#aborigines

'Last night, Victoria's first Treaty passed the Victorian Parliament and will now become a reality.'

'This moment marks the first time in Australia's history that Treaty – an agreement between First Peoples and the state government – has been enshrined into law.'

'The ‘Statewide Treaty Bill 2025’ will make the First Peoples’ Assembly permanent as part of a new First Nations body called Gellung Warl (Gunaikurnai language). Gellung Warl will be able to decide on things like place-naming and cultural practices, support truth-telling education in our schools, and run events like NAIDOC week. It will also have the power to question Ministers directly, holding them to account on things like Closing the Gap. The Treaty Bill will also ensure that the First Peoples’ Assembly is consulted by the state government on legislation affecting Aboriginal people – because when it comes to Aboriginal communities, cultures, and lands, the experts have always been Aboriginal people.'

Original and Indigenous Australians that the mainstream media won’t show you celebrating the New Year.

The Marree Man, a mysterious geoglyph, discovered in the Australian outback in 1998.

Queer, Female, and Aboriginal - Matika Little, a Wiradjuri lesbian.

Growing up in regional New South Wales, finding other queer people – much less Indigenous queer people – felt almost impossible. I didn’t look like the stereotype of either community. I have pale skin, blue eyes and brown hair so I definitely didn’t look like representations of Aboriginal women I saw in the media.

I remember school photo day in my senior year of high school. The Indigenous students were called up for our yearly photo. I stood up, and my teacher stopped me and said, “oh not you Matika, It’s only for the Indigenous girls”. This would not be the last time I would encounter comments like these.

Too white to be black, too black to be white and too femme to be gay. It seemed that finding out where I belonged was going to be harder than I thought.

All too often Australia’s Indigenous queer community can feel like we are invisible. Very little research has gone into understanding or representing First Nations LGBT+ realities or struggles. So our communities often go unheard, unseen and unaided – particularly in regional or rural parts of Australia, where I’m from.

As a Wiradjuri woman who also identifies as lesbian, I would be lying if I said I haven’t also faced depression, even self-harmed in the past as a result of feeling hopeless, feeling unwanted and struggling to find positive representation of my people in the media.

I used to think that my Indigenous and queer identities had to exist separately, that embracing one made me less of the other. Luckily, with age comes wisdom, and today I realise that Aboriginal and LGBT+ people have more in common than I thought. It’s the very thing I had been worried about never truly having.

In 2017 I marched in the First Nations float of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. At 21 years of age, it was the first time in my life I truly felt two of the most important parts of my identity coming together as one.

As I walked down Oxford St with an Aboriginal flag tied to my back, surrounded by glitter, pride flags and love, I could finally see all I had ever wanted was right there in front of me. This was my community, these were the people I had been searching for in those times of self-doubt and isolation.