A response to Lana Collaris: Why the Vic Bar acknowledges traditional owners

The Victorian Bar has long prided itself on its strong relationships with the Indigenous members of our community, whom we serve and work with through many professional associations or who are members of our Bar.

The Victorian Bar is proud to have been the first Bar in Australia to have a Reconciliation Action Plan. Initiated more than 10 years ago, it guides us in our efforts to reconcile with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to provide access to justice and to ensure Indigenous Australians who join the profession are valued, encouraged and respected. The RAP has been supported by all Bar councils since its introduction and I do not expect to see it ever resiled from.

To acknowledge country is a commitment we have made in our Reconciliation Action Plan and it has become an honoured and important feature of Victorian Bar functions.

Comments from Lana Collaris, a Victorian barrister and Bar Council member, in The Australian this week fail to recognise this commitment to doing what we can to bridge the many gaps between us and our fellow citizens who are Indigenous. Those gaps are real and the work to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians has been accepted as a critical policy priority by all governments, state and federal, on a bipartisan basis for decades.

As president of the Victorian Bar, I am charged to act as an ambassador and champion for the Victorian Bar’s reconciliation initiatives, ensuring that reconciliation remains high on the agenda. The very smallest part of that role is to recognise and acknowledge connection to country, and I am proud to do so whenever I can.

As chair of the Bar Council, I open our meetings with an acknowledgment of the peoples of the Kulin Nation, the traditional owners of the land where we meet at Owen Dixon Chambers in William St, Melbourne. When I do so, I acknowledge something ancient and culturally significant about the place and its connection to those who have met there before. I believe that to do so also enriches my connections to the place and to my community. In Mabo, the High Court acknowledged the special and unique connection Indigenous Australians have to the land and waters as part of our common law.

Similarly, in Love v Commonwealth of Australia, Justice Geoffrey Nettle observed that: “Central to the traditional laws and customs of Aboriginal communities was, and is, an essentially spiritual connection with ‘country’, including a responsibility to live in the tracks of ancestral spirits and to care for land and waters to be handed on to future generations. Ignorance of those connections, and of their potential significance at common law, justified the early dispossession of Aboriginal peoples in the decades after 1788.”

The common law of Australia now turns its face firmly against this kind of ignorance. Indeed, the judge, in the same passage cited with approval the comments of Michael Dodson (the first Indigenous member of our Bar) that: “Everything about Aboriginal society is inextricably interwoven with, and connected to, the land. Culture is the land, the land and spirituality of Aboriginal people, our cultural beliefs or reason for existence is the land. You take that away and you take away our reason for existence … Removed from our lands, we are literally removed from ourselves.”

The connection to country, recognised by those and other decisions of the High Court, sits quite comfortably with and is recognised by the common law of Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are unique as Indigenous to this country – there is nothing controversial about recognising that fact when we refer to First Nations or First Peoples. In fact, it is wrong to suggest that the law does not recognise there were, and continue to be, distinct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political societies: Yorta Yorta Aboriginal community v Victoria (2002). The suggestion that by doing so we somehow advocate for a two-tiered system based on race is nonsensical and contrary to current law.

As for Collaris’s comments about the Yoorrook Justice Commission, it may well recommend reforms to our justice system in Victoria to improve outcomes for Indigenous people. Those recommendations will be the product of an inquiry currently under way, and which involves much evidence, consultation and public discussion – its hearings are open and recordings and submissions are online. If we are to be concerned with equality and differences of treatment of Australians, we should first and foremost be concerned about closing the gaps in socio-economic outcomes for our Indigenous Australians, gaps Yoorrook itself has highlighted.

I will continue to acknowledge country and I hope those who hear me do so understand that it comes from the heart.

Taken from The Australian on August 30, 2024.

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