At the heart of the voice is just our desire for honesty

At the foot of Uluru, the symbolic and spiritual heart of our nation, about 300 people stood together in May 2017 for the First Nations National Constitutional Convention. We were drawn from some 150 Australian “tribes” whose ancestry runs deep into this country.

It was a moment of common purpose, about our hopes for the future, embodied in a message sent to the Australian people and known as the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

In a few months from now another group of Australians will stand together, this time on the east coast, looking out across the shore of Kamay Botany Bay.

This, too, is a significant site for our nation and these Australians also have roots in this country, though more recent, and they will stand together to mark the 250th anniversary of the day the Endeavour dropped anchor and James Cook led a party of men from the British Empire ashore.

Uluru and Kamay Botany Bay: two sites of significance, two gatherings of historical importance, a confluence of ancient history and our recent past that will, perhaps, inform our country’s future. I am reminded of disting­uish­ed poet and stateswoman Ood­ger­oo Noonuccal when she wrote:

Let no one say the past is dead

The past is all about us and within

For indigenous people have not lost from our minds the history of our nation, not only its deep past of thousands of years, but also the events on April 29, 250 years ago, when Cook ordered his men to fire on the two men standing on the shore.

It is likely they were Gweagal warriors, who stood before him in defence of their family behind them on the beach. Cook’s action signalled the Crown’s intentions; the transfer of a continent, from one people to another, by force if necessary, a phenomenon we politely call colonisation.

Of course, our generation wasn’t standing on the deck of the Endeavour or on the shores of Kamay Botany Bay in 1770, just as we weren’t present during the massacres as the colonial frontier progressed from south to north.

However, as my father Charles Perkins, the indigenous leader who came to prominence in the 1960s for leading the Freedom Ride, said: “We cannot live in the past, but the past lives in us.” The past has made us. We are its inheritors, for better or worse, and this is now our time. How we move forward from this moment will set the course of relationships between indigenous people and their fellow Australians.

I was brought up surrounded by politics, trailing after my father from meeting to meeting. I saw the hard work required to achieve understanding and consensus and I also witnessed the extraordinary change it can bring.

The Uluru statement and the Cook anniversary provide a moment in time, a catalyst to see each other better, to strive for a more holistic national identity.

In some way my heritage reflects the nation’s evolution over millennia. I am Arrernte and Kalkadoon, desert peoples, but I am also a descendant of immigrants: a poor Irish miner and German farmers. This makes me feel uniquely Australian and I hope it enables me to identify with these parts of our nation and see it from multiple perspectives.

I am no expert, not an elder, politician, or lawyer, but I am Australian, and the aspirations articulated in the Uluru statement about our shared country are for us, the Australian people, to consider. And that is why the statement is addressed to us, not the government of the day.

It is the result of more than a decade’s consideration and discussion around what has loosely been called indigenous recognition; that means how the nation acknowledges its indigenous history and resolves the outstanding legacy of colonisation within our contemporary society.

In 2017 at Uluru, after many days of heated discussion and much humour, which always accompanies indigenous meetings, law professor Megan Davis took the floor to read the Uluru statement and get the endorsement of all the delegates. In the recording taken at this moment you can sense the anticipation and tension. Three hundred blackfellas have never been so quiet.

She began: “We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart: Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago. This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors.”

Moments later, in a nod to the Barunga Statement three decades earlier, a blank artist’s canvas was rolled out. Across its cream unmarked surface, Noel Pearson inscribed his signature, under which he wrote in the language of his people “Guugu Yimithirr”.

His Christian name identifies him as an individual in the world but his language, his tribe, his people demonstrate the roots of his ancient identity. This identity has endured against great odds since that day in April 250 years ago — and it remains so to this day.

I joined the other delegates as we added our names and lang­uages. Later, the senior women and custodians from Uluru painted the dreamings of their country as a border around the signatures. As they painted, they sang the dreamings passed down to them.

Finally, the words of the Uluru statement, crafted during the three-day convention but distilled from more than a dozen previous meetings around the country, were printed in the centre. The Uluru Statement from the Heart gives us the road map to finally end the great Australian silence, this cult of forgetfulness on a national scale - by a constitutional guarantee that indigenous peoples’ voices will be heard. For the full history of our nation to be finally told and listened to and for agreements to settle the unfinished business of our nation that began on the shore of Kamay Botany Bay 250 years ago.

Rachel Perkins is a film writer, director and producer. This is the edited text of her first 2019 Boyer lecture to be broadcast on ABC TV today at 1.30pm.