We are pleased to bring you a message from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks; an Alywarr and Amnatyerr elder from Utopia homelands.

I can look back over 70 years on this part of the land. There was a richness of the relationships between people so you felt never alone. You felt secure, you felt you belonged. We always said pmerel atnyenem, we never said pmer nhenh tha atnyenem. That means, country owns or holds you, not you holding the country and becoming master of the land.

From time immemorial there had been an order where nobody queried who was who, who had the right to speak, who had the right to be a ceremonial leader and everything was orderly, yet inclusive.

We still felt the strength and the security of our law and order, even as late as the 1990s. The 1990s saw us living on established homelands that we still live on now. We still felt that carrying out our laws was holding us together and the community was still cohesive and strong.

"To the Alyawarr people, the land owning you means that through your song lines, you've got to know which part of the land owns you and where you are responsible for the wellbeing of that earth...Let me assure anybody who cares for the Aboriginal people of Australia that once we are moved from our place of origin, we will not only lose our identity, we will die a traumatised tragic end."

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks

Fast forward to 2007, we had the visit from departmental staff, the army and the police, who told us we were now under the Intervention. Suddenly there was a policy in the Northern Territory that took away our rights. It was assault. It traumatised all of us, so we looked around to see what made sense. What made sense was at all costs to hang onto the land.

As we go into 2012, we see that there are certain Aboriginal communities earmarked as growth towns. Let me assure anybody who cares for the Aboriginal people of Australia that once we are moved from our place of origin, we will not only lose our identity, we will die a traumatised, tragic end.

We cannot have identity if we are put into these reservations that are now called growth towns, we will become third-class, non-existent human beings.

This is a tragedy that is unfolding through the policies of an uncaring government. It seems sentimental and - I can't find the other word in English - about attachment to the land. It's not attachment to the land, it's survival of a cultural practice that is still alive in spite of what has been thrown at it.

We need to stop the destruction of the oldest living culture in the world.

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