NSW Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg is right. There is "a gaping hole in the heart of Canberra" whose very existence is eloquent proof of what he describes as "the great Australian silence" on reconciliation and our Indigenous heritage.
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That hole is the glaring absence of any formal, institutional, or architectural recognition of the First Nations peoples who were stewards of this country for at least 60,000 years before the arrival of Europeans.
Those incursions led to a massive decline in the Indigenous population through violence, a malign neglect, and exposure to diseases such as small pox and measles. Modern Australia, perhaps more than any other country, was built on the foundations laid by often deliberate, but sometimes unintended, acts of genocide. This is a truth white Australia has refused to acknowledge to itself for almost two centuries.
Charles Darwin, on a visit to New South Wales in 1836, considered the process to be inevitable: "The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals - the stronger always extirpating the weaker," he wrote.
One of the first acts committed by the crew of the "Endeavour" on meeting Indigenous Australians was to fire on them. The "Gweagal Shield", complete with a hole from a musket ball, has been part of the British Museum's permanent collection for centuries. It is one of tens of thousands of Aboriginal artefacts and relics that should be returned to Australia to flesh out the narrative of our evolution as a nation.
That is also true of the stolen remains of countless Aboriginals, the vast majority of whom would have been laid to rest with great reverence and solemn ritual by their communities, which ended up in museums, laboratories and private collections overseas. At a time when body snatching was considered a heinous crime in England white Australians turned it into a cottage industry in the name of scientific research.
While the federal government deserves credit for committing $4.7 million in this year's budget to develop a business case for a proposed national resting place - or Ngurra Cultural Precinct - in Canberra to "respectfully hold" the repatriated remains of First Nations people which cannot be reconnected with country and community, progress has been slow. While it is a significant advance on any previous recognition of the treatment meted out to Indigenous Australians over the past 250 years, and of their contribution to the national narrative, it is still an inadequate response.
Senator Bragg, who has previously made a case for his party to take the lead in responding to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, says while governments have been quick to recognise white leaders their Indigenous counterparts had been overlooked.
"There is nothing to honour Liberal senator Neville Bonner ... Nor is there any recognition of Charles Perkins, the Aboriginal rights leader who became the first Indigenous Australian to become head of a federal government department ... Not to mention Eddie Mabo ... who single-handedly changed Australia's legal foundation," he recently wrote.
These are compelling arguments for this government to ensure a Museum of Indigenous Australia should be developed in concert with the already proposed Ngurra Cultural Precinct.
The two institutions would go a long way to correcting 250 years of "whitewashed" Australian national myth-making.
Let's get them built before this decade is over. We have already waited far too long.
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