Lingiari Lecture to deliver powerful message

An Aboriginal advocate for social justice and winner of the 2016 Human Rights Medal will deliver this year’s Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture at Charles Darwin University on Wednesday, 16 August.

Ms Pat Anderson AO will deliver the 17th annual lecture, which commemorates the historic walk-off from Wave Hill Station by Indigenous stockmen and their families, planting the seeds for Aboriginal land rights in Australia.

Chair of the Lowitja Institute and co-chair of the former Prime Minister's Referendum Council, Ms Anderson is a campaigner for advancing the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in education, health, early childhood development, and violence against women and children.

“For Australia's First Peoples, 2017 is a year of powerful symbolism,” Ms Anderson said.

“Among other key anniversaries, this year marks 50 years since the 1967 Referendum, 25 years since the Mabo Decision overturned the lie of 'terra nullius', and 20 years since the Bringing Them Home Report.”

In the lecture titled “Our Hope for the Future: Voice. Treaty. Truth” she will use her personal history and experience as an advocate for social justice to reflect on the last half-century of struggle for the recognition of the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 

“Across the continent, in different ways and at different levels – individual, community, organisational – a new determination is arising about the need to fundamentally re-set the relationship between our First Nations and non-Indigenous Australia,” she said.

Ms Anderson also will speak on the processes and outcomes of the Referendum Council's work including the National Constitutional Convention held at Uluru in May.

“Despite the diversity of the Nations, communities and individuals represented, it was clear that we want substantive change and structural reform,” she said.

“Our demands were captured in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ adopted by the Convention, requiring the establishment of a representative First Nations Voice, enshrined in the Constitution and empowered to speak directly to the Australian Parliament. 

She said the Statement also recommended the setting up of a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of treaty-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about Indigenous history and a declaration of recognition to unify Australians.

The 16 August event at CDU’s Casuarina campus amphitheatre will begin at 6pm, with the lecture starting at 7pm. The lecture is free and open to the public.

For more information visit W: cdu.edu.au/indigenous-leadership/vincent-lingiari