I received an invitation to meet the King and Queen. This is why I accepted it

A few weeks after I’d arrived home from Paris after covering the Olympics for Channel Nine, and shortly after I’d finished presenting the Today show, I found myself sitting in my little brother’s spare room (down the road from the high school I didn’t finish). That’s when I received an email out of the blue from an address I didn’t recognise.

Brooke Boney: I probably would have refused my invitation in the past, and I might in the future.Credit: Hugh Stewart

It read: You have been nominated to attend a Reception hosted by Their Majesties The King and Queen at St. James’s Palace on the evening of Wednesday 2nd October. You have been selected in recognition of your work and advocacy on First Nations Australian policy issues.

I sent it to a friend to make sure had I read it correctly. The response was, “Like the actual King and Queen?!”

There are two stark perspectives on this invitation. When I told my aunty, she cried. She grabbed me and pulled me into one of those big soft cuddles that only aunties can give. It was overwhelming pride and elation that her once-little niece could go from housing commission in Muswellbrook to the palace in London.

That’s one reaction. Of course, there is another.

I felt quite emotional when I saw Senator Lidia Thorpe’s protest against King Charles inside Parliament House last month. I understand the rage. Australia is one of the only Commonwealth countries that doesn’t have a treaty or constitutional recognition for its Indigenous people. There are parts of our history that are so uncomfortable that we as a nation are yet to fully confront them, and we continue to bear the scars of those wounds.

There are parts of our history that are so uncomfortable that we as a nation are yet to fully confront them, and we continue to bear the scars of those wounds.

BROOKE BONEY

There’s space, and necessity, for all kinds of protest. I know there’s a line of political thought that says we can only be included equally if the whole system is dismantled. But we’re currently seeing what the path towards dismantlement looks like elsewhere and, call me cowardly if you want, I don’t want that for my babies or my grandparents.

Is equilibrium to be found by getting inside the system but being disruptive? I don’t know how fruitful that is either. In an age of self-promotion on social media, all kudos from sycophants and hate from trolls, I question the nobility of some people’s intentions when all they do is share content without any meaningful effort to change policy or engage with the process.

It poses an interesting question about power: how we get it and how we share it. I probably would have refused my invitation in the past, and I might in the future. That’s not to say that my values are flimsy – it’s that the sharing of those spaces could impact my life differently at different times.

If you’re the beneficiary of power and privilege, especially inherited at birth, perhaps the only way you see to rectify that imbalance is to share space with others who’ve had worse luck and lives. I know there are those among us who maintain the rage on behalf of us all and who want vengeance and reparations, but at this point in my life, isn’t being invited into these spaces what I’ve been asking for?

I’ve gone to the cradle of modern colonisation, the birthplace of the dispossession and oppression of my people, to study the policy and politics behind it at Oxford University. Wouldn’t it be remiss of me to refuse to go directly to the source? Sure, it would be easy to ignore the invitation, or to say thanks but no thanks, but who does that serve? I’d feel morally superior, but what about the work I aspire to do?

One of the projects I’d desperately love to work on while I’m away from Australia is the repatriation of Indigenous artefacts and remains. Every time I travel from Sydney to London I think about all the objects gathering dust in the basements of museums when they could be encased in glass and put on full display as a reminder of our brutal and uncomfortable past.

So, I went into the meeting with a plan, armed with briefings from friends who’d had knowledge of the repatriation of the Gweagal Spears, and the people at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies who are doing incredible work to have these important objects returned to their places of origin.

I knew that if I met the King or Queen, I didn’t want to just stand there and curtsy and giggle. I wanted to push something forward, to do something other than have a squiz inside in the palace (although that was part of the allure). In the end, I spoke with Queen Camilla about programs designed to prevent domestic violence.

On that day, I chose to engage because I saw no other way through it. Rage doesn’t fit my purpose. To disengage would be to forfeit indigeneity or wave a white flag. So, quietly, in the cradle of colonisation, I’ll carve some sort of path through these weeds, untangling my own thoughts and trauma as I go. I’ll try to make things a little better in any ways I can. Occasionally, that might mean accepting an invitation to the palace.

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