With Invasion Day demonstrations across the country set to be the biggest yet with thousands of attendees taking the streets across the nation’s capital cities, Survival Day proceedings in Toowoomba Queensland will be taking a more somber note.
The Rally will be an hour long proceeding at 5AM in Duggan Park and asks attendees to join in on “remembering the loss of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereign rights to their land, loss of family, loss of the right to practice their culture.”
One of the event’s organiser’s Uncle Wayne Fossey says that for him the day is about respect and protest.
“To me I have a personal approach that it is about respect, and that it is about protest, it’s a day where we show the courage and resilience we have in the last 200 years.
But it’s also a chance for other people to come together and bring back their own histories and join together,” he said.
On the topic of the “treaty before voice” stance adopted by other rallies across the country, Fossey said that rural areas like Toowoomba weren’t aware of the stance as strongly as people were in the nearby city of Brisbane.
“I think there is far greater awareness of treaty before voice in Brisbane than in the Toowoomba-Darling Downs area.
There’s still that feeling in the downs that (the voice) is our chance to show our resilience this our chance to show our courage and that we are still sticking together, we’re trying to do things we’re to connect.
I feel in some ways that we are in some ways one step behind we still see it as a day of mourning rather than a day of action.”
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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
