Axis of Hope: papers

Karen Flick: War and Indigenous Australia

Karen Flick is a Yawaalarray woman from north west NSW, south west Queensland and is a community historian.

Thank you. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the Gadigal people, whose country we meet in tonight. I want to also acknowledge my fellow speakers and fellow anti-war activists. I am a Yuwalaraay woman from north-west New South Wales, south-west Queensland. I've been involved in a whole range of peace and justice campaigns for my people for a long time and I want to talk about some of those things that relate to where we are in the world today but also where we are here in this country today as well. So, I want to put that perspective across tonight.

There is one earth. This one earth we all live on is the same earth we constantly use and abuse. I want to talk a little bit about my views and experience of peace and justice in this country, or, in fact, the lack of it. What we as indigenous people in this country are experiencing right now is also the outcomes of invasion. It's been over two hundred years and our situation as a people continues to get worse. Our life expectancy is twenty year less than non-indigenous Australians and in some communities, in some areas of the country, it's forty years less. So people are dying at 35. Our overall population and in particular our young people are incarcerated on an ongoing basis, and that's our future. We have been dispossessed of our land, our language and our culture and that also is ongoing. We have been, and still are, denied our right to live our own lives. It's been a couple of generations now. And we retain our strength, and that continues.

I want to relate one story about my family. My grandfather, my father's father, signed up to participate in World War One when he was 16, like many other young men at the time. He was wounded several times, gassed and fought in some of the bloodiest of battles. He grew up over there. He fought in the trenches, on the battlefields at Gallipoli, Lone Pine, the Somme, Villers-Bretonneux and others. He came home and talked very little about what he had experienced, but passed on the lessons he had learnt. He told our family about one time when he was in the trenches, he had confronted another young man, not much older than him, the so-called enemy. They'd drawn their weapons, ready to engage, when they stopped, looked at each other and saw what I think was their futures. They turned their backs on each other and went back to their respective trenches. One split second when their lives were saved by each other. And the so-called freedom that he went to fight for was not for him, in his own country, when he returned. He was not such a respected soldier, like many other Australians who fought in World War One. But he grew up his family strong, protected them and passed on his values of dignity, respect, strength, love, humanity and compassion. At the same time as my grandfather was fighting in the war, my grandmother, my mother's mother, who was fourteen at the time, was being taken from her family in north-west New South Wales and sent down to Cootamundra Girls' Dormitory. After that, she was sent out to work as a domestic slave for several years. She grew up in a foreign place, in her own country. But she returned home. Other members of her family did not. She grew up her family strong and passed on her values of dignity, respect, strength, love, humanity and compassion. And these two amazing people passed on their values to their families - their ideals and commitment I'm proud to uphold.

We have a collective responsibility and an obligation to remain vigilant, to call to account, to witness and to challenge always. I'm honoured to be a part of a powerful movement of people, who together in strength of spirit say loudly, strong and long, no to war. As I am proud of my Yuwalaraay heritage. There's a lot of talk about the cost of war, in economic terms, territorial, land, casualties, destruction, reconstruction, but the biggest cost of all is the cost to humanity and the future. We must rightly feel and act against the atrocities of war in Iraq right now and we must do the same all over the world, including here at home. There is only one earth and we have a responsibility to protect it, to nurture her and through that, protect, nurture and keep ourselves whole. This one earth is the only place, the only planet where we all can live. We need to have hope and much more than that, our future demands it. But just as importantly, it's the sustenance for the present. Thank you.