30 April 2015, Sydney, Australia
Daniel Solomons committed suicide on 23 April 2013. A Memorial Scholarship was established in his name, and Justice Michael Kirby spoke at the launch event. The name of the talk is, “Lawyers Suicide: The Influence of Legal Studies and Practice, Stress and Clinical Depression and Sexuality’. Daniel’s mother Sandra Solomons also spoke at the event.
CONTRADICTIONS AND DISCORDANCIES
This is not an evening for joy and humour. Ashurst have offered their Sydney office for the launch of the Daniel Solomons Memorial Scholarship. Daniel was their employee. Before that, he was a gifted student at Moriah College. He received the Premier’s Medal for all round excellence in his High School Certificate results. He graduated in an Arts/Law course at the University of New South Wales, with first class honours. He was respected by his colleagues at Ashurst. He was admired for his analytical skills. He was studying for admission to practise at the New South Wales Bar. Two years and a week ago, on 23 April 2013, he took his own life. His death has been a devastation to his partner and his family, his work colleagues, the members of his intended Bar chambers. His is another story of might have beens.
I honour the lovely, discordant, evocative Jewish music, played by the quintet. I appreciate the fine food and the wines. But this is not an evening for enjoyment. Losing Daniel has left a hole in the heart of too many. The sharpest loss has been felt by those present at the event:
His parents, Sandra and David Solomons.
His sisters Michele and Rebecca, who grew up with him.
His domestic partner and faithful friend, David Darley, who is here with his mother, Sandra Darley, still close to Daniel’s family.
His two grandmothers who are both present.
His uncles, cousins and other family members.
His school friends from Moriah College.
His University friends from UNSW.
His work colleagues at Ashurst, who cherished his dazzling abilities.
Jordana Wong from UNSW Law, substituting for Dean David Dixon, who planned the scholarship to continue Daniel’s passions.
And the rest of us who are here, seeking to find meaning out of this tragic anniversary.
This cannot be a usual dinner with laughter and celebration. We have serious work to do. And if we shed tears, that will be entirely appropriate. Yet tears are also not enough. We must respond to Daniel’s family’s determination to establish a scholarship that will recognise in others, and support, the same courage, idealism and determination to change things that Daniel exhibited in his short life.
COMMONALITIES
I feel an affinity for Daniel Solomons. Not to be too boastful (for Daniel and I would never be such) we were both pretty brilliant at school, and at university.
We were both enthusiastic and energised by our early work experience. We loved solving the problems of the law, Daniel and I.
We were both good writers. It is a genetic thing. A capacity to communicate simply. To write in the same language that we talk – a simple tongue derived from the Saxons, that now conquers the world.
We both tended to think outside the square. This irritated some people. But it helped us to see things to which others were blind.
We were both challengers of settled things. And, as we grew up, we knew, from our experiences with love and life, that many things needed changing, including in the law.
Undeservedly you might think, we both were lucky in love. We both won handsome and intelligent partners and (for a reason we could never fully understand) they loved us. Daniel’s, David Darley. My Johan van Vloten. Luck in love, we knew, could not be methodically planned. It was a gift from the Gods.
It is good that tonight we honour David Darley and his mother. Often, you know, this is done for wives or husbands but not for LGBT partners. Yet they are flesh and blood. They hurt. They weep too.
DIFFERENCES
Emanuel Poulos of Ashurst has shared with us a thoughtful and moving description of Daniel’s life in the Firm. So well-constructed and full of detail. Daniel’s sudden death, and its circumstances, would have been a terrible shock to his work colleagues. He had so much to offer and to look forward to. The support by Ashurst for Daniel’s scholarship. It will be one way to keep alive the flame of memory and to honour his unusual personality. It will support those selected who decide to make the study of law their dream. It will help those who need something more, to get started. And who demonstrate personal courage, as Daniel did, seeking knowledge and enlightenment despite challenges, whether personal, financial or both.
Still, there were differences between Daniel’s life and mine:
I am nearing the end. He was knocking on the entrance door. I applied for articles to Dawson Waldron Edwards and Nichols (a predecessor of Ashurst). I may have been brilliant. But they rejected my application. My father was not a lawyer. That was often a prerequisite in those days. Daniel was accepted here. I never made it to a top tier firm. Often in the High Court, I would look at the coversheet of appeal books. The old firms that rejected me may have changed their names. But it did not deceive me. I knew who they were. It did not make a difference to my judgment. But I still remembered. Daniel, on the other hand, entered the magic circle.
Daniel’s office was, let’s face it, a mess. Mine has always been antiseptically neat and tidy.
Towards the end of his life, Daniel, who had suffered anxiety, came to suffer from clinical depression. I never have. Depression is not an easy journey. In Samuel Coleridge’s poem “Dejection” he describes how it feels:
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy stifled unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear.
To honour Daniel, we must resolve to talk about depression. To analyse its causes. Above all, to understand why it is so common amongst law students, legal practitioners and judges. Although I did not feel its pain myself, I spent many years of enforced silence about another demon of others that Daniel knew: sexual difference. So it is not hard for me to understand the challenge of depression. The way out of the closet is to put it on the table, turn it around, examine it, acknowledge it and challenge its corrosive effects.
RESISTENCE
After I was appointed to the High Court of Australia, in February 1996, I was soon afterwards invited to address a judicial conference in Brisbane. I was asked to talk on any subject I might choose. Perhaps they were hoping for the Rule against Perpetuities or the Statute of Mortmain. Instead, fresh from a recent conference in Canada, I selected stress. Judicial stress. Stress done to judges. Stress done by judges. Little did I know that I could not have chosen a more stressful topic for my audience.
The commentator, Justice Jim Thomas of the Supreme Court of Queensland, was antagonistic to my theme. He blamed his wife, who, he said, had berated him for even coming to respond to such an inappropriate and irrelevant theme. Most of the judicial attendees at that conference appeared relieved and mischievously happy to tweak the tail of the new High Court Justice for daring to choose a “touchy-feely” subject. How rude of him. A few supported me; but not many. However, I stood my ground. That was another thing I shared with Daniel. The sometimes irrational belief in our own correctness. I have kept gnawing away at this subject since 1976: betraying a naively simple belief in rational persuasion. Now there are fewer lawyers who are dismissive of the topic. Too much evidence of its impact. Too many suicides and breakdowns to sustain the code of silence. Now, most law deans, chief judges and leading lawyers know that this subject is serious. We will honour Daniel’s life by treating is as such.
SUICIDAL DIMENSION
Suicide is now such a serious problem in our world that even the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO) has provided a first report addressing the topic. According to the report, someone in our world commits suicide every 40 seconds. This is more than the aggregate of victims of wars and natural disasters. The largest toll is amongst the elderly. The highest rates occur in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia with 25% of cases occurring in developed countries. Men are almost twice as likely as women to take their own lives. Inferentially, this is because women have better networks; they are more willing to talk about issues that trouble them; and to seek help. They are less likely to feel an obligation of denial. They will seek help beyond their own limited knowledge and experience. Lonely self-help will often not provide the solution.
The WHO report took a decade to produce. It found that the rates of suicide in developed countries (12.7 per 100,000) were slightly higher than in developing low and middle income countries (11.2). The very highest rates in the world occurred in North Korea, India, Indonesia and Nepal. Worldwide, the most suicide prone countries included Guyana (44.2 per 100,000); followed by North and South Korea (38.5 and 28.9 respectively), Sri Lanka (28.8), Lithuania (28.2), India (21.1) and Southern Sudan (19.8). Russia and Uganda each had 19.5. The purpose of the WHO report is to encourage a new global strategy. The Organisation hopes that this will reduce suicide rates by 10% before 2020.
Australia has a rate of about 11.5 per 100,000. Every year approximately 2,000 Australians commit suicide, with up to 40 times that number making an attempt to end their lives. Suicide is the leading cause of death in Australia for young men under 44 years and for women under 34 years. One person dies by suicide in Australia approximately every 4 hours.
One issue which the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention is currently studying is the particular impact of human sexuality on the suicide rate. This is why the Institute has recently appealed to persons who know someone who committed suicide to assist them with their research into the impact of minority sexual orientation or gender identity. These are topics that can occasionally lead to feelings of isolation, low self-worth, fear of violence and hostility.
Although we have known the basic facts of the science of sexual orientation for more than 50 years, recent research and experience shows that often there is good reason for people, including young people, to feel depressed and discouraged because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. They may keep up appearances. But, particularly if they are suffering from clinical depression, the appearances may simply mask the inner turmoil that is going on. Sometimes that turmoil will lead them to an exit strategy. For people who face what they see as unrelieved stress and pain, suicide can appear a rational way out of unyielding conflict and misery.
Many young people in Australia come up against hostility and animosity because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. A recent report by Beyondblue revealed high levels of homophobia amongst Australian teenage boys between the ages of 14-17. A quarter of the cohort considered that it was acceptable to describe something they did not like as “gay”: assimilating the insult with the description. Most participants in the study agreed that homophobic discrimination was common in their circle and they realised that it could lead to depression and anxiety. However, despite this insight, a significant minority indicated attitudes that would escalate such responses:
38% indicated that they would not be happy being friends with a same-sex attracted person;
41% said that lesbian, gay and bisexual people make them uncomfortable;
34% of boys were unsure whether ending a friendship if someone said they were same-sex attracted would be discrimination;
Around 19% saw homosexuality as immoral; and
17% regarded it as a “passing phase”.
DOING SOMETHING
The response to this problem in Australian society (which would appear to be larger than in most other western countries) demands institutional and individual responses. The places where such responses need to occur obviously include educational institutions. Some of these are under the control of religious (“Faith”) organisations that are resistant to changing the environment that gives rise to the discrimination, hostility and potentially terminal responses on the part of those targeted. Not all those who commit suicide amongst young Australians are from sexual minorities (LGBTI). But clearly some are. The higher rates of suicide amongst young males appears significant.
When the Australian Federal Government launched a “Safe Schools Coalition Australia” initiative, supported by federal funding of $8 million, to support an active campaign against bullying in schools, this was criticized by the Australian Christian Lobby. It called for a boycott. Nor is its approach confined to evangelical Christian churches. In March 2015, I wrote to a senior official in a Roman Catholic educational institution, drawing attention to reports that students had been refused accreditation of a LGBTI student group which would have financial and venue advantages for them. The institution had also reportedly refused permission to the students to meet on the university premises. The response by the senior executive of the institution was discouraging:
“As a [religious institution] recognised by Australian law, we believe that we have a right (and duty) to run [our body] in a way that is consistent with and gives witness to our Faith. We clearly identify our Objects in all of our recruitment materials and we ask all students to respect the Objects. We do not assert this as a justification for unjust discrimination, as we are absolutely opposed to unjust discrimination, but we do assert that this allows us to approach and deal with issues in ways that may be different to the practices of secular institutions but are none the less valuable and important. By way of illustration; while a secular [organisation] may well affiliate clubs with a “Pro-Gay Marriage” advocacy purpose, [we] would not, and indeed could not affiliate a … gay marriage advocacy club without completely undermining our existence… which operates within a ‘context of Catholic faith and values’. However, our commitment to pastoral care, human dignity and opposition to unjust discrimination means that we must - and do – ensure that all students continue to feel free to exercise their own judgment and discernment on such matters and are free to act in accordance with their conscience. Furthermore, we do not ban or prohibit such issues from being discussed publicly or privately at [our institution], and indeed to do so would be counter to the purpose and role. We would however, seek genuine debate, which means we would normally require the case for [our Faith’s] position to be debated together with any opposing positions. “
The fundamental message of this response remains that the institution concerned is happy to receive public funds to support its mission. But that mission is certainly hostile to the actuality of LGBTI students. Those students who are not themselves Catholic (and even some who are) might dismiss the institution’s unfriendly approach as predicable unequal treatment and just move on. But some students, particularly those raised in a Catholic tradition, could easily feel conflicted, stressed and unworthy by reason of such an environment.
Recently, the Holy See refused to accept the appointment of an ambassador accredited by the Government of France. He was openly gay. His offence, it seems, was that he did not keep his sexual orientation to himself. Demanding this of experienced ambassadors may perhaps be surmountable in countries like Saudi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Uganda and possibly the Vatican. But for young students in an Australian educational institution, it only serves to sharpen the anxieties, stress and depression. This can clearly have deleterious consequences for those exposed to suicidal thoughts. But especially for young people who may love their religion and hate themselves for being unchangeably gay, as science teaches that they are.
Earlier, there were similar religious attitudes in the United States and in South Africa to support racial discrimination against minorities and miscegenation. Apartheid in South Africa was often supported by the Dutch Reformed Church (which has since recanted) on the basis of scriptural texts. These problems are bad enough as an intellectual dilemma for people growing up. But are particularly harmful as they apply to vulnerable young people who may be suicidal in what should be a nurturing environment. I may be wrong, but I cannot see that such attitudes in publicly funded institutions in Australia are compatible either with legal and constitutional principle or with the pastoral and legal duty of care owed by every educational institution to those in their charge, given increasing knowledge of the risks.
In Daniel’s case, he had no religious conflicts we know of as he grew up in Moriah College. He was surrounded by love and protection by his family, teachers and fellow pupils. Yet, even then, he was caught in the chains of suicide. Daniel’s basic problems were that he suffered from clinical depression, a recognised pathology. And he worked in the law. For such a person, this is an especially hazardous occupation.
CLINICAL DEPRESSION
I have just returned from a conference in England, most of whose participants were statisticians and biological scientists. Statisticians are drawn from the most brilliant of students. I know this from my time as Chancellor of Macquarie University, with its degrees in mathematics, statistics and actuarial studies. I was, I think, the only lawyer at the conference. One participant, Professor Lewis Wolpert, an expert in cell and developmental biology at University College London, talked of the challenge of severe depression. He has given papers and written books on the subject. He talked openly about his own experience with depression. He explained that:
“If you can describe your severe depression, you probably have not had one. It is indescribable and one enters a world with little relation to the real one. It was the worst experience in my life, even worse than the death of my wife from cancer. With her dying, I could do things to help her and I mourned afterwards. But with my depression, there was nothing I felt I could do and I believed that I would never get better. My state bore no resemblance to anything I had ever experienced before. I had had periods of feeling low but they were nothing like my depressed state. I was totally self-involved and negative and thought about suicide all the time. I just wanted to be left alone.”
Cognitive therapy eventually gave assistance to Professor Wolpert. He gradually got better. But his family were embarrassed about his depression. They would tell no one. He knew from his reading that only 10% of patients with severe depression do not have a relapse. He regarded William Styron’s Darkness Visible as an outstanding exposition of the problem. Styron points out that:
“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances as it cannot be borne.”
Cultural and social inhibitions in many countries prevent identification, treatment and support during such an illness. Pharmaceutical drugs can sometimes help. Professor Wolpert found that physical exercise was useful. He saw an analogy between depression and cancer, in the sense that it is a normal process of living (sadness) that has become disordered and magnified. He tried to analyse the condition from an evolutionary point of view. Feelings that are so common in society could have some advantages for the individual. A “social competition hypothesis” suggests that depression is an adaptation whose function is to inhibit aggression by rivals and superiors when one’s status is low. It is a means of yielding, when there is acute social competition. It thus reduces the efforts of the aggressor. But Professor Wolpert is not convinced. Especially when depression leads to suicide, it is hard to see an evolutionary value in it. It may have a perceived individual value, as terminating unendurable pain. It may, like sexual orientation, simply be a variant in nature whose purpose is not always clear and may not matter much given its reality as part of human experience. If it exists, that is enough. Society must respond. It must seek to palliate and help the subject and to avoid needless termination of the subject’s life.
LAWYERS’ RESPONSES
Those who suffer the indescribable pain, recounted by Professor Wolpert, are rendered extremely vulnerable if their career choice has taken them into the law. The law is usually a very public vocation. Its top practitioners are on display most of the time. They face fierce competition. They are often perfectionists. Overachievers. Trapped in “pin striped prisons”. We now know that law places special and excessive pressures on students and practitioners. Working in symbiosis with depression, this can trigger suicidal thoughts and actions. As wise commentators have observed, because lawyers generally sell their talent in modules of time, there is always pressure on them to sell more and more time, until there is no time left for the other priorities of life.
There is some evidence that pressures of this kind are heaviest in large firms where it is harder to maintain a life/work balance. Although many firms today (and some law schools, even judicial institutions) have attempted remedial measures to show that they care about the challenge of depression and the risks (including suicide) that it brings, commentators repeatedly observe that the lawyers most at risk commonly do not believe that these efforts are real or intended to be taken seriously:
“… [P]rivate practice lawyers are often subject to tight, client-driven deadlines and exacting internal performance targets – the competitive and confrontational nature of legal practice leaves many believing that such wellbeing policies are not worth the paper they are written on. ‘A few months ago, my firm distributed helpful tips, printed on colourful postcards, suggesting we ought to “go for a swim in the ocean” or “go home and cook a meal with your family”, wrote one lawyer anonymously… in 2013. “Apparently the irony of recommending such fun and whimsy to a group of employees who are effectively required to remain at the office upwards of 14 hours/day for months on end was lost on the hopeful folks in human resources. Under such conditions, and with the profession’s poor track record in looking after its own, such cynicism is well placed.”
Certainly, there does now seem to be a growing realisation of the existence of a true crisis in legal employment as a career choice. In a recent poll asking “is life as a lawyer what you thought it would be when you were a student?”, more than 37% of respondents said “No, I wish I was working in a different career”. Only 11% of the 444 respondents to the survey said their law career had fulfilled all their expectations.
Plainly, we have a problem here. Estimates suggest that one in three lawyers from law school to final retirement, suffer at some stage from depression and low self-esteem. A number will face serious suicidal imaginings. If one of Google’s lawyers’ suicides and inserts the name of the city or town, names will come up that one knew but sometimes had forgotten. Tristan Jepson was such a name. His parents established the Foundation in his name in his name to tackle the issue. Daniel Solomons was another young lawyer who fell victim to suicidal depression. Most of his colleagues did not know, could not understand and could not believe that such a talented and handsome, much admired person would suffer the condition at the end of his life. Or respond as he did. But that is the fact. Lawyers have to face the facts.
Shortly before the launch of the Daniel Solomons Scholarship, yet another Sydney lawyer, a specialist in tax, who had taken a part in advocacy for a genuine response to suicide risks, took his own life. This challenge is always with us. It goes on. It does not disappear.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
The beginning of wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge. The Tristan Jepson Foundation has sponsored research by Professor Ian Hickie of the Sydney University Brain and Mind Institute. There must be more such research. The burgeoning legal industry and the multiplying Australian law schools – now numbering more than thirty five – should contribute to it. They have a stake in addressing the challenge successfully. So have we all. So has our society.
As with sexual orientation and gender identity, those who have faced the challenge of depression and suicidal thoughts need to come forward, stand up and identify themselves if they can. They should bravely become role models for those who do not yet dare. Tristan and Daniel did not live long enough to follow the lead of Lewis Wolpert in acknowledging the condition, facing it squarely in the eyes and seeking to communicate its burdens and dangers to their fellows. So this is the great opportunity loss we have suffered through the deaths of these young men. We must act before more join them.
My own decision, (with my partner Johan van Vloten) to be open about my sexual orientation was, in part, motivated by a feeling of obligation to young LGBTI people (including lawyers) coming along behind us. I cannot respect the attitudes of the Faith organisations quoted in these remarks who enter the educational space and alienate and humiliate a vulnerable cohort who came under their direct influence. They seem to be far from the loving message of the religion they purport to promote. In particular, they seem distant from the response of Pope Francis, soon after his election to the See of Rome, declaring of the sexual minorities: “Who am I to judge?”
Eventually, Faith organisations, Christian and non-Christian, will have to reconcile themselves to the science of the origins, causes and features of diverse sexual orientation and gender identity. It is not binary. Meantime, they should be brought to understand that their practices promote homophobia in society, as is recorded in the recent Australian survey on the attitude of teenage males. They cause or aggravate low self-esteem, lack of honesty and consignment to silence or duplicity that feeds depression and suicidal conduct. Especially in the stressful world of legal studies and of contemporary legal practice.
Lawyers and law students should support the Tristan Jepson Foundation and the Daniel Solomons Scholarship. These parental-driven initiatives help us to fill the void left by the loss of such gifted, young people. Not all of them are LGBTI. Not all of them suffer clinical depression. Not all of them are remembered as they should be. But all of them deserve to be respected. This way, we can learn from their pain. We can respond to their cry of despair.
The Daniel Solomons Memorial Scholarship is a practical initiative in a great ocean of neglect and indifference. Daniel’s life and death should not have been in vain.
Stan Grant: "This week Australia is a boy in a hood strapped to a chair", Wallace Wurth lecture, UNSW - 2016
29 July 2016, UNSW Kensington Campus, Sydney, Australia
The lecture was given only a few days after damning allegations were revealed on ABC's Four Corners program about treatment of Indigenous children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Australia's Northern Territory.
There was a speech I had planned to give tonight. I wished it to be a speech rational and measured.
In this speech I would have appealed to the best of Australia – to what Abraham Lincoln would have called the better angels of our nature.
In this speech I would have wished to locate Indigenous people within the framework of the grand tradition of liberal western democracy.
In this speech I would have spoken of Hegel's idea of man "not being at home in the world".
I would have asked how we – the first peoples of this land – could be at home in a world imposed upon us.
In this speech I would have spoken of Edmund Burke's template for society – that it be a covenant between those living those who have passed and those yet to come.
What is this covenant that would link my ancestors and my children – for us it would not be the glory of nations won but of nations lost.
How then after having our world upended could I pledge allegiance to what has supplanted us?
In this speech I could have touched on those thinkers who are the pillars of western democratic ideas – I would have told of wrestling with John Locke and JS Mill.
How they have inspired me yet left me reeling from their implicit harsh judgment of the society and culture that I am drawn from.
I would have told of feeling both drawn to the steadfastness and stoicism of conservatism yet wonder how so many of those who lay claim to the mantle conservative today can be so mean spirited and have a deficit of generosity.
This speech would have looked to contemporary thinkers like Australian Duncan Ivison.
Ivison strives for a theory of justice that enables us to feel at home in the world when we are no longer alienated from the institutions and practices of this society – that being at home in the world is not just having to be resigned to accepting or accommodating injustice.
I would have quoted the late American philosopher John Rawls and his idea of reconciliation through public reason – of people being able to endorse the institutions and practices of society and not merely tolerate them.
I would have explored what American political scientist William Connolly has termed the 'vital centre of the nation'
I would have returned to John Stuart Mill – the Mill who could speak of a centre that could "soften the extreme form and fill up the intervals between us"?
This speech I wished to give would have sought amity with a tradition that has excluded us.
In this speech I would have sought those things that can unite us not those things that divide.
In this speech I would have chosen carefully my words.
In this speech I would have sought less to inflame and more to comfort.
I cannot give that speech it is best saved for another day.
That speech would have come from my head but I wish to speak from my heart.
Some of my own people have criticised me for being too faithful to diplomacy.
They find fault in my hope or optimism. To my critics I give Australia too much credit.
In another week I might challenge them – but not this week.
This week they are right.
This week I have struggled to contain a pulsating rage.
I have moved from boiling anger to simmering resentment but the feeling has not passed nor do I wish it too.
Even as I write, my words are powered by a coursing fury. My hands hover above the keyboard in a clenched fist.
This is an anger that comes from the certainty of being.
This is an anger that speaks to my soul.
This anger I know to be just.
This speech tonight does not look to Lincoln's first inaugural – then the great American president spoke words of brotherhood to a fractured nation on the eve of war.
"We are not enemies but friends", he said.
"We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."
How I wish I could say that tonight. Another time – yes – but not tonight.
For this speech I look to Lincoln's second inaugural.
Here he stood before a country bloodied and worn.
Victory was at hand and slavery at an end.
But this president was tired.
His country lay in ruin. His assassin lurked in the audience.
Lincoln leaned on the gospels to lay at the feet of the nation the sin of slavery:
"Woe unto the world because of offenses – for it must needs be that offences come, but woe to the man by whom those offences cometh."
Woe to the man by whom those offences cometh.
What offences we have seen this past week.
How can I stand here and speak to the idea of our place in an indissoluble commonwealth when this week my people have been reminded that our place is so often behind this nation's bars.
This week we know what Australia looks like.
This week Australia is a boy in a hood strapped to a chair.
This week Australia is Aboriginal boys tear gassed, locked down and beaten.
These are the images on our television screens.
These boys who look like my boys.
I watched my teenage son as he saw this unfold before him. I saw him lose his place in the world – with each scene of horror he became less sure of his country.
For he has been raised not to believe in our worst.
He has been spared the fate of so many of his people.
But on that night he wondered at the difference between himself and the boys on the screen.
For in these boys he sees something of himself and he asks how his country can allow this.
When I saw the boys I saw a tragedy my son had escaped but I saw a reminder of a brutality his grandfather and my grandfather had endured.
I saw in those boys the broken bones and stab wounds and dark ink jail tattoos of my father.
I recalled the story of my mother's father dragged from his bed by police accused of drinking.
The same man arrested and tied to a tree like a dog.
There are those who would rather I not speak of these things.
There are those who accuse me of having a nostalgia for injustice.
A nostalgia for injustice – as if these wounds on the body and soul of my mother and father are things of memory.
As if we choose to cling to suffering – as if this injustice is a thing recalled and not a thing lived.
A nostalgia for injustice – such a charge could be levelled only by someone certain of his place in this country.
A certainty denied to a people – the first people – still searching for ours. Estranged in the land of our ancestors.
It could be levelled only by someone who sees injustice and brutality as something to be pondered and not endured.
It is a charge brought by people comfortable in their own history while they tell us to forget ours – to get over it.
These are people who value their traditions exalt their heroes and deny ours.
I wonder: would they dismiss the memories of the Jewish people so lightly?
Are the Jewish memories of suffering too, merely a nostalgia for injustice?
These are people who proclaim themselves conservatives but with their meanness debase the very traditions they claim to uphold.
These people who seize on difference – gay, Muslim, Asian, black – to vilify, divide and demonise.
All the while reserving for themselves the right to define our country and set the price of inclusion.
They are the people who wrap their words in civility to mask the beating heart of their bigotry.
How do these people square their supposed conservatism and professed love of country with the words of British conservative writer Roger Scruton when he says: "individuals must be free which means being free from the insolent claims of those who wish to redesign them."
Yet these people seek to redesign us to tell us who we should be and how we should think.
These people would tell those boys on our television screens this week – the boys crying in agony - that they live in an imagined world of pain.
They would tell them that they are to blame for their treatment.
They would tell the family of a 10-year-old indigenous girl who takes her own life that they live in an imagined world of sadness.
They would tell our people in overcrowded housing in communities ravaged by violence and drug and alcohol abuse that they revel in their misery.
They tell me I have a nostalgia for injustice.
No, we have no nostalgia for injustice because we have not first had the chance to forget.
Polish Nobel prize winning poet Czeslav Milosc spoke of his people carrying the 'memory of wounds'.
The memory of wounds – as Milosc wrote –perhaps all memory is the memory of wounds.
Certainly for us these memories sit deep within our soul.
Rather than long for these memories – rather than seek them out to give meaning to my identity in a perfect world I would wish them away.
But what has been done cannot be undone.
What has been seen cannot be unseen.
The scars of my father and the memory of my grandfather – these stories and images – the graveyard crosses of people gone too young are seared into my minds eyes as surely as the charred flesh and the stench of blood from a lifetime of reporting haunts my night's sleep.
The memory of a hooded, bound boy in a cell is now similarly burned in my consciousness.
Australia was redeemed in part from complicity in this disgrace only by the national outrage.
The Prime Minister responded by calling immediately for a royal commission.
It may meet a minimum requirement for action but forgive us if we lack faith.
We have been poked and prodded for two centuries.
We have been the subject of endless inquiry.
The heads of our people rest still in glass jars in foreign museums and our skeletons contained in cardboard boxes – the artefacts of inquiry.
Two decades ago we held a royal commission into black deaths in custody – it was supposed to end the culture of incarceration.
Today almost every face – man woman and child – behind bars in the Northern Territory is black.
Nationally, barely 3 per cent of the population comprise a quarter of those in jails.
It is not to excuse their individual crimes to make plain the fact that every one of those people – indigenous people – are a product of this country's history.
It is a history still yet to be given its full account.
It is a history still yet to puncture the public consciousness.
It is a history born of terra nullius – the founding of a nation on the lie of the empty land.
It is a history lamented in the 1960s by anthropologist W.E.H Stanner as the "'great Australian Silence".
It was he said: "A cult of forgetting practiced on a national scale."
Half a century later his words ring just as true.
Rather than this royal commission how more necessary is a truth and reconciliation commission.
A full reckoning of our Nation's past, that may set loose the chains of history that bind this country's first and today most miserably impoverished people.
In my caution I have argued against such things fearing it would harden division.
Now I accept that we need this mirror into our soul.
How can we continue to look at endemic child suicide, intractable disadvantage and our choking jail cells as mere pieces of a policy puzzle scattered on a board devoid of the outline of our troubled past.
If we are to remember the fallen of Pozieres and Fromelles, then surely we can remember the fallen warriors who resisted the invasion of their lands on this soil 200-plus years ago.
We can remember my people the Wiradjuri and the martial law of Bathurst.
We can recall the words of William Cox given the first land grant on the plains west of the Blue Mountains.
"It is better that all the blacks be shot and their carcasses used to manure the ground which is all the good they are fit for."
And shot they were – and poisoned and herded over cliffs – others ravaged by disease.
Half the population wiped out in a matter of years in what the Sydney Gazette reported as an "exterminating war."
And this is just the story of my own blood – each of our hundreds of nations has its own similar history.
This truth telling would make good on the demand of French philosopher Paul Ricouer:
"We must remember because remembering is a moral duty, we owe a debt to the victims. By remembering and telling we stop them from being buried twice."
Stop them from being buried twice – Australia's war dead are etched on walls of remembrance: 'lest we forget'.
Our dead lie in fields forgotten - histories still untold.
Without such truth where is our reconciliation?
Is it just to be measured in economic statistics?
Must closing the gap be the only measure of our justice?
Without such truth what is this thing we are calling recognition?
I sit on the referendum council and this week the word itself: recognition has felt small.
In this week it reeks of incremental shift when we cry out for fundamental change.
What is this perversity – that we should ask Australia to finally recognise us?
That we should ask for others to decide whether we have a place in a constitution that was designed for our exclusion?
This recognition lives in the netherworld of symbolism when so many of the lives of our people are crushed by a real world that has never truly recognised them – that has rendered them invisible: out of sight and out of mind.
We are asking Australia to recognise us when most Australians still admit to having never met an Indigenous person.
They may likely hang a dot painting on their wall having never touched the hand of the painter.
This recognition doesn't speak to my father – he recognises himself when he speaks with the power of his language: still alive when Australia would have seen it silenced.
Balladhu Wiradjuri Gibbir – dyirramadilinya badhu Wiradjuri! I am a Wiradjuri man – proudly Wiradjuri.
In this week: how can this recognition excite our people, weary of a struggle for rights so long denied.
Support for this recognition feels insipid and its supporters can speak only an air of resignation that the best we can get is less than we deserve.
I had thought that recognition may complete our nation – that it may fill the unfilled void.
I saw it as a chance for Australians to recognise ourselves. I am prepared to say that I put too much store in the power of this symbolism.
Now my arguments feel timid.
Recognition on these terms feels like betrayal of those who have fought for a justice more deserving: more dignified.
Recognition risks shrinking our ambitions to fit a miserable national mood where the polity has lost faith in its politicians.
This recognition is hostage to politics and politics is often the enemy of the truth.
This recognition demands finding common cause with those who have no interest in enlarging our nation but containing it.
This recognition demands a dispiriting compromise with those who seek to do nothing more than the least they can do.
To give full flight to our aspirations would be to court failure.
What a damning state of affairs in a country that remains the only commonwealth nation not to enshrine the sovereign rights of its first peoples.
Are we really so stricken with lethargy on this subject?
Must we be comfortable with our laggard status?
Do we not look to New Zealand or the United States or Canada and ask why we too cannot negotiate treaties?
Treaty even unattainable sings to the heart of indigenous people here in a way that recognition cannot.
If recognition is then to mean anything then we need to infuse it with the urgency of now.
It needs to speak with hope to the hooded beaten boys in dark prison cells.
It needs to rise above the transactions of our daily lives to sing in our hearts.
It needs to whisper to the conscience of our political leaders.
If it is to mean anything it needs to be imbued with the power to reorder our lives…to give real voice to the first peoples.
If the constitution is our rule book then we need to rewrite those rules.
Anything less will speak to the poverty of our spirit not the breadth of our vision.
Can we do this? That part of me that wants to believe struggles with what my eyes this week have seen.
Those boys: links in a chain that has bound us for 200 years.
This recognition: what is it without truth?
To quote the poet Milosc: "Crimes against human rights never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of friendship between nations."
Can we confess these truths?
My people have spoken this country's confession even when no one would listen.
Our heroes have sought to fill out this country. They have held its greatness to great account.
Our warriors of the frontier: Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Yagun, Jandamarra, Tunnerminnerwait and so many others who resisted invasion and whose names should fall from the lips of schoolchildren as easily as Captain Cook, Arthur Phillip or Ned Kelly.
Their spirit has lived in those who have followed.
Joe Anderson – otherwise known as King Burraga of the Tharawal people – who said in 1933:
"All the black man wants is representation in federal parliament. There is plenty of fish in the river for us all and land to grow all we want."
Victorian Aboriginal leader William Cooper who in 1937 petitioned King George for representation in Parliament.
The years have not diminished our struggle. We have fought on many fronts.
In 1963 the Yirrkala bark petitions were recognised by the Australian parliament.
The Yolngu People asserted the ownership of their lands and the right to be heard.
In 1966 Vincent Lingiari walked off Wave Hill station to demand equal pay and won his land when Gough Whitlam poured the sand through Vincent's fingers.
Charles Perkins led a bus load of students to smash segregation outback New South Wales.
In 1972 a group of activists pitched a tent on the lawns of parliament house.
In 1988 Yolngu leader Gallarwuy Yunnipingu presented the Barunga statement to Prime Minister Bob Hawke demanding what the Yirrkala people had demanded in their petition to the Queen: a treaty.
Eddie Mabo a man from Murray Island took his battle to the highest court in the land and did not live to see his claim vindicated: this was indeed his land.
After the apology to the stolen generations Gallarwuy Yunnipingu gave a speech talking about what he called 'serious business': a final settlement.
Still we wait.
This week we ask again: how long do we wait?
I don't put myself in this pantheon.
I live in the enormous shadow they cast.
So I turn to words; the words of a man I turned to as I began this speech.
I turn to the speech I had hoped to give.
I recalled the words of Lincoln's first inaugural, his appeal to his nation's better angels.
I return to the words of the weary Lincoln. The Lincoln at the start of his second term, a man whose death stalked him as he spoke.
"Let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds."
Mandang Guwu – Thank you.
Stan Grant was a guest on episode 8 of the Speakola podcast, talking about his Australian Dream speech.