 So Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, members of the university executive staff and students, thank you for that wonderful welcome and for your words. I mean, it's not written in my speech, but I just want to say those two speeches from Redfern and the Sorority Speech are just such powerful words, and I'll say something about those in a minute, but they have, I've really connected with both of those speeches throughout my whole life and they've been such an inspiration for me and I know for many other Indigenous people. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of Canberra, the Ngunnawal people, on whose land we meet today. I acknowledge them as a descendant of the Ngunnawal people of Central Queensland, and I send you greetings in the Ngunnawal language, bin bhi kadi. I'd also like to acknowledge Ann Martin, the head of the Jabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre at ANU and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and attendants here today. It's a great honour for me to have this opportunity to deliver the 2017 National Sorority Address here at ANU. I'm sorry to say that I didn't study at ANU unfortunately, but I've had many connections to this university over the years and I was delighted to be able to welcome Professor Brian Schmidt to Copenhagen in 2015 where he won the prestigious Niels Bohr Institute Medal at the University of Copenhagen. I'm speaking to you today as an ex-Ambassador. I recently concluded my four-year term as Australia's Ambassador to Denmark, Norway and Iceland and I acknowledge the Norwegian Ambassador here today. It's about as far as you can get from Canberra, 16,000 kilometres away, 22 hours of travel, but the whole experience of being on that posting for four years was remarkable on so many levels. I've always had a great fascination for the Nordic region and I'm happy to say that my respect for them only grew by living there. I came to realise that despite our differences, despite the distance, we really have shared values and interests and every day we're working with the Nordics to advance international peace and security, free trade and Indigenous rights and I'll say something more about that a little bit later. It was wonderful to serve in a place like Copenhagen because some of you may know, but many of you may not, that it's actually a place of many Australian diplomatic firsts. The first woman diplomat to be appointed an Australian Ambassador, Ruth Dobson, served in Copenhagen in 1974 and then in 1999 Stephen Brady was the first Australian Ambassador to present his same-sex partner to a head of state, so the first Australian and the first Ambassador in the world to do that. On the 15th of June in 2013 I had the great honour of presenting my little envelope, my credentials to Her Majesty Queen Margrethe of Denmark and I was the first Indigenous person to do this. So today I wanted to talk about three topics. The first is what Sorry Day means to me. The second is about what the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, what DFAT is doing to promote reconciliation in Australia and also what DFAT and Australia are doing to promote Indigenous rights around the world. As the Chancellor said, today we mark National Sorry Day. It's held on the 26th of May every year and the day was a recommendation of the Bringing Them Home report released in 1997 and section 7A of that reads that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in consultation with the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation arranged for a National Sorry Day to be celebrated each year to commemorate the history of forcible removals and its effects. So today we do just that. We remember the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people right across Australia from the early 1900s right through to the 1970s. There are Indigenous people in this room who were taken away or who had relatives who were. Almost every Indigenous person has been affected by this policy in some way and its consequences are still being very deeply felt today as well. I thought I might just start my speech by showing a little bit of my own family story because we too have been affected by its Protection Act as so many others have as well. As I said, I'm a proud descendant of the Gungaloo people from Central Queensland. My family, my ancestors originated from the fertile Dawson and Collide valleys and they lived in this place for thousands of years. We still have a very deep connection to this part of Australia and as far as we're aware, it wasn't until 1844 that the first Europeans turned up and it was none other than the German naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt and my last posting in Berlin. We commemorated his many travels in Australia, which was a bit of a sweet for me because he was the first European to arrive on my traditional country and he was coming to the Dawson Valley, the Rockhampton area on his way north. One of his colleagues, one of the other naturalist travelling with him said that the area was one of the most beautifully picturesque and extensive scenes that ever witnessed. Leichhardt and the other explorers paved the way for a very rapid European expansion into Central and Southeast Queensland. During the 1840s, settlers, squatters and others pushed deeper into the rich pastoral lands around Rockhampton. And by 1845, a little station had been created at Taroum and then soon after by 1854 there were pastoral lands and licenses right across Gungaloo country. So it meant in a very short period of time what had been traditional Gungaloo land for thousands of years belonged to someone else without the knowledge, let alone the consent of the traditional owners. And over the next 50 years, expansion of this frontier society was to have a profound and everlasting effect of on the people of Central Queensland and in particular for my family, the Gungaloo. There was initially some positive interactions and negotiations, but over time whole indigenous communities were devastated by violence, epidemics and the forced movement of people. My great-grandmother, Saratobi, was born in a place that is sacred to the Gungaloo. It's a little place with a strange name, the place where my family, one of my most sacred places is a place called Banana, which doesn't sound very sacred and it's firing, but it is actually called Banana. And that's the sort of, we consider the birth place of the Gungaloo people. She was born between 1876 and 1884 and we don't have a precise birth date for her, but I actually do have, our family has some photos of her thanks to the work of a South Australian anthropologist, Norman Tyndale, who did a lot of work in that region much later, but I have a picture of my great-grandmother and a family tree going up to the 1850s, which is a wonderful thing for my family to have. The lives of Sarah and her six children, including my grandmother, Emily Miller, were governed by the Queensland government and in particular by the very tragically named Protection of Aboriginal People and the Sale of Opium Act 1897. And the course of my family's lives was determined by their race and by the actual colour of their skin as well. It's unclear, we don't know the exact kind of precise date, but my great-grandmother, Sarah Tobi, was taken from her traditional lands to one station in Tarum. She was then moved in 1926 to Warra Binda, which is a place where many Aboriginal people in Queensland have connections to, and she was moved again to a place called Baramba Mission in Cherbourg, another place where a lot of Queensland Aboriginal people have connections. And inside this settlement, the government and church authorities controlled nearly every aspect of the lives of the inhabitants. What they ate, what they wore, where they could go, who they could meet, what language they could speak, what religion they practiced. So my great-grandmother and my great-aunt lived in this place, they lived in the women's dormitory. And those who broke the rules, including them, could be denied rations, they could be locked up or sent away to Palm Island or one of the other reservations. My great-grandmother and many other of my family members lived their whole lives in this place. My grandmother, Emily Miller, was born in 1909. And she had three siblings for all what we would consider mixed race, that had lighter skin. And because of that, their policy, the way the Protection Act affected them was quite different. They were from a very early age sent off to work in stations across rural Queensland. So at the age of eight, my grandmother was sent with her siblings to work at a particular station in Queensland. And the reports from the government authorities at the time record the harsh treatment she received at a number of these stations. And because of that, she had to be moved around many times. From the age of eight to 21, she lived under this system where she was constantly moved with no control over her own life. She was given basic rations, bored, we think a limited wage, but we don't actually know for certain whether she did receive a wage. My grandmother applied to the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland in the year 1931. She was 22 years of age. And she was, she asked to be exempt from this system of being moved around from the Protection Act. It was granted to her, but the consequences of that exemption were that she was no longer to associate with Aboriginal people. She was no longer to associate with her family. And for many years, she had no connection to them. I've doubled the speech many times. But as time went on and laws and attitudes changed, she did reconnect with her mother and sisters and brothers spread across the state of Queensland. Despite the trials she faced, my grandmother was a proud and resilient woman. She raised two sons, including my father, and she wasn't able to pass on her language or the stories of our ancestors. And sadly, after a life of hard work, she died of a heart attack at the age of 61. And never had the opportunity to ask, so I never had the opportunity to ask her firsthand about her experiences. I don't know whether she would have wanted to talk about it or not. The bits of this story that I've been able to piece together have come from my father and other family members and the extensive government records that were held. My family's experience was on my mind on the 13th of February, 2008, the day that Kevin Rudd delivered that amazing national apology. I was working in Parliament House at the time. And through the kindness of one of my colleagues, I was given a seat in the chamber to hear the apology. And I remember the electricity in the air that day and seeing many friends at Parliament House for the event. And to repeat the words that Professor Evans is, I'll say them again. For the pain, the suffering and the hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we are sorry. To the authors and fathers, the brothers and the sisters for the breaking up of families and communities, we are sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we are sorry. These words affect me and many of us very deeply. But to hear the words we are sorry, not once but three times, was electrifying. Of course, words are not enough to heal the heartbreak of separated families and address the disadvantage experienced by so many Indigenous Australians. But these words still have great power. On this day, we reflect on the pain, but we also celebrate the survival and the resilience of Indigenous Australia. The apology resonated not only in Australia, but across the whole world. And over the past four years, I have met many Indigenous people across the Nordic region. I've met with representatives from the government and Parliament with the Inuit people in Greenland. I've been to the very north of Norway to a place called Karashok to the home of the Sami Parliament. I had to trudge through knee-high snow and it was pitch black in the middle of winter. But it was wonderful to go and visit these places and the one thing that I always mentioned was the national apology because that apology had power for them too. I also spoke to them about reconciliation movement, the national conversation it started, its wide support and its practical elements. These, the national apology and the reconciliation statement were revelations to many Indigenous people I met in Europe in something that they wanted their governments to also embrace. I'm going to shift gear a little bit now and start talking about where I work at DFAT. And I know it's, I think that it's very relevant to your Chancellor, who was my Minister for a short time when I joined the department, which I'll say something about that in a moment. But DFAT was an organisation that wasn't even in the lexicon of my family. There was nobody in my family who had any dealings with DFAT at all. They didn't even know what DFAT was. And my interest in all things foreign came from my father, David Miller. He was always very interested in the world around him. He had a deep fascination, still has a deep fascination for other cultures and, and through him I sort of developed this appreciation as well. And I always dreamt of being able to live and work overseas. In primary school I visited a, visited a careers fair in Brisbane in the 1980s and I picked up a little brochure and a lovely kind of shade of 1980s brown. And it was from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and it said our mission as an organisation is to win a place for Australia in the world. And I didn't know what that meant but I thought it sounded like a great thing to be involved in and to be able to live and work overseas was very appealing. So I moved from Brisbane to Sydney in 1994 to start an arts law course at UNSW and it was there that I met the remarkable Ann Martin, who was at the time the head of the Indigenous Student Centre at UNSW. She was an inspiration to all of us, funny, wise and determined to help us succeed. With her encouragement I applied for an Indigenous cadetship at DFAT and I was successful in joining the department in 1995 and the program allowed me to study during the university year at UNSW and then come to Canberra every summer for a break. So when I joined the then Foreign Minister was the Honourable and now Professor Honourable Gareth Evans. A lot's happened in the department since the 1990s and I'm very proud as many of the other Indigenous staff at DFAT are very proud to have had this association with this department. When I joined there were only a handful of Indigenous staff. There were no senior leaders, no ambassadors but now I'm very proud to say that we have over 80 Indigenous staff in DFAT serving with distinction in Canberra in our state and passport offices and overseas. We are actively helping to shape Australian foreign policy. We're advocating it here and abroad. We have colleagues working at United Nations in New York contributing policy advice advice and complex free trade agreements delivering aid in the region and providing consular support to Australians all around the world. In my experience many other governments do take note of the fact that we have so many Indigenous staff working in our foreign ministry and also that we have such a multicultural diverse workforce as well. The department in partnership with Indigenous staff has developed an Indigenous recruitment and career development strategy. It is helping to attract some of the best and brightest Indigenous staff, Indigenous talent and ensure that they stay with us over the long haul. Through our reconciliation action plan we're striving to have three percent of our staff in DFAT Indigenous and we're on track to reaching that target. I think what's important with these policies, reconciliation action plans and things is that they're not just documents that sit on shelves. We don't just want to have them and dust them off and update them and we need to update them. They need to be living, breathing documents and I'm very happy to say that in DFAT's case it is our reconciliation plan, our targets and strategies to increase our Indigenous representation living documents. It's very clear that many areas of DFAT want to get involved and have Indigenous staff working across the department in all kinds of areas and I think we can all take pride, all of us here, take pride in the steps that DFAT and the Australian government have taken over many years to increase our Indigenous representation. I think one of the things that's been very inspiring to me and DFAT management as well is the growth of something called Indigenous Employees Network. So with 80 of us it means that we're able to kind of work very closely with DFAT's management to guide department of policy on Indigenous issues. We also try to mark all the significant dates Indigenous states in our calendar so we mark Sorry Day and National Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week and of course this year we celebrate two very big events, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum as well as the 25th anniversary of the Marbeau decision, two watershed moments in Australian history. NAIDOC Week is important to Wilson, we have our national chair and Martin here who's in charge of NAIDOC celebrations in Australia but this is celebrated here by the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra but we also celebrate it all around the world. It's a time to showcase Indigenous art, music and fashion and Australian embassies put on amazing NAIDOC Weeks all around the world. I think we take great pride in celebrating not only the fact that Australia has the oldest living culture, continuous living culture in the world, that's something we should all be proud of as Australians, not just Indigenous Australians but it's important not just to celebrate sort of art and tradition from the past, it's important to celebrate the best of contemporary thinking, contemporary Indigenous writing, design and ideas and with the support of Australia's cultural grants program the Australian government has sponsored many fantastic performances and exhibitions around the world so we've had groups like Bangara perform in Germany this year. Indigenous writers like Anita Heiss come to Europe, Kim Scott another great Indigenous writer, film directors like Warwick Thornton and Indigenous academics like Professor Megan Davis, all of them have been able to travel overseas thanks to grants by DFAT and I think all Australian embassies take the promotion of Australia's Indigenous heritage and interests as core business but we also seek to be honest about the challenges that Australia faces in closing the gap, we don't shy away from the fact that Australia obviously has very big issues that we need to deal with in terms of Indigenous disadvantage right across this country but we also believe it's important to celebrate what's great and what all the wonderful achievements that we've seen in our community over the last 30, 40, 50 years. As Melbourne University professor Marsha Langton and journalist Stan Grant have said we need to also focus on success, the emergence of an Indigenous middle class, the growth of Indigenous businesses and consultancies, Indigenous people breaking down barriers in all areas of life from science to law, politics, media and even diplomacy. I had the opportunity to deliver a number of speeches in the Nordic region in Germany and Austria to talk about Indigenous issues and it's really wonderful to see that there's not just diplomats who are able to do this, there are more and more Indigenous people who have that opportunity to go and speak about our culture and about our issues all around the world and many of them have been funded by the Australian government. So every year we have a delegation, Indigenous delegation that goes to the UN in New York to attend the permanent forum on Indigenous peoples and of course in Geneva as well there's another gathering, the expert mechanism on the rights of Indigenous people, we have an Indigenous delegation that goes there every year as well. Indigenous people only make up about five percent of the global population, however we make up fifteen percent of the world's poor and about one third of the world's nine hundred million extremely poor rural people. So in 2015 DFAT launched an Indigenous people strategy and this strategy is about advancing Indigenous rights, strengthening connections between Indigenous people and promoting their economic engagement. The strategy is guided by four pillars and DFAT works with our partners to influence international policy to advance the interests of Indigenous people. So some of the things that we're working on are to increase and give greater access to Aboriginal people in the global economy. It's one way that we can increase Indigenous economic prosperity and we think reduce disadvantage. Our portfolio is helping to meet the needs of those who want to have who have Indigenous businesses and want to export and take their businesses overseas. DFAT has worked to secure agreement from the UN expert mechanism on the rights of Indigenous people to undertake a global study on barriers to Indigenous economic development, particularly for Indigenous women and people with disability. We expect the committee will hand out its report in July. DFAT's also trying to work with Indigenous people across our region, the Indo-Pacific region. Indigenous people, as I said, are some of the most vulnerable people in these communities. We have over 260 million Indigenous people in the Indo-Pacific region alone. So there's a lot of people who need our support and we need to work with them in partnership. We're also, as I said, DFAT has lots of money to, not lots of money, it has some money to, I shouldn't say that we have lots of money because we don't, but we have some money so that cultural groups and other academics and those who want to go and to exhibit or show their, to do talks and presentations all around the world, DFAT has money to make that happen. So if you know Indigenous people who want to take their story around the world, you should come and talk to us about that. And of course, as I mentioned at the beginning, we're trying to make a more inclusive workforce where those 80 Indigenous staff feel valued and supported. And we're all other staff in DFAT, the couple of thousand who we have working for us have a good understanding of our Indigenous heritage and culture. Just yesterday I was at an event at DFAT where we launched something called a tool kit, an Indigenous cultural awareness tool kit, to give people all staff more understanding of Indigenous culture and history. And I think as a diplomat, you know that it's one of the questions you will always be asked about, some aspect of Indigenous culture or heritage and there are many things that I can't answer. But it's important that our staff know about the key milestones in our history, including things like the critical speeches that were mentioned by the Chancellor. I'm just going to mention two other areas that DFAT has been working in, something to do with aid and then I'll talk a little bit about what I have done in my own post in Copenhagen to kind of advance this agenda as well. These are two areas where we're trying to encourage innovative Indigenous policy, so that's one area. And the other area is work that I've been doing and I've been doing to connect Indigenous peoples. So I think in the area of policy innovation, we feel that we need more than ever to develop innovative policy solutions to improve the well-being and to advance the interests of the world's Indigenous people. The world is changing, there are new technologies, new sources of development finance and new opportunities. And it is clear that our approach to development must adapt and keep pace. DFAT launched an institution called the Innovation Exchange in 2015 and we're looking at to find new ways to solve all problems. We really believe that innovation can help us deliver development solutions that are cheaper, faster and more effective. And we of course don't believe at DFAT or in Australia that we have all the answers because we clearly don't. But by being open to new perspectives and encouraging fresh thinking, we believe we can find new ways to tackle some of the toughest development and governance challenges. One of the things that we're trying to do in DFAT is establish something called a community of practice on Indigenous issues. We're trying to facilitate collaboration and share evidence-based lessons between organisations working on domestic and international issues affecting Indigenous peoples. By strengthening our expertise on Indigenous policy, we're hoping to build a hub that can be a sort of a virtual hub and a real hub where Indigenous people from around our region can meet and talk about Indigenous policy and share ideas. And of course Australia's already home to some quite remarkable innovative Indigenous policy. And I think one of the key elements of that is in Australia we understand the many of working in partnership. Well, we're getting better at learning to establish partnerships between Indigenous peoples, between federal governments, state governments, local governments, universities, companies and non-government organisations. And I think if you look around Australia, it's these sort of partnerships, these clever, innovative partnerships that are making a difference. I was recently back in Canberra for a meeting of global ambassadors. It was the first time that our ambassadors had been brought back to our capital to get together and that as part of that program we were sent to different parts of Australia. So I went with Gillian Byrd who is our ambassador in New York at the United Nations. We went to Alice Springs. We wanted to go and see some of this innovative policy. We met an amazing organisation called the Centre for Applied Technology. I don't know whether many of you know about them but they're quite a remarkable institution. They were spun out of CSIRO. They have connections to a number of Australian universities. They really are trying to develop ideas and technologies that are going to benefit people living in remote areas. So Aboriginal communities living in the middle of Australia which have no resources, no lighting and sewage and water and Wi-Fi. They're building solutions so that they can set up little communities in the middle of Australia where all these things are provided. And some of the remarkable technologies that they have come up with to allow communities to do this is it's quite remarkable. It's meant that people who wouldn't be able to live on these traditional lands now can. Some of these ideas have great applicability not only in other parts of Australia but also across our region and this organisation which is an Aboriginal led organisation is now working with other countries in the Pacific to try and take some of these ideas to our region. And Alice Springs, Ambassador Burden, I also met another organisation called Children's Ground. It's quite a remarkable mix. It's an Aboriginal organisation. They have lots of philanthropists and others, universities working with them. The idea is to mix sort of Western education and traditional Indigenous education for young children and communities. So the children from these communities will go to school for a couple of hours each day and then after that they will then spend the afternoon with their elders and they'll get a traditional knowledge as well. This has all been sort of thought through. The policies have been designed. Again, it shows how being innovative in your thinking can make a big difference. And a lot of the students who are going to this program are getting much better results. So these are just two examples from one part of Australia, but wherever you look in Australia there's other examples with us in Western Australia in community housing. If you look at Indigenous economic development programs in Victoria, community justice programs in Queensland, right across Australia this innovative policy is happening. And we're not just looking at DFAT for good projects. We're actually looking at what are the reasons behind, why do these programs succeed. And I think there's no magic formula but the two key ingredients for any of these ideas is that they're based on self-determination. So communities deciding for themselves and also the protection, protection, respect for their human rights. So if you have these two ingredients and Indigenous people are at the sort of in the driving seat it makes a big difference. I'll just finish my speech by making a few comments about the importance of connecting Indigenous peoples. This is something I took very seriously when I was in Copenhagen and I was very lucky to be in a place. I was ambassador for Denmark, Norway and Iceland and Denmark and Norway both have Indigenous peoples. The Inuit people in Greenland Denmark, Greenland and the Sami people in Norway. And it was wonderful to go and meet them and talk to them about what was happening in Australia. There is so much that we have in common even though we're on opposite side of the world when I think you put a group of Indigenous people in the same room together it's remarkable how these little synergies and connections have found very quickly and that's something I think we need to do more of to build that sort of global sense of Indigenous identity. A couple of initiatives I worked on we set up a little scholarship program with another Australian university Deakin University as well as Greenland University and the University of Copenhagen. We sent some University students from Greenland to Melbourne to study at Deakin and we sent some Indigenous students from Deakin to Copenhagen and Greenland and again it's just broadening the horizons of these students it made such a difference for these students to have this experience. So anything that universities can do to encourage these opportunities for Indigenous people is something that we support and hopefully some of these people have these experiences could end up in de-facts that would be a very good thing for us. We also worked with a number of Australian universities to connect Indigenous people to talk about protection of Indigenous design. It's a very important issue here in Australia it is for all Indigenous people and so we did some work to work towards the development of an Indigenous design charter. We have one in Australia already but the idea was to try and build momentum for this in other parts of the world and so we held a series of consultations on that. And finally, I think in Denmark and Norway I had lots of very useful conversations about the extractive industries so mining companies and mining industries. I think these issues related to Indigenous people and land rights and the role of mining companies is very relevant in Australia and we have a lot of expertise in this. I was able to draw on my own experience my family, the Gangaloo who I've mentioned a few times in the speech our land is on rich pastoral land but also we have coal seam gas and other mineral deposits. So we have 20 years of experience of dealing with mining companies and for us the mining companies have been a positive. Does it's not the same it's not the case for every Indigenous community in Australia and I'm not trying to say that it is but sometimes there can be a partnership and you can get mutual benefit. So to talk about this concept was very interesting to people in Northern Norway and also in Greenland as well where they're sitting on vast swathes of mineral resources. I've spoken quite a lot and quite quickly so I think we've covered a lot of ground we started back in the 1850s to my family's situation we've talked about protection policies from the 1900s and to the 1970s and I think the message I'd like to deliver and my own family personal story is one of resilience I think that despite these tragedies that have before and our family and many others it's a story of resilience is something that we really need to celebrate. I've also talked about DFAT and the remarkable journey that we've been on over the last 20 years from where we only had a handful of Indigenous employees now we have what we're describing as a growing cadre of highly skilled and motivated Indigenous officers and I've got to say it's remarkable to meet these young DFAT officers who are starting off in our department and going off into senior roles overseas as well and I also talked about the Indigenous people strategy of DFAT as well and how we're trying to look at innovative ways to work with Indigenous people in our region and also for Australia to celebrate our British Indigenous culture at home and abroad as well. So I'd like to thank the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor and Martin for giving me this amazing opportunity today and it's an honour that this is my first major event that I'm doing, my first speech after stepping down as ambassador and it's a privilege to be able to do it here at ANU and I want to congratulate you on all the work that you're doing to advance Indigenous scholarship and education because you're building the next generation of Indigenous leaders here particularly under Ann's guidance. But I look forward to continuing my close association with ANU and perhaps even one day I might return as a student. Thank you.