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In the winter of 2015
Australia turned to face itself.

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It looked into its soul
and it had to ask this question:

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Who are we?

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What sort of country do we want to be?

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And this happened in a place that is
most holy, most sacred to Australians.

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It happened in the sporting field,
it happened on the football field.

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Suddenly the front page was on the
back page, it was in the grandstands.

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Thousands of voices rose
to hound an Indigenous man.

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A man who was told he wasn't Australian.

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A man who was told
he wasn't Australian of the Year.

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And they hounded that man into submission.

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I can't speak for what lay in the hearts
of the people who booed Adam Goodes.

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But I can tell you what we heard
when we heard those boos.

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We heard a sound that was
very familiar to us.

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We heard a howl.

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We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes
across two centuries of dispossession,

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injustice, suffering and survival.

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We heard the howl
of the Australian dream

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and it said to us again,
"You're not welcome".

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The Australian Dream.

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We sing of it, and we recite it in verse.

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"Australians all, let us rejoice
for we are young and free."

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My people die young in this country.

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We die ten years younger than average
Australians and we are far from free.

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We are fewer than 3 %
of the Australian population

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and yet we are 25 %,
a quarter of those Australians,

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locked up in our prisons
and if you are a juvenile,

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it is worse, it is 50 %.

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An Indigenous child is more likely

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to be locked up in prison
than they are to finish high school.

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"I love a sunburned country,

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a land of sweeping plains,
of rugged mountain ranges."

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It reminds me that my people
were killed on those plains.

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We were shot on those plains,
disease ravaged us on those plains.

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I come from those plains.

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I come from a people
west of the Blue Mountains,

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the Wiradjuri people,

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where in the 1820's
the soldiers and settlers waged

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a war of extermination against my people.

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Yes, a war of extermination!

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That was the language used at the time.

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Go to the Sydney Gazette and look it up
and read about it.

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Martial law was declared
and my people could be shot on sight.

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"Those rugged mountain ranges".
My people,

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women and children were herded
over those ranges to their deaths.

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The Australian Dream.

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The Australian Dream is rooted in racism.

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It is the very foundation of the dream.

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It is there at the birth of the nation.

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It is there in "terra nullius".
An empty land. A land for the taking.

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60,000 years of occupation.

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A people who made the first seafaring
journey in the history of mankind.

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A people of Law. A people of lore, l-o-r-e.

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a people of music and art
and dance and politics.

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None of it mattered because our rights

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were extinguished because we were
not here according to British law.

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And when British people looked at us,
they saw something sub-human,

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and if we were human at all,

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we occupied the lowest rung
on civilisation's ladder.

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We were fly-blown, stone age savages
and that was the language that was used.

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Charles Dickens, the great writer of the
age, when referring to the noble savage

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of which we were counted among,

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said "It would be better that they be
wiped off the face of the earth."

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Captain Arthur Phillip,
a man of enlightenment,

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a man who was instructed to make peace
with the so called natives,

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in a matter of years was sending out
raiding parties with the instruction,

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"Bring back the severed heads
of the black troublemakers."

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They were smoothing the dying pillow.

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My people were rounded up
and put on missions

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from where, if you escaped,
you were hunted down,

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you were roped and tied and dragged back,
and it happened here.

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It happened on the mission
that my grandmother

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and my great grandmother are from,

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the Warrengesda on the Darling Point
of the Murrumbidgee River.

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Read about it. It happened.

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By 1901 when we became a nation,
when we federated the colonies,

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we were nowhere.

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We're not in the Constitution,
save for "race provisions" which allowed

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for laws to be made
that would take our children,

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that would invade our privacy,

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that would tell us who we could marry

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and tell us where we could live.

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The Australian Dream.

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By 1963, the year of my birth,
the dispossession was continuing.

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Police came at gunpoint
under cover of darkness

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to Mapoon, an aboriginal
community in Queensland,

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and they ordered people from their homes

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and they burned those homes to the ground

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and they gave the land
to a bauxite mining company.

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And today those people remember
that as the "Night of the Burning".

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In 1963, when I was born,

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I was counted among the flora and fauna,
not among the citizens of this country.

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Now, you will hear things tonight.

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You will hear people say,
"But you've done well."

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Yes, I have and I'm proud of it.
And why have I done well?

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I've done well because of
who has come before me.

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My father who lost the tips of three fingers

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working in saw mills
to put food on our table

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because he was denied an education.

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My grandfather who served to fight wars

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for this country when
he was not yet a citizen

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and came back to a segregated land

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where he couldn't even share a drink
with his digger mates

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in the pub because he was black.

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My great grandfather, who was jailed
for speaking his language

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to his grandson, my father.

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Jailed for it!

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My grandfather on my mother's side
who married a white woman

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who reached out to Australia,
lived on the fringes of town

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until the police came,
put a gun to his head,

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bulldozed his tin humpy
and ran over the graves

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of the three children he'd buried there.

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That's the Australian Dream.

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I have succeeded in spite of
the Australian Dream,

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not because of it,

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and I've succeeded
because of those people.

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You might hear tonight,
"But you have white blood in you".

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And if the white blood
in me was here tonight,

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my grandmother,

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she would tell you of how
she was turned away

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from a hospital giving
birth to her first child

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because she was giving birth
to the child of a black person.

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The Australian Dream.

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I'm Fanny Smith.

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I was born on Flinders Island.

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I'm the last of the Tasmanians.