Megan Davis
Megan Davis is the Director of the Indigenous Law Centre and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, UNSW. Megan's area of scholarship is Indigenous peoples and public law and Indigenous peoples in international law. She is a former United Nations Indigenous Fellow of the UNOCHR and has participated for the past 9 years in UN working groups on Indigenous peoples issues. Prior to UNSW, Megan was a Senior Research Fellow with the Research Unit, Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, UTS. She has also held the position as Director, Bill of Rights Project, Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, Faculty of Law, UNSW. Megan is currently the Australian member of the International Law Association's Indigenous Rights Committee. Megan has a B.A. (Australian Studies)/LLB (UQd); Grad. Dip. Leg. Prac./LLM (International Law) (ANU). She is an admitted legal practitioner of the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory. Megan is currently completing her Doctorate in Law at ANU RegNet, ANU examining how Aboriginal women fare in liberal democracies and the importance of constitutional reform.
What a reconciled Australia looks like to me.
A reconciled Australia will be a triumph of imagination and a triumph of leadership. A leader who had the courage to imagine that we could all be something greater - not as Australians - but as humans. This leader understood that there was never going to be a good political time to reconcile and didn't shirk at the state's responsibility to say sorry. This leader ignored polls, the political commentariat and her own prejudice and woke up one day to learn that the country too had anxiously and slowly but surely moved with her.
A reconciled Australia is an Australia in which Indigenous peoples have a sense of ownership over the public institutions that affect them. A sense of inclusion in the Australian state and a sense of belonging among the Australian people. Where Indigenous peoples can trust and respect the police and the police respect Indigenous people. This reconciled Australia can only be achieved if our imagination allows us to change the way we think and to amend our institutions to recognise the inherent rights of Indigenous peoples so they are free from political fashions and the ease of legislative rollback.
A reconciled Australia will be an Australia that accepts the complexity of Indigenous identity as it does Irish Australians or wartime Australians or sporting Australians. I see a reconciled Australia in the faces of Allira, Zaine, Rueben, Tamas, Willy, Melachi, Bethany and Lily Davis, my nieces and nephews who are growing up in urban, middle class Australia, attending primary school, playing soccer and netball and dancing and singing the songs of the Waka Waka people and the Torres Strait and learning the stories of their great grandfathers Davis and Burns: a proud black landowner in Hervey Bay and a Wollongong wobblie who booed Menzies off the wharves. That is a reconciled Australia. Assured and confident with complex and layered identities: Cobble Cobble, Australian, South Sea Island, Jewish, Scottish, Danish and with the skills to successfully traverse two worlds.
And in this reconciled Australia, non-Indigenous Australians will feel confident to traverse the same two worlds without fear and with curiosity and pride. And the word 'traditional' will become inapt for conversations about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The great West Indian poet Derek Walcott has written about this reconciled Australia. In his prose he writes about the union of separate cultural identities. This resonates for all Australians and reminds us that our problems are human problems. A reconciled Australia is an Australia united not by our economy, not by our sporting triumphs or our military feats but united by our humanity.
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart.
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Megan Davis
