Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy – a win in sight?

More than 450 days ago Auntie Jenny Munro and other elders set up the Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the about-to-be-stolen-again land of the Redfern Block, demanding that affordable Aboriginal housing be built there. Their steadfastness since has forced even the Abbott government’s Aboriginal Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion to acknowledge the justice of their cause.

While on 24 August, the NSW Supreme Court found against the Embassy, giving the original owners of this land the ludicrous label “trespassers”, the Embassy has had a moral victory.

Scullion has offered a $5 million grant for Aboriginal housing to be built at the same time as any commercial development of the Block. Originally, any Aboriginal housing was to be an afterthought, only entering into the plan if enough profit could be made. The developers that Mick Mundine’s Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) was dealing with, Deicorp, had already shamefully reassured investors that Aboriginal people were being cleared from Redfern, indicating that it would never voluntarily have built any Aboriginal housing.

There’s a way to go yet to guarantee anything from this untrustworthy government and the AHC. But what has been offered so far is testament to the fight undertaken by Jenny Munro and others since they established the Embassy on 26 May 2014.

The 15 months of struggle has paid off. Jenny Munro said yesterday: “I’m old school. My teachers taught me the principles of our resistance - we never ceded our land to anyone. The embassy has demonstrated that for our people, resistance is the only way to go. For all the communities around the country facing closure – don’t talk sovereignty, assert your sovereignty.”

It’s not over till it’s over, as they say. While waiting to address the assembled media, Jenny Munro made it plain that the Redfern Tent Embassy stalwarts are prepared to fight on. There are Aboriginal grandmothers still willing to get in front of those bulldozers if that’s what it takes.

But whatever comes next, Jenny Munro concluded outside the court this morning that “We’ve had some serious open-heart surgery there at the Block, but I think we can say after this that the black heart of the city is still beating”.