Travis Lovett knows something about long-distance walking and gathering Australian stories along the way. He went through numerous pairs of shoes trekking more than 500 kilometres across western Victoria early this year in the cause of truth-telling for Indigenous people.
Now he is planning to pull on new walking shoes and to hike even further – from Melbourne to Canberra, to ask Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to establish an Australia-wide truth-telling project.
Travis Lovett arrives at the state parliament after his 500-kilomtere walk across western Victoria in June.Credit: Justin McManus
He is inviting as many people as possible to join him on this new walk, to begin in April, which he says is in the cause of healing the nation.
Lovett was the deputy chair of Victoria’s Yoorrook Justice Commission when he walked highways and byways from Portland in Victoria’s far south-west to the steps of the state parliament in Melbourne in June, joined on various stretches by almost 22,000 Victorians.
He delivered message sticks calling on legislators to take heed of the stories of First Nations people gathered by the Yoorrook Commission over four years.
Yoorrook – meaning truth-telling – led to the Victorian government recently signing Australia’s first treaty with First Nations people.
The Albanese government failed in 2023 to persuade Australians to pass a referendum that proposed to give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a formal Voice to parliament.
Lovett said he accepted that the debate about the Voice was over, though it was one of the three pillars of the Uluru Statement from the Heart issued by First Nations leaders in 2017.
That statement called for constitutional recognition of a Voice to parliament, a treaty and truth-telling.
Lovett said he was not going to ask the Albanese government to commit to a treaty at this point, but he believed Australia had to deal honestly with its past in the cause of a better future.
Now the executive director of the Centre for Truth Telling at the University of Melbourne, Lovett said he would seek a formal commitment from the federal government to establish a national truth-telling process in partnership with First Nations peoples.
Telling the truth about the experiences of Aboriginal people since Australia was colonised was not about blame, but healing, he said.
“Walk For Truth is a shared journey that says, with our feet and our voices, that our country needs healing,” Lovett said on Wednesday.
“We will walk because love of country means loving it enough to change it.”
He said that after leaving the Victorian parliament steps in April, he would plot a course for Canberra that would enable him to engage communities and people from all walks of life, and to start gathering stories that had lain untold for too long.
“As a nation built on stories, we too often leave out the violence, dispossession and survival that followed colonisation.
“But a country that turns away from the truth of its own beginnings cannot be at peace with itself.”
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
