ANTAR believes that Australians need to understand what Treaties are, why they are important, what they represent, and where they might lead us together as a nation.
More than 250 years on from James Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770 with instructions from the British Crown to annex Australia with the ‘Consent of the Natives’, First Nations Peoples from across Australia have never given consent or ceded their sovereignty.
Finally, we are seeing State and Territory governments take the tentative steps towards negotiating treaties and agreements with the First Nations peoples of their jurisdictions.
I join ANTAR in calling on governments to step up and take responsibility for Australia’s inevitable process of treaty, centuries after it should have happened.
As the only remaining Western colonising nation to have failed to treat with the First Nations of the land, Australia is exceptional for the wrong reason.