Pressure builds for a national keeping place for Indigenous remains | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Mon, 05/03/2018 - 4:00am

Recognition of a Melbourne site where Indigenous elders are buried is a moment of profound symbolic note

The commonwealth’s National Heritage List has finally recognised a symbolic part of central Melbourne where the bones of many Indigenous elders lay buried.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians the incorporation into the list of the Melbourne Domain Parkland and Memorial Precinct (including the Kings Domain Resting Place where the elders are buried) represents long overdue official acknowledgment of the injustice and disrespect shown to Indigenous dead.

The lakes of the Royal Botanic Gardens, while modified, are noted as some of the last surviving remnant wetlands within the Melbourne district which were present prior to European settlement ... they remain (with the Yarra River) as significant landscape markers of a pre-European landscape.

The federal government has long been shamefully remiss in establishing a permanent keeping place.

This ... generated a major cultural, artistic and intellectual revival in Aboriginal Australia which led to a challenge of all institutions that Indigenous people regarded as involved in the cultural oppression of the Indigenous community.