The Grimwade Centre and its staff support the adoption of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the call for the Australian government to establish a Makarrata Commission and a Voice to Parliament.
In accordance with the AICCM Code of Ethics, Grimwade Centre staff are governed by:
- an informed respect for cultural property, its unique character and significance and the people or person who created it, and
- an unswerving respect for the physical, historic, aesthetic and cultural integrity of the object.
Loss of Australian Indigenous knowledge is a national preventable tragedy and sovereignty is key to the preservation of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage.
"This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?
With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood."
