In 2019, my partner and I bought a house in Adelaide, our first small piece of ground. But with the excitement, paperwork, moving boxes and money story came a serving of white colonial guilt and responsibility that we hadn’t yet realised for our previous apartment in the sky.
We now live on the unceded land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung in Naarm/Melbourne. We exchanged money that didn’t go to its original and rightful owners. We continue to benefit from the ongoing dispossession of First Nations people from that land.
With those acknowledgements comes a new personal approach to reparations: that for each year we own a home, we will make a donation of the amount we pay in Council Rates to an Aboriginal-owned and led not-for-profit organisation. We started with Tandanya in 2019 and 2020, the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in 2021, then Pay the Rent in Tarntanya from 2022 and in Naarm from 2024.
We do not offer this small act as a solution, but as an expression of solidarity.
We do not offer it as a perfect model, but as an addition to the growing list of grassroots reparations going on worldwide, and as the start of an idea on which we’ll consult and build.
And we do not offer it as a way of signalling our virtue, but as a contribution to the ongoing conversation about privilege, respect and what it means to be an Australian.
Other resources:
- Pay the Rent website
- 10 things you should know about white privilege (Luke Pearson and Sophie Verass for NITV)
- Robin DiAngelo on why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism (Anna Kelsey-Sugg and Sasha Fegan for ABC Late Night Live)
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