Recognize the Owners Properly

Question: How do you recognize Aboriginal traditional ownership of this land?

Answer: Observe the Aboriginal protocol as closely as you can.

Here in the Whadjuk area, 200 years ago that meant you would…

• ask the elders‘ consent to be here,
• carry a message stick (or equivalent) from the elders,
• look after the land properly

This site hopes to enable you to do that. Or at least get close to it.

Would you like to do that?

Look around these pages to get the basic info. If you want to be informed if and when the Consent Ceremony and/or symbols are going to happen, then click the RSS (on the right-hand side of your URL bar) for the feed to your email. Stay in touch.

This site also tells the story of Consent:

• The First British Commissioned officers orders were to ask for consent to be here, to make a Treaty
• These officers failed to ask consent or make Treaty
• to date, no consent was ever asked, or given.
• Some of us dream of a Consent Ceremony to redress this: to ask consent, and for the rightful Aboriginal Owners of this land to give consent
• We are hoping to develop a way for all residents to observe & respect the right protocol.

Mandurah Example

How good is this! I dream of having something like this in a prime place in Whadjuk land.

Last week I saw this on the Mandurah foreshore. It stands in front of a casuarina tree, planted on the same occasion in 2006. This art represents the presentation of a message stick to the city (at the 2006 Stretch Festival). In exchange the city mayor presented the seedling to the Noongar Community “as a symbol of the 2 communities working together.” The tree was planted at this site by the Mayor. A Noongar inscription reads “Message Stick, Together, Peace, Growth, Future.”

This symbolically undoes the symbol of destruction on Foundation Day. Instead of invasion, it asks permission to be here. Instead of chopping down a tree, it plants one. This small monument stands in my mind as a toweringly significant marker of a new and better way to walk together into the future.

Can we do likewise in Whadjuk Sovereign lands?

Booklist

Reynolds, Henry. This Whispering in our Hearts, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998

Stanner, W.E.H. After the Dreaming The Boyer lectures 1968. ABC, Australia, 1969

Kinnane, Stephen. Shadow Lines, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2003