The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart is a call to advance Indigenous rights through Treaty, Truth and Voice. Australians will vote in a referendum in October 2023 to consider constitutionally enshrining an advisory body called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice for issues of important to us. Sea country is one issue that is dear to our hearts.
Marine environments for the past 200-plus years in Australia have been colonised and sea country is not managed, owned or governed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as we would wish to. Our great chains of connection to sea country have nurtured us for 60,000 years and are a foundation for our sea cultures. We no longer want to be silent on the pains and harms of continual exclusion and dispossession from sea country and we need to decolonise our knowledge frameworks – science, policy, conservation, research and development. In order to care for sea country, we need to shift away from ‘marine environments as extraction’ to a collective movement that embeds ‘sea country as sacredness’.
Professor Emma Lee will speak to what 100 years of working together might look like and how we can build equitable knowledge systems of Western science and Indigenous science. The future of sea country health and sacredness may depend upon a marine science research and practice that looks through a lens of Treaty, Truth and Voice.