Boyer lecturer Rachel Perkins calls for 'end of silence’

In her first Boyer Lecture, leading Indigenous filmmaker Rachel Perkins says the Uluru Statement from the Heart gives us "the opportunity to finally end the great Australian silence".
“Our generation wasn't standing on the deck of the Endeavour or on the shores of Kamay Botany Bay in 1770, just as we weren't present during the massacres as the colonial frontier progressed from south to north.
“However, as my father Charles Perkins, the Indigenous leader who came to prominence in the 1960s for leading the Freedom Ride, said: ‘We cannot live in the past, but the past lives in us.’
“The past has made us. We are its inheritors, for better or worse, and this is now our time.
“How we move forward from this moment will set the course of relationships between Indigenous people and their fellow Australians into the future.”
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With a population greater than Canberra and Hobart combined, Kutupalong refugee camp is home to 600,000 people — more than half of them children.
They fight a daily battle for survival, contending with stampeding elephants, sexual assault, accusations of drug running — and counter-terrorism authorities say the younger generation are ripe for radicalisation.
Reporter Sarah Dingle travelled to Kutupalong refugee camp for Background Briefing to find out: where to now?
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“If you live in the city,” writes ABC Top 5 researcher Dr Ruth Morgan, “it's very unlikely that you'll turn on the tap and find no water comes out.”
“And given about 70 per cent of Australians live in major cities, it's easy to forget just how good most of us have it.
“The sources of our water supplies are out of sight, out of mind.
“But it hasn't always been that way — and we need to stop and think about where it comes from. If we don't, we risk being unprepared for when the next prolonged drought comes around.”
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It screams. It stalks. It swoops. And, to top it off, it's weaponised.
The masked lapwing has small spurs on its elbow-y bits, turning it into a feathered, flying, jousting monster.
But painting the masked lapwing as an evil swoopy bird is somewhat misleading.
The lapwing's daring aerial attacks are actually displays of its pure, parental love.
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