What are land acknowledgements without land back? When you pay your respects to the dead whose descendants remain dispossessed, or recognise the “traditional owners” of the land that you now possess and reap as a gift of your modernity … whose voice is it that you hear?

In Palestine, children are detained as a means of maintaining the occupation and suppressing resistance. In Australia, youth incarceration extends the legacy of forced removals and perpetuates intergenerational trauma among Indigenous communities. Children are targeted precisely because they represent the continuity and survival of their communities. This intentional disruption is not simply a matter of misguided policy but part of a broader effort to undermine Indigenous and Palestinian resilience.

There is an older chapter to the originating mythology of this saga that has been obscured. We write to register these ghosts in the architecture and alert a farther-afield readership to the latest wave of grassroots protest happening now.

Constitutional change is dead in the water. The Referendum has exposed the divides within our society, and the result demonstrates to the world Australia’s unconsciousness of its human rights failures. Sixty per cent of Australian voters have, consciously or unconsciously, determined that ‘bipartisanship’ lies somewhere between erasure and assimilation.

I can see the failure of the referendum making a whole lot of Blackfellas sit up and think and realise again, what we realised back in ’67, that our best efforts to achieve our aims are always at our own behest, under our own control. A whole new generation of Black activists deciding hang on, to hell with the rest of them, let’s just focus on our own communities and start building up the strength of our own communities.

The next huckster in the carnival of sport is the upcoming 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games. If we want aspects of it to be in line with Aboriginal protocol, we need action from across the four winds of the world. If it’s not done right we need solidarity and protest just the same. We are each other’s safety net in this theatre of sport. As a senior Aboriginal woman activist once told me, ‘we are all only as good as we negotiate’.

There’s a paradox about being a settler in a stolen country. No matter when we arrived, we inherited the bounty of genocidal violence. Many of us are the beneficiaries of the intergenerational wealth-building that saw English, Irish and Scottish settler families grow rich on the sheep, timber, wheat and resources provided by stolen land. We have a profound responsibility to dismantle the ‘lie-telling’ because it shores up this legacy and the systems of colonial violence that continue in our lifetimes.

After three arduous years, Victoria Police have today withdrawn their charges against two organisers of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest. Whilst we welcome their decision, we note that their mediocrity gave them no other option. Emboldened by their state-sanctioned impunity, Victoria Police’s ineptitude hit a dead end. Pigs cannot fly.

To winaga-li, Gomeroi/Kamilaroi people must be able to access Gunimaa. They must be able to connect and re-connect. Over 160 years of colonisation has privileged intensive agriculture, grazing and heavily extractive water management regimes, enabled by imposed property regimes and governance systems. Gunimaa and Gali still experience the violent repercussions of these processes, including current climate changes which are exacerbating impacts, as droughts become longer, floods and heat extremes become more intense, and climatic zones shift, impacting on species’ viability and biodiversity.

Progress on repatriation will only be made by reform to our national institutions; beyond improved funding to Indigenous communities through delivering on Closing the Gap targets, repatriation must be front and centre to the Treaty reforms called for by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Reconciliation demands the restoration of dignity to Ancestors through returning them to their rightful communities and Country, and the permanent return of sacred and cultural objects from which traditional owners have been dispossessed.

The Anaiwan-led #LandBack project helps us to clearly see the connections between colonisation and climate change, as well as being thoroughly entangled with a national obsession: residential property.

Dismantling the structures that bedevil the lives of Aboriginal people does not mean that Aboriginal anger will cool, or that anything will be forgiven—it is far too late for that—but for the beneficiaries of settlement it might be the first step in a necessary process of self-recognition. For us Aboriginal people, it might signal the beginnings of the end of invasion. Never forget that consensual decision-making was, and remains, a moral foundation of Aboriginal culture. Perhaps its extension into mainstream Australian culture could be the beginning of something more truthful.

Invasion Day is not a day to celebrate. It is not a day to profit from dispossession and genocide. It is not a day to debate the humanity of vulnerable and marginalised people.

Wayne is gone. And more than 470 of our people are gone, and countless before them. Gone. They are all gone. Disappeared into the belly of the beast. Killed to feed a system that must perpetuate its own existence. And what better fodder than the disposable? And who is the disposable in this country? Us. Blak fullas.

The work of the human scientist is a performance. Facts are not plain facts, sitting out there waiting for our recognition; they have to be brought into being with curiosity then some kind of funding, nurtured, celebrated and maintained in laboratories and seminars, and then propagated in the form of books.

The dedication of Farmers or Hunter-? to ‘Enkidu and Gilgamesh’, is something of a sleeper. In his interview with Stuart Rintoul, Sutton said that he sees ‘the birth of reconcilement’ in the Epic of Gilgamesh which is one of the earliest literary creations to emerge from the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. It was there that farming began, along with all its infrastructure of metalworking, urbanisation, writing, patriarchal theocracies, monarchies, armies, and colonisation.