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.

Port Pirie diocese's Bishop Greg O'Kelly, SJ, issued a letter in which he stated that same-sex and traditional marriage were like comparing apples and pears.

"The nature of marriage between two same-sex people and the marriage between a man and a woman open to life . . . are two very different things," he wrote.

"A pear is not an apple, no matter what you say, even if you start to redefine that term from its traditional one, it doesn't alter the reality."

Bishop O'Kelly's letter went on to say that children of homosexual couples would feel like a Stolen Generation, because they had been denied a mother and a father.

"I can see a generation in the future describing itself as something like another stolen generation.

"When bitterness occurs, they could say to their same-sex parents that they deliberately intervened in order to exclude what was the right of the child, to a father or mother as a parent.

"The natural process was stolen from them . . . and that was a gross injustice."

Bishop O'Kelly wrote that "a gay couple adopting a child, where otherwise the child would remain an orphan, can be defended, I believe, if that proviso is in place".

"What cannot be defended is the deliberate use of surrogacy or some other intervention in order to prevent the presence of a natural father or mother in the family of the child."

Between 1910 and 1970, many indigenous Aboriginal Australian children were forcibly removed from their families as a result of government policies.

These children became known as the Stolen Generations.

In 2013, then-Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a national apology to the Stolen Generations.

Australian Marriage Equality advocate Rodney Croome said Bishop O'Kelly claims are offensive.

Sources

• 9 News
• Diocese of Port Pirie
• Australians Together
• ABC
• Image: Diocese of Port Pirie

But for now we are up there, on the ridge, a drive and a hard walk from the camp through remote Northern Territory gums and pandanas, beneath squadrons of whistling kites, the scrubby ground crackling in the heat of the dry season. When we reach Yenmilli, the sacred rock art site, the boys and young men are suddenly still. They can talk all day and all night for hours on end in two languages and perhaps more, but not for now.

The sacred caves are small and under the crook of the ridge. The art is dots and hands, ancient and largely intact. Only one white person has seen it before, according to the family. Everyone sits. Black hands start tracing the white outlines on the cave walls and then black hands are placed over the drawn hands and most are an exact fit, like slipping into a glove.

Jules Dumoo, the eldest of the nine Aboriginal men here, a father to some of them and also a brother and uncle and guardian, sits in the dirt of the first cave where kangaroos now live but where his ancestors did also. He's only about 45 years old but his own uncles and his father are now gone. Continue reading

Sources

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: The Sydney Morning Herald

The doyens of New Atheism taunt believers. The late Christopher Hitchens asserted that "religion poisons everything" and Richard Dawkins has asked whether "religion is the root of all evil".

Any fair consideration of Aboriginal spirituality makes these assertions look like another form of white cultural imperialism. We all owe the Aboriginal community a duty to try to immerse ourselves in the spirituality that formed their culture and binds their communities to this day. This immersion will help inform us of how indigenous and non-indigenous communities can more successfully co-exist. Read more

Sources

• Dick Gross in The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: Sathya Sai Baba

Dick Gross has written and broadcast about living and dying without a god for over a decade.

One reason for this could be that NSW lags other parts of Australia in how it treats some Aboriginal people in court.

In late 1990 and early 1991, Colleen Walker and Clinton Speedy, both 16, and four-year-old Evelyn Greenup went missing from the Aboriginal community at Bowraville, west of Nambucca Heads. Colleen has never been found, although her clothes were discovered in a local river. The remains of Clinton and Evelyn were located; each had been killed by a blow to the head.

The only suspect was a local tannery worker, Jay Hart, a 27-year-old white man with a reputation for violence who supplied alcohol and marijuana to members of the community and had sex with some of them. He was attracted to teenage girls.

In 2006, he was tried for the murder of Evelyn Greenup and found not guilty (just as when he was tried for Speedy's murder 12 years earlier). Some who attended the trial say certain Aboriginal witnesses came across poorly for cultural reasons that should have been explained to the jury. Such explanations, known as "the Mildren directions", have been provided regularly in northern Australia for many years.

Wayne Martin, Chief Justice of Western Australia, told the Herald about two of the most common problems white jurors can have with Aboriginal witnesses: "In white society we use eye contact as a way of assessing veracity. If someone looks away, that's regarded as a sign of embarrassment or even lying. In many Aboriginal cultures, eye contact is impolite. It's the same with 'gratuitous concurrence'. Many Aborigines have a culture of deference and agreement. It's not uncommon to see an Aboriginal witness who agrees with everything put to them, even mutually inconsistent propositions." Read more

Sources

• Michael Duffy in The Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: ABC Open

Gooda said that since 1972, the Catholic Church had said that Aboriginal people's rights to land, employment, housing, education, and are all paramount rights.

Commissioner Gooda spoke about the apology expressed by the national Parliament, which acknowledged past mistakes, (such as taking Aboriginal children from their families and putting them with white families) and promised to make steps toward a reconciled Australian future.

"This is a journey that moves us along the road to freedom and human dignity which Australia owes her people. It is about looking forward and moving forward as a nation. It is a journey that can help build healthy relationships, necessary for an agenda of hope", said Gooda.