Always Was, Always Will Be
Tuesday 10 November 2020
Uncle Colin Ahoy
Always Was, Always Will Be!
Land is of great significance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. When Australia's first peoples talk about land, they talk about the connection to country. Country refers to all the relationships that exist between an individual, their people, and their ancestral lands, waters and the skies.
Australia's first people talk, not of ownership, but of belonging and connection to country. The country sustains them and they care for their country. Caring for country is intimately bound up with identity and respect.
Country is criss-crossed by songlines or dreamings that provide Australia's first peoples with social, moral and religious codes and guides for interacting with the natural environment.
The land where this university stand is the country of my people, the Anaiwan people who are the traditional custodians of this land. And we share the caring of this country with the Gumbaynggirr, Dunghutti and Kamilaroi people. I pay respect to the Elders of those Nations, both past and present. And I extend that same respect to each of you here today and Welcome.
Bruce Dennison - Ceremony MC
My name is Bruce Dennison and I was born and bred here in Armidale. I'm a proud Anaiwan man with strong Kamilaroi blood and I've got mob just about everywhere. This year's theme 'Always Was Always, Will Be' means different things to different people. And to me, the phrase reminds me of over 75,000 years, well, since the beginning of time really, that more than 350 distinct groups have occupied this country. We were given the responsibility of custodianship of this land, and to this day, we still have that custodianship.
Although it looks vastly different, the original responsibility given to us by our creators is still there and it has not been dissolved. No one by our creators can take that away so therefore it always was and always will be.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Brigid Heywood
Good morning, citizens, colleagues, members of the community and young citizens from Yarm.
Welcome.
May I first of all, thank Colin for welcome. May I thank Bruce, for acting as the MC and may I thank all of those who have brought traditions to a unique and special welcome on this very special day, representing a very special week in the cultural history of Australia.
From my Gaelic ancestors, Dia dhuit, from my fellow citizens in New Zealand Kia Ora.
I am deeply proud to be here today celebrating a very special part of Australian history. For me, this is the history as has just been indicated of 75,000 years of community, of environmental guardianship, of citizenship being valued, of family being at the heart, on a friendship being the narrative.
We many of us have watched him fascination as a new president was elected this week. We have watched in horror as, as part of modern society, fake news, ambiguity, dishonesty. And at some point in time, over the last week a threat to democracy was part of our modern culture. I think all of us were unsettled and some of us were ashamed that that would be the modern vehicle of democracy.
And therefore, I think that we hold to a celebration of NAIDOC week more purposefully and more passionately this time. Because it reminds us, that the guardians of a nation are those who hold true to the care of that nation in whatever way is possible, through good times and through bad, and that they stand tall after 75,000 years, as opposed to 300 years, in valuing connection with each other in valuing connection with place and in valuing, community as the highest possible instruments of the expression of that culture.
As the University of New England, it's important that we continue to learn from that culture that we continue to recognise that there is value in 75,000 years that will improve what we have achieved as a community in 300 years. It is with great pride that the University of New England represents one part of an education system that seeks to support, welcome and enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to secure their future through the benefits of education. And it is clear from a review of our students that we have those students who come here because their passion is to make a difference to their community, and through that to bring strength and purpose to this nation, we honour their commitment and we value deeply their contribution to the University's community.
We value our connections with different mobs, and we hope that they regard us in that context, we value our connections with different families and with different groups. There is much more that we can do, but we could only do it, first of all, in partnership, we can only do it if we genuinely celebrate community, and we can only be successful at it if we always remember that there is much to learn and that our colleagues from the First Nations are willing to share and generously support us in our learning.
Today and the rest of NAIDOC week, particularly here at this university, are about learning, about valuing story, about the truth in narrative and about the democracy that genuinely create rich communities.
Colleagues, citizens, members of the community may I offer my deep and heartfelt thanks for being invited to share with you this celebration, and all the other events that will be hosted here at the university and across the communities of this nation. Let us stand together and value collaborative, rich engagement at the heart of which as Uncle Colin has already said, is care and guardianship of the land, the nurturing and duty of care that we share for our people and the fact that we go forward, valuing that we go forward together.
Bringing 75,000 years of history with us as part of the instruments of learning.
Thank you very much.
Colin Ahoy Junior - UNE student speaker
Colin Ahoy Junior is a proud Anaiwan and Biripi man from Armidale. Colin came through our TRACKS, tertiary preparation program, and has continued on to study a Bachelor in Archaeology. He is not only fulfilling his own dreams and aspirations, he's also being a role model for our young people and our old people, that they too can come to UNE via our Pathways or TRACKS programs and be supported through their journey on into tertiary studies.
I would like to start by acknowledging the Anaiwan people on whose land we meet today.
Hello my name is Colin Ahoy.
My connection to Anaiwan Country is through my father, Colin Ahoy, whose mother is Barbara Ahoy and her mother is Ethel DeSilver and her mother is Sarah Morris, the wife of Frank Archibald. I also have a strong connection to the Biripi Country through my mother Phyllis Ahoy's bloodline, whose mother is Phyllis Donovan and her mother is Martha Leon, and her mother is Elizabeth Beal. These are the ways that I'm connected to both the freshwater people of the mountains and the salt water people near the ocean.
My sense of belonging is deeply connected to these lands through these people. I'm here today to talk about this year's theme for NAIDOC week, which is Always Was, Always Will Be, and what I have described to you earlier as my bloodline, that goes back well into the past of the Original People who are the caretakers of this land, which existed for thousands of years.
And here we are in the present 2020, and it's time that Australia and all the different peoples who call this ancient place home need to recognise that the places they live has deep stories that are now part of us all, and we need to walk together into the future.
We are witnessing the destruction of many culturally significant sites, such as the Juukan Gorge in Western Australia and the Birthing Tree in Victoria. How might it be possible for all contemporary Australians to feel the same connection to these cultural sites and value them as highly as we do, like we value our war memorials and cathedrals.
Our younger generation farmers talk about their connection to the land that they farm often passed from generation to generation since colonization. However, the land they farm has a much older history than these few generations appreciate.
This older history is something that should be known, valued, and owned by all Australians. The cultural material in the landscape needs to be protected, as some of these places hold evidence of thousands of years of human occupation, and once they are gone, they are lost forever. Despite this loss, the story and knowledge remain and cannot erased.
The Black Lives Matter movement in America this year has again, brought to our attention that the First People of Australia continue to face similar entrenched, systemic racism. It has shone a light on the current Aboriginal deaths in custody and the disproportionate incarceration rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The truth needs to be told that Australia has a history that started long before 1788 with the first fleet and it is a moral obligation for all contemporary Australians to own our history and truly share in the caring of this country, as it always was, always will be.
Thank you.
Donna Moodie - Guest Speaker
Donna Moodie is a Goomeri woman and a Lecturer here at UNE. Donna joined UNE as a member of the Oorala Academic team, then worked in a HEPP program in the School of Rural Medicine, and since October 2019 is employed as a Lecturer in the Contextual Studies team with the UNE School of Education.
I acknowledge the Anaiwan People of this country who share its care and this responsibility with the Gumbaynggirr, Kamilaroi and Dunghutti nations. I also pay my respects to the Elders past, present and future of these nations and I extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and to all of you here today.
I also want to acknowledge in particular the following people who greatly assisted me in my thinking to bring this speech to you today, Dr Kristy O’Neil, Dr Nikki Moodie, Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, Mr Stephen Bell, Mr Bruce Dennison and many of my colleagues in the School of Education.
“Always Was, Always Will Be” is a mantra cry from deep time and recognises that First Nations people have occupied and cared for this continent for over 65,000 years.
We are spiritually and culturally connected to this country.
This country was criss-crossed by generations of brilliant Nations. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were Australia’s first explorers, first navigators, first engineers, first farmers, first botanists, first scientists, first diplomats, first astronomers and first artists.
Australia has the world’s oldest oral stories. The First Peoples engraved the world’s first maps, made the earliest paintings of ceremony and invented unique technologies. We built and engineered structures - structures on Earth - predating well-known sites such as the Egyptian Pyramids and Stonehenge. One such place is the Budj Bim cultural landscape, the first site in Australia inscribed on the UNESCO World heritage List purely for its Aboriginal Cultural significance. It is one of the oldest and most extensive aquaculture sites conservatively dating back 6,600 years. On the lands of the Gunditjmara Peoples, they first applied for World Heritage listing in 1989, and 30 years later UNESCO inscribed the proposal on the 6th of July last year, 2019. Basalt stone deposits from lava flows have been used to construct a complex system of stone channels, weirs and traps within the natural features of the landscape. These structures have provided a plentiful supply of food, including eels, fish and turtles, for the Gunditjmara people for millennia. There are also remains of over 200 circular stone wall houses spread throughout the Budj Bim landscape. Can you imagine the engineering feat employed to build fires hot enough and accurate enough to carve the channels into those basaltic lava flows and combine that with the knowledge of seasonal rise and fall of water levels that fed the eel traps and weirs that they constructed. Bruce Pascoe in his book Dark Emu, writes that the Gunditjmara people were not just ‘hunter-gatherers’, (the myth prevails, of which Pascoe largely debunks in his excellent tome), but cultivators and farmers.
‘Always Was, Always Will Be’ acknowledges that hundreds of Nations and our cultures covered this continent. All were managing the land - the biggest estate on earth - to provide for their and our future sustainably. Here I would like to recommend another book by Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Through ingenious land management systems like fire stick farming, we transformed the harshest habitable continent into a land of bounty.
NAIDOC Week 2020 acknowledges and celebrates that our nation’s story did not begin with documented European contact whether in 1770 or 1606 - with the arrival of the Dutch on the western coast of the Cape York Peninsula.
The very first footprints on this continent were those belonging to First Nations peoples. Our coastal Nations watched and interacted with at least 36 contacts made by Europeans prior to 1770. Many of them resulting in the charting of the northern, western and southern coastlines – of our lands and our waters. For us, this nation’s story began at the dawn of time.
NAIDOC 2020 invites all Australians to embrace the true history of this country – a history that dates back thousands of generations. It is about seeing, hearing and learning the First Nations’ 65,000+-year history of this country - which is Australian history. We want all Australians to celebrate that we have the oldest continuing cultures on the planet and to recognise that our sovereignty was never ceded. That brilliant broadcast, the First Australians by Rachael Perkins and Louis Nowra begins…
“Before the dreaming all that moved on the land was the wind. Then came life, giant beings came down from the sky, came up from the sea and within the earth itself, part human, part animal, these beings travelled the land, they danced and made love, they hunted and fought creating the landscape as they went. In everything they touched they left their essence, their life-force, making the land itself sacred to those who would follow them, the first Australians.” (Perkins, R. & Nowra, L., 2009, The First Australians broadcast on ABCTV)
Professor Mick Dodson in his 2009 National Press Club address stated the following…
‘Our adaptation and intimate knowledge of Country enabled us to endure climate change, catastrophic droughts and rising sea levels. ‘When we say Country it’s… a word for all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area and its features. It describes the entirety of our ancestral domains. All of it is important – we have no wilderness, nor the opposite of wilderness, nor anything in between. Country is country – the whole cosmos’ (Dodson 2009).
The impact of colonisation and industrialisation hit hard. Rather than ‘increase’ technologies and paradigms practised by our people, the colonisers engaged and still engage in extractive resource use and abuse leading to the predicament that we find ourselves in now: the huge threat to that sentient being our mother earth.
Here I introduce to you the concept of Solastalgia. We have all heard of the word nostalgia: a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland or to one’s family and friends: a sentimental yearning of a former place or time. In addition, most of us are aware of the term solace: to comfort in sorrow, misfortune or trouble: alleviation of distress or discomfort: or something that gives comfort, consolation or relief.
The Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term Solastalgia in 2005. He is an environmental philosopher with theoretical and applied interests in the relationship between ecosystems and human health and provided the following definition. Solastalgia “is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one's home and territory”. It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault of physical desolation. It is manifest in an attack on one's sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress or psychological desolation about its transformation.
Solastalgia à (‘nostalgia’ + ‘solace’) refers to an individual’s and communities experiences of environmental and climactic change. Studies in Solastalgia have been conducted in fishing communities, mining communities in Australia and the US and farming communities in Australia experiencing drought and salinity. And globally studies include the negative impacts that the experience of climate change, and specifically in relation to us, the First Nations people, on loss of land, and the mental, emotional, physical and social signifiers of social and emotional wellbeing and not just physical desolation. In more studies research has been conducted of the Innuit experiences of instability and recession of Arctic ice, everyday experiences of poor communities in Ghana and the Torres Strait Islander communities vulnerable population’s experiences of wildfires, Indonesian villagers’ experiences with volcanic eruptions and exposure to destruction due to natural disasters. UNE and our staff, students and our communities have experienced in a very real way the impact of drought, bushfires and this year the profound impact of the global Corona virus pandemic.
By way of explanation I offer the example of Wollar:
In their 2018 paper, Hedda Askland and Matthew Bunn conducted ethnographic fieldwork and explored the concept of solastalgia, or place-based distress articulated by residents in the small village of Wollar, 48 km north-east of Mudgee, near the Goulbourn River national park on Wiradjuri Country. The expansion of the Wilpinjong open cut coal mine led to community backlash against the NSW government and the Department of Planning eventually admitted that their decision making was responsible for and is the cause of the destruction on the community of Wollar, the village and surrounding community. This has led to a tangible sense of Place-based distress leading to the transformation and degradation of the Wollar home environment. The residents spoke of the negative socio-environmental impacts of noise, vibration and dust, increased levels of health problems including asthma, the loss of community and changes to place, as well as broken promises. In the words of Askland and Bunn…
The anguish experienced by people who remain in Wollar is manifold. It concerns the destruction of a known environment, of a place with continuity and narratives; an ending of long-standing social relations; and, a loss of trust in the social institutions that are supposed to protect and secure people and their place in society. The loss of place experienced in Wollar, through the slow process of mining approvals, and subsequently expansion approvals, is one that is lived in struggle with a social world that threatens a sense of place and an imagined future in that place. The mine has distorted the meaning of the place, it has changed it from a sleeping, backwater village where people could flee the business of the city and the politics of the state to one where its residents on a daily basis are confronted by political concerns and experiences of inequality. It has uprooted friendships and relationships and left empty, derelict houses as reminders of a time in the past when familiarity and communion brought people together, it has transformed Wollar village and surrounds into a place where there is no future. Looking more like a ghost town, disharmony, dissonance and disruption are today common descriptors of the village. Everyday rituals set within the habits of the past but guided towards future realities have become distorted and, with that, a sense of homelessness has become embedded within the sense of home. Within the ongoing relationship to place, the familiar objects and the ways that these things are positioned inform people of themselves and orientate them within their lives and realities. When these are lost or severed, when the previously peaceful nights are interrupted by the rumble of trains taking that place away, it is more than a psychological trauma, but a loss of the things that tell people what they are. As Askland and Bunn contend, Solastagia offers a strong starting point for a discussion of these distresses.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it. Indigenous people are experiencing climate change and long-term changes in and on country in their landscapes and environments. We are crying, mother Earth is crying, we have a distressed sense of loss, and over these last couple of centuries have survived the threats to our ‘sense of place’. Moreover, along with you now, us two experience dislocation & homesickness whilst still at home.
Worldwide there is increase in “ecological distress syndromes” environmentally induced distress. Barry Jones, former Science Minister speaks of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, in his new book, What is to be done?
He names them:
- Population growth and per capita use and overuse of resources.
- Climate Change, lack of fresh water and arable land. Which has led to millions of people on the move, refugees, who are then blamed.
- Pandemics
- Racism and State Violence,
Jones insists these thing are all interrelated and intrinsically linked and demands a global response to ecological distress.
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People have suffered from successive government policies that have caused removals from family, culture, communities and Country. This has led to overrepresentation in justice systems. We have double the rates of suicide than that of non-indigenous people and the terrible tragedy is that our very young people are feeling so lost they are resorting to suicide. We have to check what cultural lens we look through. Many of our children are removed from family because of neglect, but why should we not look at the cause of neglect? Neglect is directly related to poverty, of successive generations of poverty. Instead of judging the outcomes of incarceration and suicide let us change the way we look at this. In Australia, self-determination must be the lens through which we all look. We, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, are quite capable of identifying our problems and our solutions. We need to be supported to implement our programs in a culturally safe way. For example, much work has been done to look at the causes of suicide. People who might have suicidal ideation and who do not carry through have a resilient capacity to self-sooth. Early intervention programs are what is needed here to teach calming and reduce overreaction to situations.
In Australia, there has been persistent drought, extreme weather, deforestation, species extinction, and in the case of Wollar open cut mining, on my Country, Goomeroi Country fracking, gas extraction, and open cut coalmines… our rivers are not running and are infested with pest species. There is coral bleaching, and in the Torres Strait Islands and across the Pacific sea levels are rising causing great distress and concern for the future. Our sense of powerlessness and lack of control over change is palpable. In climate sensitive communities, including farming communities there is poor mental health and a sense of disempowerment. This sense of disempowerment, solastalgia, is not just about our relationship with an environment or Country, it directly relates to that Country’s relationship to us, its meanings and connections and the way it holds us in Place.
Indigenous People have never ceded responsibility and custodianship for Country and we will keep taking responsibility for caring, crying, singing, learning, acting, speaking and thinking of Country, on or off Country. Solastalgia, not only affects Indigenous People it affects all of us. Which is why we offer the Aboriginal Proverb, Healthy Country, Healthy People. We can learn from each other, respecting the concept of “Always was, Always will be… We have no choice but to walk together. This is an ongoing imperative in all of our relationships with each other and our sentient beings, to undertake this healing journey. Our future generations demand this of us, as they should. Solastalgia offers a strong starting point for a discussion of this place-based distress. We must engage in better ways of being, ways of valuing, ways of doing and ways of knowing. A very wise Elder Mr Paddy Jerome told a gathering in Toowoomba,
It always was and always will be our land. We don’t own it. We belong to it. Every living thing on it is a part of it. People are custodians of the land. They are entitled to the spiritual content but not to own it. We had native title from the word go. We were denied title to it. We were not considered as people. (Jerome, P. pers. comm,. 28 May 2004)
Country is home. It is the source of knowledge, law, science, spirituality and survival. It is integral to the transmission of cultural knowledge, skills and practices.
In conclusion, I highly recommend Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, How Indigenous thinking can save the world. No spoiler alert here you will have to read it. However, Yunkaporta concludes,
“Now that the small questions of existence have been answered – Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die? – us-two should be able to get back to the business of asking some of the bigger questions. We will need living lands and living bodies to do that, though. So let’s put these hands of ours to work.”
What does ‘thriving’ look like? What do respectful relationships with each other and with these Lands look like?
Let us start a healthier, more helpful respectful dialogical discourse. In other words let us two start yarning and talking and speaking Country again for a healthier future. Our children, our future generations and our sentient beings demand this of us.
Yaama.
