Yoorrook Justice Commission
COMMUNITY TRUTH-TELLING
The Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria was Australia’s first formal truth-telling inquiry into historic and ongoing social, economic, institutional, and systemic injustice against Australia’s First Peoples since colonisation.
[The circular image above and similar images used as headers on these pages were derived from the design by Gary Saunders::Bangerang::Yorta Yorta::Wiradjuri::Dja Dja Wurrung, for the Yoorrook Justice Commission.]
Investigating Australia’s hidden history | Four Corners Documentary
Supporting the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s Walk For Truth | Bank Australia
“Walk forward together.” Yoorrook Justice Commissioner Travis Lovett | Croakey Health Media
Yoorrook Justice Commission’s historic Walk For Truth | ABC News 7.30 Report (18 June 2025)
Yoorrook Justice Commission Final Newsletter
POST-SCRIPTUM:
Yoorrook, the Victorian truth-telling process, had come to a close, but the work for a better future based on truth, understanding, and transformation carries on, not just for some but for all Australians.
“No blame,
no reasoning,
no argument,
just understanding.
If you understand, and
you show that
you understand,
you can love, and
the situation will change.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace In Every Step
Walk For Truth
Wednesday, 18 June 2025
Walk For Truth on Wednesday 18 June 2025 from King’s Domain to Parliament House was the culmination of Yoorrook’s 500+km walk from Portland to Melbourne as both invitation and demonstration to uphold and support community truth-telling, understanding, and transformation. In my 20 years in Melbourne, it was the most moving gathering for belonging to this land —and what it means to be Melbournean, Victorian, and Australian.
[Media Gerome Villarete Melbourne]
“The centre of democracy is truth. You are not free if you’ve been lied to.”—Jason Stanley
“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”—David Mitchell
“The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain.”—Paul Keating (Redfern Park Address, 10 December 1992)
Why is truth fundamental?
Because to live is to engage with reality—not illusion. To ignore, deny, distort, or remain ignorant of the truth is to participate in a lie. A lie cannot survive in an examined life.
Gerome Villarete
26 June 2025
Art Saves Lives
POST-POSTSCRIPTUM:
On Anger, by David Whyte:
“Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
“Anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete but absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence.”
More at Making Sense | David Whyte
“And Still I Rise” from 32’19”
“The trouble for the thief
Is not how to steal the Chief’s bugle
But where to blow it.”
—An African saying—
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I rise
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
Just cause I walk as if I have oil wells
Pumping in my living room
Just like moons and like suns
With the certainty of tides
Just like hopes springing high
Still I rise
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my sassiness upset you?
Don’t take it so hard
Just cause I laugh
As if I have gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard
You can shoot me with your words
You can cut me with your lies
You can kill me with your hatefulness
But just like life, I rise
Does my sexiness offend you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance
As if I have diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts
Of history’s shame, I rise
Up from a past
Rooted in pain, I rise
A black ocean, leaping and wide
Welling and swelling
And bearing in the tide
Leaving behind nights
Of terror and fear, I rise
Into a daybreak
Miraculously clear, I rise
Bringing the gifts
That my ancestors gave
I am the hope
And the dream of the slave
And so
There I go!
—Maya Angelou
Live at The Lewisham (1987)
And Still I Rise (From 32’19”)
NAIDOC 2025 links:
NAIDOC Week at Port Phillip City
NAIDOC Week Education Resources
“What’s it like to carry a name like Mabo, Dodson or Bayles? As NAIDOC celebrates 50 years, the Point sits down with emerging leaders who carry on the Strength, Vision and Legacy.”—The Point with John Paul Janke
[Credits Screenshots The Point Online]
“On Australia Day, 1938, protestors marched through the streets of Sydney, followed by a congress attended by over a thousand people. One of the first major civil rights gatherings in the world, it was known as the Day of Mourning.”—NAIDOC | History
“We have been ‘protected’ for 150 years, and look what has become of us.”
–William Ferguson in 1938
Learn more about the decades of struggle for recognition and reconciliation here:
“At the cellular level (that means You),
how much are you willing to sacrifice for
truth?” —Maria Ressa, Journalist