Noel Pearson’s National Press Club Address – 27 September 2023 Greetings to the Ngunnawal First Peoples. I pay respect to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders and all Elders of the Australian People, past and present. I bring this message stick from my Gumatj family in North East Arnhem Land. With the Referendum not […]
WE THE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE I am human and proud to be so. I am so astounded to be part of this race, the race of the humans. We are a staggeringly amazing species. Our genius is the source of profound wonder. Our home is this planet in which we have evolved. This planet is
TRANSFORMATIONAL SCHOOL EDUCATION “Something changed forever in Chris Drage around the time he turned 13.” In 2018 I read a story in The Australian about the 16-year-old Aboriginal boy who tragically drowned in the Swan River with his best friend following a police chase. It was like so many stories of young black
A JOB GUARANTEE FOR THE BOTTOM MILLION In this lecture I will put the case that the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution is critical to closing the gap on social and economic disparity. Our Cape York Agenda is based on the metaphor of the staircase. The staircase to development and freedom. It
A RIGHTFUL BUT NOT SEPARATE PLACE It is 54 years since W.E.H. Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming. In these lectures I could not avoid the lumination of Stanner’s original – in my view still the greatest of the Boyers and as vital today as when first delivered. In the course of these
WHO WE WERE, WHO WE ARE, AND WHO WE CAN BE We are on the last leg of a long journey. We are encamped on the hinterlands of the great capitals of the Federation: Hobart, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and the nation’s capital: Canberra, seeking for a majority of these states in their
