A Gesture, Half-Made

On silence, survival, and why treaty still matters in Tasmania and beyond

Julie Gough's "The Missing", Midland Highway, Tasmania.

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Lutruwita.

Van Diemen’s Land.

Tasmania.

Three names, same island. One ancient, one borrowed, one imposed. I was born here – the first in my family to be so. My mob came to this place (not so long ago) to work in industries that chewed through forests and spat out timber. They settled, cleared and extracted. Made homes on land that wasn’t theirs to begin with, and called that history.

There was silence, yes – but it wasn’t the natural kind. It was enforced. Enforced by textbooks, by government signage, by the polite white lie that no Aboriginal people remained here. That they’d vanished, as if by malice, magic or misfortune. It never held up to scrutiny, of course. Not if you looked, not if you listened.

I’m not Aboriginal. I say this not to disclaim, but to be clear: what I know, I learned because people took the time to teach me; when they didn’t have to.

I remember muttonbirding with a pair of brothers who boxed and played footy up on the North West Coast, just west of Burnie. Their families were still connected – still there, still lighting fires on Country, still gathering, still passing on stories the schools refused to teach – no matter what the government or the census or the racist dickheads at school had to say.

I knew people who’d had been taken. Not so long ago. Who were angry, and proud, and unafraid to be both at once. A woman over our back fence. Taken when she was a girl, placed with a family that, by luck more than design, weren’t cruel. She got through it. Her fella didn’t. He’d been taken too, up in New South Wales, and what he went through… it left marks. Nice bloke. Kind. But he struggled. Their kids struggled. You think that’s coincidence? You think trauma just evaporates? This was long before “Sorry.” And even then, what use is sorry when they’ve already broken something inside you?

Meanwhile, in the schoolyard, on the footy field, I saw the contradiction playing out in real time: kids called “Darkie”, “Abo” or “Coon” by the same bastards who turned around and claimed they weren’t real blackfullas. Too pale, too urban, too inconvenient to the story we liked to tell ourselves. That Tasmania’s Aboriginal people were gone. That what happened here was tragic, but finished.

It wasn’t.

It isn’t.

I used to think the silence was a sign of ignorance. That people just didn’t know. That if they heard the stories – about the massacres, the removals, Wybalenna – they’d care. They’d change. I don’t believe that anymore. Not really.

The silence isn’t passive. It’s engineered. A curriculum decision here, a heritage plaque there. A thousand tiny acts of forgetting designed to keep white Tasmania comfortable. We were told they were gone. That Truganini was the last. That the whole horror had played out like some tragic play, curtain down, applause, let’s move on.

The people never left. Only the recognition did.

Now we find ourselves here – again – with a government offering truth-telling but quietly shelving treaty. Not with malice, not with fanfare. Just… placing it gently in the too-hard basket. Tasmania shelved its commitment in May. Queensland “paused” theirs days later. Nationally, the treaty conversation dried up almost overnight. No public reckoning. Just a polite backpedal. Reassuring us that this is still progress, that healing can happen without justice. That we can listen without ever giving anything back.

I won’t pretend I’m surprised. Just tired. Tired of gestures without guts. Of well-meaning whitefellas who want to be seen listening, as long as they don’t have to act. As long as nothing gets handed over. As long as power stays exactly where it is.

I’m not going to say everything I want to say. Can’t. But I can say this: truth without treaty is like an apology with no intention of change. It asks everything of the wounded and nothing of the state that did the wounding.

They call it a “step forward.” Truth-telling. Healing. A moment of recognition. And maybe, for some, it is.

But I can’t stop thinking about what was promised – and what’s quietly been walked back. The Government-commissioned report, co-authored by former Governor Kate Warner, didn’t split the two.¹ It said: both. That truth needs weight, that it demands a consequence. Now we’re being told that listening is enough. That listening is action. That words will do the work land and law won’t.

I get it. Treaty is complicated. It’s legal. It’s binding. It involves ceding ground – sometimes literally. Truth, on the other hand, is easier to fund. You can appoint a commissioner. You can build a process. You can say the right things without changing a damn thing.

And look, I work for the Tasmanian State Service. I know the game. I understand what careful language looks like. I know how consultation becomes delay, how complexity becomes an excuse, how exhaustion becomes policy. So, I won’t bite the hand that feeds me or draw unhelpful ire – but I will say this: You don’t build trust by breaking promises and hoping no one notices. You don’t offer healing while quietly denying repair.

Tasmania has always been a testing ground for the rest of the country – an island laboratory for brutality and then for forgetting. From the Black War to Wybalenna, we perfected the myth of extinction before the rest of the country had written the script. And this moment, this pivot away from treaty, echoes louder in the wake of the referendum. A national mirror. A quiet retreat.

Because if we’re honest – and that’s the point, isn’t it? – October 14 didn’t just fail the Voice. It showed us who we are when we’re asked to formally care. When we’re asked to write that care into the Constitution.

We said no.

I voted Yes. I didn’t believe in it, but I voted Yes.

Not because I thought it would fix anything. It wouldn’t. And not because I believed the campaign’s soft-focus appeals to niceness. God no.

I voted Yes because I couldn’t bring myself to vote No. Because I understood what that No would mean to people who’ve had to survive so many of them already. And because I was haunted by the thought of what it would feel like, on the other side of it, to be told – again – that your country won’t even put your existence in its founding document.

But I didn’t believe the Voice would do what needed to be done.

Gary Foley didn’t either. “If you have no power,” he said, “you have no voice.” He saw it for what it was: a gesture wrapped in sentimentality, designed to make white Australia feel good about itself without risking a single thing. No land. No reparations. No treaty.

I agreed with him. Still do. The Voice wasn’t a bad idea – it just wasn’t enough. It was process dressed as principle. A deferred conversation. A symbol without a mechanism. And predictably, it failed.

Not because people didn’t understand it – but because they did.

Because there’s a kind of deep, hard resistance in this country to anything that requires structural change. To anything that threatens our version of fairness, which is really just comfort with a moral gloss. We like our reconciliation like we like our tourism: photogenic, well-signposted, and fundamentally apolitical.

And so the pattern continues. Gesture. Pushback. Backpedal. Tasmania shelves treaty. Queensland pauses. The Australian Government goes quiet. The noise fades. The silence returns.

And yet.

Even after all that, I don’t feel hopeless. Angry, yes. Saddened, definitely. But not hopeless.

Because the truth – the real truth – isn’t going anywhere. It doesn’t need a budget line or a commissioner to exist. It’s already held in bodies and stories and Country. It lives in the people who keep telling it, even when no one’s listening properly. It survives policy cycles, broken promises, and shifting political winds.

The question isn’t whether truth exists. It’s whether we have the courage to hear it – and to act on what it demands.

And that’s what sits heaviest for me right now. Not the headlines, not the policy sleight-of-hand, but the weight being carried – again – by people I know. Colleagues. Friends. People I respect deeply, who have to get up each morning and keep working inside a system that has just told them, in the most roundabout way possible, that it’s not ready to meet them halfway. Not yet.

People who show up anyway.

Who bring knowledge, care, and cultural strength into rooms that don’t always deserve them. Who carry grief in one hand and professionalism in the other. Who heard the government’s announcement and didn’t rage or sulk or storm out, but kept showing up to the meetings, the consultations, the process – because that’s what they do. Because they’ve always had to carry more.

If you’re one of those people, this is for you.

I know it’s not enough. It’s just a gesture, some words on a screen. But I also know silence hurts. I know it can feel like the only people talking are the ones who’ve never really listened. I want to say: some of us are listening. Some of us see what’s happened. And we’re angry too. We’re mourning too. We’re holding back too.

Because even if we can’t speak as frankly as we’d like, that doesn’t mean we’re neutral.

There’s a time to be polite. This isn’t it.

This is a time to be with. Quietly, yes. Carefully, sometimes. But not passively.

So if you’re hurting, if you’re angry, if you’re sick to death of being asked to explain the same basic truths over and over again just so people can nod and move on – please know: you’re not alone. Some of us are still here. Still watching. Still trying to find the right words, the right actions, the right way forward. Even if we haven’t always done it well. Even if we’re late.

Solidarity isn’t abstract. It’s in who you back, where you stand, and what you’re willing to carry. I’m carrying this.

If the State won’t walk forward, we will. Quietly, together - until quiet is no longer enough.

1. Warner, K., McCormack, T. and Kurnadi F. (2021). Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty: Report of the Commission into Truth-Telling and Treaty in Tasmania. Tasmanian Government. Bloody good work, by the way. Read it, if you’re fair dinkum about getting your head around the issues here in Tasmania.