Today’s poem is fairly controversial, and less overtly spiritual in nature, but it is about a topic that is important to many people. I had hoped to publish it before the Twenty-Seventh of May, but I had hoped to get some feedback from some Kooris first. [A Koori is an Aboriginal from southern New South Wales or Victoria]. For any overseas readers I mention that Australia Day is currently celebrated on the Twenty-Sixth of January, which is the anniversary of the arrival in 1788 of The First Fleet at Sydney Cove.
In writing this I have learned a few things, including that according to the “The Macquarie Dictionary” (which calls itself “Australia’s National Dictionary”) “Aboriginal” is the term that the “Australian Government Style Manual” and ATSIC (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) recommend or prefer to “Aborigine”.
I have tried to put myself into other people’s shoes, and hopefully, this suggestion, will receive some consideration. I hope you enjoy this change of focus.
In Love and Light,
Alan
AUSTRALIA’S BIRTHDAY
Which day should be our national day?
Some people want to move Australia Day,
to celebrate our country on a different, less divisive day…
one that doesn’t celebrate an invasion.
I can understand that.
Perhaps the 27th of May would be a good day,
for that is the day in 1967, that Australia voted,
to recognize Aboriginals… as people.
It is shocking to think that that was only fifty-two years ago…
less that a lifetime… even if you take as your measure,
the lifetime, of an indigenous person.
On the day that we started to see Aboriginals as people…
on the day that we started to repudiate the lie,
of “Terra Nullius”… the empty land…
that is the day we started our slow path to reconciliation.
That is the day we started to become a civilized nation.
We still have so far to go…
If we want to celebrate our potentially-great nation,
we should recognize that our path, to our redemption…
and to the creation of a kind and loving world,
took its first breath then.
Australia was born in 1967, on May Twenty-Seventh.
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