An invitation to listen
THE ULURU STATEMENT from the Heart is a sacred First Nations’ invitation to the Australian people. It was conceived on 26 May 2017 from the collective experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples during an unprecedented process of dialogue and consensus building. Forged from more than two centuries of hardship and struggle, the Uluru Statement gives hope to a nation born from many nations, that we may find our collective heart.
The eloquent words of the Uluru Statement make an affirmation that the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands have never ceded sovereignty – not when first colonised by the British, and not with the enactment of the Australian Constitution in 1901. The words remind us that neither colonisation nor the federation of those early colonies could extinguish the sacred link that no other civilisation on Earth can claim – that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are born from, remain attached to, and will return thither to, Country, to be united with ancestors stretching back an amazing 60,000 years. At the same time, the Uluru Statement acknowledges the sovereignty that we all share, as citizens of Australia.
In haunting prose, and with First Nations Voices that sing as a chorus, the Uluru Statement decries the scale of our crisis – disproportionate incarceration rates that are the worst in the world; our children, aliened from their families and culture; our youth, languishing in detention in obscene numbers – the awful effects of intergenerational trauma and systemic powerlessness writ large in the official statistics of Australia. It should be obvious that these dimensions of our crisis are not due to a genetic propensity to crime, nor to