A Jewish light to the indigenous nations?
ABORIGINAL leader Noel Pearson has hailed the achievements of the Jewish community as an example for indigenous Australians.
NAOMI LEVIN
ABORIGINAL leader Noel Pearson has hailed the achievements of the Jewish community as an example for indigenous Australians.
The director of Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership highlighted aspects of the community that could benefit the first Australians, in a speech to the American Bar Association in Sydney last week, and then in an article in The Australian.
“For the future, I have always drawn upon the example of the Jews,” Pearson said.
“They are a community who have never forgotten history and they never allow anybody else to forget history; they fight staunchly in defence of the truth; they fight relentlessly against discrimination; but they have worked out as a people that they never make their history a burden for the future, they defend racism, but they never make racism their problem.”
As well as remembering history and avoiding being defined through racism, Pearson added that the idea of maintaining culture in a diaspora could also be adopted by the indigenous peoples.
“They have maintained an identity as a community and a sense of peoplehood, religion, tradition, culture and history, while at the same time engaging at the cutting edge of whatever the world has to offer,” he wrote in The Australian.
In his speech he said: “I want Cape York to be the point of gravitation, to be home, to be the heart for our people, but I want our young members in the future to orbit around that heart and to engage in the world.”
Mark Leibler, the co-chair of Reconciliation Australia and a former mentor of Pearson, said the comments “serve to remind us of things that we hold dear”.
“It is interesting that someone from the indigenous community can make these vivid comparisons,” Leibler said.
When asked to reflect on whether, based on Pearson’s comments, the Jewish community can do more to help lift the life expectancy and quality of life of our Aboriginal compatriots, Leibler said: “The Jewish community has been fairly actively involved in working with indigenous communities, but [we] have to be careful foisting our experience on others. “The greatest help is to provide an example.”
Leibler, a senior partner at Arnold Bloch Leibler, has spent decades working with the indigenous communities and has visited Cape York with Pearson, who completed his articles with Leibler.
“All he thinks about is what he can do to improve the lot of his people,” Leibler said.
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