Statements from the Soul: The moral case for the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Shireen Morris and Damien Freeman (ed). LATROBE UNIVERSITY PRESS, ISBN 9781760643997.
Statements from the Soul brings together reflections on the Uluru Statement from representatives of many religious traditions. They include Stan Grant’s powerful reflection on the burning of his childhood church. As with other contributors he shows how Church leaders most concerned for Indigenous Australians in the abstract often established institutions responsible for depriving Indigenous people of freedom, of family connections and cultural support. They imposed on them alien answers without listening to their questions or recognising their wisdom.
In the past months we have been preoccupied by the Referendum and with the changes it would make to the Constitution. Beyond the Constitution and the laws that flow from it, however, lie the stories of the nation and the relationships between the people involved in those stories. They include the ancestral stories of the people of the First Nations, the stories of invasion, settlement, law making and building of the British invaders, and the stories of massacres, epidemics, disappropriation, and exclusion and discrimination. Together these stories speak of the original sin embodied in European Settlement, of the unending pain and alienation of the First Peoples, and of the need of all Australians for truth to be told and heard, justice to be done for this sin to be atoned for.
Statements from the Soul, like the Uluru Statement, is grounded in those larger questions of history and of the wrongs left to be righted and the voices to be heard. These lie at the heart of the Referendum.