AustLit

'Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders have just marked two hundred and thirty years of patience with displaced Europeans. We choose patience because we still see and feel white people’s humanity, despite their inhumanity directed at us daily. We choose patience because we know only together will we survive climate change. Like Bourke and Wills and other failed ‘explorers’ before them, today’s European-Australians choose to simultaneously ignore and exploit Aboriginal Peoples and our knowledges: they like Aboriginal art because they can consume and own it on Western neoliberal terms, but they don’t really like Aboriginal people in their homes. They like Aboriginal knowledge in universities (for example: astronomy, bush medicines, family kinship), but only if it builds white academics’ careers and, importantly, if it does not challenge the Western canon. This is otherwise known as white supremacy. We Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and our knowledges are usually only... '  (Introduction)

'Aunty Lilla Watson, respected Elder of the Brisbane community, has shared with us the following story. We believe this story is critical to our place and time in history as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

…See the impact of colonialism has been huge…we Aboriginal people are spiritual people and we are still recovering because of colonialism… There’s not a lot of understanding about that on the part of white Australia because they have this misguided belief that colonialism doesn’t affect them. Of course it does! It’s made them into the people they are today, which means they cannot hear what Aboriginal people are telling them… Many are trying to run away from their own history… As they get older and more mature [chuckles], hopefully they’ll have a better understanding… You see, that mouth of the snake… our people are in pathological grieving. Our people have retreated into the belly of the snake… it’s our consolidation of our Aboriginality, a renewing of our identity. Only recently have we begun emerging from the mouth of the snake with renewal and consolidation of who we are…' (Introduction)