10 July - 13 August Bengerang
Suzy is also a neighbour. She lives a
few streets away in Waterloo. Coincidently her terraced house is part of a row
identified as a heritage item by the City of Sydney Council in their recent
rezoning of our area. Inadvertently they point to the fact that an Australia
heritage is a faceted condition. Irrespective of our ancestry, indigenous,
settler or migrant, in Australia we are part of our countries heritage,
described in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 as stretching “from the
creation, according to common law from ”time immemorial”, and
according to science more than 60,000 years ago.” Concurrently as Australians
we are responsible for and to our heritage that stretches from the beginning to
the present and into the future.
In 1967, perhaps belatedly the people
of the Commonwealth of Australia voted at a referendum to include Aboriginal
and Torres Straits Islanders
in their settler society. Soon there will be a corresponding referendum
prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart that is an invitation from the Indigenous
people of Australia to join them in what will become our country.
We must accept this profound invitation. It has proposed a referendum that will recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the constitution and give voice to their heritage in parliament. It behoves us to ask, what does this mean? And the point is that we don’t know what it means yet. The point is that we have to invent what it means and what it means as Suzy Evans might say - to become the all of the Australian people - to stand at the next beginning of our culture.
Tony Twigg
