The commissioners appointed to Victoria’s truth and justice commission will need “a really grounded understanding in trauma” and to offer victim support similar to the royal commission into child sexual abuse in order to gain the trust of Aboriginal Victorians, a member of the treaty assembly has said.
The Yoo-rrook commission was announced this month and will examine the ongoing impact of the genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal people in Victoria, as well as the impact of current-day racist policies.
Troy McDonald, a Gunai Kurnai man and member of the First Peoples’ Assembly Victoria, told an Ebony Institute roundtable on truth and justice commissions in Melbourne on Wednesday that people would need “a lot of support” to speak out.
“The east coast of Australia really took the brunt of the invasion full on and the effects of that filtered down to families, communities and individuals across this country, right up to this very minute,” McDonald said.
“We’re very cognisant in the First People’s Assembly ... that this process is going to elicit vicarious trauma in many of our people. And we need to be able to have a system and a process in place that supports those people. Because in my lifetime, just in my lifetime, hurting Aboriginal people in really severe, punitive ways is a fact.”
Victoria is the first jurisdiction in Australia to announce such a commission, but other states and territories are expected to follow suit. The Northern Territory is aiming to begin a three-year truth commission by mid-year, and Queensland is also moving toward a treaty process.
To date the federal government has sidelined calls for a national truth and justice commission, which was one of the demands of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. But a national commission is still the aim of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – which means that communities face the prospect of going through a painful public truth-telling process at a state or territory level, then repeating the process for a national commission.
The Yoo-rrook commission is currently advertising for commissioners. Hearings are expected to begin before the end of the year, with an interim report to be handed down within 12 months.
Dr Jackie Huggins, the co-chair of the Queensland pathway to treaty working group, said that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would “keep talking, talking and talking and telling our truth until there is some traction”.
“This is the graciousness of our people and the absolute dedication that we want to extend to the wider community, the 97%, about finally listening to our truths, finally hearing us and finally giving us voice,” the Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru elder said. “So we’ll just keep doing it.”
Prof Gregory Phillips, a Waanyi and Jaru man, is the chairman of the Ebony Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Institute, which hosted the roundtable. It has released a discussion paper comparing international and national inquiries and is preparing to hold community consultations on the formation of truth and justice commissions in Australia.
Phillips said there was a risk that a truth-telling commission would “re-traumatise people”.
He said the international experience, looking at post-genocide inquiries in Germany, Canada, South Africa and Rwanda, was that any process of truth-telling must be followed by concrete steps to address issues raised and bring a sense of both justice and healing. That would include changing the school curriculum to accurately reflect the history of Australia.
“You can’t change 200 years of ignorance and denial with an ad campaign. That’s a good start. But there needs to be mass public education,” he said.
Phillips said the process would help not just Indigenous Australians, but non-Indigenous Australians. It should be viewed not as a symbolic gesture, or something to be done for the sake of political expediency, but as a foundational step in becoming a strong nation that was skipped in the colonial creation of Australia.
“The truth must be told not just to set us free, but to set non-Aboriginal people free,” he said. “Non-Aboriginal people from Scotland and Ireland will tell you that they have had similar things happen to them with colonisation. And then they were put on ships and bought here – the convicts were rejected. Australia has not dealt with the feelings of that, the psychological hangover of what are the white foundations of this country.
“So healing is not just for blackfellas. We need whitefellas to know who they are and where they come from.”
Steve Rossingh, a Kamilaroi man and the director of the Northern Territory Treaty Commission, said truth-telling commissions should be viewed as a “nation-building exercise”.
“Look at treaty and truth-telling as a marriage not divorce,” he said. “That’s the ethos in mainstream Australia that I think really needs to change”.
