3. The Heart of the Uluru Statement
Noel Pearson
At the 2018 Garma Forum, Noel Pearson, the Cape York Leader, gave a speech that discusses the very heart of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which begins as :
“We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise?…”
Noel Pearson continues in his speech with, “…we have to treat with one another about some fundamental questions about the old sovereignty and the new, and their future co-existence. The Uluru Statement from the Heart talked about that spiritual notion of indigenous sovereignty, the link to the soil via our ancestors. The link that ties us to mother nature and to our ancestral bones in the land to which we will all one day return thither, to be reunited with our ancestors. We need a constitutional voice because the subject matter of discussion that we need to have is heavy business. This is not some kind of service delivery discussion about health and education and housing. This is about treating with each other in relation to the most profoundly, foundational questions. We will need a constitutional voice…”
Mark Brett, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Divinity, Melbourne, describes his understanding of the sovereignty at the heart of the Uluru Statement :
“The quotation [that sovereignty is a spiritual notion ] comes from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, but most of the wording was originally framed by an African lawyer, Nicolas Bayona-ba-Meya, in the Western Sahara case (1975). Bayona-ba-Meya flatly rejected the idea that state sovereignty rests on nothing other than a popular vote, or perhaps on a murky ancestral link to a European Crown. A spiritual sovereignty in Indigenous law can be asserted in the face of any imperial imposition. The language of spirituality might seem to muddy the waters, but it is hard to find the right words when "religion" has been so alienated in modern legislation from most of its primordial connections. Under Aboriginal tradition, there are no meaningful separations between land ownership, natural resource management, cultural heritage and religious practice..”
He summarises his understanding with :
“The idea of sovereignty as a "spiritual notion" means that the First Nations cannot, and should not, ever be absorbed into a single nation-state”.
The concept of sovereignty developed in the Western legal tradition to describe nation states is artificial if applied to the Aboriginal relationship to land. (photo: P Parks/ AFP / Getty Images)
Professor Marcia Langton AM, the Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, has also expressed her understanding of the important sovereignty aspects of the Uluru Statement :
“One of the most important, and fascinating, aspects of the debate about Aboriginal rights in the last three decades revolves around the legal personality of the Aboriginal polity ― by which I mean the recognition of that social complex that is sometimes called sovereignty.
Aboriginal people in Australia have continued to argue that, just as British sovereignty did not wipe away Aboriginal title, neither did it wipe away Aboriginal jurisdiction. This is the logic of the many Aboriginal proponents of a treaty or treaties between the modern Australian state and Aboriginal peoples…It seems to me that the concept of sovereignty developed in the Western legal tradition to describe nation states is artificial if applied to the Aboriginal relationship to land that is at the core of the Indigenous domain. A more appropriate concept is reflected in the judgment of Judge Fouad Ammoun of the International Court of Justice in 1975 in the Western Sahara Case ― a concept cited explicitly in the Uluru Statement from the Heart:
Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya, goes on to dismiss the materialistic concept of terra nullius, which led to this dismemberment of Africa following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Mr Bayona-Ba-Meya substitutes for this a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the man who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty…”
Professor Marcia Langton AM is the Foundation Chair of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne
Image believed to be of Nicolas Bayona Ba Meya
Noel and Marcia’s Uluru Statement from the Heart
– is it Legalese or Congolese?
There is something very strange at the heart of The Uluru Statement – it’s the critical phrase of the document that Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton swoon over :
“This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors”.
Now, language that uses old English words like, “thither” is strange to say the least. Who uses words like “thither” nowadays? And why would they?
We can see the narrative that the Aboriginal Intellectual Elites are weaving in the background by referring to, “This sovereignty is a spiritual notion”, which gets them out of the difficult legal corner that real sovereignty, the one the adults use, is a well-defined legal concept under International Law, and which is understood and respected by all 193 countries of the UN. But hey, let’s just redefine what a word means and, hey presto!, we have a new form of sovereignty, this new “ancient sovereignty” of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. If we push this new use constantly through the media, the average Aussie pleb will come to believe it.
Well, not so fast buster! We decided to dig a bit deeper to see why a group of 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates, meeting under Uluru in 2017, came up with a statement where the crucial phrase is in Old English?
What we found was that apparently, this group of ‘original thinkers’ just essentially lifted the phrase, the vital core of their ‘appeal from the heart’, from an Advisory Opinion in a legal case in the International Court of Justice in 1975 in The Hague, which dealt with the sovereignty of the Western Sahara.
We quote from Judge Fouad Ammoun’s, the Lebanese Vice-President of the International Court, summary :
"Terra Nullius"
“Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya, Senior President of the Supreme Court of Zaire, and Mr. Mohammed Bedjaoui, Algerian Ambassador in Paris, representatives respectively of the Republic of Zaire and the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, both expressed penetrating views which compel our attention with regard to the concept of terra nullius.
“…the views of Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya [have]…links between human beings and nature, between man and the cosmos. Further, the spirituality of the thinking of the representative of Zaire echoes the spirituality of the African Bantu revealed to us by Father Placide Tempels, a Belgian Franciscan... The author sees therein a "striking analogy" with "that intense spiritual doctrine which quickens and nourishes souls within the Catholic Church".
Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya goes on to dismiss the materialistic concept of terra nullius,... Mr.Bayona-Ba-Meya substitutes for this a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or "mother nature", and the man…who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.
This amounts to a denial of the very concept of terra nullius in the sense of a land which is capable of being appropriated by someone who is not born therefrom…”
So, there you have it – our Aboriginal Intellectual Elites are using as their guiding philosophy, and their reasoning to demand changes to OUR Constitution, the ideas of respectively, Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya, Senior President of the Supreme Court of Zaire, and Mr.Mohammed Bedjaoui, Algerian Ambassador in Paris, the spirituality of the African Bantu, Father Placide Tempels, a Belgian Franciscan, and the Catholic Church!
I don’t know about you, but warning bells are going off in my head as to whether I would be taking advice on running our modern, Australian society from people like this.
Also worryingly, the phrase of a “denial of…land being appropriated by someone who is not born therefrom” – what does this mean? The next leg of the Aboriginal sovereignty project may be to remove all non-indigenous peoples from land ownership? Scary stuff.
So let’s dig even deeper.
It transpires that Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya, (1938b – 1998d), was a senior lawyer and then judge and apparent close ally of Mobutu, the dictator of Democratic Republic of the Congo & Zaire. Yes, this is the same Zaire where tribes, such as Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya’s Bantu, have pushed the Indigenous People of the Congo, the Pygmies, into the jungles and dispossessed them of their traditional lands. No Uluru Statement for you!
Click here for Dispossession of the Pygmies
And lets not mention the tribal and civil wars and genocides that have been going on in Zaire and the DRC since Mobuto’s rise in 1960, and which continue to this day, with more than 4 million people having been killed.
I am not sure I can feel comfortable with a document, with this apparent provenance, being used as the basis for changes to OUR Constitution.
Sorry No.
Mobutu Sese Seko - Who presided over the country and legal system that provided the ‘Spiritual Notion’ for the Uluru concept of Sovereignty?