Faces of truth: Victorians fighting for a brighter Indigenous future

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Professor Eleanor Bourke is chair of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, Australia’s first truth-telling body. “It is ironic that I find myself chairperson of the Yoorrook Justice Commission along with three other First Nations peoples and a former justice of the Supreme Court,” the Wergaia and Wamba Wamba elder wrote in The Age in 2021. “That we are required to develop a shared understanding among all Victorians of the collective impact of systematic injustice and intergenerational trauma that has flowed from this treatment is the greater irony.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Gunditjmara elder Uncle Daryl Rose stands in front of the 1840 killing field known as Murderers’ Flat, the last of 28 documented massacres of Indigenous people. The surviving families and victims’ descendants were most likely among the first Gunditjmara to move into the Church of England-run Lake Condah Mission in 1867. Rose says they were stripped of their land and culture and enclosed in a place where “the only right was the right to become whiter”. In his view, they were the first generation of stolen Gunditjmara.Credit:Justin McManus

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Gunditjmara elder Aunty Donna Wright and the old dormitory at Lake Condah Mission. Her mother Eunice Wright and aunt Gloria were stolen while walking home from school to the mission in 1954. “There is a brutal history down here in the south-west – and that needs to be told,” Aunty Donna, a member of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, says at the site of the Murderers’ Flat massacre. “It was domestic terrorism the way our mob were treated. But there’s this gap in history. This gap in knowledge.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Peek-Whurrong man Robert Lowe’s great-grandmother is a massacre survivor. Alice Dixon Clarke was walking to a shelter near Warrnambool in the 1800s with a group of Aboriginal people when her companions ate poisoned food a farmer had given them. “The ones who ate the poison didn’t make it to the shelter,” Lowe says. “She survived it, that’s the story my grandmother told me.” The story Lowe’s family passed down through generations at the Framlingham Aboriginal Mission has never featured in historical records. Lowe began giving classroom talks about it when his children encouraged him to do so. “We were told by our elders never to tell our stories,” Lowe says.Credit:Nicole Cleary

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Former Victorian Aboriginal affairs minister Gabrielle Williams told The Age in 2021 that racism was ingrained in Victoria and society was “underpinned by a series of assumptions” that continue to harm Indigenous people. “Opening ourselves up is uncomfortable because most don’t regard themselves as racist or being part of an operation that might be racist. That’s such an uncomfortable light to have shone into your soul.”Credit:Simon Schluter

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“Victoria’s infatuation with a system that places less value on the lives and cultures of Aboriginal children needs to stop,” Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency chief executive Muriel Bamblett told Yoorrook in 2022. “Anybody that fosters an Aboriginal child permanently doesn’t have to comply with any cultural obligations. They can completely cut off the child’s Aboriginal culture.”Credit:Jason South

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Walter Saunders is a descendant from the Kilcarer Gunditj people – almost all of whom were believed to have been killed by whalers in the Convincing Ground Massacre of about 1833 – and their neighbours the Gilgar Gunditj from the river country to the east around Tyrendarra. “Our story, handed down, is they were rounded up by settlers, taken to a big depression in the land above the Surrey River, a sort of sinkhole, and taken away in the night on bullock carts,” he says. “They just disappeared. We don’t know where they went.”Credit:Justin McManus

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A band of armed squatters and shepherds on horseback, led by Frederick Taylor, ambushed an encampment of Aboriginal people and murdered almost all of them while they slept under the shadow of Mount Noorat near Terang in 1839. John Clarke, a Girai Wurrung man of the Eastern Maar, pictured in the area, says “that place where those people were murdered was already like a refugee camp. There were three or four mobs [clans] camped together.” Some of the victims had fled previous assaults or threats by white settlers and left their Country in the hope of safety.Credit:Justin McManus

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Gunditjmara and Bunganditj man Uncle Johnny Lovett is the son of WWI and WWII veteran Herbert Lovett, who served alongside his four brothers. Authorities allowed him to enlist only because he had enough white blood, but, like many Indigenous soldiers, he was denied equality in peacetime. While land at the former Lake Condah Mission, where Herbert had lived, was carved up and handed to white ex-servicemen, he received nothing. Uncle Johnny has fought for years to win compensation for his father’s loss of opportunity. “I’m never going to give up,” he says. “This has always been our Country ... My father only wanted equality. He served Australia at war, twice, and he was served up nothing but humiliation. Bucketloads and bucketloads of it.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Wurundjeri woman Mandy Nicholson is reviving the Woiwurrung language, spoken by Kulin Nation peoples, traditional owners of Melbourne and surrounds. She is doing this at the Galina Beek Living and Cultural Centre in Healesville on the former grounds of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Settlement where her great-grandmother was born. “She told me that, as a kid, she had heard her grandmother speaking this foreign language she had never heard before to some blackfellas that were outside of the reserve. Years later she realised her grandmother was speaking her Woiwurrung language, but because [speaking] it was restricted, she didn’t teach my grandmother,” Nicholson says. “That meant my dad didn’t know language either … I thought, I’m going to break that cycle as much as I can.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Richard Frankland,Gunditjmara man, singer, author and poet, wrote this poem about his Country: Early mornings on Gunditjmara country!/ Where the south wind blows so cold and hard/It can blow the scars off your soul/ And the sunrise is so golden it makes a poor man rich beyond his dreams/ And a body could travel the world and never be at home ’til he touched those golden shores of his dreaming/ ’Cause when I’m there I walk where my grandmothers and grandfathers walked before me/ And when I’m there I taste the wind that my grandfather tasted long before me/ And when I dream, I dream where my people dreamed before me/ I dream of Gunditjmara winds and I’m rich far beyond my dreams.Credit:Justin McManus

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Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, Wemba Wemba and Wongaibon man Paul Briggs on his Country on the Murray (Dungala) River. He writes: “The denial of invasion is a denial of truth. The leaders who sailed into Botany Bay denied our humanity. The nation was built on conquest. Invasion gave licence for atrocities and genocide in the cause of dispossession. Our sovereignty was not acknowledged then or since. These truths need to be told and heard if we are to construct a shared and mutually respectful national identity. A just and inclusive society cannot be built on the foundational lie of terra nullius ... Denial of truth will eat away at the soul of the Australian people and prevent any chance of shared pride in our nationhood. The nation cannot be reconciled without First Nations people being at the core of the Australian identity.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Veronica (Ronnie) Gorrie, a Gunai/Kurnai woman whose ancestors were massacred by Angus McMillian at Brodribb River in East Gippsland. She writes: “I have never been there and don’t ever plan on visiting the site where my family was murdered … Unknowingly, when I was a young girl I lived close to this massacre site. On the farm we would ride horses. When my younger brother rode, he was drawn to the site, but could never explain why. At the time he had no idea that it was the site of the massacre, and the site where our great-great-great-great-grandfather Charles Hammond miraculously survived. Up to 20 others – men women and children – were slaughtered there in the mid-1800s.” Hammond was five, couldn’t understand his captor settler, so he was named after a station owner. He escaped years later.Credit:Justin McManus

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The late actor Uncle Jack Charles was the first elder to share his story with the Yoorrook Justice Commission. He was removed from his family as a baby. Charles said he was placed in the Box Hill Boys’ Home, where he experienced “cruel and callous punishments” in the 1950s. As a result, he lived through cycles of incarceration, homelessness, familial dislocation and drug addiction, he said. “I wasn’t even told I was Aboriginal. I had to discover that for myself. I knew nothing, was told nothing, and had to assimilate ... I was whitewashed by the system.” Credit:Darrian Traynor

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Tara Fry only learnt the devastating truth of her family history since her grandfather died nine years ago. Growing up, her pop always told her that his mother had never wanted him, that she had dumped him into a state boys’ home. After he died, people began to come forward with accounts of how he’d been forcibly removed, aged 10, from an Aboriginal mission as part of the stolen generations. Fry, a Ngemba and Ngiyampaa woman from NSW, who was born in Victoria, has been a “truth receiver” with Yoorrook, helping Indigenous Victorians share their experiences with the commission.Credit:Justin McManus

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Aunty Geraldine Atkinson is the co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. When her brother was aged under 10, he would repeatedly steal what was then 20 bob from his teacher, she told the commission. “He was removed from our family,” she said. After being in a boys’ home and a string of Victorian juvenile detention centres, he went to Sydney and ended up in Long Bay jail, then Goulburn jail before being released. “His brothers actually died, and he came home to Victoria ...Then he ended up in Pentridge ... Do you know how old he was when he died? Thirty-six. All of those fellas, his mates, they’re all dead too now, they were around the same age … They were removed from families. And that’s the story of a child being removed ... their life trajectory. And that’s what we want to stop.”Credit:AAP

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Aunty Eileen Alberts of Heywood weaves baskets the Gunditjmara people have used for thousands of years to trap fish and eels in aquaculture waterways they had built on the Budj Bim lava country. Her aunt, Aunty Connie Hart, taught her the craft of basket-weaving – forbidden on Lake Condah Mission – she’d learnt from older women practising in secret. Aunty Eileen has taught basket-weaving to her daughters and hundreds of others. Her great-great-grandparents Johnny (Kangatong) and Sarah Dawson survived the massacres of Indigenous people as pastoralist James Dawson gave them refuge and employment. In turn, they took his name when they married. Dawson introduced Johnny to famed Austrian artist, Eugene von Guerard, who taught him to paint. Johhny Dawson’s works are held in galleries and museums.Credit:Justin McManus

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Marcus Stewart in 2021 in his then role as the co-chair of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, photographed at the Goulburn (Warring) River. “We need to pierce the collective and deliberate amnesia that white Australia wraps itself in,” he writes. “Not so we can wallow in our pain or inflict shame, but so we can reckon with the past, commit to unpicking today’s tangled impacts of colonisation, and spur ourselves on to do better, to be better ... Yoorrook will help us find the path forward, but treaty will provide the dotted line that they sign on to hold them and future governments to account … Sometimes you have to look back before you can move forward, but whether your family has called Victoria home for five years or 50,000 years, treaty is about creating a fairer future together as equals.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Palawa woman Katrina Harrison is a single mother to nine children, a family violence advocate and deputy co-chair of the Victim Survivors’ Advisory Council. She is a survivor of child sexual abuse, being criminalised in her youth and made a ward of the state, and a survivor of 20 years of intimate partner abuse. She continues her activism despite a major stroke in 2022. She writes: “Aboriginal women are more than our stories of injustice; we are also our stories of resilience and resistance. I am determined to continue to show my children what healing and freedom look like. I will always fight for the rights of my community, my children and all Aboriginal women. I will not privilege other people’s comfort over the need for truth-telling. I will not let the injustices continue.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Jaclyn Symes was attorney-general when she gave evidence to Yoorrook in 2023. “I acknowledge the fact that the justice system has both recently and historically been a site of exclusion and oppression,” she said. “I acknowledge that Aboriginal peoples face unique and pervasive inequities that go over and beyond those experienced by other vulnerable cohorts ... This includes structural racism that is a product of the devastating effects of colonisation. Regrettably, our current structures, laws and policies can serve to compound those inequities.”Credit:Chris Hopkins

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In 2023, Shane Patton, in his then role as Victoria Police chief commissioner, apologised to Indigenous Victorians on behalf of the force for its harmful actions and policies. “We will know we have achieved true partnership when every Aboriginal person feels confident to look to this [Victoria Police] uniform for services and support, and better yet – when more and more Aboriginal people want to wear it,” he said.Credit:Joe Armao

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Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan became the first premier in Australia to give evidence at an Indigenous truth-telling inquiry when she appeared at the commission in 2024. She committed to a treaty. “The record this commission will hand down will mean at long last, the truth of our state’s history is told,” she said. “The murder, the massacres, the dispossession of culture and Country. The land taken away, the way of life destroyed, the children who never came back home, and those who are still trying to find their way back. It’s not enough to merely know this history. We do need to learn from it, and we do need to act on it, too.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Travis Lovett is deputy chair of Yoorrook and a Kerrupmara, Gunditjmara and Boandik man. He has worn the tail feathers of his traditional totem – the endangered south-eastern red-tailed black cockatoo when officiating at the inquiry. “The red-tail has our spirit, it has our ancestors, and it’s connected to our songlines, our lore. The red-tail dictates our clan marriage protocols,” Lovett says. “When we’re on Country, we are able to connect with them; we mimic some of those behaviours through our language, culture and also our dance. Our ancestors, our elders and people have fought too hard to let the red-tail become extinct.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Dr Katrina Kell is a descendant of Captain James Liddell, who brought the Henty family to the Portland region in the 1830s. The first known massacre, of an unknown number of Indigenous people, at a whaling station known as The Convincing Ground, occurred shortly afterwards. Kell is calling for greater acknowledgment of settler atrocities against Indigenous people. “My ancestor, Captain James Liddell, was employed by Edward Henty during a violent period of land theft and genocide in Gunditjmara Country,” she told Yoorrook. “Based on historical records, he appears to have happily done Henty’s bidding, which makes it hard to believe he was unaware of the atrocities. It is distressing to consider, as his descendant, that he may have perpetrated some of the violence.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Peter Sharp is the great-grandson of former prime minister Alfred Deakin, who as Australia’s first attorney-general in 1903, ruled that people of mixed Aboriginal and white blood were not Aboriginal at all. Deakin’s earlier work as a lawmaker in Victoria proved catastrophic to Aboriginal people and led to the wholesale removal of children from their families. Sharp believes Australians should learn more about his great-grandfather’s racism, though he is widely revered as a founder of modern Australia.Credit:Justin McManus

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Elizabeth Balderstone is a grazier whose South Gippsland property includes the site of the 1843 Warrigal Creek Massacre. Settlers known as the Highland Brigade shot dead 60 to 150 Brataualung people in retribution for the murder of Ronald Macalister, the nephew of wealthy pastoralist Lachlan Macalister. Balderstone and her neighbours have ensured the massacre site is undisturbed by farming activities. She is looking for ways to return the land to traditional owners and supports the introduction of annual or regular payment by primary producers and landholders to help traditional owners care for their Country.Credit:Justin McManus

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Suzannah Henty (left), a descendant of Victoria’s first settler Edward Henty, with Gunditjmara/Yorta Yorta woman Keicha Day. Both women want the Henty name and monuments to the family removed from the area due to the Henty settlers removing Indigenous people from their land, killing many in the process in the 1830s. They want place names to honour Indigenous culture and markers recognising the sites of massacres. Henty became aware of her family’s role in what she called genocide only when she attended a Gunditjmara man’s lecture at university. Day says of meeting Henty: “I truly believe that the ancestors brought us together – where we’re supposed to be here at the right time. And so I’m going to honour that.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Keicha Day (left) and Suzannah Henty on Ploughed Field in Portland, a park on the site of the first land ploughed in Victoria. “Edward Henty was the first to arrive, where, in his words, he ‘stuck a plough into the ground, struck a she-oak root, and broke the point; cleaned my gun, shot a kangaroo, mended the bellows, blew the forge fire, straightened the plough, and turned the first sod in Victoria’,” Suzannah Henty told Yoorrook. “He was performing a colonial ritual, like James Cook did, to enact an invasion based on claims of terra nullius. This marks the beginning of the harm that continues to be inflicted on Gunditjmara peoples and their country at the hands of the Henty family, the state of Victoria, and the settler colony of Australia.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Yoorrook deputy chair Travis Lovett led groups of Victorians in the 500-kilometre Walk for Truth, a commission initiative to inform the public about the impacts of colonisation. The walk, from Portland (pictured) to Parliament House, drew more than 12,000 participants. It marked the culmination of the commission’s work in gathering the first-hand stories of Indigenous Victorians. As walkers passed massacre sites in Portland, Lovett told them: “This is where the Henty brothers illegally established the first permanent European settlement in what would become Victoria. This marked the beginning for many, but for Aboriginal peoples, it was the end of the world as they had known it for tens of thousands of years.”Credit:Justin McManus

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Travis Lovett holds message sticks at the end of the Walk for Truth at Parliament House on June 18. Handing one to Deputy Premier Ben Carroll later, he said: “This is not a gift. It comes with expectations.” The walk had been a “treaty in motion”, he explained, and Indigenous Victorians now expected the first treaty between an Australian state and First Nations people.Credit:Justin McManus