Australia is an ongoing colonial project. Today marks the beginning of that project – one founded on genocide, rape, dispossesion and slavery. One which continues today in child removals, deaths in custody, rates of imprisonment, work for the dole schemes, and many manifestations of intergenerational trauma.
Today Honi Soit recognises that this issue runs much deeper than a date, and that Australia itself is nothing to be celebrated.
The colony will tell you that with the Royal Commission or the Apology came Reconciliation. The cultural climate that many young people today grew up in led us to believe that things were getting better for Indigenous people, while governments continued to ignore realities and build on the same project that began back in 1788.
We are told that we, as a country, are young and free. Yet Indigenous people are the most incarcerated population in the world, and have a life expectancy a decade younger than non-Indigenous people. We are told that Australia was founded at Federation, in 1901. But Indigenous people have been here for over 70,000 years. We live in a country that has been manufactured on lies, and prioritises a fabricated “culture” over Indigenous lives.
Honi aims, in our reporting, to provide something the Australian state, by nature, is at odds with: truth.
Truths such as Indigenous communities in New South Wales still being without clean drinking water. Or that universities continue to fail Indigenous students, as demonstrated by reports of their consistently lower retention rates. Or the increasing gentrification of suburbs like Redfern, the very same suburbs that many USyd students frequent over the course of their studies. No political or corporate platitude can ever displace the need to speak the truth about this colony’s treatment of First Nations people.
Honi Soit will not celebrate until the colony no longer stands. We encourage all our readers to do the same, and to listen wholeheartedly to First Nations people as they tell the true story of the lands we live on.
Sovereignty was never ceded. The land we produce our newspaper on is and has always been Aboriginal land, since time immemorial.
Groups and movements to follow and support:
https://www.facebook.com/ISJA.SYDNEY
https://www.facebook.com/FISTTmovement
https://www.facebook.com/justiceforjnr/
https://www.facebook.com/GMAR.GrandmothersAgainstRemovals
https://www.facebook.com/GamilaraayNextGeneration
Honi Soit is made and printed on the land of the Gadigal of the people of the Eora Nation. Always was, Always will be, Aboriginal Land.
