Bridging the Divide !

We are about to spend fifty million dollars to create a memorial to the day that Captain James Cook first stepped ashore at Kurnell on April 29, 1770.   To the ancestors of the first settlers that commemorates the birth of what has evolved as the Australian nation but to the Indigenous people who were already living here it represents the arrival of invaders who imposed laws and a foreign culture on their people.

Exactly what is planned has yet to be formalised but it is hoped that it is something that is acceptable to both cultures to commemorate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of that historic moment in 2020.  At present, the landing  place is marked by a simple plaque attached to a very ordinary stone monument.

In recent times, other monuments to Cook and the British establishment of a penal colony in Australia have been vandalized with slogans such as  " change the date " and " No pride in genocide " painted on the visual surfaces.  There is a hard core of Indigenous people who refuse to recognise that Australia is now the property of the twenty-four million people who have Australian citizenship.  They promote the catch cry " Aboriginal land.  Always was.  Always will be " !

From a practical point of view, that is tilting at windmills.  There is no doubt that the British arrived here uninvited, but it is also a fact that they established their colony by force of arms.  They were cruel and inhuman to the prisoners that they came to guard and there is no doubt that genocide was inflicted on some Indigenous people.  Those events are consigned to history and both the victims and the perpetrators have been dead for scores of years.

The Aboriginal people of Australia are very much a part of that twenty-four million that call this country home and they are entitled to the rewards that its success delivers.  That does not mean that they must abandon their culture or their aboriginality.   The country can not go back to the way of life they lived in 1770 because the world is now different to that period.  The only way forward is a form of integration, and with good will on both sides that is possible.

That historic day in 1770 saw the old and the new Australia come face to face.  We still have a way to go before all our Indigenous people have the lifestyle this nation offers but that is progressing and it will be achieved. Indigenous people are represented in all walks of life and what is now important is the improvement to health culture and the extension of educational opportunities to widely dispersed Aboriginal young people.

It is hoped that the plan to create this commemoration of Cook's landing will be a joint venture between both cultures.  This is now a shared land and it is important that it be a prosperous country in a troubled world, and that will only happen if we settle our differences and accept that we are a united people.

What happened in the past is a matter for the history books, but Cook was part of that culture and his arrival can not be ignored.   This commemoration of a historical fact needs to be accepted as the creation of a new Australian nation that equally encompasses those that lived before Cook with those that came after.  Perhaps this is the bridging point that we need to bring together both sides in reconsolidation.