 Thank you very much for joining us this evening for the inaugural Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy, to celebrate First Nations peoples and their invaluable contributions to international relations, diplomacy, foreign policy, and political thought. The title of this year's lecture is Indigenous International Relations, Old Peoples and New Pragmatism. I'd like to express my thanks to the ANU First Nations Portfolio and the Debal Center for their support. And I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to Senator the Honorable Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and thank her for being here with us. It's an honor to have you here, Minister Wong. I'd also like to thank our Vice Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, for joining us. And I'm absolutely delighted to welcome our two very distinguished speakers this evening, Dr. Mary Graham and Dr. Morgan Brigg. I know that I speak on behalf of everyone here when I say how much I'm looking forward to your lecture this evening. Before we commence with the proceedings for this evening, I'd like to invite my colleague, Paul House, to do the official welcome to country, Paul. Amandangu and Waragawari, Tony, thank you very much, Tony. And Yari Marang, Jumbotapura Maramang, Amaranya, good afternoon, everyone. You and do Paul Geroa House. My name is Paul Geroa House. Naadu Maradu Maraibirangu, Gujigangu Nyambri Nurembangu. I was born here, the center of my ancestral country at the Alcambra Hospital. God bless it. Anyone born in the Alcambra Hospital. Great to see some hospital alumni here. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Yinja Marabala, Doctor Matilda Williams House. My respects to my mother, Doctor Matilda Williams House. Maradu, Gurungambira, Guwara, Rambi, Galari, Hollywood, Nyambri Nurembangu. My respects to my mother, Doctor Matilda House. Born on a Rambi 32-acres carer, I raised at Hollywood Aboriginal Reserve and here on country, Nyambri, Canberra country here. Nyari Njemali, Nyambri, Gumau Waugulu Waulabulao Nunao Nagarago, Raradri Mujigangyang Nindu Jayandu. My respects to Nyambri, Gumau Waugulu Waulabulao Nunao Nagarago, Raradri Elders Past and Present. Nyari Njemarabu Mujigangu, Nurembangu Nini Yiridu. My respects to all people and elders from all parts of the country. Doctor Ani Mary. Nyari Nyambri Waugulu Waulabulao Nunao. I'm Ngai Banye Nyi Nyokai Nurembangu Dara. Nyambri Nunao people, welcome you all to country. And Nadoo Wurukibigi Balabambo, Gubu Balagibangu, Gugungulila, Dumbali Nair Muraway Marambu. We listen to our old people, our ancestors, our elders, and they show us the straight, the correct path. Dula Gang Muru, straight path, Dula Gang Muru, Bidjeri Muru, good path. Gugungulila, Bilinga Nair, Dhamma Mali Nair, Wala Mali Nair. They protect us, they nurture us, they guide us, our old people. Mambu Wara, Naminya Gugul, Wurukibinya Wurudaregul, Winengala Gubali Gul, looking to see, listening to hear, and learning to understand. Yinja Mara, Yinja Maru Gijuul. It's a powerful word on country, irraduary word, it means many good things. It means to go slow, be patient, be polite, be gentle, and take responsibility, Yinja Mara. Yinja Mara Bala, Gujigang Gagumara Wala, Nungayalara Dayin Ma'in, respect is in the people and the government embracing voice, treaty, and truth telling. Yinja Mara Bala, Wengira Marana, Murubalabua Gurugambina, Bangonaranara, respect is in the warmth of the campfire and the possum skin cloak that shelters all. Yinja Mara Bala, Bala Wala Mwangadabu, Murumadandabu, Bama Yu Gurugambina, respect is in the grinding stones and the car trees, made long ago on country, Gugengulila, Bala Biridabina Bina, Yawilawilawil Nurumbango, respect is in the Canberra Creek and the breeze quietly moving through country. Murumbang Malang, Nui Goy Malang, it's wonderful, it's fabulous to see everyone here. Our welcome to countries are always made in the spirit of peace and a desire for harmony for all people of modern Australia. And our main aim as local custodians is always to establish an atmosphere of mutual respect through the acknowledgement of our ancestors and the recognition of our rights that declare our special place in the pre and post history of the region. The name Canberra is derived from the name of our people and country, right from here, the Nyamburi. Canberra station was gazetted on the 22nd of January 1834 under the New South Wales colonial government. Murumbanginya Yinja Mara, Murumuru, Wurumbira Nurumbango, living a respectful way of life, cares for country. Yinja Mara, Wurumbira Mara Ndougo Bo, Gehira Go Bo, Yawndo Go Bo, respect is taking responsibility for the now, the past, the present and the future. The law of the land, with this welcome, we ask that you respect the law of the land. The law of the land says Yinja Malanguijo, Maingalang Bo, Yawndo Maingalang Du, Yinja Malanguijo Ninyuge, giving respect and honor to all people and all parts of the country. Murubangabala, Winninggana Go, Yambuwan, Bangonaranara. First to know the nature of things. Wuraini Yang, Wuramei, no language, no people. I'd like to acknowledge all our ancestors for keeping our language alive and be able to pass it on through the generations which embodies and preserves our relationship and our connection to country. Murugaladal, Walanmayan Mayangalang, hold fast to each other, empower the people. Walangunmalamara, Murugurabi, brave, make change. Deeriyawana, Murawaranarambira, get up, stand up and show up. Just like to finish and acknowledge my mother, Dr. Matilda Williams House, because of her I can, because of all our matriarchs we can. Our matriarch here, Minister of Foreign Affairs, is our matriarch. Aunty Anne Martin is our matriarch. We have lots of matriarchs and because of them, we can. Yinya Mara, Mara Nyi Nyi Nya, Girama Maranya, respect shapes us and lifts up the people. My mother was the first Indigenous Australian to be awarded honorary doctorate here in 2017. And I'd like to thank the ANU for supporting my mother at that time. My mother was also the first Indigenous Australian to conduct the Welcome to the Country for the opening of federal parliament, the 42nd opening of federal parliament and the 43rd and also the subsequent, the following 44th. And we gifted that opportunity last year at the 47th opening of federal parliament. A great gift, a great honour to be able to share Yinya Mara Bala, Burumbar Biranain Murra, be able to share and care for our people on country. So with that, it's Maran Bang Malang. It's wonderful to be here. I wanna play a quick song on the Yiriki as part of this Welcome to Country. And I'd like to invite two people to come up and support me with the Welcome to Country song. An act of reconciliation. Reconciliation can mean many different things. Reconciliation is part of diplomacy. Diplomacy is a part of reconciliation. The act of friendly relations. The restoration of friendly relationships in this country is important for us all as First Nation people. So please feel free to come up. I need two volunteers. And it's wonderful to see everyone here. So Mandangu, Waragawari, Gwaiambana, are welcome and thank you very much. Any papers? Thank you. Thank you very much, Paul. In my excitement in welcoming you here, this is about to tell you who I am. I'm Tony Erskine and I'm director of the Coral Bell School here at the ANU and now it's my great privilege to invite our Vice Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, to come up and say a few words and also to introduce Minister Wong. Brian. Thank you, Tony. Thank you, Paul, for your wonderful welcome to country. I certainly always find them so inspiring. I too would like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we are meeting here this evening, pay my respects to elders past and present. And I also welcome the many First Nations people who are with us here this evening, including those who have traveled from a long ways and lots of staff and students. I also welcome the Honorable Penny Wong, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Mary Graham and Dr. Morgan Brigg from the University of Queensland, along with all of the colleagues who have managed to walk across campus, to the other side of campus, to physics from the College of Asia Pacific and many of you, how many raise your hands have never been to this side of campus before. Yeah. So this is a great social experiment as long as everything else. So behalf of ANU, welcome all to here if you are a visitor to the College of Asia Pacific, welcome to physics. So tonight we are here in our new physics building which is not yet officially been open but is a terrific new venue to showcase activities like tonight. This building was started pre-COVID and had a number of interruptions as you might imagine but it is a $200 million investment in the future. It is essentially the best ultra-stabilized labs for things like quantum mechanics studies in the world. And so it is truly an outstanding facility to use knowledge to help transform society hopefully for the better. You will note that every seat here throughout the theater has a different color. I am color blind so I am going to take my notes as that being true but they have been selected by a random number generator because that is the way physicists are. Anyway I am very pleased to see this building, the home of such fundamental science research to be utilized tonight for a lecture on first national affairs. As a national university our remit is to lead conversations that matter for Australians and I believe to further and lead the spirit of reconciliation and it is fitting therefore that this lecture is being held in what will be remembered in years from now as a key moment in history for Australia and the First Nations people with a voice referendum later this year. So I have said to our new students who started just a few weeks ago that in order to understand First Nations people we as an institution must embed First Nations culture, history and perspectives into everything that we do. So tonight's lecture is not held by the First Nations portfolio or from the Humanities College but from the Coral Bell School whose focus is not just in Australia but in our region and beyond. The topic is one that should resonate with all of us, diplomacy and learning from people who have demonstrated this for literally thousands of generations. I am also pleased to see that tonight's speakers are also guests of ANU demonstrating the importance of connections between research institutes and global experts. So I am now delighted to invite the Honourable Penny Wong Minister for Foreign Affairs to speak. Minister Wong has been a regular guest of this campus which we greatly appreciate and was just here a fortnight ago to launch the new national security program for parliamentarians along with 22 colleagues from both sides of the aisle. Minister Wong is more than two decades of parliamentary experience since her first being elected in 2001. She is of course the current Minister for Foreign Affairs and I am delighted now to welcome to her speak and I am hoping that we will hear first hand I think an important announcement you just made across the lake before coming here. So without further ado Penny Wong. Thank you very much Brian for that introduction and to Tony thank you for hosting this and I start appropriately by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land upon which we meet today and unawalong Nambri peoples and pay my respect to their elders past present and emerging and acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people present here today and I restate the Albanese government's commitment to implementing the Yuliru Statement from the heart in full voice, treaty and truth. And I acknowledge and thank you Paul for your welcome to country. Being welcome to country is a powerful reminder that diplomacy has been practised here for millennia and that these practices still live on today and it also reminds us that the First Nations peoples of this country were this land's first diplomats. So acknowledge the presence of First Nations leaders here at the ANU and I thank Coral Bell School for extending the invitation for me to speak today at this inaugural lecture on Indigenous diplomacy. Thank you Dr. Mary Graham, Dr. Morgan Brigg and also James Blackwell. Before I move on though I just wanted to pick up something about matriarchs. I haven't actually been called a matriarch before. I'm not sure whether to be happy or worried but I want to just say to you I think it is a very powerful thing to say and to speak of and just to share if I may with you. For me the matriarch in my life was my grandmother, Madam Lai Fung Shim, who was about this high, very small Hakka woman in Sundakan in Malaysia, widow during the war, who lost many children but whose determination kept my father alive through that period and because of her I stand here today. So I turn now to First Nations people and diplomacy and I think all of us here understand that knowledge and stories have power and offer connections previously unrecognised or unseen to draw connections between to quote that wonderful title, Old People's and New Pragmatism. So on taking office as Foreign Minister last year I made a commitment that I would seek in this role to tell Australia's full story, our modern diversity and the rich heritage of our First Nations peoples. This is a national asset and a source of strength. It opens new ways to engage on shared interests with partners in our region. So I've been to quite a few countries in the Pacific, it's a very big ocean and throughout Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia I have been welcomed by traditional owners and the centrality of traditional custodianship, customs and leadership to the Pacific way is something Australia should respect in our let regional engagement and it is something we should be sharing with the Pacific family by elevating perspectives and voices of First Nations people across communities, across the blue Pacific. We have the capacity to build on common ground together. So we've already taken steps to elevate First Nations voices in our international engagement. September last year I was honoured that Senator Patrick Dodson and I cheered around table in New York on indigenous approaches to foreign policy with representatives of Canada, Finland, Mexico, New Zealand and the United States. Last month Minister Bernie welcomed the US Secretary of the Interior, Deb Harland, to Australia to strengthen our relationship with the United States, drawing on their experience as the first, both of them as the first indigenous women to hold cabinet positions in their respective countries. Just pause for that for a minute and think how long that's taken. And as I speak to you today, my friend and colleague Senator Malendiri McCarthy leads your country's delegation to the Convention on the Status of Women at the UN. And we are seeking to engage First Nations communities and organisations to develop new policy approaches, such as our development policy and trade 2040 task force. But gee, we've still got a lot to learn. And we have to learn it together, which is why this sort of dialogue such as this tonight is so important. As someone who is not indigenous, I seek to approach this area with both curiosity and respect. Curiosity for that which we do not know and respect for that which we can learn. Tonight's lecture follows a landmark announcement in our history. Dr. Mr. Justin Mohammed will be Australia's inaugural Ambassador for First Nations people. And I welcome Justin here tonight. And I also welcome Dr. Janine Mohammed. So thank you for joining us and thank you for taking on this role. Mr. Mohammed is a goring, goring man from Bundaberg with extensive and impressive experience across many roles. And he will lead the Office of First Nations Engagement in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. He, my department, will work together in genuine partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to progress indigenous rights globally and to help grow First Nations trade and investment. This new position ensures for the first time that Australia will have dedicated indigenous representation in our international engagement. We're so happy to have you take this role, Justin. I hope this underlines what an exciting and hopeful time this is for First Nations diplomacy in Australia, in our region and around the world. See, we have the opportunity to tell our full story. And we have the opportunity to see First Nations business and exports taken to the world. And it is in this spirit that I have the privilege of introducing Dr. Mary Graham to deliver this evening's lecture. Dr. Graham is a Comber Mary person through her father's heritage and affiliated with Waka Waka through her mother's people. She has worked across government and universities, teaching Aboriginal history, politics and comparative philosophy and incorporating Aboriginal knowledge into curricula. She'll be joining conversation with Dr. Morgan Briggs, Associate Professor of the University of Queensland. So I regret I have to go back over the lake for the other place. But I wish you all the very best for this evening's lecture and beyond. Thank you very much. So, we'll stop. Thank you again, Vice Chancellor and Minister Wong for your remarks. It's now my very great pleasure to turn things over to Dr. Mary Graham and Dr. Morgan Briggs. Thank you. Well, thank you for that very warm welcome. It's really wonderful to be here, actually. Let me begin by acknowledging the Nganol people and thanking Paul House for the welcome to country. Thank you very much, Paul. I also acknowledge Dr. Matilda House, Senator Penny Wong, Julian Lisa MP, Professor Brian Schmidt and the ANU, Professor Tony Erskine and staff of the Bell School, representatives of foreign embassies and missions, acting Deputy Secretary Rod Brezia and representatives from DFAP, CEO Judy Baroon and NOAA, Aunty Anne Martin, and staff of the Jubile Center, professors from ANU, other guests and ladies and gentlemen. To introduce ourselves a little more, my people are the Ugenbeer Combermerie mob from current-day Gold Coast, actually, on my father's side, and walk-a-walka people to the northwest of Brisbane on my mother's side. This is Morgan Briggs. He's a meaglu, people out west, say, well, up north, or he's a dug-eye in my own language or simply a whitefile. He has grown up in Central Queensland in Darenbowl Country toward the Gengaloo side. So my father was a very big influence in my life and my mother. As I grew up as a young person, I gradually became aware of how Europeans had behaved in Combermerie and Ugenbeer Country right across the continent, now called Australia, in the early phases of colonisation. This early awareness of how whitefellas do inter-nation relations made me quite wild and angry as a young person, like a lot of us have. I recall speaking with my father about it, wanting to know why and how and all of that. And I asked him, why did they behave like that? Why do they behave like they're still today, even? He paused, he stopped for a minute, and he gave a really considered sort of reply that surprised me at the time, actually. He said, they don't know what they're doing. Now, he could have said anything he liked, but that's what he said. He could have said some really, really damning things, but that's what he said. And growing up later, I only really understood his meaning many years later, especially after reading Hannah Arendt about understanding what fascism is, actually, and its relation to colonialism. We are slowly building greater knowledge and awareness of the doing that my father referred to, how you do things, of the historical relations between colonisers and First Nations people, but we're only at the beginning of knowing what underpins the doing of learning and having conversations about the foundations of how Europeans and indigenous peoples everywhere structure political order and intonation relations. How are we, the oldest living human communities on the planet who probably invented diplomacy? I don't doubt, actually. How we constructed political order and relations among polities remain almost entirely unknown in interrelation, international relation scholarship. We're here to speak to you about these matters. I speak about, from my own experience and my own Aboriginal mob, of course, Combermary and Yugambe, our lot are not on this map, another map later I'll show, as well as Waka Waka, but I expect that what I say resonates for First Nations peoples everywhere. We know that some Europeans imagined us in quite particular and strange ways, including as, you know, native, sorry, noble savages, as simple, peace-loving, close to nature and so on, but Aboriginal people are not intrinsically peaceful. Human frailties, the wild card of the ego, competitive or aggressive impulse, are part of human being and experience. Killings, raids, feuds among Aboriginal people are documented in the ethnographic record, also in the old, some of the old stories, actually dreaming stories, as is the use of physical violence to process disputes and restore personal or clan dignity and autonomy, but human frailties and conflict are managed so that wars of conquest are unknown in Aboriginal political life. In fact, it's not even in the languages from what I gather, the word conquest or invasion. Much about Aboriginal political ordering and intonation relations arises from the fact that we are in straightforward terms, an old people. We lived in relative isolation for tens of thousands of years and hence therefore had the opportunity to develop ways of relating with the land and each other. We have then, as Morgan says, which I like to say, we engaged in a long-term experiment in human order making. The spectacular timescales that are involved see Aboriginal political order emerge gradually through a process of evolutionary political design. The process here may be something like what Leanne Simpson called thinking information. This type of slow, collective and emergent process is central to the way political order arose in this continent. Aboriginal people came to produce sociopolitical order over tens of thousands of years by using landscape as a template. Aboriginal ontogeny at the beginning of the ordering of the world, lies in the dreaming when the world was soft, totemic ancestors, ancestor figures moved through the landscape, giving the world form, shaping rivers, mountain ranges, particular sites. Through their behaviour, ancestors produced country with a capital C or in Bill Stanner's definition, land already deeply related with people. The dreaming is not simply an ancient set of events, it is continually present as a poetic guide for living in and renewing the world with moral force and meaning. Ancestor movements continue to resonate, providing the template for how individuals and nations connect to each other through networked relations. In this system, place is used like an ontological compass, a calibrating mechanism for regulating connections with the beings and relations that link to and radiate from where people take their grounding. If time is fleeting, then place serves as a device for modulating experiences that can appear random in time. Landscape and the relations that derive from it are the foundation for self-regulating governance with each individual invited to recognise the more-than-human moral force of the dream as the calibrating mechanism for growing and disciplining oneself. How does one measure up in one's country? How does one scale one's behaviour in a given constellation of relations? How does one weigh different courses of action in relation to country? To others in and outside the group, to the ancestors and to the overall register of the dreaming? How does one become worthy of what is proper in a relationless cosmos? Just as individuals are connected to others, to ancestor figures, immediate and distant kin, and other living beings through kinship system interleaved with skin or subsection systems, so are nations. Nations are related with each other through songlines, connect sites, people and groups both near and far away. These relationless systems are not intellectually local because they're connected through landscape as a template. As the geographer Doreen Massey explains, if we really think relationally, then our connections may go around the world. So this system of using landscape as a template for socio-political ordering generates relational autonomy. And this is an apparently paradoxical combination of autonomy and connection for individuals and for nations. Individuals are highly autonomous in contrast with mistaken assumptions that Aboriginal people are exclusively group-oriented. Nations are similarly autonomous with other nations described to some European observers as places inhabited by wild black fellows. However, networks of trade, exchange and intermarriage also link nations with many leading observers noting the remarkable uniformity or patterning of Aboriginal social organization across the continent and the almost complete identity of certain customs in different places. Songlines, the sacralized pathways of ancestors documented in story and ceremony, connect nation to nation. And these links, of course, continue in the present as we saw through Paul's wonderful welcome. Over tens of thousands of years of human ordering, this deeply relational way of living and organizing political order generates what Mary terms a relationalist ethos. This characteristic spirit of Aboriginal people's places humans amidst the world with humans, of course, but also with other than human beings while providing a flexible yet ordered universe for people an order which is more laterally organized rather than hierarchical. But relational autonomy and a relationalist ethos do not imply a peaceful Aboriginal Arcadia imagined by some Europeans. Autonomy is demanding and sometimes tense. It requires reflective self-regulation because in Aboriginal cosmology and political ordering the autonomous self is a self-regulating being. It's not a law unto itself. Autonomy requires concerted effort in actively considering weighing and scaling relations with others as Mary's already signaled. While looking out for and protecting one's autonomy. Relational autonomy requires guarding autonomy while being attuned to the relational constitution of the cosmos. It defends a form of autonomy which is always already related to and interdependent with others. Relational autonomy, of course, helps to keep relations flowing when relations are good. It serves as a kind of fulcrum for smooth relations for recognizing others, other people but also other diverse beings including other nations and for weighing and moderating the responsibilities that come with ordered entanglement. But relational autonomy is perhaps most crucial when relations are tense or difficult. Indeed, a capacity for dealing with enmity and conflict is the true measure of how relational autonomy helps to sustain political order. It's a way of being that sits in between in the middle preserving one's dignity while staying in tension, even amidst conflict or a fight and thus in relation with others. The relationalist ethos which derives from what Mary terms autonomous regard is a steadying disposition for relating with others in peace and also in conflict. Part of what's achieved by this form of political design is the provision of important public goods with perhaps the most important of these being long-term stability and security. There's naturally a type of conservatism in operation here and a commitment to the indivisibility of security in the basic meaning of being free from danger or threat as foundational for life. These broad goods, of course, they speak to all humans but the relationalist ethos generates a form of interpolity relations that is very different from the form of internationalism that have emerged in comparatively very recent times out of Europe. The relationalist ethos underpinning indigenous international relations generates a type of expansive internationalism. This type of internationalism is a poetic and life-affirming interspecies stability system that uses landscape as a template to develop a multifaceted and laterally organized system of obligations and dispositions. This system operates through a type of fractal relationalism that fits one thing with another from the very small to the cosmological from the internal to the external and from the prosaic to the ethereal to generate security, order and meaning. One of its key achievements is to recognize and accommodate human needs, both individual and group for autonomy and connection. So autonomy and connection with other individuals and with other nation groups. This algorithm for stability and security, as Mary terms it, works by countering survivalist inclinations through a relationalist ethos. Now, survivalist impulses and behaviors are part of being human and part of human experience. The aggressive impulse, competition and a range of cognate human behaviors are part of who we are as human beings. Mix these with the wildcard of the ego. I should also acknowledge one of Mary's phrases, the wildcard of the ego or an inability to meet key needs and survivalist desires apparently become primary. Survivalism is also naturally heady, exhilarating and intoxicating. It seems important because it's so highly charged and because it has the appearance and feel of getting to the heart of things. And indeed, it does get to the heart of things in the sense of getting to the survival of one's own life or one's own group. In these moments, survivalism does seem especially important, perhaps even foundational. But, and this is the major but, there is a risk that humans grant survivalist responses more important than they deserve in the cool light of a fuller consideration of the patterning of human behaviors and existence. Some peoples, those who hold dominant influence in today's world, have gone so far as to institutionalize survivalist scenarios and behaviors, developing a survivalist ethos in thinking about and operationalizing political order. Tales of scarcity proliferate and come to be seen as a truth courtesy of mainstream economics. And self-maximizing, acquisitive, competitive and combative impulses are normalized and even celebrated. Now, of course, in the short term, a survivalist ethos facilitates forms of human existence that overpower others. To exist in this mode is to survive others, human and non-human, and to trade in domination. To institutionalize survivalism may be a tempting short-term solution to the challenges of social life and being together and indeed to the fundamental challenge of politics, but as Mary sometimes asks, does domination have a use by date? The Aboriginal relationalist view is that stability and security developed over tens of thousands of years of shared life on this continent, so definitely not short-term, requires finding ways to manage and counter rather than institutionalize the survivalist impulses of humans. The Aboriginal way of doing this is to use landscape as a template for developing cross-cutting relations, including by sacralizing that which is ready to hand by turning land and sea into country. Capital C country, as Mary said before, thereby relating people with land and sea with other beings and with each other. So now here we are amidst the knowledge and governance institutions of the colonizer in an era of great global political change and challenge, how indigenous peoples construct political order and relations among polities is almost entirely unknown in international relations scholarship. We face survivalists who have wrought incredible violence on our peoples, in some cases bringing us to almost the brink of extinction. We've been victimized, but we are definitely not victims. We're the original owners and runners of country, actually. Our long-term habit of running the country has been rudely disrupted but hasn't gone away and we want that autonomy back so that we can redeploy our long-term experience in facing and managing survivalist phenomena as part of a collaborative experiment in human order-making. We now stand at the beginning of bringing those insights to our current relations with white fellas and to the larger global canvas. Indeed, the circumstances that we find ourselves in call for the rejuvenation and exercise of relational Aboriginal diplomacy with the colonizer and in the wider world. The most obvious example of Australian Aboriginal diplomacy giving expression to Aboriginal governing authority is the seafaring and trading connection between First Nations peoples of Northern Australia and the peoples of what is present day eastern Indonesia. This connection, based around the trade of Tri-Pang or sea cucumber, was ended by colonial government in 1906. Our knowledge of this connection is limited but we do know that the positive trading relationship is likely to have been modulated by relational forms of self-hood coupled with personal status and socio-political order mediated through kinship moieties in the original case and royal houses in the Indonesian case rather than inflexible notions of sovereignty, status, politics informed by a survivalist ethos. The Indonesian connection shows that relationalism can enable and promote inclusive and grounded connections beyond the Australian continent. Indeed, this is not simply idiosyncrasy or historical anomaly. Relationalism is foundational, in fact, in a range of philosophical traditions and religions of the world and it can also operate in the contemporary era amidst a world of nation-states. Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, gave voice at the 1955 Bandung Conference to a relationalist vision that registers the constraining effects of the contemporary international system. At Bandung, Sukarno directly acknowledged the fact of diversity and connection among peoples. He sought, quote, to impress on the world that it is possible to live together, meet together, speak to each other without losing one's individual identity and yet to develop a true consciousness of the interdependence of men and nations for their well-being and survival on Earth. End quote. Sukarno's vision goes some way towards what Mary describes as multi-polarity with Aboriginal characteristics, which is also one way of bringing old Aboriginal insights for managing inter-polarity relations into exchange with international relations and to bear on current challenges. This is not multi-polarity that conceptualizes nations as independent of place and enacting sovereign power relations within a given territory, nor does it see emergent order as arising solely out of the play of competitive power relations and utility maximization. Multi-polarity with Aboriginal characteristics recognizes the fact that nation-states arise through lateral connections and that they are integrally bound with their place and their history. Aboriginal inter-polarity ordering arises not solely because of the play of contestation with other nations, though that is not entirely absent, but because peoples maintain cross-cutting responsibilities to others, both human and non-human, even as they assert their autonomy. These are not idealist propositions. The reality of this type of multi-polarity is either upon us or urgently and insistently calling us. Amidst hyper-connected inter-polarity relations of the 21st century, resonating connections across and among polities more accurately describe international relations then does an understanding of disarticulated contesting entities. And, of course, in relation to climate change, an Aboriginal approach to multi-polarity suggests the grounding of politics in place and landscape as a foundational way for people to be engaged with and care for the well-being of the systems that they inhabit and embody. Stepping aside from the survivalist ethos or attempting to manage the survivalist ethos by pursuing relational Indigenous diplomacy and multi-polarity with Aboriginal characteristics involves in a most basic sense being worthy of what is proper in a relationalist cosmos. This suggests the value of respecting and being curious about other political philosophies. There's that word curiosity from Minister Wong as well. So, being curious about other ways of relating and connecting. Here, difference is not to be feared but to be engaged. For instance, there are likely parallels and divergences, certainly divergences too, between Aboriginal understandings of the centrality of kinship relations and the Confucian view of the family as a model for wider social relations between kinship obligations and giao or familial piety. A commitment to relational autonomy makes it possible to do this work of engaging difference while also being clear-eyed about one's own values and autonomy, including amidst conflict, if that be the case. To suggest the value of relational autonomy and multi-polarity with Aboriginal characteristics is not to argue for a relationalist approach against the modern nation-state regime or against international relations scholarship. Nor are we calling for the representation of Indigenous people or making some kind of ideological approach for institutionalising an Aboriginal approach. That would reverse, but not resolve, the structure and form of domination. And moreover, tens of thousands of years of political design and stability generates a more expansive vision. We are suggesting, though, that Australia's foreign policy, albeit constrained by dominant political architecture, can gradually be recast to become commensurate with long-standing First Nations ways of approaching political order, including by asserting autonomy while responding to current regional and global circumstances. The First Nation ways of being and relating that could be drawn upon here are not esoteric, but Aboriginal relationalism is also demanding and in some respects may seem otherworldly to mainstream international relations scholarship and indeed to mainstream Australia. First Nations people represent a challenge to the colonial mainstream as they have always done. One way of deploying a relationalist ethos to counter and manage survivalism in our contemporary international relations is to develop an Australian conceptualisation and practice of multi-polarity by drawing upon Aboriginal approaches to political ordering and inter-polarity relations that have sketched here and begun to discuss elsewhere. There are filaments of possibility, of course, emerging to support this work. Those filaments are in strong evidence here today, including through discussions of First Nations foreign policy and obviously the remarkable announcement that we've heard today. First Nations foreign policy represents an opportunity to seriously rethink the conceptual underpinnings and practice of Australians foreign policy and diplomacy. Of course, there are also risks here, not least because there are, in fact, no easy or immediate equivalences between Aboriginal inter-polarity relations and contemporary international affairs. Developing First Nations foreign policy will require serious and long-term effort. To underpin this and relate its efforts, I suggest, as indicated by our subtitle, a new type of pragmatism that draws on the insights of old peoples. We use the term pragmatism in case it's not obvious, not in the everyday sense to evoke the triumph of expediency over principle, but to refer to the philosophical tradition which suggests that thinking is a form of contingent and recursive doing that is in and of the world rather than apart from it. In this tradition, thinking should be used for forms of knowing directed towards guiding, predicting, planning and acting. Pragmatist thinking does not claim to deliver singular or complete knowledge of the world. We have not here tonight, for instance, set out to convince you that Aboriginal political thought describes the truth of what politics or international relations is. But as in many other areas, First Nations people were philosophical pragmatists before there was pragmatism. The process of evolutionary political design that generates what Mary refers to as Aboriginal political thought is thinking for doing, thinking for generating sociopolitical order. We refer to new pragmatism because to the extent that international relations scholarship has begun to engage with pragmatism, it's tended to retain both the pretense of European and American origins and its dominant conceptual and institutional coordinates. Here we suggest the possibility of something else and something new, a form of pragmatism born of this continent and our joint being here together. To inform this work, we have sought to suggest to you that First Nations have different and valuable insights for organising being together and rethinking international relations. Such a new pragmatism would be one developed from and drawing upon both our traditions, a joint venture oriented to our belonging and responsibilities in this continent and also very crucially in this region. So, in conclusion, in straightforward terms to Aboriginal peoples, we're an old people. We've had time to develop a relationalist political philosophy and approach the interpolity relations through an extremely long-term process of political design. Aboriginal peoples are a society of great age. Australia, in contrast, is very young and has asserted sovereignty through invasion and rapacious cruelties of colonialism. One result is that the mainstream Australia exercises power on this continent, but Aboriginal people have authority. We are the legitimate holders of jurisdiction. White fathers are more able to bring force to bear to direct behaviour, but their legitimacy on this continent is questionable. Black fathers can't readily mobilize significant force, of course, but the legitimacy of our presence and governance is not fundamentally in question. This difference can block us from working together from being worthy of what is proper in terms of both our traditions and a relationalist cosmos, but it can also be the foundation for us together to build a fuller modern and confident Australia. Because Australia is young, it has a serious conceptual underpinning. There are ideas of what Australia is, but these are often derivative, as Australia's approach to international relations often can be. To develop a proper sense of its place in history and to pursue relational Aboriginal diplomacy or First Nations foreign policy, Australia must come to terms with not only its founding violence, but also with the deep influence of survivalism in its European-derived system of politics, law, governance and international relations. This requires serious engagement with First Nations, not to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into Australian liberal democracy, but to engage us as political interlocutors to build a modern and confident Australia. From the 1990s, the term civilisation state has sometimes been deployed by countries seeking to stress their civilisational identity in contrast to western and liberal 20th century nation states. This discourse, which Mary and I are not endorsing, but this discourse for us highlights that Australia has a deep lack of a civilisational tradition. And without such a tradition, Australia will remain always somewhat insecure and uncertain, governing and ungrounded, albeit slowly evolving European outpost in an unfamiliar region. We wonder to twist this language a little if Australia might be able to develop a civilisational state. First Nations people of this continent are a civilisational culture who have never had a need for a state. The state arising with agriculture and as a way of centralising power is substantially less than 10,000 years old. From an Aboriginal perspective of a society of great age, the state is an unruly teenager. Aboriginal people now face and are forced to engage with this unruly teenager that is demonstrably uncivilised. Can we develop a civilisational state to overcome the uncivilised behaviours of the state and to pursue a mutually beneficial process of nation building that draws on both our traditions and is deeply grounded and embedded in this continent and in this region? If agriculture and the state have brought us to this point, then as Mary often asks, what does the next 10,000 years hold? This continent has much to offer its inhabitants, the region and the world. First Nations people, as Mary says, became human in this place. So the depth and meaning of their connection to this continent is unassailable. But the relationalist ethos means that First Nations people do not tend to seek to impose their meanings upon those, colonists and others, who have come across the seas in repeated acts of what can only be described as truly remarkable generosity. First Nations people tend to look for ways for us to face the future together. Mary suggests that the continent might be thought of as a type of shelter that makes land the source of the law for all of us who live here. The corollary is that all who live here are also responsible for a form of stewardship that manages not only the continent but also counters survivalism through relationalism. The aesthetic entailments of such a concept might just sustain us in a collaborative venture to draw upon civilizational First Nation cultures to develop a civilizational state and to develop and pursue an Australian form of multi-polarity. Along the way, this concept may help us to recognize and engage First Nations approaches to political ordering and international relations to see the value of landscape as an ontological compass and to pursue autonomy while fulfilling all our responsibilities in a relationalist cosmos. Thank you. Could I just add something to that? I also work with the School of Philosophy in UQ, University of Queensland. So we've been talking about, I was suggesting to them, we've always been interested in both politics and philosophy and maybe we should start looking at, considering all of this, a true Australian philosophy, a real Australian philosophy that is not just a copy of Aboriginal notions, ideas and that, but where Europe comes together with this country because it's mainly European philosophy that has been the major idea of thinking, isn't it, you know, Aristotle and so on and so on, but a real Australian philosophy which will probably take decades and decades to develop eventually, you know, so, yeah. I'll leave it there. Thank you so much, Dr Graham and Dr Brigg. Hi, everyone. My name is James Blackwell. I'm a graduate man and research fellow here at the Colla Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs and it's such a privilege to have both Dr Graham and Dr Brigg here to have Penny Wong, our VC, Justin Muhammad, our new first sessions ambassador. So welcome to everybody. So we are a bit ahead of schedule so we can have a much longer Q&A session than we initially planned, which is great for all of you, but while you're there all thinking of your questions, I'm going to jump in ahead of you and give you some privilege and ask a lot of my own. So Morgan, Mary, you talked about this idea of a civilizational state, this idea of kind of combining Aboriginal order and philosophy with Australian order of philosophy. What does that look like in the practical term? Even if it's just some examples or some random ideas in your head, what does that look like to you? Well, for me, it's... I think Paul talked about it before, I think, I've not got you. Something about the realising, truly, truly fully taking on that the source of the law is land and I think that's a title of a book, I think, or somebody's book, I forget. But, yeah, the source of the law is, sorry, land is the source of the law, yeah. So in other words, everything from this hopefully new philosophy coming, eventually emerging, right down to policymaking and ideas about politics and society has to be like coming from that part, coming from that idea. And of course, things are mounting up, aren't they? You know, climate change, pandemics and so on. So the idea of that, the source of the law, even being land, is the idea of the law of obligation. So obligation comes first before everything else. That is obligation to land, and that's the template for obligation to people. The NHS, you know, the old NHS, when it came out, from an Aboriginal perspective, the British NHS, National Health Service, that would be like attending to the law of obligation. So free, good quality health for everybody, no matter how poor they are, and it keeps going and it keeps being supported fully rather than being in the process of being destroyed, I think, if I'm not mistaken. That's that kind of obligation. Shall I add? Yeah, thanks for the question, James, and just to add a little to what Mary's had to say. I think the first thing I'd say is we do see filaments of that emerging already, certainly with welcomes to country, certainly with the appointment of Justin Mahomet and to the ambassador role in the work that DFAT is doing at the moment. What might this look like? The question about what might this look like specifically in response to that, I would defer to this work around a pragmatist approach. An everyday way of talking about what pragmatism involves is to say it's a form of muddling through, and I think that's what needs to happen. So it's very hard to say prescriptively what it should look like down the line. But I do know that one thing that Mary is interested in and we have written on as well is the idea of getting the custodial ethos and commitments to notions of stewardship into public service departments. Now that kind of a notion is not that far removed to public service practice. And in fact, there are some links going back to the THOTI review and that wasn't picked up but may be going to be picked up now in terms of rethinking APS and so on. So we think there is scope. And as we said, there are Aboriginal ways of being and operating that are not esoteric and can be brought to bear in public service and in other organizations. So could I just say another thing? Another thing is our old system was sort of like a gendered governance system. So quite balanced. Quite balanced. That would be good. But men and women run society. Not a hierarchy at all. Something like that. Thank you. And for a camera audience, you've picked your public service comments. Perfect. I'm sure half of us here work with a public service. So I'll open up questions to everybody here. We do have one roving mic but probably easier if just you project your voice. I'm going to say though, first of all, again, podium privilege, second time. The only time I'm going to do it after this I'm going to ask for mob question first. So any Aboriginal people want to ask their first question? I'm going to... If not, I'm going to pick on someone. So please... Yeah, right here. So I'm at the conclusion since within the concept of the relation. No, I think I'd talk loud enough. People can hear me. No. No. Hello. Is that better? Yes. I've always approached all of my interactions with a relational approach and that hasn't always been successful in the public sector. No. I feel though... My confliction is around institutions, educational institutions and how the voice of First Nations people and this concept is only being heard through a particular... You're a doctor. You've studied philosophy. And so if someone who hasn't got a university degree and I've spoken to my grandmother who is a gering woman too, so I'm very proud of Justin over there. And I sat down with her. I sat down with my grandfather who is incredibly intelligent people, incredibly intelligent young people who may never get to university. I guess how can we support that voice, that grassroots voice that might not get this university education and a platform to be able to deliver on this? I don't know. I have to say... I have been asked that. Well, we've talked about it with many other people, but the idea of everybody being an autonomous being, you are your own boss. And we come from our own old society is that that's how everybody is treated. You're supposed to... Autonomous regard I'm talking about. So no matter who you are, even between ages, you know, the distinctions between male and female and ages, but no class system, no caste system. And it's a horrible thing to say, but that's part of the... how do you put it, the way of colonization, of course, is to bring all those sorts of hierarchical, rigid hierarchical kind of systems into wherever they happen to be invading and taking over. And it's been very influential, I guess. And that's part of the battle or the struggle, if you like. But at least if it's between ourselves, if that idea of being proper with what's understood or believed, treating each other very well and so on, if that isn't forgotten, but if it's possible, that's really the hard part, if that could be learned, basically, could be learned by people in the mainstream everywhere, but especially in places like official places, government places, education, institutions, all that sort of thing. Because they operate in what they do in a hierarchical way. They actually operate. They don't just treat other people, sometimes their own people, of course. They treat them as a top-down sort of, all of that. But that would be really hard. We just have to keep giving good, I think, good examples of it. And I think we do. I think we do. We know how to talk to each other and all of that. I'm going to take your lead, because I have the microphone. So speaking of philosophy, one of the most powerful comments that I ever heard was when I was living up in Noolamboy, up in the Northern Territory, and I was sitting down with what they call the long grasses. And so he was a chronic alcoholic, had deformed legs from syphilis, and we're only talking not long ago. And I asked him, why do you drink? And his response to me was, being drunk is like being in paradise in a white man's world. And the power of that comment is something that just spoke to me, and I relay all the time. Not an educated man, but incredibly powerful. It's a reality. Can I just add to what Mary said by saying that the continuing task, the continuing struggle is to challenge hierarchy and to create opportunity. And of course, as you well understand from your own lived experience, the type of political philosophy we're talking about here is a resource for doing that. It's not hierarchical. It's laterally organized. It's not about being educated. It's not about these kind of institutions. This is lived philosophy among mob on the ground that you can feel and experience and sense. So all we're doing by being here and speaking that is not to endorse the hierarchies of institutions or embrace them. I believe we challenge them and we want to continue to challenge them and we want to try and make the connections between that grassroots lived experience as the networked set of relations that connect to country and law and dreaming and have that speak back to the state. As Mary says that this is where jurisdiction stands. This is where legitimate jurisdiction stands. Let's have a more open conversation that recognizes that jurisdiction. Thank you. Any other questions? I saw one up here before. Change the batik shirt. Thank you. My name is Pudi. I came all the way from Adelaide. I'm... Adelaide. I am... I would like to ask about what can we do or what would be the best way to re-engaging with the Makasan? I'm originally from Indonesia. I'm an Australian citizen now, but I went to Anemlan Folkama Festival last year and I left my job because I wanted to trace the relationship, but I went to Makasan many times with my student. But the question is, as Mary has said, the relationship was stopped in 1906 at the beginning of the white immigration policy. Now, since we're trying to formulate First Nation foreign policy, please I beg that past the colonial or Australian government block or stop their relationship can be open again. Meaning that the flow of Makasan or young Makasar can come again in a different way, maybe doing cultural teachings, educational teachings, as well as our mobs in Anemlan or Yonglu can go to Makasar. Thank you. Yes. Shall I? Yeah. I thought I actually thought there was connection. It's still now, isn't it? Yes. And it's great. I think that's fantastic. Yeah. I mean, I can't... In 1997, there was an opera which was performed in Makasar, which celebrated this connection and relationship. But of course, Park, you're right that there isn't an ongoing way of celebrating and drawing upon this relationship. And extending on some of what you've said, I will take the opportunity of having a semi-public forum to say that I, at certain points, have had a dream about running young people's cross-cultural diplomacy workshops on the shores of Anemlan between young Indonesians, young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and young mainstream Australians. I think a venture like this would be a remarkable way of making the connections with the past and building diplomacy in our region. So as Mary says, yes, there's connections. I think, and you well know some of those connections are there, but certainly I'd at least agree with you that there's plenty of Department of Foreign Affairs and trade staff in the room. So there's an idea that you and I've dropped. Yeah. Let me in the hoop earrings. Hi. My name is Mary Spice Williams. I look after Indigenous Studies in College of Arts and Social Sciences. Dark and drunk through my nana. So honoured that you are here, Mary, and it's really lovely to hear you for the first time, Morgan. Your talk today was just amazing and wonderful and it's just lovely to hear, especially in this context and in this place for so many reasons. I literally, my hand shot up so you mentioned the word jurisdiction and I just simply want to ask you to speak more about that, what you're thinking about jurisdiction, what that means in this context of relational autonomy. Gee, look, I don't know the law very much, but I take all my advice from Dr Irene Watson. You know that, I don't know if people are familiar with her book. She's the one who talks, and it's been very influential for me. I've learned a lot about law. She knows about law, Aboriginal law and Western law thoroughly, you know. And of course, jurisdiction, for example, the way I've tried to look at it in my own way without knowing very much about law is to give an example at the Commonwealth Games in Gullcust, you might have heard about that. We, all of us, you can bear people representing six different groups who got together, mainly older people, but a lot of young people too, and talking about getting preparation for it and all sorts of things, practical things, working with Gullcust City Council, the state government, state Queensland government, the Games officials, any other kind of official at all, but working with our own mob too, of course, there. And we all decided to write basically rules for how to behave in our country. They were just one to, well, I don't know, about a dozen, I think. And these rules, though, were for everybody, including other Aboriginal people, basically how to behave in our country, you know. So about protecting the land, of course, don't trash anything or ruin anything just because of the Games. And so there were all kinds of Aboriginal people there, the other people, visitors, people who had businesses, they wanted to sell their goods, you know, products and so on, people who were just looking for jobs, people who were just interested in the sport, and of course the protest people. So all these rules went out to all of them, but it also went to all of these other white participants, the government ones and so on, including the police. And that was very interesting. How we put it basically was with all the various other rules, but one thing we said, this is written up because we can see that you obviously, as the police, have power, but you have to know that we're the ones with authority. So you take notice of this here and do things how we want, you know. This is what we're not asking you, we're telling you actually. So we are acting like we are in our own jurisdiction, you know, we're not asking for anything, including from my point of view how I say, I don't either support or not support the voice treaties and stuff, but I think it's our authority that has to be engaged with about these things. And I don't really like the idea of asking permission from anybody, settlers, police, you know, corporates, anyone at all for having a voice. I'm not going to ask permission to have a voice. So I'll be talking about, I always talk about that. So that was the basis of it, those rules, you know. And that's personally my own view about it. And I think it's implicit or perhaps even more than implicit in what Mary said, that one of the real and remarkable benefits of jurisdiction as a concept to work with is its flexibility. There are negotiations going on all over the country at the moment between local governments and indigenous people, between state governments and indigenous people, between corporates and indigenous people. And jurisdiction is infinitely divisible and very susceptible to being negotiated and having particular arrangements made around it. You're responsible for that part of land management, but we're taking responsibility for this part. So I think jurisdiction is almost like, without becoming particularly legalistic about it, I think it becomes a very useful and workable frame or terminology at least for different, for parties to negotiate relations all over the country, which do connect right down to the grassroots level and grassroots arrangements. Thank you. Sorry. I was just going to say it's a very old idea. I think a very traditional idea of, say, on people's land, our own land, or each other's land. So people on the land, in their land, there are some people who are like, they're the owners. In the English sense, you'd call them owners and managers. Do you know what I mean? And they know each other and they're related, but they both got those two responsibilities and they mustn't argue about anything, fight or argue or disagree. They both have. One knows all the stories and the history and everything like that. The other guy, the other person, it could be a man or woman or men and women. One looks after the detail of looking after land, what needs to be done, what shouldn't be done. It's an old system jurisdiction. Absolutely. Sorry. So in that flexibility, it's not only... One of the things that tends to happen in Australia is we're obsessed, like a colonial state law, obsessed with jurisdiction as being land. It's land, we draw lines on it and so on. So it's not about that because those lines shouldn't be mistaken for hard boundaries or barriers. Yeah, it tells a different story. But that the jurisdiction is... If it's understood as relational, it's also about people, which also points to people being part of country and being country, not being part of or connected to, but actually of country. Would that be the direction? Yeah, that's right. I always also remember an old activist from New South Wales. Mum, Cheryl, why don't people who are familiar? Yeah, of course. And one thing she said, I always use it in talks and various things, she said something about... talking about colonials, if only they'd come here differently with a different way of acting. If only they'd come here, told us what the whole gist was, why they're there and how they were kicked out of their own country and all that sort of stuff. And they're looking for another place, you know? Not as a prison or anything like that. But if they just told us that, we would have understood that and we would have made space for them. Do you know what I mean? Even on wherever their own land is, they would have felt like that. Look after them. And I always thought that's... I could imagine other people listening to that would have thought it was highly, almost naive, but actually, that's that law of obligation in practice, plus the jurisdictional kind of things. You'd make room. Because ancient times, you had to make room because the sea reclaimed land. Do you know what I mean? So all of a sudden, one mob's land wasn't there, it was under the water. So what could you do? You have to make other... who knows, maybe have conflict for a little while or whatever, who knows. If I could ask a follow-up, Mary, on your Gold Coast story in the Commonwealth Games, what was their response from the state, from settlers, from visitors? And what does that tell us about the success or not of these endeavors? It was essentially a success, even though they were shocked by the police being spoken to like that. But very nicely, politely, telling them. But no, and to their surprise, nothing much bad happened because we were saying to the protest mob too, by all means, we're all for the protest. Some of our mob were, some of them weren't. So yes, have the protest. Shout, sing songs, slogans, I mean, hold up traffic, everything. But not things like smashing windows and anything like that. You know why we're turning cars or something. So yeah, go for it, you know. So you couldn't have Aboriginal people totally being against protest, you know. It's one of our things, isn't it? It has to be. Anyone else with questions? Over there on the side. Sorry, James, she's come to me first. Dr. Mary Graham, you promised us another map if I heard you correctly. Would I share that? Another one? A map? I think you said, yeah. Just in our place, yeah. Yeah, because for some reason it doesn't show up on the Horton map. This is from a really old map, 1866. And what I like about it is see it shows the different groups. And it doesn't show marks though, you know. What do you call it? It means, you know, because some people might think, some people do think, they're like boundaries with guards on them and things like that, you know. And really this shows not that. It shows we had relations with other clans and fights occasionally, you know. But, you know, that kind of diplomacy was in play. Yeah, so, but relational. More than relational, yeah. That's all it is there, I want to share. If you could go to the question over here. Thank you very much. That's very inspiring and really thought-provoking. I can't help but think with all the new philosophy, Australian Indigenous philosophy, thinking about custodian ship, thinking about stewardship and how to deliver services better to our community. You know, the thing in the room is the voice, you know, giving our people the voice to be able to express what they need, what works for them. I mean, this could be an enormous, powerful driver for completely changing how we think about our country, how we think about how we deliver our society, how we relate to each other. It could be quite a game changer. That's my question. Yeah. Watch your thoughts on that. Yes, look, I'm not saying for a minute I'm against it at all. I'm like many Aboriginal people, actually. What does it actually mean? You know, I've heard it quite often, not only from white fellows, but from quite a few Aboriginal people. But overall, as typically Aboriginal people, they like the idea of coming forward to going into things together. You know what I mean? To will try anything. There was just as much doubt about, you know, ATSIC, National Congress. I was on both those things. There was just as much doubt and criticism from Aboriginal people. But we'll give it a go, you know? And that's part of that thing of the law of obligation, too. You have to. You just have to. Even if you don't have much faith in things as, well, old ages ago, decades ago, Native Americans, when they came here, we had talks or discussions about constitutional stuff, even though the American thing is different, you know? But in their words, they said, don't have treaties with white men, white people. They always break them, you know? Which is their experience. And they even break treaties among themselves, you know, white fellows among themselves. So how can you believe it, you know? So you take all this stuff into account. But I wouldn't say no, no, don't. You know, outright no, or outright yes. What I see is when I look at things of how they're presented as sides, I always try to meet that with another kind of sides. And that is to look at whatever the thing is, whatever it is about, the issue. Look at it with the sharpest kind of analysis you can think of, very good analysis, context and history. I try to look at that side of things, you know? And when you look at it, it does make you doubtful about things, like as quite a few people have said, well, after the voice, will we be seeing, you know, 10-year-old children still be thrown in jail, original children? Will anybody ever be held accountable for all the murders and deaths in custody? Do you know what I mean? Is it happening fairly soon after? You know? And if there was some kind of sure thing that that will happen, well, I'll be all, I will be openly, quite all for it. But you can never be sure, you see? You know, you just don't know. It has to be tested. And we know, and I know that if it does happen like that, that nothing much happens. But that it is a very good cosmetic thing for Australia. It makes Australia look very good. But nothing much changes. Then, you know, disappointment again. But, yeah, context, analysis, real analysis and history. I think you have a question up there. Good evening. My name is Richard. What came through very clearly to me is in the development of the relational ethos across eons, effectively, tens and tens of thousands of years, it was an evolutionary process implying that mistakes were made, learned from, and the system improved. Given the newness of the white presence here, how long or has your work covered any thoughts on timelines for the development of the new Australian philosophy that you mentioned? All I can say, a long time, I think. Now, Mary, come on, tell us when, day, time, minute. Exactly when. I think we gave a sense of the time frames that Mary is thinking of when she says, you know, we're grappling all human societies with the state form as the dominant form of political organization. In fact, disciplines such as political science and international studies operate with that as a given, as the, as synonymous with the possibility of political ordering. Part of what the perspective that Mary and First Nations people around this country bring and many other peoples globally is that political order is not dependent upon the state form. And when we, to go directly to your question, when Mary asks, you know, the state is less than 10,000 years old, what does the next 10,000 hold? So, I mean, of course, I hope it doesn't take that long. And I think, again, referring to pragmatism, the point is not so much to establish a program and prescribe particular things, but that we crack on together and build this and do this work, do this working out that you talk about in this relationship that we've been, that is beginning with Justin taking up this role. You know, there will be steps and perhaps missteps, and that doesn't matter. The key thing is to be continually in dialogue and learning and working together. And as far as philosophies go, what we're talking about at the moment in philosophy is the idea that it definitely isn't a Western-style idea, you know, of Western philosophy. But even the very thing of different ways of looking at it, the only way you could call our system, and it is a system, it's a civilizational system, because when you look at that other, the Big Map, you know, not a square inch of the country was wild or left behind or was somebody's responsibility. So that makes it a system, so that makes it a civilization and how they work it out and so on. So you can't, you can't, the dreaming, you can't call it a religion because a religion, the system isn't religious because religion is absolutism, you know, and it relies on faith. And faith is such a, how can you put it, untidy thing in a way. Sometimes you find faith, sometimes you lose it, sometimes it's strong, sometimes it's weak, so it's very unreliable faith. You know, it's just unreliable. It's not firm enough, you know. The only thing that's firm is what we're walking on. Excellent. That's the only thing that's firm and even if it's getting damaged, you know. Plus it's not an ideology. It's not about an idea of a good society. So it's not ideological because that can be very, very hard to, you know. You have ideologues who follow, which usually comes up against another because our logic, I had to go trying to work out a logic of ours because that old system, the old system is, in a sense, it's not just a language map, it's a governance map, or if you like, it's a logic map. All perspectives are valid and reasonable. That's our own logic. Very different to Aristotelian logic. So it's not an ideology. It's not even a philosophy in the sense of, like Western speculative philosophy, speculating about what the meaning of life is and so on and so on and so on. The only thing you can think of is it's a world view. And I actually like, I haven't found a word yet. My son is better at the language, our own language than me actually. But there's a German word called Welton Schoen. I don't know, people are familiar with that. Welton Schoen, and it means world view. It's exactly me. It's a deeper meaning than just your opinion. Much deeper, but a world view. How you look at reality, really. And that's all you could say, really, about our own old system. But I believe it's a brilliant old system. It's something of genius, actually. I really do believe it, you know. Other old cultures, I mean, have the greatest respect for other old cultures, old civilizations, you know, building monumental architecture. You know, it's just unbelievable. But I do believe that we sort of invented or created a monumental concept of a stable, secure system, you know, out of the whole world and lasted for a long time. Have a question from the front row. Hi. My name's Amy. I'm Narunga Angana. I was born in Adelaide. And I just want to acknowledge the traditional oiliness of the land that we are on today, the N'Animal people and the Embry people. And I thank them for allowing us to be here. So my question is, I just wanted to make a comment, actually. What you said before, the only thing that is firm is the land we are walking on. I really love that. And I'm definitely going to take that approach as I leave here. But my question was, I'm currently in the process of getting ready to go to Korea as a new Columbia plan scholar. And I'm very excited to be a part of strengthening the relationships between Australia and Korea. But I know that many of us are students here today, First Nations students. And many of us kind of struggle with the structure of an academic environment. And I'm just wondering, how can we be a voice to bring this pragmatic approach to relationships? Can you hear me? Yeah. Sorry. To bring this pragmatic approach to our relationships in the classroom and beyond. What sort of language and behaviour can we exhibit to show this sort of approach and to encourage everyone's learning and knowing? Well, I don't know. I'm not quite sure. Apart from being yourself, which most people will tell you, just be yourself and so on and so on. That idea about autonomous regard. But it's a learned thing. And, you know, as you get older, it gets easier, I guess. Or maybe it doesn't get easier. Because you have to deal with people that don't like you or you don't like or are talking bad. You know what I mean? Straight out racist sort of stuff. You know, I don't know. You just have to learn that. You want to say something about it? Because you're in the university. I'm in the university, but not really. We're tired. Best way to be. Yeah. Look, I think the question was directed to Mary. Okay. Thank you. Well, I mean, I think what you started out with with your comment is about the land, taking ones grounding from the land and the land being the source of the law and connected sites in the landscape forming a template for political ordering but also cross cutting connections among people is a great resource for everyone. Of course, First Nations people have very direct, very direct access to that. And white fellas and others walking on this land have been invited to participate in that. But we must do so with very, very carefully and respectfully and only with appropriate sets of connections and so on. That's an important caveat. But to come back to your case, I think to assert the value of, Mary calls it, autonomous regard, a form of selfhood which is grounded and connected to those ontological foundations and expects others to be operating and engaging with each other in similar ways. Now, and I think we should routinely draw upon that kind of system in institutionalized settings to challenge behavior that, and this goes back to the question that was raised earlier about hierarchy and so on. All of us should routinely do that. And that's because this system and this approach based in autonomous regard has a deft way of connecting with what is basically human and good and respectful. So I think that you, because you're so directly connected with that, can take great solace and use that as a great source of personal strength for driving change, challenging others, but also just being strong and solid in yourself, I think. Could I add, oh sorry, could I just add something else that sort of connects with what you said and what you were saying before, is more to do with, partly to do with this voice, I suppose, to what comes out of it, you know, a, what do you call it? A representative body of some sort. But overall, I do believe that Aboriginal people everywhere should run Aboriginal affairs. It'll stop, you know, just run it, all of them, with our terms of reference, our terms of reference of how to run it, you know, our world. If that comes out of the voice, then that would be fantastic. The Sami, you know the Sami, you've heard of, they have a parliament. They have their own parliament over three countries, I think, three countries, you know, and I'm not saying we should have a parliament, but something as pretty independent as that and that nobody tells us how to run it because that's part of the problem. You know, part of the problem is that we're not running it and it is almost genetic, you know. We've done it for so long, it's genetic, you know. So we have to get back to that. They have to treat us, the government, I'm talking about, I suppose, really, they have to treat us like equals. We are more than equal, you know. Thank you. We have time for one more question. We'll end on that one. Hello, my name is Leilani. I'm from the wonderful region of Zanath Kess, the Torres Strait. Thank you for a very insightful discussion and your lecture this evening. I'll have full disclosure. I'm also a DFAT officer, but I did spend time as CEO of the Torres Strait Regional Authority up north, so I feel like I'm in the game of thrones, you know, us in the north, we're a bit different. So, just picking up a couple of points. So you mentioned about practical measures for the young masters before about how to engage internationally. And within the APS, the Australian Public Service, I would say from a practical perspective, that's about our cultural competency and ensuring that all public servants are completely, culturally competent when dealing with Indigenous affairs and Indigenous peoples. Secondly, from a DFAT perspective, I would say, what we're very good at is being diplomats, but I would push it a little bit further and say cultural diplomacy is key. And this goes to very hard of your discussion tonight. So I heard elements of trade, I heard elements of, you know, cross-border discussions with the Macassans. We in the north have multiple ancestries that come from the north, the south and the east. You know, I myself impart Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Pacific Islander, Jamaican, Dutch, English, Aboriginal, Chinese, so you name it. We're the fruit salad. And then when you talk about relational philosophies, I would again push that a little bit further when you talk about land as the tangible. I would say we would probably extend that a little bit further and say we are inter-relational in that we are land, sea, sky and wind. And at the heart of all of this, of course, is our interactions from a cultural perspective. So when you mention worldview, we see everything from our worldview from a cultural lens first and foremost. Our interactions with one another as Indigenous peoples of this country and then with other countries. It is from the cultural platform first. And then I just want to end on in terms of the Torres Strait. Well, we have our first ever treaty, as you're probably aware, the Australia Papua New Guinea Torres Strait Treaty, which came into force in 1984. I know this very well. And this acknowledges the trade and traditional kinship ties we have with the western province of Papua New Guinea. So this already exists in Australia. And so we can take some points and key learnings from the north on Indigenous diplomacy because it is diplomacy in action. It was actually a case study of our foreign policy White Paper in 2017. So there are already examples of this. And then from the Torres Strait itself as a Torres Strait regional authority, we have an act of parliament that came into effect in 1994. And what underpins the Aboriginal Torres Strait Act for the Torres Strait is what's called island custom. Now you talk about philosophies, we say this is about customs. It is our values. It is our philosophies. It is the way in which we engage. So we already have values in the north. We already have examples. We have practical examples of this that we could learn from. And I'll end on saying that we are also the home to Mabo. So we have given this country a lot, both LAW and now L-O-I-E. So there's much to learn from us. Thank you. Thank you very much. I might just take that as a comment. Feel very Q&A of me. But if you could just give Morgan and Mary one more final round of applause. Yes. I will now hand over the reins very briefly again to our director who will give some good remarks. Thank you. This was such a wonderful discussion that I really don't want it to end. I want to say some thanks. I want to say thank you to James Blackwell for moderating tonight. James is our first Indigenous Diplomacy Fellow in the Coral Bell School and we're incredibly lucky to have him. And I also want to thank him for being instrumental in putting this lecture together. So James, thank you. I also want to thank all of you for joining us here tonight for the inaugural Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy. Thank you for your great questions and for contributing to what was a really stimulating and really important discussion. Our plan is to make this an annual lecture. So I hope that you will all join us and continue this discussion and come to our lecture next year. But most importantly, I want to thank Dr. Graham and Dr. Brigg for their incredibly eloquent, powerful and timely lecture tonight. And please join me once again to thank our distinguished speakers tonight. Thank you.