We live on the land of the Wurundjeri People

Welcome to the website of the Nillumbik Reconciliation Group Inc.

The NRG is a volunteer-based, non-profit incorporated group committed to furthering the process of reconciliation with Australia's Indigenous peoples – the first Australians. Based in the Shire of Nillumbik, which includes the Melbourne suburb of Eltham and surrounding areas, the Group aims to cultivate and promote the issues of reconciliation in our local region. Click on the links down the left hand side of the page to find out more.

Original website design: Mark Lowrie. NRG logo design: Elizabeth Savage Kooroonya

Last updated: 9th June, 2009

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 Nillumbik Reconciliation Group Inc. Nillumbik Reconciliation Group does not object to its articles being reprinted provided they are not edited and the source is properly acknowledged. However, please note that this website may also contain articles and/or images copyright to other organisations or individuals.

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THE PAST MATTERS

Nillumbik Reconciliation Group and Eltham Bookshop:

A Reconciliation week event 29-30 May & 2nd June 2009

Opening address by Elizabeth Savage Kooroonya

As an Indigenous woman, I usually have a lot to say about past matters, but my presence here today is shadowed by my recent life events. There are however threads of commonality in both stories.

In the last few weeks I have had the painful task of returning to the ruins of my home; in a sense, the ashes of my life and all it represents. Futilely searching through the ashes I did not find anything that I wanted to find; nothing of material intactness, nothing of emotional, spiritual preciousness. No physical, touchable, visible evidence of my life, my children’s lives, my Aboriginal heritage, And nothing of my husband’s life and of our life together, our creativity of more than thirty years laid waste as ruins and ashes. I gazed on scorched earth, the place where Graeme passed from this life. It seemed like we had never existed, that any idea of a past had been completely obliterated. My only existence an unbearable now.

But this unbearable now begs some questions: does this grief not mean there is a past. That this past matters? That this past will enable me to create a future?

Almost invisible amongst the rubble there was one thing intact and remaining; a tower of jumbled metal inexpertly welded into a sculpture, perhaps eight or nine feet high. To an outsider, just junk; to my children, their childhood friend, and myself something pricelessly precious. Our memories, our lives. The tower, always there, was now a tangible symbol of Dad, invoking so many associations. As children they had scrambled around finding all sorts of scrap metal – horse shoes, chains, bits of re-o, rusty old tools, rabbit traps and discarded plough teeth; Dad was teaching them how to weld.

With a hacksaw a friend cut through the anchors; we carefully toppled the tower, and lifted it into the trailer. We took it to the new house and stood it up just inside the front gate. Still an unfathomable pile of junk to an outsider; perhaps eventually to again become ‘invisible’ even to ourselves, it will always represent something from ‘the past’, our story, something which is in the very fabric of our being. The nurturance of a loving Dad, embodied as part of self and now brought into consciousness as memories. In this sense the past is always the present.

Facts of time and events are not the only dimension of ‘past’. The fact of the fire is one thing; the impact, and our engagement with this is another, and day after day I listen to the Royal Commission as I, and indeed all of us, seek to understand why and how. In my life the fires will never be a past matter.

But what is this thing we call ‘the past’?
I think of ‘the past’ as lived lives
I think of ‘the past’ as cause and effect
I think of ‘the past’ as story; personal story, collective story, a multitude of stories
I think of ‘the past’ as knowledge, empowerment and inspiration
I think of ‘the past’ as a source of strength, and as a precious gift

But I also think of ‘the past’ as a jail, a confine from which there is no escape; this is because when past is unexamined, it maintains privilege and marginalization; rights and opportunity for some are taken for granted while injustices and lack of opportunity for others become normalized and invisible.

Past can give no surety because it can be an imagined ‘truth’ claimed for privilege and power, for maintaining the status quo, for shirking responsibility and, ironically, for denying the truth. Selected versions of the past have been appropriated, and claimed as mega narratives, promoted as valid, valued and valorised whereas selected other pasts have been denied, disputed and silenced.

Sometimes the past is conceptualized as ‘ancient’, as ‘in the olden days’, as historical, over and done with and somehow not connected to the present. These versions allow a convenient denial of the impact of past matters on contemporary lives. They have been used to objectify Indigenous peoples in government practices and policies, in research, land appropriation and social attitudes. Today they have become a way of distancing Indigenous people through language and representations with words like ‘traditional’ and ‘authentic’ and images of desert, difference and dysfunction.

No doubt our guest speakers will be unpacking these issues more thoroughly than I, but to finish up, I have a couple more comments. I wonder if western societies have become self-consciously obsessed with hanging onto the trappings and tangibles of the past; nothing can be allowed to be ephemeral. But I ask what is the point in amassing cultural artifacts and accounts of events if we have no interest in the meaning of these and the impact on lived lives. I like the pun contained in the title of this conference: Past Matters. While I hope we can all agree that ‘past matters matter‘, it is how and why they matter which is important.

The past is the warp and weft in the fabric of ourselves. It is who we are, what we know, how we live, it is our embodiment. None of us, least of all those of us affected by the fires, nor Indigenous people affected by generations of dispossession and marginalization will ever ‘just get over it’ as we are so frequently told we will do or should do. The past is not a past matter; it is a present matter and it matters.

Thankyou

See also:

Bonded by pasts and futures

Article in the Diamond Valley Leader:

http://diamond-valley-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/bonded-by-pasts-and-futures/

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Download NRG Newsletter #38 (May, 2009) (160KB)

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THE WURUNDJERI CULTURE RESOURCE KIT

IS NOW AVAILABLE ON DISC

The Wurundjeri Culture Resource Kit has been completely updated and is now available on CD-ROM.

The kit is primarily targeted at children in the primary years, and as the title implies it is particularly relevant to the Yarra Valley and surrounding areas – Wurundjeri country.

However, other regions would find much that is relevant, and would also see ways in which they would be able to particularise it to their areas.

You can download a preview of the first ten pages here (1MB pdf file). The CD-ROM includes files to print a board game up to A2 size.

The price of the kit for individuals, churches and Indigenous organisations is $30; for others – such as institutions, schools and local councils – it is $50.

Please contact the Secretary for further information.

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From: http://www.diamondvalleyleader.com.au/article/2008/02/20/29796_dvv_news.html

You can download a printable version of this article here (139KB)

Spirits rise after a sorry saga

Engel Schmidl
20th February, 2008

NILLUMBIK'S Sorry Day flag-raising ceremony was a small piece in the national mosaic that marked a long-awaited, emotional event.

The low-key ceremony at the civic centre, organised by Nillumbik Reconciliation Group (NRG), first and foremost recognised the pain and grief of the Stolen Generations.

But it also recognised the grassroots role played by groups across Australia such as the NRG in keeping the flame lit for an issue that only a couple of years ago appeared to have been extinguished.

As local historian and group patron Mick Woiwod watched children from Apollo Parkways Primary School raise the Aboriginal flag, he reflected that the day marked a new horizon for Australia.

``You need to start with something symbolic to underpin the practical,'' Mr Woiwod said.

For NRG members, there was a sense of finally reaching the end of a long, dark tunnel the journey was not over yet, but the darkness had lifted.

``There's been a feeling of deadness about these issues,'' Mr Woiwod said.

``It's kept going with local groups but there was a deadening in the community about issues such as reconciliation.''

Kelli Curr grew up in the Diamond Valley and met her partner, Ricky Drill, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, where he was born.

They moved to Smiths Gully six years ago for the benefit of their children's education.

Mr Drill, a noted indigenous artist, is a traditional owner of the Purnululu (Bungle Bungles) National Park near Warmun, Turkey Creek.

``It's recognition. It gives people the freedom to move on with their lives,'' he said of the local ceremony and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology speech in Parliament.

Ms Curr was impressed with Mr Rudd's speech.

``It felt like more than just saying sorry,'' she said.

``It felt really sincere and it feels like it came from the heart.''

NRG president Jan Aitken said the day was the culmination of work local groups had done to keep the reconciliation issue alive.

Ms Aitken said the group had worked with the council since 1998 to make symbolic events such as flag-raising ceremonies a regular event in Nillumbik.

The day carried a ``sense of relief and self-respect undermined in the past by the absence of an apology'', Ms Aitken said.

``There was a sincerity of spirit that has perhaps been lacking and the raising of the flag here today marks this new spirit,'' she said.

Nillumbik Mayor Warwick Leeson ran through a potted history of landmark moments in Aboriginal Australia's history in his speech to the crowd.

He said the apology to the stolen generations ranked as ``one of the giant leaps in Australian history''.

This historic moment, shared across the nation at similar ceremonies and larger gatherings such as that in Federation Square, spoke not only about healing a symbolic rift.

It paid tribute to the passionate persistence of groups such as the Nillumbik Reconciliation Group.