VideoTranscript
I’ve spent many, many trips to, I’ve been to many many trips to the APY Lands for instance, and they’ve got some great churches out there, in particular Pukatja which is Ernabella. And I remember probably about seven or eight years ago I was talking to a group of old boys there one day and I was sitting out front of the – well not far from the church actually in the shade and I was sitting down having a cigarette with them and I was talking to them and I said, boys, how’s land rights worked out for you? You know, how’s all that affected the land since 1982 when they were granted land rights which gave them freehold for that country in the APY Lands.
And I remember one old bloke, and I probably don’t want to say his name but I remember him saying, land rights is a piece of paper. He said, look where we are now. Look where we are with this government system. He said, why can’t we have the missionaries back?
And I said, what do you mean? And he talked about what they had then, when he was a kid. And he was an old man then, he would have been eighty, ninety years old. And he said that when the missionaries were here, we didn’t want for anything, we had everything. We had food, you know, our kids were educated, we could all read and write. He said there was no drugs, no alcohol. We had the date plantations, we had gardens, we had sheep, we had a shearing shed. You know, so they learnt a lot of things, they were educated, they had good health. And, you know, I guess it was, again that sense of belonging and feeling and having people care for them, as opposed to what they’ve witnessed from the end of the missionaries to what they have now. And I thought that was an absolute shame that it’s gone like that, and it was really disappointing to hear that.