My ancestors shaped our Country with a culture based on the principles of respect, behavioural protocols and integrity under a strict code of laws.
I am from the Bundjalung nation, a proud Widjabul Wia-bal woman with Irish/Scottish and Anglo heritage.
From a young age, I was told the stories of Bundjalung Country, the stories of England, Scotland and Ireland, including the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
But it was the gentle guidance, the pride, the knowing of the seasons, and my dad’s secret whispers at night, reminding us of the language of the plants, animals and rivers during our childhood, we knew we were different. By the time we entered school, we also knew there was a shame we carried.
Our cultural belonging is something we have built and developed with an extraordinary level of capacity and resilience, through innovation and adaptability to all things.
Today’s information and new communication technologies are no exception and it’s a year that will test some of us.
We will react to the content on social media and content platforms, we will debate, ensure the transmission of knowledge, question systemic behaviour and walk the streets demanding we are heard.
But let’s address cultural amnesia.
Mapping country
The hundreds of distinct Aboriginal nations, each with their own strict laws, were seen as one homogeneous group by the invading British. Those laws, their sovereignty and their humanity were ignored by the colonists.
They lived as a people constantly adapting but now is a time to advance progress, remembering and remaining true to the eons of oral storytelling, the seasonal behaviours, accepting the obligations, stewardship and responsibilities under tried and tested knowledge structures and systems.
On New Year's Day 1901, the British colonies of Australia formed a federation. At the same time, there were many clans and language groups who were associated and living on their estates across the rich fertile lands of Northern NSW and Southeast Queensland.
When senior leaders met at Tucki Tucki for the annual ceremonies, it was clear new colonial borders were being drawn up with little regard for the existing Country borders and skin groups.
At that time, the traditional lands of my family's associated moieties and clan groups extended to Grafton and the Clarence River in the south connecting with our Yaegl and Gumbaynggirr neighbours.
It extended up to southern Queensland, sharing borders with the Yuggera and Barrunggam Nations on the Logan River. To the west, our neighbours were the Ngarabal Nation.
With that wisdom, men and women formed the federation of our varying clans which would then be known as the Bundjalung Nation.
My great grandfather Lyle Roberts Snr was the last Bundjalung man to go through full business – he was a lore man and could see the future of his people.
I can only marvel at his grace and patience and the two worlds he learned to walk in.
The outlawing was growing in momentum, where all things treasured, the religious/spiritual ceremonies, the coming-of-age rituals, and cultural practices enabling the stewardship of Country were now consistently labelled by the western authorities and the missionaries as barbaric and the work of the devil.
Understanding that Aboriginal life was changing forever, Grandfather Lyle, known as Boogul, set down three principles for us, his descendants.
Those three principles were to retain pride in our race and colour, to retain our identity and language, and to consider relationships with other people to make the best of a new life.
He believed if we adhered to his values, there would be progress for his people.
Like Grandfather Lyle, there has been a long line of cultural leaders, many who were language men and women, political campaigners and knowledge holders.
Then there were also boxing champions in the family, including my cousins, uncles and grandfather Frank Roberts Snr.
The boxing matches were such social gatherings and in 1927 a young boxer known as Ironbark ventured to the north coast town of Casino for a bout, and it was a trip that would change his life.
He met local beauty Selina Avery from Yulgilbar and when they married in 1931 at Tabulam, Jack Patten (Ironbark) became part of the Bundjalung kinship system.
Jack was appalled by the living conditions across the North Coast, in communities deemed missions and managed by the Aborigines Protect Board.
He forged new friendships, meeting like-minded men and women who created space for dangerous dialogue, amongst them the call for citizenship and civil rights.
Along with our cultural and political leaders, they began to talk about the organisations, the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) and others that had formed such as the Aborigines Advancement League (AAL) with many across the country joining their membership.
It was the start of a new era, a civil rights renaissance, and my family was heavily involved.
At the 1937 Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into the administration of the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board, William Ferguson read out correspondence sent to the APA.
The letters were scathing in their condemnation of the poor treatment of Aboriginal people by the Aborigines Protection Board.
One that was read was penned by my Grandfather, and was introduced as being from Frank Roberts Snr, a Bundjalung man from Tuncester.
"It is terrible," he wrote.
"Words cannot express what is scandalous treatment by the Destruction Board… The Aborigines Protection Board made conditions so hard that I was forced to leave the settlement and through persecution of the board… I am without a home."
Grandfather was one of the organisers of what would become the National Day of Mourning.
The untold story
Prior to 1935, the day of January 26 was known as First Landing Day or Foundation Day.
In 1935, when the then-colonised states and territories of Australia began to mark Australia Day on that date, there was the desire to build a national celebration leading to the sesquicentenary (150 years) since Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet landed at Warrane (Sydney Cove).
There was an increased momentum across Aboriginal communities that the date for the 150-year celebrations should be marked as a national 'Day of Mourning'.
In November 1937 in Melbourne, William Cooper called a meeting of the Aboriginal Advancement League (AAL).
At the gathering was the founder of the Aborigines Progressive Association, William Ferguson, Jack Patten became the President of the APA and both men set an agenda for the civil rights movement in Australia.
On January 12, 1938, they published the Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! pamphlet for the National Day of Mourning.
In it, they declared: "We do not ask you to study us as scientific freaks … the superstition that we are a naturally backward and low race … shows a jaundiced view of anthropologists' motives".
The government control
The Darling River that inspired some of Henry Lawson’s work runs through the freshwater lands of Paakantyi (Barkindji) in Western NSW, the first town of the region was established and named Menindee.
By the early 1930s, some 11kms from the fringes of the town centre, a new government Aboriginal Station was erected with the sole purpose of dislocating clans off their homelands to make way for pastoralists and continuing the government's rhetoric of the Aboriginal dying race propaganda.
Alongside the Barkindji, many men, women and children, were rounded up, thrown onto trucks and trains and transported from Wilcannia, Pooncarie Reserve and Broken Hill as well as other western NSW nations such as the Ngiyampaa people from the Carowra Tank mission.
Together they were held at Menindee at the Aboriginal Mission Station.
By January of 1938, Government officials had selected the best dancers and singers from the Aboriginal Mission Station and told them they were required to perform cultural dances in Sydney.
If they did not perform and cooperate in the role of 'retreating Aborigines' for the re-enactment of the First Fleet segment as part of the sesquicentenary opening celebrations, the officials informed and threatened the men, and their families would starve.
The proud men had little choice and to ensure they did not change their minds and or get assistance from the Aborigines Progressive Association and its supporters, the dancers were held and locked in police barracks.
They returned home and were silent not wanting to upset their children, but inwardly they had struggled and were deeply troubled culturally.
On January 10, 1939, just a year later ... Sydneysiders would hear of Menindee in western NSW, recording the hottest state temperature at 49.7 °C.
You can only imagine how those men and their families fared in their tin huts under the scorching sun and lived under a daily regime of fear and government threats.
But it would be many years until white Australia grasped the truth, cultural shame, and trauma behind those celebrations.
The Day of Mourning was not only about the march – it was also a time of remembrance of those ancestors who some 150 years earlier had witnessed the Barangga, the big vessel, returning to our shores on January 26, this time into the heartland of the grass tree peoples, the Gadigal.
These white visitors did not recognise our lore and strict border control, they refused to observe the protocol or seek invitation, rather they came with a vengeance, greed, and a very different philosophy of what land and progress was.
For Aboriginal people, there was the honouring of the 1789 New Year’s Eve event, when the forced kidnapping of a civilian called Arabanoo occurred.
He is regarded as the first political prisoner who had not committed any criminal offence and was chained and held against his will by government.
The 1938 march was captured by the media and made history, and at 1.30pm that afternoon the First National Meeting of Aboriginal People For Citizenship Rights was held at the Australian Hall on Elizabeth Street in Sydney.
Chaired by Jack Patten, he was joined on stage by Bill Ferguson, Doug Nicholls, William Cooper and Jack Kinchela.
About a hundred civil rights campaigners attended including some of our great leaders who were also the organisers representing their communities, included were Margaret Tucker, Selina Patten (Jack’s wife), , Jack Johnson, Mrs F Ardler, Bert Marr, Frank Roberts, Tom Peckham, Henry Noble, Jack Kinchella, , Ted Duncan, Robert McKenzie, Louisa Agnes Ingram, Doris Williams, Tom Foster and Helen Grosvenor.
There is no denying the world is a harsh place and we like many others have felt demoralised but our custodians and Elders continue to take the hits, some fall, but others get up and keep taking those knock backs, socially, culturally and politically.
They have taught us a stark lesson, to stand your ground against all odds. And that you may not be popular, you will even be seen as a threat, and labelled angry and divisive.
But those lessons are based on a moral fibre that is better and resounds daily in the telling of our stories – perhaps those boxers relied on their training to help them face the onslaught head-on, round after round, year after year, over and over again.
Some 84 years after my grandfather marched the streets in the fight for equality, time and time again, we’re still talking about changing the date.
When I reflect on the talks back then and the topics for consideration based on the deep loss of sovereign rights, and while there have been some great wins, it appears in 2023 the dialogue on January 26 remains similar.
So how do we combine all the above to inform Australians that a specific and sensitive date can be considered a catalyst for change?
The advancement of our sovereign Voice
Many thought advancement had arrived and the nation's behaviour would change, when in 1973 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had been declared by the Australian newspapers broadsheet as the Australian of the Year.
It was due to the discourse that erupted with the government's leading agendas, which included peace in the Vietnam war, introducing no-fault divorce and taking control of Indigenous policy.
We still all met on January 26, 1973, and gathered across communities, towns and cities to honour our Day of Mourning and to never forget.
Fifty years ago we had a new flag. One that defined us and those colours gave us something that connected the mob and a new pride as we carried the colours.
It cemented my identity as a young teenager.
In February 1973 a young Kuku Yalanji girl was born, she would also be transformative through sport, when she ran, the nation's desire was to get to know her a little more and when she won gold - together our pride was palpable as a nation.
She became a global icon with a race that literally stopped the world. Although prior to her greatest race in 2000, again Cathy Freeman was warned by officials not to carry the Aboriginal Flag.
So she boldly got inked - with a tattoo of the flag and an inscription that read cos we're free on her right side, for audiences to see. Cathy also made history as the only person to have won both Australian of the Year and Young Australian of the Year awards.
In 2021, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison was very contentious and deliberate with a . The nation's response was one of encouragement – she was still our Cathy.
"You know on Australia Day, it’s all about acknowledging how far we’ve come. When those 12 ships turned up in Sydney all those years ago, it wasn’t a particularly flash day for the people on those vessels either," Mr Morrison said.
Cathy’s response and tone reverberated across the nation.
“You can’t compare the experiences of those 12 ships that first arrived to this country to what their arrival meant for all generations of Australia’s First Nations people!”
Unpacking January 26 more broadly
In 2021, Stan Grant said: "Every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country’s history."
Is January 26 now perhaps the commencement to internally own our truth? The dark history, warts and all?
There are many deep questions we need to probe and as we have witnessed, there are many personal opinions about the date. But there are other areas relating to our sovereignty, identity and unceded territories that need to be explored to give weight and evidence to our future discourse.
We all are aware the custodians have always passed on the knowledge of respect, and what we now call deep listening. We were always told – you do not steal, there is abundance for all, treat Country with the love you afford your mother, like her, Country is the giver of life.
So when the theft began, there was confusion, and with that uncertainty came the trauma of a landscape so pillaged it was left visibly bruised. Those who depended on the abundance have still not recovered and we need to reconsider all needs with care, thought and regard.
Once the outlawing occurred through colonisation – there was an abrupt onslaught to our mapping of Country – previously in the old ways, every generation travelled homelands – and knew place through the six seasons, the geographical formation through story.
I am trying each year to develop a future thinking lens. But like many humans, there are always those times the anger rises and through the silent rage I personally question the nation's state of play.
I question the senseless death of a teenager returning from school.
I rage over the statistics and the incarceration numbers.
I interrogate the rise of intolerance across the generations.
I speculate how we find a solution for self-medicating and turning on ourselves.
I wonder when justice for the many missing and murdered will begin.
I deliberate why my mother was labelled and disrespected as a woman, just because of her interracial love.
And now I examine why we cannot accept there are many opinions, responses, options and choices in the 21st century and our level of communication and listening has disintegrated.
Am I wrong to think over the last few years we are becoming so intolerant when we do not agree – can we find the resolution, that it's okay to have varying views and we are simply not shouted down?
Looking ahead
As we head into 2023, there are many positives – we are more than the wounds that have perpetuated our shared history.
There are elements of our cultures, where communities are full of joy today. They are picking up the fragments and revitalising what remains be that through elements of ceremony, language and the important reclamation of our songlines connecting us across Australia.
This healing is recommenced the mapping of Country.
While life in the colony has changed us all dramatically, there are now the new platforms that amplify who and why we are.
This year the very vital and necessary dialogue we need to embrace for truth, treaty and a voice, will raise some distressing realities for some – and there is still the need for deeper conversations, so we are all able to grasp the future outcomes of a different but inclusive tomorrow and every opinion needs to be heard and listened to.
We need to understand what the structure, the actual plumbing of a Voice to Parliament involves and how it will operate. What is its mechanism that will achieve the humanity and compassion included in its aspirations that is determined through an Indigenous viewpoint.
Perhaps January 26 is a time we can find the generosity to embrace each other and have those uncomfortable conversations — ensuring the knowledge systems set down by ancestors are honoured and valued.
Shifting our mindsets, and considering the equality of a Voice is perhaps a catalyst for change for this century.
Rhoda Roberts AO is the SBS Elder in Residence and has amassed an extensive career as an art curator, actress, director, writer and arts executive. In 1990, she became the first Indigenous person to host a mainstream prime-time current affairs program in Australia.
