The Uluru Statement from the Heart was made at a historic assembly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at Uluru in 2017. It addresses the fundamental question of how Indigenous peoples want to be recognised in the Australian Constitution. The answer given is a First Nations ‘Voice’ to Federal Parliament protected by the Constitution, and a subsequent process of agreement-making an ... (read more)
Kevin Bell
Professor the Honourable Kevin Bell AM QC is the Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. He is a member of the First Peoples-led Yoo-rrook Justice Commission, a Royal Commission established by the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria and the Victorian government to examine the impact of colonisation upon the First Peoples of Victoria, to undertake a process of truth-telling and to make recommendations for informing treaty-making.
Australia’s national identity is as complex as the people who make up the nation and the historical forces by which it was made. Our Indigenous peoples, whose unique histories precede the nation’s by more than fifty thousand years, are central to that identity. A century ago, making those statements would have been virtually unthinkable to most, such was the dominance of exclusionary colonial ... (read more)
Are you part of the non-Indigenous majority? Have you had too little contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Do you feel that you do not fully comprehend their worldview, but wish you could? Is entrenched Aboriginal disadvantage eating away at your sense of Australia as a fair and united country? Do you still possess the recollection of your first encounter with an Aboriginal pe ... (read more)