“I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains”
I’m reminded of those words as I stand here on Kaurna country; hard earth beneath my feet and hot wind sweeping across my face.
It’s this feeling that tells me that I’m home.
Kaurna land is truly beautiful. The city is almost entirely encompassed by vast bushland that expands from the York Peninsula (Guuranda) nearly up to Port Augusta (Goordnada) and all the way back down to Cape Jervis (Parewarangk). To the West of Adelaide, we have the open water that is St Vincent’s Gulf (Wongajerla) and out to the Indian Ocean.
This may not be the place of my ancestors, but it was the place that I came into the world and spent my early years and childhood.
I sit here and ponder that.
I ponder the deep spiritual connection I feel to this land and for the first time really consider what it means to be on Aboriginal Land. I think to myself, if this is the connection that I feel to country, how much stronger is it for First Nations Peoples. One hundred, one thousand, sixty thousand, four hundred thousand times stronger perhaps? And the weight of that really hit me.
This moment was brought on by the Bachelorette and Brooke’s friend asking the final two if they know what country they live and work on. I felt smug about it at the time. Yes of course, I know the original custodians of where I live and work (The Gadigal/Cammeraygal People of the Eora Nation).
But I was considering why I know that.
I was still in school when Welcome/Acknowledgement of Country first came to be following Kevin Rudd’s official apology to First Nations Peoples. Every school assembly I would be reminded that I was on Kaura land. This continued into my university years. When I moved to Sydney and started tutoring in the middle of COVID, I had to look up whose land I was on as my classes were online so this information couldn’t be provided in the slides as it would be different for everyone. So in sum, I know because I’ve had to know, not because I did this on my own accord and all of sudden I felt ashamed by that.
No my ancestors weren’t responsible for the atrocities whereby Australia came to be (my family migrated to Australia in the 1950s from an impoverished warn-torn Italy). But even if my ancestry was Ango-Saxon, who was responsible to me, is missing the point. What can we all do now to preserve and celebrate Aboriginal (and Torres Strait Islander) culture and I don’t think I am doing enough.
I want to be a part of the conversation and I want to involve myself. Restoring the rights of First Nations peoples are and should be every Australians responsibility.
So I’m here for it, I’m open and I’m willing to learn. I acknowledge that I cannot drive this, that should come from First Nations and only First Nations Peoples. But I will be an ally and I will do everything I can.
