I've always loved studying history. I like to think an understanding of history will ensure 'history never repeats'. My faith in communities learning from their history has been tested of late.
This year I was contacted by some elders from the Aboriginal community in Moree to help with a legal problem. Their names were familiar from my history books, as citizens who stood up to segregation with the freedom riders in 1965.
Despite Moree priding itself these days on reconciliation, members of the Aboriginal community continue to fight for their rights. The fight is now to preserve their own culture and history from commercial interests. The fight is dividing their town yet again, but this time it is dividing both black and white.
Moree is a town like many in regional Australia whose population and community are in decline. The Moree Council has experienced the greatest population decline in NSW of late. The community is desperate to stem it.
They've picked an unlikely saviour. Many believe the solution is the construction of a discount department store.
Such is their passion that they are willing to sacrifice their main oval in town to the cause. Instead of seeing cricketers and rugby players strutting their stuff on Taylor Oval, you could shop till your heart's content in the new Big W marketplace. And Moree would rise again to stake its place as a regional retail centre with jobs for all.
But an unlikely coalition of old cricket and rugby players and some members of the indigenous community have been fighting the proposal.
The old players cannot believe their Council would develop their oval, which has been at the heart of reconciliation in their town; where black and white played cricket and rugby league for generations. Many greats of Australian sport — Don Bradman, Clive Churchill — played on Taylor Oval.
More importantly, traditional owners believe the oval is a burial site. Two Aboriginal bodies were found under the oval during excavations in 1903. But many Moree residents, including the Council and proponents of Big W, remain sceptical, and are intent on more testing before accepting that the site truly was a burial ground.
Nor is it enough that the site is also where a young Aboriginal man was killed in race related tensions in the 1970s, or where other ceremonies have been performed to recognise Aboriginal leaders in Moree. In Moree it seems history and culture have no