An Australian newsreader of Indigenous heritage said she was not mourning the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, stating that the monarchy owed an apology to First Nationals for its colonial past.
Narelda Jacobs said the modern-day Royals did little to make up for the “great wrong” done to Aboriginal people when “Australia was settled without their consent”.
The presenter of the morning talk show Studio 10 who described the British monarchy as a ‘symbol of colonisation’ also sympathised with native Australians refusing to mourn the Queen.
Born 138 years after Australia was colonised by Britain in 1788, the Queen died last week and the country like New Zealand and Canada proclaimed her successor – King Charles III – as the head of state.
Narelda criticised the late Queen for not saying anything about a treaty between Indigenous Australians and the Commonwealth that her late father Cedric was drafting, despite him meeting the monarch in the 1980s to receive an Order of the British Empire.
Cedric, a survivor of the Stolen Generations, was a reverend of the Uniting Church in Australia.
Stolen Generations refer to the children of native Australians removed from their families by government agencies and church missions during the 20th century.
“They knew full well that plans for a treaty were afoot, as there were treaties [with Indigenous people] in New Zealand and also in Canada. But what did they do? That’s the source of the frustration,” Jacobs said.
“While the world has united in grief over the Queen’s passing, colonised people have also united over their trauma,” said the journalist whose mother is Irish.
Noting that there were “stolen” artefacts, gems and diamonds in British museums, she claimed “there are human remains that are sitting in British museums”, although there “has been no acknowledgement of that.”
She also posted on Instagram a photo of herself wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Another Day in the Colony’ and shared an opinion piece titled ‘Don’t ask me to mourn the Queen’s death’ which the left-wing women’s website Mamamia had published.
