RESIDENTS at Morven Manor Retirement Village, Mornington have welcomed the installation of a plaque featuring the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
With an average age of 75, the group of residents want to see the kind of changes First Nations people are calling for in the Statement from the Heart.
None of the group received education at school about Australia’s past treatment of Aboriginal people.
“What happened in the past is shameful,” village resident Joyce Toth, 94, said.
Another resident, Maureen Donelly, said she remembered visiting Mooroopna with her grandfather in the 1950s.
“Even as a small child I could see on the faces of the Aboriginal people a terrible sadness,” she said. “Now I understand the reason for the deep grief I sensed as a child.”
Three other residents, Wally Sharman, Val Campbell and Moz Lucas have worked with First Nations people.
Mr Sharman voiced their concern that many non-Indigenous people did not know what happened when the Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people’s land on the Mornington Peninsula was taken by white settlers, threatening their survival.
The plaque features wording from the Uluru Statement from the Heart with detail of Wurundjeri artist Mandy Nicholson’s artwork, Cycle of Knowledge, commissioned by the City of Melbourne in 2000.
Ms Donelly said the Uluru Statement from the Heart calls on non-Indigenous Australians to symbolically “walk with” First Nations people for a voice enshrined in the constitution, and for truth-telling and treaty.
First published in the Mornington News – 14 December 2021
