Reclaiming Our Belongingness: ‘Our Australia’

The First Nations of Australia experienced uninterrupted occupancy as a living culture within their civil society built on governance frameworks for thousands of years. It is argued that Indigenous people were not given the same rights as Australian citizens until 1967. However, the information in previous chapters have presented a history of the community of Cherbourg, my community, to highlight the colonised and occupied experience from the perspective of those who lived through it. There is a very different story to that gross generalisation. This chapter outlines the tenacity of Cherbourg people and my belief of the importance of education and art, in all of its forms, in documenting the preservation of culture, and the realities of a living heritage, which evolved out of the intensities of attitudes and values that prevailed in the historic treatment of Cherbourg residents and other Indigenous Australians. Survival required the ability to maintain core values and belief systems in one’s adaptation to legislation, conditions, and practices that contributed to survival. Is Australian art and education inclusive of its First Nations’ identity within Australian civil society? Such a question draws upon the reminiscences of the residents of Cherbourg, by exploring the art created from this place, the complexities ‘scaffolding of isolation’ involve terra nullius, non-citizenship, the separatism of apartheid, human rights issues of prejudices, racisms, and marginalisation for Indigenous people. Aboriginal people continually determine their Aboriginality in just living.