage or often even their parents’ names.
It wasn’t until 1967 that Australia’s original inhabitants were even counted in the national census.
Yet in 1984 the late mining magnate Lang Hancock – who attended boarding school in Toodyay – told a national TV audience that chemicals should be put in the water to stop Aboriginal families having children.
This is all a well-documented truth that cannot be denied.
My point is that some among us say the past is the past and should not influence how we view our nation’s history or its ongoing impact on Australian society.
They say it all should be forgotten because Australians need to ‘move on’.
But for many First Nations people, what happened is still very raw and far from something that can or should be forgotten.
The truth needs to be told, and only then will we all be able to move on together as one nation.
Barb Dadd
Toodyay
