Valerie Sutherland

I know that John Batman came from ‘Van Dieman’s Land) sometime in the 1830’s and that Truganini also came around that time. That the Woi Warrung people spent half the year by the coast on the bay and moved inland to the flatland towards Dandenong during the other part of the year. I am not clear as to which part of the year (summer or winter) was spent where. I know that a man called Macmillan was responsible for much brutality towards traditional owners further into Gippsland. I also know that as the areas around what is now Melbourne were taken over by European lifestyle and buildings, the original people were pushed to the outskirts and lived in poverty having lost power over their traditional foodsources. In 1970s there were still groups of Aboriginal people who gathered beneath a tree on a tiny patch of land at the intersection of Fitzroy St and the Esplanade in St Kilda…I used to see them when I was a young woman. I know that in the West the Henty family wreaked havoc on the local people and stole their lands to make huge wealth for themselves. I know about the Cummeragunga walk off and the shanty town on the river flats near Shepparton (from reading the play ‘Rainbow’s End’). I know that my own forebear (Edward Asling who migrated from Nottingham, England in 1841) ‘bought 5 acres of land in the Brighton Estate, part of the Dendy subdivision in April 1846…I do not know whom he ‘bought’ it from…presumably not from the traditional owners. I know he then (‘sometime prior to 1858’) ‘purchased three large blocks of land at auction at Narre Warren North’. I do not know if he was involved in preventing the Woi Warrung people from using and living on that land – probably he was. This land was a place I remember loving very much as a child in the 1940s & 1950s but at that time there were no traces left (that I was aware of) of the original inhabitants or the rich lifestyle they must have led there.

I went to school in the 1950s in the public system in South Yarra and Upwey. I never knowingly met an Aboriginal person. I remember learning about the Myall Creek massacre and feeling shocked and upset but thinking it was an isolated incident (I know better now). I also remember being told that Aborigines were a nomadic stone age people who wore very scant clothing and had a superstitious cultural system in which men were cut to leave scars on their bodies and that some kind of a ‘witchdoctor’ could ‘point the bone’ and cause people to die…I never heard the respectful term ‘elder’. I was told that Aborigines were unreliable as they had a habit of ‘going walkabout’. That Aborigines lived in flimsy shelters called ‘mia mias’, started fire by rubbing sticks together and sharpened stone tools to make spears. I was led to admire the ability to make a boomerang return.

Fully open access and discussion of the terrible history of colonisation and the ongoing repercussions of the brutal destruction of First Nations lifestyles and culture. I would like children to be taught the true history of Australia from 1788 from an early age. I would like children to be able to learn to respect Aboriginal people and to understand the refinement of the culture that European colonisers degraded and tried to destroy. I would like them to know that the land we all live on was stolen and brutally taken from traditional owners.

We can listen. We can continue to put Indigenous texts on to school curricular. We can educate ourselves and acknowledge the destruction that has been carried out on the land and on the culture. We must face up to the thousands of Aboriginal deaths that have been caused by the actions of the British Empire and the deaths that continue to happen as a result of the trauma of dispossession. We can stand in solidarity with First Nations people when they take social actions.

We can listen. We can continue to put Indigenous texts on to school curricular. We can educate ourselves and acknowledge the destruction that has been carried out on the land and on the culture. We must face up to the thousands of Aboriginal deaths that have been caused by the actions of the British Empire and the deaths that continue to happen as a result of the trauma of dispossession. We can stand in solidarity with First Nations people when they take social actions.