Reconciliation Action Plan News
Mrs Bridget Jenkins
Relationships with Community – Celebrate National Reconciliation Week
National Reconciliation Week, 27 May to 3 June, is a time for all Australians to learn about our shared histories, cultures, and achievements, and to explore how each of us can contribute to achieving reconciliation in Australia.
For our St Virgil’s community reconciliation is a fairly positive word, one which inspires hope-filled action as we work together with First Nations people to engage in an ongoing conversation about how we occupy the Land upon which our College sits and embed truth-telling practices into our learning and activities.
However, as one of the leading schools in reconciliation education in the country it is important that we continue to review and define how we use and understand the term reconciliation. To re-concile means to go back and do again the action of conciliation, yet in lutruwita/Tasmania ‘conciliation’ was the lie upon which the people were dispossessed of their Land by the colonial government. Between 1829 and 1834, the ‘Conciliator of Aborigines’, George Augustus Robinson, travelled the island on his ‘Friendly Mission’ with the deliberate intention of persuading the people to give up their home and move to the Bass Strait islands. Robinson has been described throughout white history as a protector and peacemaker and immortalised in colonial painter Benjamin Duterrau’s famous work The Conciliation (1840), a depiction of the ‘capture’ of the last group of Aboriginal people by Robinson in 1832. The truth of this time was that the people believed a treaty had been agreed upon and that they had not permanently given up their Land as part of a peaceful negotiation. Truth telling and re-conciling means being brave enough to go back and see the past through a different lens, one informed by First Nations voices, and then being brave enough to make significant change to the way we describe our shared history and the people who shaped it.
The National Reconciliation Week 2022 theme, “Be Brave. Make Change.” is a challenge to all Australians— individuals, families, communities, organisations and government—to Be Brave and tackle the unfinished business of reconciliation so we can Make Change for the benefit of all Australians