Monica Morgan

Thank you Fred, I would like to pay respects and honour the people of the Kulin nation and whose land we walk on today. I would like to pay recognition to the Indigenous peoples that are here today and also the international guests, if there are any here. But most of all I would like to pay recognition to my people, particularly my mother and my aunties and all the people who made my existence where I am today. Because without the struggle and the force and the continued survival that our people fought for I wouldn't be here today.

The Yorta Yorta people are not just, belong to Victoria our land were created many thousands years ago before there were state borders. We come from a people who were created by Baha'i, and in that creation he created that landscape, he created our river system in which the Murray River, as you know it today, is flowing through our lands. Our lands cover New South Wales and Victoria. In saying that our people have never, in all our years of survival since the first contact was made in 1830s, we have never ceded our sovereignty, we have never said you come take our land. We have never said to open and give all of our heart without anything in return. I have to acknowledge the struggles that my peoples have fought over many years. They have had to fight the genocidal practices that were put on to our people. They had to fight for their very survival in existence, and the land and with a people that tried to alienate us.

In those struggles our people were very much foremost, our people were foremost in the fight for equality, and in that fight in equality we never forgot that we are part of something very significant and that is our connection to our country. Even though the struggle itself has put us on many roads, and has put us through many heartaches, the heartaches that you are hearing with the stolen generation our people still live with today. The heartaches of not being totally in control of the processes that try to take away our language and our laws and our connections to each other. They have survived, they have survived because of sheer will of our people and this will never be taken from us. So it is with that understanding and knowledge and strength that we have fought to the next level.

The next level as it is known as Native Title. I would like to thank and pay homage to those Murray Island people who fought and stood up and said you are not going to take away my existence, you are not going to take away our connections, you are not going to just commit genocidal acts and that act of genocide was when they tried to take away our existence.

Now with Native Title, our people, we have never ceded our sovereignty but we have seen that to be able to progress in a society that is very slow in progressing it took over 200 years for people to acknowledge our existence on this country. So it is going to take a lot longer before people acknowledge that we have got a lot more that is needed by our people.

With the introduction of the Native Title our people saw a way to once more put our thought and strive further. It was a daunting task because Native Title was never expected to be for the people from southern Australia. It was expected that our people had already been wiped out. There was myths told and it is still told in history that we no longer have our connections to our land, we no longer talk our language, we no longer do our dances. But we have kept, and we continue to keep that tradition of survival, of being who we are, of having our kinship links, of having our knowledge about our lands and our culture.

When we put in our Native Title application, we had a number of parties join, there was over 400 parties who joined the application as respondents. Through the process, our people stood with dignity and said this is what we expect to have on our land, we expect to be able to share in the resources of our country, we expect to be able to look after our cultural heritage sites, we expect to be able to look after our environment because if we don't do those things there will not be any being in the next century, there is more than just having a place, it is about survival, it is about having the waterways clean for our children, it is about having the environment that has our animals, our fish all those things that are important to us, that give us our sustenance.

We trusted the Native Title legislation. So we continued to go through a mediation process with over 400 respondents. We said the first thing that we would like to happen is that you respect our existence, we know that who we are and you can stand up there as men and women who have come over to this country, not as our guests, but still we recognise your existence. Not one of those parties recognised our existence. Not one of those could say Yes, we will sit down with you, not even as equals, but as people, they did not want to, did not have one concrete resolution come out of the mediation. Now that is not to say that the process itself is wrong, it is to say that the mindset has not changed yet. There is a long process to happen before the mindset will change, that people can sit and acknowledge our existence.

So the process goes that you go to a federal court system. The federal court system has been very emotional for us, it has meant that our elders, our people have had to put on the line their very existence. We have gone through the process of speaking about the stolen generation, we have had our people say the things that have happened to us, we have talked about the massacres that have occurred on our country, we have talked about how the missionaries tried to contain us and remove us from our country, we have talked about all those things and still our people have stayed strong. They have had to put up with people ridiculing their genealogies, we've had to have people say that they do not exist, they have had people trying to deny their very existence. But still our people stay strong, because we trust that somewhere there is going to be some justice, that there is going to be some light at the end of the tunnel.

Native Title itself is not the answer to all things. People try and box us and say that Native Title is going to be able to give us a relationship with our land. We want more, we want a lot more than just a relationship with our land, we want a say over our land, we want to be a part of our land, we want to know that the policies and the guidelines and those things they come from us as well.

Also it has given a strength to our people, because at times when we were surviving just the mere survival of trying to get our people housing, of trying to keep our young people out of the jails, as were trying to keep our young people from feeling hopelessness about what is around them. As we are trying to do that we are starting to realise that Native Title is not the end all, that we need to look further, and we will look further and this has to be acknowledged that we are looking for a place that gives us our own self government, that gives us our own rights to practice our own laws and customs, that gives us the right to be able to continue and continue into the next century.

But there needs to be a change, a fundamental change in the way this government acts. You are at a cross roads all right, but we're not in a cross road of reconciliation, because reconciliation itself means to acknowledge each other, it needs to go a lot further than that. You have got constitutional changes because when Captain Cook came to this country, he put in a set of laws that were foreign to us. We still operate under those foreign laws and if true reconciliation are going to occur then our laws must meld in with the laws of your society. Before that happens we are not going to be equal, we're still going to be on the perimeters, we are not going to be able to stand up within the part of the whole political play of this country because wealth and power and those type of things are built on the foreign policies that are being brought in, unless you acknowledge our laws and our customs and our traditions and make them a part of a new Australia, we are still going to be on the outer.