Tomorrow will be an historic day for Australia. It could have been a more meaningful day if Indigenous leaders were more involved in the process and if the leaders of all parties with official parliamentary status had been allowed to be part of it, but the purpose of this post is not to discuss this.

As part of my education degree, I completed a compulsory subject on Indigenous Issues in Education. It was created and taught by an all-Indigenous staff and consisted of a journey from the self outwards, examining identity construction. I would count it as one of the most valuable experiences of my life.

As the final task of the subject, we were charged with presenting our findings. Some students created art or wrote essays. I wrote a poem that summed up what I had learned. I am reproducing it here as a reminder that an apology is an infinitesimal first step towards justice for Indigenous Australia.

From the white man to all Indigenous Australians - Why do I do what I do?

I am complicit in the violence of misrepresentation.
I want to be comfortable: my privilege unchallenged.
I say you are equal, ignoring what is institutionalised.
I cover my privilege with “we’re all the same”.

I continue to divide our histories
Because I want to forget the injustices of the past
I want the tragedies to be yours only.
It helps me to deny the injustices of today.

I essentialise you, portray you as one people with one culture
not recognising your many nations.
This gives me the power to make you what I please
while denying you the power to represent yourself.
I don’t want to listen to a story that might shake my foundations.

I call you traditional
and unknowingly denigrate your culture as past.
If it is fossilised, with only a few remaining who truly practise it, you are white when I want you to be and ‘we’re all the same’.

This is why the men who represent all of us say you are not sovereign
that you are citizens of this nation.
They choose to ignore that we are only citizens by your pain.

I have a notion of normal that is everything you are not.
I call you alien, an other, not part of the ‘us’
so I can push you to the edge of my consciousness as ‘too different’
and forget your disadvantage and my obligations to you.

I make you invisible.
I leave you out as though the Mabo decision was never made.
It makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge your place as ‘first’,
To think that I might have to do things differently if I truly embraced equity.

Why can’t I know you?
Because I don’t know myself.
My culture is invisible to me – it is normal, taken-for-granted, unquestioned.

But now that I’m a fish out of water
I can examine that which sustained me.
I can breathe the air of enlightenment.

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