The recent challenges, brought about by the global pandemic, have created significant seismic shifts in a whole range of things; attitudes, perspectives, communities, as well as socio-economic and demographic profiles.

The world has connected across scientific, geo-political, ethnic and cultural boundaries, through the shared experience that the global pandemic has forced on us, but ironically because of the ensuing isolation we have also personally turned more inward, focussed on our more immediate locality and caused many people to become more introspective. In some bizarre way it's really brought home the adage about 'thinking global, acting local'.

That introspection has lead many people to reassess and re-evaluate a long list of things, not just in their own spheres of influence, but also across a broader view of ingrained and unconscious biases, preconceptions and previously un-questioned notions and beliefs.

Along with this intense period of re-evaluation and introspective contemplation many people have also spent this time reading, re-learning and re-educating themselves about indigenous cultures and communities, seeing how they have remained resilient and strong in the face of so much change.

The global pandemic has often had the affect of making many realise the greater value of the fundamental things around us that sustain all life; clean air, fresh water, reliable access to clean, sustainable food and shelter. These are the very things that indigenous communities, across the globe, having been saying for time immemorial.

Perhaps now we can acknowledge and begin to really listen to the voices of indigenous people, especially those on whose land we stand, to tune in to the wisdom and knowledge that they have accumulated and held in stories and songs over tens of millennia, link it with or own knowledge and technologies to make positive changes.

After all when the colonists arrived on the shores of Australia they found a land that they themselves described as a vast and beautiful parkland. A land that was so carefully but lightly managed, through a profound understanding of the landscape, which was done via deeply held cultural connections, that the indigenous people did not see themselves as seperate from the very landscape that they inhabited and to the uninformed eye of he Europeans seemed to be untended.

Since we have arrived we, in a relatively short space of time, have arguably wrought havoc, where for those proceeding millennia the indigenous nations were careful custodians and caretakers

Perhaps this is the real lesson of the global pandemic; that we have been given a chance to stop, pause, re-evaluate, re-educate and re-focus on the very fundamentals of life. The world is round and all life on and in it is connected, whether we like it or not. Aboriginal people across the globe know this and its inbuilt to their fundamental cultural practices. It's time we respected that long tradition, listened and learned

Welcome to country