The Speech
Today was meant to be a Celebration of Inclusiveness. A joyous, hopeful look at how Australia, a nation made wealthy, strong and vibrant by the millions of immigrants and refugees from all corners of the globe who have sought a better life here could move forward into this new century, still holding dear the hopes and dreams encapsulated in the journeys of those brave, determined and adventurous souls. How we can {put a comma here}
and will build a future of hope and friendship and community together. And more: To build it with the strength born of diversity which we have been, from time immemorial, blessed to harbour here.
So many have come here. Over so long. In waves. Each bringing with them their cultures and their faiths. Their traditions. Their skills. Their dreams. Each wave making us stronger. Better. More diverse
a comma here and through that diversity, more united. The ones who arrived walking from Indonesia when this land, still attached to Asia as Gondwanaland
a comma here gave them haven. They were the ancestors of the traditional owners of our nation. Those brave souls arrived in what we now know as Larrakia Country - or Darwin in white fella talk.
Over centuries the descendants of those First Peoples made their way south, east, west . Everywhere in our wide brown land felt the tread of their feet. Unlike many who followed them, their tread was soft. They took care of the country which had succoured and sheltered them. They reverenced the gods and the goddesses who filled its streams and rivers, who blessed it with the fruits and flowers; the sea creatures and land animals that formed their diet, their medicine, their herb lore and their faith. That nourished them body and soul.
This is Awabakal country we stand in. They made it here. They were here when the white man arrived. They are here still and we thank the representatives of that community for greeting us all here today in that amazing Welcome to Country we just experienced. For opening their hearts and their home to us. As they welcomed those first white settlers who had travelled
remove an L up the coast from the hellish prison colony that was then Sydney Town. Little did they know that the inclusiveness and hospitality they were bred to show strangers would, in the following two centuries, be so ill repaid.
When those first humans arrived in Larraika Country, they brought few material possessions with them. They had their tools, their dingos, their babies and their dreams of escaping tribal warfare and population pressures. The First of the Awabakal peoples arrived here in the Hunter in a similar state. Possessing little, but wealthy beyond measure in the things that count. In hope, in family, in the freedom to live as they wished to live.
Thousands of years later, more came. Not willingly this time, but forced here by the inequitable legal, social and economic systems of 18th Century Britain. Whose prisons overflowed with the poor, the destitute, the desperate and the forgotten. They were the ones who came in chains in prison ships from "Mother England." Once again, they arrived with nothing of note materially, But with strong backs and stronger minds, many made much of themselves in the ensuing years. Some returned when their sentences finished, but most stayed on.
They built lives and
remove and, put a comma homes and dynasties even, off the fat of the land they had been sent to as punishment for stealing a loaf of bread to eat, a coat to keep the chill from their bones
, or
, in the case of the many women in those holds, for selling the bodies they had as their only exploitable resource.
Soon news of what riches lay here had got
gotten back and volunteers began to arrive. The hopeful young prospectors who came to seek their fortune in the Gold Rush. Few of them found that fortune, but many stayed on, finding another, more hard won wealth, on the land and in the towns. Young farm labourers and their wives, looking to do here what was beyond their reach at home. To own a plot of their very own. To pass it down to their offspring. Making homes and lives and leaving behind them their progeny who are here still, reaping the rewards of the seeds they sowed with back breaking labour and sacrifice.
There were so many who came. Some early on in our European experience, some a little later. Writ large on our souls are the tales of those who, with tatty suitcases and shell shocked faces, came to us on Assisted Passage from war torn Europe after WWI and WWII. They built the Snowy River hydro electric scheme. In doing do
remove do so they truly did power the growth of this country into what we are today. The richest, luckiest nation on earth.
Before them we had seen the pearl divers from Japan who made West Australia rich. The Indonesian fishermen who taught us how to mine the seas. The camel drivers from Afghanistan who brought food and building supplies and precious letters filled with news from home to those who farmed and mined the Never Never. The Red Centre. The heart of this beautiful land. The Germans and Italians, among the first of the Free Settlers, who showed us how to make wine, to grow sweet olives and exotic leafy greens. They gave us the Bread Basket that is the Murray Darling region. The jewel in our rural crown.
These people, in their millions, in their own ways and their own times, all contributed to making this the place we call home today. In making for us the wealth, the hope and the future we are all so unutterably privileged to share.
Sadly today is not the Celebration the organizers from the Network On Action For Refugee Rights envisioned. Not any
remove not any, just use No longer a happy day
nor a day for rejoicing. It is the saddest of days. The most tragic of events. A mass funeral service. It has now become a memorial service for 100 more people with similar hopes. Escaping similar terrors. Facing similar unknown hazards and travails. 100 people who were not so lucky. 100 people who were not welcomed as they have the human right to hope they might be. 100 people who gambled on freedom and peace. And who paid the terrible, final price of losing that gamble.
We don't know many of their names. We probably never will know the names of most of them. But we do know this. We know they were people just like us. Just like our forebears. People with names. With families. With dreams and futures to forge. People who seek to live in peace and harmony with their neighbours. To send their children to schools which are not bombed. To shop in markets that are not burned and pillaged.. To give a fair day's labour for a fair day's recompense. To make life a little better for their children than it has been for them. To look to a future filled with hope, not fear.
That treacherous seas and more treacherous governments stole that hope from them along with their lives is a travesty. It's a national shame upon all of us that it has happened once again.
But it is
also, remove too too, a source of great pride and hope to me - and I hope to each of you here - to see so many of us who will not stand idle and allow this tragedy to go unmarked or unmourned. Who have come here today to honour and remember those people. To speak for those whose voices have been silenced by cold seas and colder hearts. To make a promise to their lost souls - that we will never forget them and the price they paid for daring to hope and to strive for better lives. That we will never betray their courage and their sacrifice. That we will fight every day that we breathe the free air they fought so hard to share with us, for their families and their fellow suffering hordes to partake of alongside of us.
I'm not a great one for national emblems or national songs. They have been, to my mind, too ill used by too many for too long to be deserving of the reverence so often accorded to them. But I want to say this one thing. I have noted that we seldom
comma, remove any more at official events any more at official events, sing that second verse of our national anthem. I don't think this is any accident of fate. I'd
use I would instead of I'd ask you all now to contemplate that verse; to think on why it may be that at this time in our history, the powers that be might seek to drive the meaning of those words from our hearts and minds.
Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,
We'll toil with hearts and hands,
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands,
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share,
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.
Shall we commit here today - to one another and to the memory of those latest casualties of the struggle for freedom, lost on Thursday night to the waters off Christmas Island, to work towards making the spirit of those words come alive again.
?To truly "toil with hearts and hands" to ensure that what our land is once more renowned for is not the selfish, fear filled, xenophobic hatred of the "other" so evident in recent years in the populace and its political hacks. That fear which makes policies which condemn people seeking a safe haven here to the status of criminals. Subhuman, unwanted, undesirable elements thrown into what can only be called Concentration Camps - That is what they are and I will not dignify them with that evil euphemism "Detention Centres" - Can we commit to one another and to the people we lost this past weekend; more importantly to the people already here languishing in those political prisons our taxes fund, and to those who are still massing at ports across the world now, still hoping to make the leap of faith to get here - that we will raise our voices, use our votes and put our feet on marches like today's towards the cause of letting those in Canberra know this above all else
?We do still have those have boundless plains - and I know that to share them with people who have had the guts, the brains, the skills and the sheer unadulterated courage to make a break for freedom against what I know most of us would see as insurmountable odds is central to the wishes of those of you who have come here today-
?Shall we tell them please, that it is this, beyond all things, which is our most heartfelt wish? That Australia
ns should
, once and for all
, strive together to become truly "FAIR"?
