"Wominjeka" profiles Victorian Koorie culture and Koorie organisations across Victoria. This excerpt relates the invasion by European Settlers in the late 1700s and onwards.

Further Information

TRANSCRIPT

What must the old people have thought the first time they saw a huge white ship sail over the horizon. Some of them who remembered the experience told of monstrous birds or trees growing out of the sea. People were afraid and hid their children in the bush. The old people first thought the white men were relatives returned from the spirit world. The fact that they had forgotten their language and customs was explained by their long journey from death back to life. Koori’s gradually realized that the settlers were ordinary men and women and these people were not visitors but intended to stay. Aboriginal customary law allowed for people to travel through each other territory but taking possession of another’s land and resources was unimaginable.

There was a lot of people from Lake Condah that went to the War. There was soldiers in the First World War. Five of my dad’s brothers…he and his brothers, there were five of them, went overseas and fought…an’ they were in the Light Horse…an’ everywhere else, they fought…Gallipoli , an’ all those places where the horror of war was worst, they were there in the middle of the fighting. I think why they went to war was because they really believed that the country was theirs…that Australia was their own an’ I believe that they went to war to fight and protect it from the enemy but when they came home the bad thing was that they never got any reward.

At a Referendum in 1967 with the YES vote of over 90% Australians amended the Constitution which allowed Aboriginals to be counted as human beings in the National Census.