Uluru Statement of the Heart: Statement of Support from the Royal Society of NSW

In January 2018, the President of the Royal Society of NSW, Emeritus Professor Brynn Hibbert AM FRSN, signed the Uluru Statement from the Heart declaration on behalf of the Royal Society of NSW.  The Society’s Statement of Support included the following paragraph:

“Our mandate, as the Royal Society of NSW, Australia’s oldest peak scholarly body, is the disciplined concern for excellence in knowledge across the natural and social worlds. From this base, we reaffirm the significance of our indigenous forebears in the strength and contribution of their own culture and knowledge to Australia as a whole. Their exclusion from government endorsing and paying attention to the collective ‘Uluru Voice’ is both a reprehensible return to human rights violations of the past, as well as a loss for all Australians from the indigenous culture, knowledge, and voice from which we can all learn, both for now and for our sustainable future.”

On 27 May 2018, the Society made a submission (Submission 65) to the Parliament of Australia’s Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition Relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples that included this Statement.