Australia has told me I don’t belong

Friday, October 23rd, 2015

I am thinking now that I have to speak very gently. I need to tread warily and allow you the chance to absorb what I want to say.

There are things that can tear us apart. There are people who are more interested in turning us on each other.

It is so easy to distort words to take something that is meant with sincerity and fill it with hate.

My people – Indigenous people – are especially vulnerable, because we are so few and often so fragile.

Yet, there are things that need to be said and we need to find a way to have hard discussions.

Here goes. I am not an Australian or more precisely I don’t feel Australian. I am not alone among my people in feeling this way.

There is nothing in Australia’s myths that include us. Our stories don’t form this country’s folklore. Clancy of the Overflow wasn’t black. Thejolly swagman wasn’t black.

Bush poet Ted Egan got it right: we were “poor bugger me Gurindji”.

The sweeping plains and rugged mountain ranges of Dorothea Mackellar’s imagination were also places of death for our people. We were stricken by disease on those plains. We were herded over those mountains.

After the coming of the settlers: this was the “wide brown land” for us.

For most of this country’s history we were not citizens.

Some of our people – my grandfather included – enlisted to fight in Australia’s wars but returned to a segregated country where they could not enter a pub to share a drink with the diggers they fought alongside.

We find our peoplehood in the ancient nations of this land. For me it is Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi, for others Bandjalang or Luritja or Arrernte or Ardnyamathanha or Yorta Yorta.

There were many hundreds of nations here when Europeans came. Yet, we were conveniently bundled together as Aborigines – our identities extinguished along with our rights to our land. Continue reading

Award-winning journalist Stan Grant is from the Wiradjuri tribe of Australia and began working for SBS’s NITV in 2012 as the host of the channel’s flagship current affairs program Awaken.