TPAN

A welcome to country is a way for us to speak for our country.

When we speak our language we are not speaking to you but to kunanyi, to timtumili minanya - our country and our people.

So today, I acknowledge and speak to my country, and I remember my own ancestors and those of the muwinina people. whose country stretches all along this side of the timtumili minanya, covering kunanyi and nipaluna.

The muwinina people did not survive the colonisation of their lands. So, I pay my respect to our people across this island who survived this history, who carry our culture and the responsibility to our country right across Lutruwita.

Both israel and australia are settler colonial states built on ethnic cleansing and the dispossession of indigenous peoples.

Neither states could exist without genocide and neither has a national identity that can be separated from the erasure of indigenous people and culture.

The Nakba is the violent dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people that saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people removed from their homes, their cities and their country.

In australia, the frontier wars began with British Invasion in 1788, and resulted in the mass dispossession and murder of Aboriginal people across this continent. Through hundreds of soldier and settler led massacres of Aboriginal people, continuing until 1928, there was a 90% loss of the pre-invasion population.

Almost immediately after the first Nakba, israel enacted martial law or military rule to control and dominate the lives of Palestinian people remaining in their country, restricting their movements, their freedom and seizing more of their land.

In australia, the longest declaration of Martial law was here in Lutruwita in the 1820s, this was a time when a 5-pound bounty was offered by the colony for the capture of any free Tasmanian Aboriginal person still living on our country.

Some of the first laws of the state of israel were laws of citizenship and property, designed to facilitate the theft of Palestinian family homes and deny citizenship in their own country.

The first laws enacted by australia after federation are those that establish the white australia policy by limiting non-white immigration and those that created the stolen generation through laws to force the establishment of Aboriginal missions and the legalised removal of Aboriginal children from their families.

In 2024 israel was found to be in breach of the international genocide convention for the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in front of the eyes of the world.

The genocide convention of 1949 cannot be applied retroactively to the frontier wars that here in Tasmania claimed 8 of the 9 nations gone, left only 12 women to leave descendants and was even celebrated through the public display of palawa woman truganini’s skeleton until the 1940s.

israel has engaged in 78 years of attempting to erase Palestinian history and culture, by removing the names of Palestinian towns off the map, removing Palestine from their history books, claiming many aspects of Palestinian culture and heritage as their own.

Colonists in so called australia, have renamed every landmark, every river and mountain, erasing the culture and language of this country to present the public face of australia as white.

israel’s national holiday is celebrated on the 14th of May, the time of the first Nakba.

australia is the only other country in the world that marks their national holiday as the start of the invasion and domination of one people over another.

In 2007 israel refused to vote on the United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous people, widely considered a foundational articulation of indigenous rights and self-determination.

While australia on the other hand actually voted against it, one of only 4 countries to do so.

The israeli government completely denies the Nakba in public record and marks only the establishment of the Zionist state.

The australian state completely denies the frontier wars, which have never been recognised in national history, war memorials or school curriculums. The foundational legal lie of terra nullius denies the existence of Aboriginal society here prior to British invasion.

israel in 2026, actively pursues the complete erasure of Palestinian people and culture.

australia instead just treats Aboriginal people as a welfare issue, rather than a rights-based issue and relies on consent through total structural domination.

The Nakba is not a moment in time or a single event. It’s an ongoing condition of oppression, land theft, erasure, restriction of freedom and a very real and ongoing military genocide.

It is often said that those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it.

We see ourselves in the struggle of the Palestinian people, just as australians might see israel in themselves if they look closely enough.

Settler colonialism is inherently violent — there is not a stage or point in time in which that violence ceases.

But the rights of indigenous people remain whether or not they are acknowledged by our oppressors.

The only true peace is that will which come through the recognition of complete, unrestricted and inherent right to self-determination of indigenous peoples.