About Reconciliation
Click on the drop down menu "Kulin & Wurundjeri" above for more pages about Melbourne Aboriginal history & culture.
The following was directly transcribed from a series of interviews with Wurundjeri Elder, Ian Hunter, recorded in 2004-5.
My mother [Jessie Hunter] was the one who said that Reconciliation initially is about Aboriginal people coming to terms with where they are and who they are. [...] Non-indigenous Aboriginal people living on other Aboriginal people's country have to reconcile themselves with that and appreciate that fact.
The next stage comes into that humility thing again. If non-Aboriginal people are willing to put their hand out and talk about the wrongs that were done, we will never have Reconciliation until the Aboriginal people are accepting that hand putting out, instead of condemning and not working with the white people.
Reconciliation is where both parties are giving equal and we won't have Reconciliation until Aboriginal people agree with that.
The other part of Reconciliation is education [...] How can non-Aboriginal people reconcile what happened or reconcile the past if they don't know it?
When you can actually educate them and show them that the Aboriginal people were virtually professors in their own rights, of anatomy, biology, astronomy, theology, geometry, flight...all of those things. And it was one old man who would've had to know about all these things to survive in this country.
When you can make people aware of that, that's when they would appreciate [and say] hang on, what we have lost, or what we are still loosing is extremely valuable.
There's already the converted non-Aboriginal people, so you have to get to the non-converted, the ones that go, "I don't want to know about that. If it weren't for us you'd still be living in the trees".
They're the people that need to be converted and that's part of Reconciliation, where we have to work with those people. But you're not going to get the changing of those people's minds with confrontation. You're going to get that with humility and cap in hand, "Can I tell you about it?"
If people have got something in common, that's what we've got to look for I suppose - the thing that's common, not to look at the differences of people. To look at people as what has one person got to enhance another person's ideals.
And one of the best ways to do that is by educating people, I've found is through art, both visual and performing art. Because people have all got that in common [...] and learning more about where we live and where we fit in.
When you have kids yourself, that's one of the things that you want to look at - what are you going to leave for your kids? Not leave aggressive ideals and animosities to other people. When your kids grow up, you want something better for your kids, so that they don't have to put up with the crap that you put up with as a kid.
[...] So that's another of the great summing ups - move on. Move on. Remember those things, but go ahead, move on, don't dwell on them.
My mum had plenty to dwell on - about [...] having to write to see her grandma and her mother [Martha Nevin], she wasn't allowed to live with her mother [Jemima Wandin], but she didn't have any animosities to whites - she married them, they married the whites.
[...] Too many people wanted radical change, instead of just the old traditional way. [...] When I talk to kids about our language, we talk about [how there are] no swear words, no [words to describe] frustration. There must've been frustration, but the frustration was "It'll sort itself out". 
Why be frustrated? Because you're not going to change the way things are at that precise moment. You're not going to stop your thumb hurting, if you've hit it, so why be frustrated over it?
We think that we can control everything, being of European decent. Control and command instead of working with [...] and that's coming back to the radical people - they want to command and control and that's not the Aboriginal way.
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© Aliey Ball (freshwater.net.au) 2006
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