Plenary speech by Stacey Thomas, CEO, The Wyatt Trust, to delegates at the Philanthropy Australia Conference, Wednesday 7 August 2024, Adelaide Convention Centre
[Acknowledgement of country, in Kaurna language.]
I’m grateful to be able to share with you this afternoon, in Kaurna language, that I am Stacey Thomas, second born in my family and today we
are meeting each other on Kaurna country.
I pay my respects to all Elders past and present and to my Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friends and colleagues in the room. And to these friends and colleagues, the next fifteen minutes or so is my interpretation of things we have learnt from truth telling, with some of you having walked part of this journey with us – thank you for your continued graciousness and willingness to sit in this session.
But let’s call that big elephant in the room out right now. Why is the middle-aged white woman, from the country’s oldest philanthropic foundation steeped in colonialism, standing on this stage to talk about truth telling?
I’m not going to lie, I agonised over this. Wouldn’t it be better to have a panel, or a conversation? Have some Aboriginal voices next to me, sharing the privilege of being on this stage? Because that would make me feel far more comfortable. And that’s the point. Truth telling is about facing the truth. Not about having an Aboriginal person make me feel more comfortable about sharing the truth.
And so, taking the guidance of some trusted friends here I am, somewhat nervously, sharing a story that is uncomfortable and I hope the audience can see that this is from a place of respect.
Over the last day and a half, we have heard a lot about South Australia and some of the unique landscapes, issues and programs across the State. The Wyatt Trust is another piece of South Australian history. We were established in 1881 in the will of Dr William Wyatt after his five children had pre-deceased him. Our first grants were made in 1886, six weeks after his death and he’d probably be astonished to learn that we’ve now distributed over $70 million to support South Australians.
Dr Wyatt established the Trust to assist people in financial hardship with a preference for those who have been in the state for at least five years because presumably, his passion for the colony was such that he wanted to support those who had also been here building this new European settlement.
You can still see Dr Wyatt’s fingerprints on the city today. Some of you may have walked down Wyatt St, or over the plaque bearing his name embedded in the footpath on North Terrace as you were making your way here to the Convention Centre.
For those of you who are from Adelaide, you may have sat in Wyatt Hall at Pulteney Grammar or been a boarder in Wyatt and Allen House at Saint Peters College. If you have visited a family member or friend in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, you may very well have walked past the Wyatt leaf sculpture at the entrance. These things still exist today because of the long list of his official roles and public contributions he made immediately after his arrival with wife Julia in 1837.
But while I could do an entire speech on the history of Dr Wyatt and the Trust there is only one topic that is the focus of today. Reconciliation and truth telling. Many of us talk about reconciliation. An amorphous concept for some, but in essence a future in which every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person in this country has the same rights and experiences that many of us take for granted. But without an acceptance of the truth, we will never achieve reconciliation.
The point of me being up here is to share five learnings from our ongoing process of reconciliation and truth telling with you and the first one is – the process of reconciliation isn’t work for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, it’s work for all of us, and it is everyone’s responsibility.
When Wyatt started on a journey of developing a Reconciliation Action Plan back in 2017, we took counsel from well-respected Kaurna man Parry Agius who very quickly advised that we weren’t yet ready to develop a RAP. We had work that we had to do internally. We had to better understand our history, our views and experiences. In the development of our RAP, it wasn’t about us listing all the things we were going to do, it was about us understanding why we were going to do them.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people know what they want their future to look like. It is our work to understand how we can support this future. Let me say that again, it is our work to make reconciliation happen.
After events of the last year, I know there may be people in the room today who fundamentally disagree with what I have just said. This goes to my second learning – this work is hard. We know that not everyone is interested and not everyone agrees. But I ask you to sit through this session in the hope that we can broker a conversation. We don’t all need to agree, but perhaps we can all contribute a small piece that joins into a bigger puzzle.
For Wyatt, our puzzle piece was an approach that if we really wanted to advance reconciliation, we needed to understand our own truth. We had what was considered to be a very thorough and well researched history of Dr William Wyatt and the establishment and operation of The Wyatt Trust up until the early 2000s. For those that have seen a copy of Keeping A Trust, it has a bright purple cover and we refer to it simply as the Purple Book. And the Purple Book does exactly what it set out to achieve – document the life and achievements of Dr William Wyatt. But it does this from a commemorative, white perspective.
What is the history of Dr William Wyatt from an Aboriginal perspective?
The Wyatt Trust has a board of seven, voluntary Trustees some of whom are here with us today. And this Board asked that very question – what is the truth from an Aboriginal perspective? What does our history, our story, sound like when it isn’t written to commemorate Dr Wyatt, but to explore the impact of his arrival on Kaurna land?
We are joined in the room today by Dr Jennifer Caruso, an Eastern Arrernte woman and historian who we commissioned to research this question. Over the course of almost a year, Aunty Jenni explored archives, public records and gathered oral histories to deliver a report to us that speaks to the life of Dr William Wyatt.
While I’ve shared that this work is hard, I want to unpack this for just a moment. I think it is really important to point out that while I can stand here and share why I think this work is hard, I will never understand how difficult it is for a proud Aboriginal historian to research truth telling. To view images, read and listen to stories of vast atrocities against family and mob. The cost of doing this work, to one’s own wellbeing and soul can be great. It is a level of hard that I will likely never experience and so my utmost respect goes to Aunty Jenni and to everyone who walks a similar path.
So, what is the truth in relation to The Wyatt Trust’s namesake?
The truth is Dr William Wyatt was a man who came to the Colonies to make a better life for himself. He did not have the opportunity for great social mobility in the UK as marrying the daughter of gentleman did not in fact make him a gentleman himself.
Immediately upon arrival he threw himself into the opportunities that life in a new colony offered. This included purchasing town acres from the South Australian Company, land that we now acknowledge was, of course, never ceded.
If this was Dr Wyatt’s only shortcoming, perhaps I would not be standing here today as it is the story of many a free settler of the time. But, as I alluded to earlier, in his quest to better himself and his standing, Dr Wyatt took on many other roles. There were over 40 bestowed upon him during his fifty years here including as a Director of the SA Savings Bank, State Coroner, and Governor of the Public Library to name but a few.
A significant role was his appointment in August 1837 as the Ad-Interim Protector of Aborigines, a role where he was to extend his knowledge of the numbers of, habits, difference and dialects of local Aboriginal peoples. Dr Wyatt was on the record as acknowledging that this role would suit his personal ‘scientific interests’. The Protector was also responsible for issuing rations, and again Dr Wyatt is on the record as stating that it was ‘an act of common justice to those whose lands we have occupied and whose game we have destroyed.’
In 1838 Dr Wyatt was appointed the Medical Board Secretary of the Adelaide Hospital. He held this position for almost fifty years until 1885, the year before his death. He was a Committee Member of the hospital from 1868, taking on the role of Chair from 1870 until 1885. That he was well ingrained in the medical establishment here is of little doubt.
This is the truth.
What is also the truth is that while Dr Wyatt was Ad-Interim Protector of Aborigines the Colonisation Commission Report stated that the first inhabitants of the colony, ‘may receive, not gratuitously, but in exchange for an equivalent in the form of labour, food and clothing superior to their ordinary means of subsistence… the value of the moderate quantity of work they will be required to perform will exceed the value of the rations and clothing they will receive; and thus they… are a source of revenue rather than of expense.’
So, to repeat, an Aboriginal person could receive rations from Dr Wyatt, but only if they performed work that was valued at more than the cost of the rations, so they are a source of revenue, not expense. There is a word for this, can anyone think of it?
And what of his time involved with the Board of the Adelaide Hospital? This was a time when, according to the current Head of Humanities at the South Australian Museum, the medical fraternity saw Aboriginal people as a resource, and that the activity of desecrating their remains was considered normal, all in the name of science. Did Wyatt himself undertake such desecration? We do not have evidence of this, although it can be easily assumed that this common practice was something he had knowledge of at the very least.
And these are examples of exactly why truth telling is hard. Because it is entirely possible to have two truths, and both be correct.
Yes, Dr Wyatt in his role as Ad-Interim Protector of Aborigines provided sustenance in an act of what he saw was ‘common justice’ while at the very same time practicing the enslavement of Aboriginal peoples. Yes, Dr Wyatt gave almost fifty years to the establishment and running of the Colony’s first medical hospital, while at the same time being complicit in the heinous treatment of the remains of Aboriginal peoples.
While there have been people who have voiced, ‘but he was of his time’, Aunty Jenni also encouraged us to remember that ‘there are universal truths regarding humans and humanity which have existed across all time.’
In accepting these truths, without being defensive, we can take a further step towards reconciliation.
These are just several examples of the researched and documented truths that we had presented to us by Aunty Jenni and there is a timeline on our website should you want to understand more about Dr Wyatt and his time here.
Commissioning Aunty Jenni to deliver her report to Wyatt was the act of a small number of people. But of course, it is just one way of undertaking truth telling. And this brings me to learning number three.
Based on the conversations I have had, it seems that there may be a fear for some of having to give something up and that this is holding things in place. And so my learning is that this fear is maintaining the status quo.
We saw this thirty years ago with the social commentary around the Mabo decision. People were scared that as non-Aboriginal they would need to forfeit land they legally owned. And in this different context we see it today, when I am asked if I am worried we will need to hand over Wyatt’s corpus. Starting from a position of fear, of questioning what I have to lose, can only retain and perpetuate the status quo.
Wyatt has taken on board advice from those we have consulted with as to how knowledge of the truth should inform our future in our vision for a South Australia free from poverty.
This advice has, so far, ranged from using our corpus to look at how we create wealth for Aboriginal peoples, to ensuring we focus on education and pathways for young people, to continuing to do what we currently do as we are meeting a need in the community that would otherwise not be resourced.
We are taking this advice on board, continuing to consult, and together will land on how this truth telling will inform our work – but we will do so without fear, because there is nothing to fear. Everyone at Wyatt wants the same thing, truth and reconciliation.
And this leads me to learning number four, what is normalised, of course, is in fact normal. Wyatt has been working on our approach to truth telling and reconciliation for some years, and so when I am caught up in the middle of our day-to-day work and operations, I don’t think what we are doing is that extraordinary.
It is only when having conversations with others that it becomes apparent that maybe we have approached things a little differently. Maybe what we are doing isn’t a conversation or body of work others have yet been willing to consider.
But remember when almost 20 years ago reconciliation action plans were first developed? They have been applauded, and they have been criticised, but they are now considered standard practice. Imagine if we can be in a room like this in (hopefully not quite) 20 years’ time and talk about how truth telling is a regular part of our vernacular.
Some people may think it is well and good for me to share this story, but the practice of truth telling is not really relevant to them. Perhaps you are a first, second or third generation Australian. Or maybe your wealth is derived from a business that imports products from overseas, your portfolio invested in global stocks.
But for anyone here who has ever had farming in current or previous generations of your family. For anyone who has had the privilege of attaining a high school certificate and going on to further study. For anyone who has built a business with access to mainstream finance. For anyone whose personal wealth is invested in companies where you have trusted they have a social licence to operate without digging further into exploring that. For the many, many of us in this room who can put our hand up for all of these privileges I just mentioned, truth telling is our work.
It is our work because we have reaped the benefit of the generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge that preceded European settlement. We have had access to advantages that the people here before us have not. Understanding the truth and accepting the truth is what has been asked of us as non-Indigenous Australians and we need to do the work to get to a place where we can do just that.
And so, my final learning to share today is that truth telling is a journey. Just like you can’t do a short course, an on country walk or attend a festival and give yourself a tick of ‘cultural competency’, you can’t commission a research report and say you have all the answers.
Dr William Wyatt and The Wyatt Trust have a history and practice that is intertwined with the first inhabitants of South Australia. It hasn’t always been a positive experience and the present-day Board acknowledge the harmful impact of settlement by European colonisers and the ongoing effect it has on Aboriginal people today.
With the knowledge and perspective we have from Aunty Jenni and all who have taken the time to work with us, and share wisdom and truths, our future will continue to be intertwined.
I hope that today I am leaving you with something to think about. And that part of your thinking includes a critical assessment of your truth, whether that be personally or professionally, so that together we can continue to strive for reconciliation and truth telling. Thank you.
