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Across the Pacific Ocean, in Canada or ‘Turtle Island’ as it is also known by many of its Indigenous inhabitants, a horror has been unfolding. It started at a the former residential school in Kamloops, British Colombia where, via the use of ground penetrating radar technology, the remains of at least 215 Native Canadian children were found buried in mass unmarked gravesites. This school ran for 85 years, was part of compulsory government programs to forcibly assimilate these children, and was administered by the Catholic Church.
It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.
The question of reconciliation in the Church is particularly pressing, given 2021 marks the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity in Australia, and the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Christianity to the Torres Strait. Yet many First Australians recognise that the Spirit of God was poured out onto the original inhabitants of this great Southern Land many, many thousands of years prior.
But it is possible the members of the Plenary could begin to hear a deeper voice speaking in their hearts. There may arise a new courage to start a process of truth and reconciliation, reporting the process of this journey to the second Plenary Council planned for Sydney, July 2022. We can only begin that journey if members of the Plenary Council come and are open to listening to that deep inner voice.
Reading the paper, Instrumentum Laboris, written in preparation for the coming Plenary Council, I found myself quite disappointed by the lack of depth, awareness and any sense of the need for an apology. Much less an openness to any serious conversion that is needed within the Church.
Those two little boys turn ten this year, reaching a milestone most Australians celebrate simply as reaching 'double figures'. Yet with these double figures comes a new threat most Australians aren’t aware of: they will also reach the age of criminal responsibility.
It is no coincidence that white ‘settler’ theology in this country has barely begun to engage with Indigenous people. Arguably, it has only begun to do so because the Indigenous citizens of the churches have begun to cast off the imaginative shackles made for us by our white gubbas and find our own voice.
Due to the impacts of colonisation which have led to everything from loving intermarriage to acts of sexual violence, most Aboriginal people have non-Indigenous relations. Most of these people have, at some time or another, experienced racism within their extended family.
Recent research has documented some of the historical causes of the ongoing absence of water justice. When the land rights agenda emerged towards the end of the 20th century, deliberate decisions were made to restrict access mostly to land without water rights.
There are a number of current issues within our present Australian political system, issues we need to remedy brought to light with strong media attention. But in contrast, how much media attention is being paid to this ongoing scandal of First Nations peoples who, while representing just 3.3 per cent of the population, now represent an extraordinary 30 per cent of the nation’s prison population?
Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a truth-telling inquiry that will investigate injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation, rightly looks to similar models in South Africa and Canada. Each of these also had a clear Indigenous focus and addressed the ravaging impact of white settlement on traditional lands, cultures and communities in their respective countries.
25-36 out of 200 results.