Today marks the beginning of National Reconciliation Week from 26 May to 3 June.

The University of Melbourne Student Union Inc (UMSU) acknowledges the long and disgraceful history on which the foundations of modern Australia stand. The theme of Bridging Now to Next, speaks to the continuing connection between past, present and future. We are a country that continues to bear a flag bearing a symbol of oppression to Indigenous Australians. We are a country that continues to incarcerate Indigenous Austrlaians as a vastly disproportionate rate. We, as the state of Victoria, take apparent pride in changing bail laws to further exacerbate the incarceration of Indigenous children.

As was codified in the first volume of Dhoombak Goobgoowana, the University of Melbourne has a history of oppressing the original owners of the land on which we study. The academics of our institution, and the community more broadly, have perpetuated inequality by supporting ‘injustices called progress, half-truths presented as facts, and prejudices pretending at objectivity’.¹ However, acknowledgement of this history is the first, and in many ways the easiest, step towards reconciliation.

We must, as a community, be active in advocating for reform and avoid the trend of tokenistic gestures and platitudes that serve as a means of settler-descended Australians alleviating guilt without progressing our country towards reconciliation. The failure of the Voice referendum serves as a startling, albeit not unexpected, reminder of the vast gulf between contemporary Australia and a version of Australia free of discrimination and absent of the systemic repression of Indigenous Australians that continues to undermine our supposed values of diversity, inclusion and ensuring a fair go for all.

As was stated by the then Prime Minister, Paul Keating, in his Redfern Speech in 1992:

‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.

We brought the diseases. The alcohol.

We took the children from their mothers.

We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice.

And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.’

All members of the University of Melbourne community must take an active role towards reconciliation, passive observance is not sufficient.