In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Some years ago I was at the lunch of a relative around Australia Day, when unfortunately I became embroiled in an argument about the treatment of the First Peoples of this country and newly arrived immigrants to Australia.

In my opinion, these persons showed ignorance and apathy towards the First Peoples of this land.  Australian history is replete with stories of their treatment by the white colonisers, many of whom were Christians who had attended church in the morning, then after lunch had gone out with their friends, shooting First Peoples for sport.  The First Peoples of this land were treated as curios, as savages, their brains and skulls removed and sent back to England for research purposes in an effort to determine the origins of this strange people, who wore little clothing, spoke an alien language and fought with spears against the white men with guns who had robbed them of their land, their lives and their heritage.  According to one of the persons I confronted at that lunch, this behaviour was excusable because it happened over two hundred years ago!  Excusable indeed!

Another brief anecdote – recently a friend at our home for lunch repeated a remark from a tour guide in the Northern Territory, who stated that the brains of our First Peoples were smaller than those of other races!  I could go on, but I choose not to.

Many of us have heard or read about Truganini, considered to be the last of the full-blooded indigenous women of Tasmania.  Born on Bruny Island off the south-east coast of Tasmania around 1812, she was a daughter of the Chief of the Bruny Island people and had strong bloodlines with the people of the Kulin Nations, the original custodians of the land on which this church building stands.  By 1829, her mother had been killed by sailors, her sister abducted by sealers, her uncle shot by a soldier and her fiancé brutally murdered by timber-cutters who then repeatedly sexually abused her.  Unsurprisingly, she later joined a gang of outlaws operating in Dandenong and South Gippsland and was wounded when being captured by colonial soldiers.

Before her death in 1876, fearing that her body would be mutilated in the cause of science, like many of her kin had, Truganini pleaded that her body be cremated and ashes scattered in the sea near Bruny Island.  Notwithstanding her plea, two years after her death, her body was exhumed by the Royal Society of Tasmania and placed on display.  Approaching the centenary of her death, her remains were finally cremated and scattered according to her wishes.  In 1997, a museum in Exeter, England returned her necklace and bracelet to Tasmania and in 2002 some of her hair and skin was found in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in England and returned to Tasmania for burial.

Australian history has by and large been written by the Second Peoples, who wrote history from their own point of view and successive Australian governments have persisted in the fallacy that this country was ‘Terra Nullius’, a Latin term meaning that the land belonged to no one, before the arrival of the colonisers from the West, completely and deliberately ignoring the fact that archaeology and palaeontology had proven that the First Peoples had occupied this continent for at least forty thousand years. They used this fallacious claim to justify British colonisation and establish subsequent Australian land laws, thus justifying British occupation without treaty or payment to the First Peoples.  The claim was challenged through the Australian legal system, but it was not until the successful appeal by Eddie Mabo in the High Court of Australia in 1992, that ‘Terra Nullius’ was overturned and the Indigenous Peoples of Australia were granted land rights in their own country.

Even Christian missionaries, though many may have been well-intentioned in their own eyes, cannot be absolved from blame and we have acknowledged this in the Day of Mourning liturgy.  Working with Australian governments, First Peoples were herded into reserves, the children of the Stolen Generation dragged from their families and forced to give up their rich languages and cultures, as a result of which many have been lost for all time.

In 1992, in response to the Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, I visited Alice Springs – the symbolic heart of Australia – to facilitate a three-day conference by senior members of Australian police forces, directed to respond with meaningful strategies to the unacceptably high rate of incarceration and suicide in police custody.  Despite all the high-minded resolutions passed at that conference, thirty years later nothing has changed as coronial reports will show.

History has shown time and time again, that memories, especially bad ones, are extremely difficult, if not impossible to erase.  We have seen this in the United States, where the memory of slavery, ill-treatment of the blacks and discrimination on the basis of colour has persisted and continues to cast an immense shadow over race relations. In Zimbabwe, it led to the exodus of the whites post-independence from Britain as their farms were taken over by the black population. In Sri Lanka the contempt and hostility shown by the Christian missionaries to the Buddhists they wished to convert has been kept alive by successive generations over the centuries by word of mouth, teaching in Buddhist schools and a multitude of books, magazine articles and speeches by the Buddhist priesthood and prominent Buddhist leaders as a tool to promote their political agenda.

In Australia it is no different.   Bad memories of mistreatment remain.  Someone who works for a well-known national Christian mission charity told me recently that many First Peoples hesitate about interacting with the charity, suspicious of their motives, because of the connotation of the word ‘mission’ and the damage to their heritage wrought by Christian missionaries.

In a genuine effort to heal some of the deep wounds between First and Second Peoples, in 1997 the Rudd Government issued in Parliament, its Apology to the Stolen Generations and in 2018 the Day of Mourning was endorsed by the 15th Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia arising from a request of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress. These are positive moves towards reconciliation, but as individuals and as a body of the church in Dandenong, we have to take meaningful steps ourselves.

In the readings brought to us by Amma and Manova today, we have heard God’s appeal for peace, faithfulness and steadfast love through the Psalmist and Jesus enjoining his disciples, ‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments’.

In closing may I add two very recent and powerful observations:

The first from a survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Poland, in a TV interview last week on the Holocaust who said, ‘I don’t live in the past – the past lives in me’.  We are conditioned by our past, by the experiences of our parents, our ancestors;  we are who we are and nothing can change that.  We cannot consistently lock out bad memories, but to heal, we have to learn to use them constructively.

Recognising that their cultural and religious heritage, orally transmitted through the centuries, would be lost if they were not committed to writing, the educated Jews returning from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century BCE, are credited with writing the first five books of the Old Testament in their present form – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

The second by President Joe Biden in his inaugural address: ‘To heal, we must remember, but we must also act’.  His message is clear – healing has two inseparable  interactions.  When we see injustice, we must not sit on the sidelines, we must call it out for what it is and take meaningful steps towards amelioration.

These are fundamental lessons for us on this Day of Mourning 2021.  Go in Peace. Amen.