‘Would a national truth-telling process hurt anybody?’ Long walk ends with plea for reckoning

Travis Lovett arrived at Parliament House with a plea from his Aboriginal elders.

“I have walked my part of the road. Now I ask this country to walk the next part with us,” he told a crowd of hundreds of people.

The Kerrupmara Gunditjmara man had just presented a kangaroo skin to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, inscribed with a letter calling for national truth-telling.

“The time has come for us to look honestly at ourselves,” the first line reads.

Lovett brought the message on a slow, 38-day walk, covering more than 500 kilometres of winding rivers from Melbourne to the nation’s capital.

The final part of the journey was completed alongside hundreds of people from Canberra’s Reconciliation Place to Parliament House, where he was met by the prime minister.

The walk, completed with wife Renata and their children, ended 59 years to the day after a successful 1967 referendum that led to Aboriginal people being included in the national census.

But Lovett said many of the wants of Indigenous Australians were still being ignored.

Establishing a national truth-telling process was one of three requests made in the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017, which the Albanese government later committed to implementing.

The Indigenous voice to parliament, which failed at a referendum in 2023, was just one part.

In August 2024, Albanese told the ABC his government had not committed to establishing a formal truth-telling commission, despite providing $5.8 million towards creating a Makaratta commission to explore truth-telling and treaty.

“That’s not what we have proposed,” he told the ABC’s Insiders program. “What we’ve proposed is Makarrata, just being the idea of coming together.”

Last October, the National Indigenous Australians Agency told Senate estimates that the commission was chiefly now a part-time salary to monitor developments in other states.

Closing the Gap reports show no progress and critical issues facing some Indigenous communities have become drastically worse, architects of the Uluru statement say.

“Would a national truth-telling process hurt anybody? Of course not,” Lovett said. “No people can be free inside a story that is not true. Let’s be very clear; everything that has been achieved for the betterment of our people has been done by us, for us.”

Albanese said there was still a long way to go for reconciliation with Indigenous people.

“There are bumps in the road,” he said. “It’s not a straight journey, as progress never is. But I assure you that we’ll continue to walk with you. We’ll be a stronger nation when there is proper and full recognition of First Nations people, and of course a full acknowledgement of our history, the pluses and the negatives.”

Uluru Dialogue co-chairs Pat Anderson and Megan Davis marked the start of National Reconciliation Week with a continuation of their call for constitutional recognition of Indigenous people.

Governments continued to announce policies, reviews, inquiries and programs without proper consultation with Indigenous communities, the co-chairs said, showing the need for a voice had not diminished.

AAP

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.