Introduction: In the wake of the traumatic Voice referendum outcome, the role of non-Indigenous people as allies and accomplices has become increasingly important, according to Dr Summer May Finlay, a Yorta Yorta woman and prominent public health academic.
In a presentation today to the National Allyship Summit, held at the University of Wollongong and online, Finlay urged allies and accomplices to speak out about the Prime Minister walking back his commitment to a Makarrata Commission.
Labor promised before the last federal election to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which calls for a Makarrata Commission “to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history”.
Finlay said the Prime Minister has “immense power and privilege”, and “leads a party that collectively has an overwhelming amount of privilege and power and, quite frankly, I think they’re being cowards”.
She urged allies and accomplices to do more to challenge and change the status quo: “I need you to remember we can never walk away, and we are asking you to do the same: to never walk away. If you stay in your comfort zone, we are perpetually going to live uncomfortable lives with the cycle of trauma never broken.”
Her presentation is published in full below.
Summer May Finlay writes:
I would like to begin by acknowledging that we are on Dharawal Country of the Wodi Wodi people.
As a Yorta Yorta woman, this is not my Country but this is Country that is special to me, because this is where I have birthed my children, where I am raising my family. It’s where I live and work. This is Country who supports me in everything that I do. So I am eternally grateful for those that have continued to look after it for millennia, and for those that we look after in the future.
I am a mum of two beautiful girls. I’m a daughter, I’m a godmother, and of course I’m an academic, though that title sits more uncomfortably than the others…
It is an absolute privilege to be sitting here, particularly after the presentation we heard this morning from Aunty Pat [Anderson] – amazing woman. We heard from Geoff Scott, Jaki Adams, Bronwyn Fredericks, Thomas Mayo, all people that I know and have a huge amount of respect for. Their contribution, particularly to the advocacy and the promotion of the Uluru Statement, is unparalleled.
So today I’m going to talk to you about today about allyship and accomplices.
As has been discussed today, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was a gift to the people of this country. A gift for the 97 percent. That is non-Indigenous peoples. Most of you in this room.
The gift that is in there, in terms of Voice, Treaty and Truth, is needed now as much as it was previously. You would have heard the Productivity Commission on whether we’re on track on Closing the Gap targets.
Five of them are not on track: life expectancy, rates of suicide, which are increasing, incarceration, out of home care, and overcrowding. Those statistics represent not a nameless, faceless people; they represent my family, my community, my friends and Aboriginal and Torres Strait people across this country.
We have higher rates of out of home care than we did under the Stolen Generations. We have children not knowing their identity, not knowing their culture. We have people taken out of their communities and incarcerated. We can’t even, in a wealthy country, make sure that we have enough adequate housing for mob. And the suicide rate is a symptom of all of the stuff that’s going on in this country.
That is why our allies are hugely important. We’re three percent of the population. We can’t do this alone, and you know that.
I need to share with you this stuff and how it makes me feel, because you see those statistics, and what you see is the number. You see it with your head. We need you to see it with your heart.
Driving change
What we genuinely need, as you know, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here, is substantive change.
What does it take to get substantive change?
We need a seismic shift in the way we’re currently addressing things in this country. And again, the lion’s share of that burden should not be on Aboriginal and Torres Strait people, it should be on the 97 percent.
What this means is that, and this is going to be a theme through my chat today, we need people to be uncomfortable. We need you to be uncomfortable. The status quo maintains those statistics at the very best, and at the worst it makes them get worse.
Every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person in this room and outside of this room, their families are in those statistics.
So I’m here because I wrote two articles which seem to resonate with people. The first one was with NITV on how to be a good ally. I wrote this because, at the time, I felt like people needed to hear what those actions were that you needed to do to be a good ally. And this was from my perspective. I don’t claim to be a fountain of all knowledge on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, or to speak for all of us, and I just want to actually say that.
But for people to be an ally, they need to preference our voices, using your privilege to make sure we are heard on issues that impact us. Good allies are okay with not being part of the conversation. Blackfellas make the decisions around what needs to happen, and you guys get behind us and help drive that forward.
Good allies are there for the good times and the bad times, not just putting up a black image on social media, but there when the going gets hard, like right now. We have hope, but it doesn’t mean it’s not hard.
One of the things I always encourage, and I’m hoping people in this room already do this, is say something when you hear something inappropriate. Another thing is, don’t take it personally when we don’t agree with you, and don’t go it alone. And one of the big things is to understand, and I think that was obvious during the referendum debate, that we’re not all the same.
The second article was published in 2022 by Croakey Health Media. This article almost didn’t get published. This was actually written for the ABC in the lead up to Reconciliation Week, and on the day that it was due to be published, ABC pulled it because it was too political. So I’m very, very lucky to have friends in the media who would publish it. And this one talked about: where do you fit? Are you a tokenist? An ally? Or an accomplice?
I want to talk about accomplices. That’s the next step, right? That is genuinely people who are with us at all times. They lift us up, they pick us up, they open doors, they create spaces, they use their privilege to their own disadvantage and risk. That’s what we need.
I have a privilege as an Aboriginal person with a reasonable level of education and socioeconomic status. It’s my job to make sure that I am also opening doors and making sure that voices that don’t have the platform that I have, and I clearly have a platform, are heard.
And we need you to do that too.
The big thing about allies..is, you, me, we. This is a collective action. This requires a collective response. You don’t hear very many Aboriginal talk people talking about ‘I’. It’s all about ‘we’, it’s all about the collective.
And we need you to be with us as accomplices, even when it’s not convenient. But you do have a challenge as non-Indigenous people: where’s the line between being an accomplice and also maybe culturally appropriation? That’s all right, we’ll keep you in check! I’m aware that that is a challenge, but taking that risk is something you need, but also listening when maybe you’ve overstepped is also something we need you to do.
We need you to be political. My whole existence is political. My parents’ marriage was political. My birth was political. My dad’s white, that’s where I get my freckles from, my mum is Aboriginal. When my dad went to get some tools off a friend, apparently, he said to his wife, after my dad left, “you should see the colour of Mark’s daughter”.
Me identifying as Aboriginal is political. So you can imagine how political it is working in a university as an Aboriginal person is. Even standing before you is political.
Between the political nature of who we are AND our lived reality, we need our allies and accomplices more than we ever have before, at least in my lifetime.
Get uncomfortable
To do that we need you to get very uncomfortable. So I want you to be OK with being uncomfortable. That kind of uncomfortable which makes you squirm in your seat still, where you’re actually wondering what the fallout will be. The kind which leaves you doubting yourself just.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said, “Well-behaved women seldom make history”. Well, Aboriginal people have seldom made history by being “well-behaved” either. And I can’t say I’m particularly well behaved and I’m asking you to also not be particularly well behaved.
We need to challenge the status quo, that status quo that is seeing my mob dying, by increasing numbers of suicide and with increasing numbers of our children in out of home care.
I regularly make people uncomfortable, I’m told, when I speak up on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues – with one colleague once telling me my controversialness waxes and wanes.
The majority of people don’t like to be uncomfortable; we like to stay where we know, we like to stay in our box.
We like to quantify and qualify everything, which is why very many people at a university prefer qualitative research, because they get to accurately describe it, the grey which is qualitative, which is that not being able to adequately describe things often makes people uncomfortable. And while you sit in the dominant culture comfortably, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people from other cultures sit very uncomfortably.
So while I’m asking you to be uncomfortable, I want you to know we are often uncomfortable, if not most of the time. At 43 I’ve been uncomfortable a lot, and quite frankly, particularly after the [Voice] referendum, I was tired. I have a one-year-old and an almost three-year-old. They’re not the reason I’m tired.
I know I regularly speak up on issues relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, yet every time I do, I need to tell you I am uncomfortable. I may look and sound okay here on the stage, but I get nervous every time I get up here. How is it going to resonate with you?…. And every time we voice something, we’re thinking about the possible unintended consequences that we can or cannot predict. Every time I sit here, I am vulnerable.
Safety matters
I think most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will understand this when I say we have very few places where we’re actually comfortable, so much that I know when I leave the house, I put on my mental armour. Armour has become a reflex. We walk into a meeting, we walk into a space that’s predominantly non-Aboriginal people, and we do that, as a matter of course, it’s the only way we can get through.
It protects me from the disease of racism, the disease of complacency and, quite frankly, wilful ignorance, which is what we saw with a lot of people who voted no at the referendum, wilful ignorance, all of those which are chronic conditions our society suffers from.
I, like most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, need to put on that mental armour to avoid dying a death by 1,000 cuts. It’s always the small things that get you.
And, can I just say, home is not always a safe place, not when you’re flicking through the channels and you see people like Andrew Bolt, who’s been at it again, Pauline Hanson, Peta Credlin. They still occasionally make their way into my private spaces, on the TV, radio, online, social media and unfortunately my phone.
Therefore as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, we are rarely ever completely safe, unless we decide we want to shut ourselves off completely from the outside world, a possibility I don’t think any of us could tolerate. So again, I ask you as allies and accomplices, to be uncomfortable. Wherever you are now, take it to the next level and enter that zone of uncomfortableness.
Challenge power and privilege
I want you to be so uncomfortable you start saying stuff about our Prime Minister effectively walking back his commitment to Makarrata. Exercise your democratic rights. He’s a person with immense power and privilege. He leads a party that collectively has an overwhelming amount of privilege and power and, quite frankly, I think they’re being cowards.
I want you to be uncomfortable and be okay with being uncomfortable that we’re still reeling, in some ways, from the outcome of the referendum. I was interviewed the other day by some students who were doing a research project on the impact of the referendum, and I was caught off guard, and I actually cried. And I am not a crier. I didn’t actually realise I was still carrying that much pain. It’s an outcome that has emboldened racists in this country.
Therefore, we need to do more. You need to do more. You need to ask your friends, colleagues and family to do more. As I said, you need to exercise your privilege to our advantage. The privilege that most of you have benefited from comes from the colonial takeover of our country and the subjugation of our ancestors that continues today.
I need you to remember we can never walk away, and we are asking you to do the same: to never walk away. If you stay in your comfort zone, we are perpetually going to live uncomfortable lives with the cycle of trauma never broken.
I do want to say that obviously change is possible and change has happened. I sit here today because of all of the work that the Elders and ancestors have done before. I need to recognise that I am privileged sitting here, my mum would not have had this privilege. She left school at 13 to work in a factory. She wanted to be a nurse. She didn’t see that as an option for her.
Think of the children
But I want it to be that, rather than being the exception, my experience is the rule. I want to see a better future for my kids. I don’t want them to feel the pain the first time they have someone call them an ‘Abo’ at the age of eight.
I don’t want them to have to protect themselves from the mental lows and the mental anxiety. I just want them to be Aboriginal, to experience their culture, to celebrate that culture, and do in life whatever they want to do, and just happen to be Aboriginal.
I want them to live a life free of racism, and more than that, I want it to be a life that celebrates our culture with us.
So again, I ask you to do more. I ask you to help fulfill my aspirations for my children, their children and everyone else’s children, either born or unborn in this country.
I want you to help us make a world where they can be Aboriginal, and they are celebrated for it, and they can know their culture like every other child. I want that to be a reality.
So I want to leave you with three questions.
I want you to ask yourself, why are you here?
I didn’t talk about accountability, but I think it kind of is obvious. I want you to actually think about who you’re accountable to. When you’re working in our space, when you’re advocating for us and with us, who are you accountable to?
And the other question that I would ask you to think about is, what are you doing when nobody is looking?
So I ask you to move from allies, which I think is a great, great support, to accomplices, to people who stand with us at all times, who are uncomfortable with us and celebrate the successes with us. So thank you.
• Dr Summer May Finlay, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, is a member of Croakey Health Media, and a contributing editor.
Watch the recording
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the Uluru Statement
