Indigenous Witnesses Call for Treaty Talks in Victoria as Government Reviews Recommendations

In this series, we examine the work of Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission, a public inquiry into the impact of colonisation on Indigenous Victorians. Eva-Jo Edwards struggles to summon up even the vaguest memory of her childhood before she was forcibly removed from her family. Aged five, she was carried off to a police station and placed for the remainder of her childhood in institutions where she says she never received a hug or a kiss and where no one told her she was loved.

One early memory is of a torch being shone into my face whilst I was sleeping. From a discussion with my sister, I believe this was the night before we were taken – the authorities, seeing us sleeping on the ground as a family, and then returning for us the following day. Us meant Edwards and her five siblings, whom police removed from their mother and father in a single day in Swan Hill in 1968.

Her two elder brothers, aged 11 and eight, were sent to the Burwood Boys’ Home. Edwards, her sisters, aged 10 and three, and their baby brother, just eight months, went to the Lutheran Children’s Home in Kew. Edwards, in a story familiar to many other Aboriginal families, did not see her mother again until she was 15. Meanwhile, she tried to look out for the most vulnerable member of the family. I was very protective of my beautiful baby brother, she says.

The baby boy was adopted into a loving family, but his adoptive mother died of cancer, aged 25. His adoptive father remarried, but his new wife did not want to raise a black child. Aged six, the boy was sent back to institutional care. Haunted by abandonment and rejection, the boy as a young man tried to deal with his pain through alcohol and drugs. He took his own life on his 25th birthday.

Today, Aunty Eva-Jo Edwards shares the experience of her lost childhood with new generations of police officers in her role as an Aboriginal community liaison officer within Victoria’s justice system in the hope of building a better future for her people. We know 170 or more years of policing in Victoria has played a part in destroying a nation of people and that the uniform has not been our friend, she says.

But in the same breath, if we want to make change, and we want to educate, and we want policing to be better and have better outcomes and justice for our mob, we have to be part of that change, don’t we? Edwards’ testimony is simply one of more than 1300 submissions made to the Yoorrook commission, Australia’s first truth-telling inquiry, over the past four years, each exposing different realities of life for Aboriginal people in Victoria.

Now, as the government considers the commission’s 100 recommendations, Edwards and other Indigenous witnesses stress the need for a treaty between the state and Aboriginal Victorians as the only way forward. The government has committed to establishing a treaty through negotiations with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, a democratically elected, independent body representing Indigenous people.

Edwards, a respected Indigenous elder, has dedicated much of her life to supporting survivors of the stolen generations, their children and grandchildren. She has spent a decade working within the Koori courts to help young Aboriginal people caught up in the justice system, led children on cultural camping trips and supported victims of institutional sexual abuse seeking redress. All the while, she has raised six of her own children and housed several from other families.

Edwards’ painful story was one among torrents contained in the Yoorrook reports, tabled in Victoria’s parliament on Tuesday. They were told by those who have endured the intergenerational reverberations – still resonating – caused by the arrival of European settlers on their ancient lands. The commission’s recommendations come with a potentially massive bill: land restitution, monetary compensation, tax relief and other forms of recompense the commission finds are owed for almost two centuries of hideous injustices to Indigenous people.

What may prove the toughest challenge, however, is yet to come: the completion of a treaty, its shape yet to be determined, between the state and Victoria’s Aboriginal people. It would be the first in Australia, the only post-colonial Commonwealth nation that has not negotiated any formal treaty with its Indigenous people. The First Peoples’ Assembly’s negotiations with the government on the formal agreement have focused on Aboriginal people’s self-determination and mechanisms the assembly would have to keep the government accountable to creating positive outcomes for Indigenous Victorians, including those based on Yoorrook’s recommendations.

One of Yoorrook’s final reports, the five-volume Yoorrook for Transformation, contains the commissioners’ recommendations. The other, Yoorrook Truth Be Told, is an official public record that encompasses First Peoples’ account of Victoria’s history since colonisation.

It is the first such history to have been compiled, but some of its findings caused a split among commissioners. Following last-minute crisis meetings, the commission’s account of Victoria’s history of colonisation as told by Yoorrook’s witnesses went ahead with a fine-print caveat stating that three of the five commissioners did not support all of the findings. However, Indigenous Victorians who gave evidence to Yoorrook and who spoke to The Age, emphasised their belief that a treaty must not only recognise their people had never ceded their sovereignty, or just address past issues, but confront contemporary problems reported by the truth-telling commission.

You know the government has had 200 years to get things right, and they still haven’t got it right, Edwards says. I think Aboriginal people need to be able to ... make decisions that are best for us. We are the best decision-makers because we know how things affect us. Edwards, like others, nominates getting better outcomes for Indigenous people in education, child protection, health and the criminal justice system as priorities.

The path to treaty