After the Fracture:
Resurgence and the Sovereignty of the Every’when
A companion to: Resurgence: Refusal, Renewal, and the Sovereignty of Country (2025)
Prepared in the lead-up to NAIDOC Week 2026 — 50 Years Deadly
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To refuse is not to turn away but a turning toward what endures. Two years on, I understand this more clearly. The fracture of October 2023 hasn’t broken us; it’s simply clarified the challenges ahead.
This paper is not for those who need convincing.
It is not a submission to governments. It is not a report to a committee, nor does it ask permission to be what it is. It is addressed to you, to us, the First Peoples of this country who have watched, over the last two years, every door beginning to open, being closed again, and having to decide what to do next.
I want to begin not with theory, but with what happened, because what happened is the argument.
The Fracture and What It Revealed
On 14 October 2023, Australia voted no.
I was on the road for nine months. A hundred and twenty-three events. Seven thousand people. Most of them were not there because they wanted to be. Most of them were not friendly towards me or the Voice. I walked into Diocesan Synods and church gatherings, people whose stated purpose for existence is reconciliation, redemption, and inclusion, and found rooms, at best, evenly divided. At worst, openly hostile.
A few weeks into the campaign it became clear to me that it was doomed. If a people whose theology demands love of neighbour could only muster a marginal response to the gentlest possible invitation, a Voice, advisory only, with no power to veto, no power to compel, then the general population was never going to do better. The further we went, the more the outcome became certain. Australia was not ready to address not just the past, but the present and the future.
On the night of the 14th, ignorance had its day, and the gentle bird of hope was slain on the wing.
THE RECORD | Since October 2023: the Federal Government has walked back its commitments to truth-telling and national treaty. Queensland repealed Path to Treaty within weeks of the 2024 election. The Northern Territory lowered the age of criminal responsibility back to 10. NSW and Victoria tightened bail laws driving Aboriginal youth on remand to record levels. One Nation is on the cusp of having leverage in the Federal Parliament and multiple state governments. Neo-Nazi groups have become visible in public spaces across the country for the first time since the 1990s.
What I want to say to you is this: none of this surprised me. Not one item on that list.
The fracture of October 2023 did not create those outcomes. It licensed them. It encouraged what was always present: possessiveness, the refusal to share, and the comfort of a story placing us as the problem to be solved rather than us as the people to be heard. What changed on the 14th was not the presence of those forces. What changed was the social cost of acting on them. For a period, that cost had been sufficient to require moderation. On the 15th of October, moderation was no longer required.
Since then, I have been watching the “great walking back”. Federal government commitments to the Statement from the Heart: walked back. National truth-telling: walked back. Treaty: walked back or repealed. With each retreat, the space for the next retreat grew larger.
This is what the fracture revealed: the system was never moving towards us. It was moving towards a version of us it could manage. When we asked for something it could not manage, recognition, voice, presence it said no. It said no more loudly, more often and in more places.
What Two Years of Evidence Tells Us
I wrote Resurgence in the immediate aftermath of the referendum. I wrote it from grief and from determination: the grief of the result, the determination to refuse what came after it. Two years on, I want to say such a framework holds. Not because nothing has changed, but because what has changed confirms it.
We have now run the full experiment. Not for the first time, our people have run versions of it since 1788, but in our generation, in our lifetimes, we have tried every form of engagement the settler system offered on its best days. We have been strategic, patient, built the case and produced the evidence. We have stood in their parliaments, spoken their language, constructing our arguments in the shape they said they needed it to hear us. We have built the ACCO sector, the health services, the legal services and community-controlled governance. We have led the truth commissions, written the recommendations and waited for the responses. There has been no response.
The system has shown us what it does with all the input and wisdom we have given it. It uses all of this to manage us, funding the parts it can control, defunding the parts it cannot. It appoints us to committees, commissions truth-telling and rejects our voices. It repeals hope in the form of treaty framework and truth commissions when the politics change.
This is not a failure of us as individuals or as a community and it isn’t a failure of campaigns or strategies or the people who led them. It is the system working as it was designed to work as a project of administration, management and control. It is not and never has been about a relationship between peoples.
We have not been failing to fix the system. The system has been succeeding at what it was built for: keeping us as a project, not recognising us as a people.
What the Numbers Say About Who We Are to Them
I want to speak about the statistics we hear much about, because they are our numbers. They are about our lived experience and are used against us in ways we often don’t see but need to understand.
The Closing the Gap project: which I described in my earlier work as a mechanism for embedding a deficit stereotype while appearing to address disadvantage, has now produced thirty years of data. What does the data show?
THE RECORD | 617 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody since the Royal Commission reported in 1991. 33 died in 2024-25, the highest figure in 45 years. The imprisonment rate has risen every year since records began. Aboriginal adults are now 37% of the Australian prison population despite being 3.3% of the general population. Aboriginal children aged 10-17 are 27 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous children, a ratio that nearly doubled in four years. Over 20,000 Aboriginal children are in out-of-home care, representing 41% of all children in the system. More Aboriginal children are currently in Victoria’s child protection system than were removed during the Stolen Generations.
These are not the numbers of a people being empowered but the numbers of a people being administered. In recent times the administration is tightening, not loosening. The bail laws are being hardened and the age of criminal responsibility in the Northern Territory has been lowered back to 10, a jurisdiction where 94% of children in detention are ours. Queensland has legislated that children can receive adult sentences for 33 categories of offence. Despite signing the first State treaty, Victoria has enacted a similar law impacting children. Particularly our children.
We are also faced with the reality that the organisations we built, the ACCOs, the health services and the community-controlled bodies, are often, in many cases, being used to implement their control. This situation is not because our people involved in those organisations want it to be so. The people in those organisations are our people and are doing the best they can with what they have been given. But the structure where governments decide and the ACCO implements means our organisations are, in some domains, the face of a system harming our families.
VACCA, the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency, receives approximately 10% of child protection funding in Victoria, even though our children make up 32% of all children in care. They are being asked to manage the consequences of a system they did not design and cannot reform from within. This is significant as the statistics show Victoria removes more of our children from their parents than any other jurisdiction in this country. Even more than during the Stolen Generations era.
I am not saying our organisations are the problem. I am saying the arrangement is. Their arrangement to fund us to implement their decisions while calling it self-determination is the problem. This arrangement is not self-determination. Our own peak bodies, such as VACCA and SNAICC, say it is not, and they are right.
The Employment Story
There are better numbers, and we need to be honest about those too, honest about what they show and what they hide.
Employment rates have risen since 1994. Year 12 completion has more than doubled since the early 2000s. The Indigenous business sector has grown substantially. These are real achievements and they were built by us, not by governments. These achievements are things for us to celebrate and remember when we are deficited by those in power.
But and there is always a but, the employment growth, when you look closely, is largely in government-funded organisations. These include the health services, community organisations, government programs and the work-for-welfare schemes which counted participants as employed for thirty years before being abolished, when the political climate changed, leaving communities with nothing. The research is reveals that when you strip out the government-funded sector and the identification change effect, the growing number of people, many of them urban, many of them from Stolen Generations families reconnecting with identity, who are counted in our numbers but whose socioeconomic position is more advantaged than those of us who have always been counted, the employment gap for the most disadvantaged communities has barely moved.
I am not saying reconnection with identity is wrong. I think it’s important and it has been for me. What I am saying is if the numbers of those reconnecting are used to claim our community as a whole is improving, while the communities where deaths in custody impact, children are removed and incarceration rates are worst are being left behind or getting worse, this data is evidence the Closing the Gap project is working to manage the appearance of progress rather than to produce its substance.
They measure whether we are becoming more like them, not whether we are flourishing as ourselves.
The Climate We Are In
Let us name clearly what the political environment of 2026 is, because to speak about resurgence without naming the ground it must grow in would be dishonest.
Neo-Nazis are marching openly in Australian cities. One Nation is positioned to hold leverage in the Federal Parliament and in multiple state governments. The party which built its foundations on opposing Native Title and by claiming Aboriginal people have too much, is about to have more power than it has held since the late 1990s.
Let’s be clear about what this is and what it is not.
It is not new. The possessiveness, the fear and the refusal to share or include have been the substrate of this country’s relationship to our people since 1788. What is new is the permission. The 14th of October gave people who held those views in private a public validation. The majority of Australia said, in a formal democratic process, it did not think Aboriginal people deserved a Voice in matters affecting us. From that permission, other things have followed including the normalisation of a political conversation in which our rights are a grievance for non-Indigenous people rather than a reality for us.
I have been in those rooms, and I have felt the refusal to shake hands. I have experienced the slow retreat of people who worshiped besides me for years when I became, in their view, too inconvenient, too much and too insistent on being seen. Such an experience is not unique to me. It is the daily reality of being Blak in a country that voted to remain comfortable.
There is something else to say about our present circumstances, something I have come to understand more clearly in the two years since the fracture.
Fear is not power. The neo-Nazis march because they are afraid of a world where they are not exceptional by virtue of being white. One Nation is gaining because a portion of the electorate remains deeply afraid of a world in which they must share. The governments retreating from their commitments are afraid of the political cost of courage. Fear is what drives all these responses and actions. It is important to remember here fear, though it causes real harm, is not the same as strength.
Sixty-five thousand years is not afraid of two hundred and sixty.
They are marching because they know something is ending, we are still here because we know something endures.
What Resurgence Means Now, After the Fracture
In Resurgence I wrote about three interconnected practices: refusal, insurgency, and resurgence. I want to return to each of them now, from this ground, two years on.
Refusal
Refusal is not rage. I want to be clear about that, because the climate now invites us to respond to what is being done to us with a rage entirely understandable and one I feel myself. Rage is the system’s preferred response from us as it confirms their story and it gives them permission to enforce containment.
Refusal is something quieter and more powerful as it is the act of withdrawing consent. It is not the consent for us to exist; that is something that was never theirs to give. It is the consent to be administered, to participate in the arrangement in which they decide and we implement. It is our consent to the Closing the Gap metrics as the definitive measure of our flourishing. It is our consent to the idea that if we are not closing the gap between ourselves and white Australia, we are failing.
We are not failing. We have and are being failed. Those are different things, and the refusal to accept the first framing is the beginning of every other practice.
Refusal, in the practical present, looks like this: No more turning up to validate dispossession with welcomes and acknowledgements because it makes them feel better. No more engagement with governments, corporates, and institutions as the ones tasked with making them appear safe for us. No more resilience and graciousness as the price of being permitted to speak. No more consenting to be recognised, included and heard on their terms.
In the space refusal opens for us, the space Simpson identifies as the only ethical response to a recognition politics assimilating us into the normative while calling it inclusion, in that space, we remember who and what we are.
THE RECORD | 338 of the Royal Commission’s 339 recommendations remain unimplemented after 34 years. The Victorian Government accepted 4 of Yoorrook’s 46 recommendations in full. The Federal Government has not legislated any element of the Statement from the Heart since the referendum. These are not oversights. This is the system operating as designed.
Insurgency
Insurgency is working from within to destabilise. It is the practice of those of us who, by circumstance or vocation, find ourselves inside the institutions of the settler state, the churches, the universities, the public service and the funded organisations, who choose to use our positions not to make those institutions more comfortable but to make them more honest.
This is the work I did or tried to do as Provincial Archdeacon. Not to make the Anglican Church of Australia feel better about its relationship to First Peoples. To hold it to account for what that relationship has been and what it must become. To refuse to allow the church to use our presence to paper over the coloniality that is still structural in its theology, governance, and its distribution of power and resources.
Insurgency is not comfortable work. It is costly and I have paid that cost. It manifests in the people who avoid you, those colleagues who become suddenly unavailable and the institutional exhaustion greeting every call to account with a request for patience, for process, for more time.
Insurgency is necessary precisely because it operates in the spaces that refusal alone cannot reach. There are things inside the institutions our people need, resources, legal permissions, political connections, and those things do not simply materialise outside the institutions. Insurgency is how we take what we need without surrendering to what the institutions require in return.
The line between insurgency and assimilation is the line between using the institution and being used by it. That line requires constant attention. It shifts. You can cross it without noticing, especially when the institution is generous in its praise for how well you play the role it has designed for you.
Resurgence
Then there is resurgence. Resurgence is not a response to the system. It has always been here, before the system arrived and will be here after it recedes.
Resurgence is Country. It is lore. The custodial relationship, a six-dimensional universe with a relational, kincentric system sustaining life here for 65,000 years before the 260-year colonial interruption began. It is ceremony, language and the every’when or the understanding that past, present, and future are not sequential but simultaneous, and our obligations to those who came before and those who will come after are as present as our obligations to each other now.
In the present moment, resurgence looks like the Murnong Gathering Place. An Anglican church in Glen Iris with a disused tennis court, a garden called Wominjeka, a gallery named for the women who cultivated the food that fed this country, and a gathering space for the Aboriginal diaspora of Melbourne’s inner eas; 1,500 people who have no safe place to be themselves within reach of where they live. That happened without a government strategy. It happened because people who know who they are created the conditions for others to remember who they are.
Resurgence is not waiting for permission to gather, teach, practice ceremony, speak language and govern according to our own protocols. It is doing those things in whatever space is available. With or without funding and with or without recognition.
It is the Wave Hill Walk-off, the Tent Embassy, the Freedom Bus. It is every moment in our history when our people stopped waiting for the system to be just and started living as though justice was already ours to enact.
Resurgence is not the strategy we try when everything else fails, it is the truth we return to when everything else reveals its limits.
Governing Ourselves As The First Peoples Nation State
I want to speak about the idea I raised in Resurgence, the First Peoples Nation State, because in the two years since I wrote it, I have become more convinced of its necessity, not less.
The argument is simple. Without a treaty and an agreed co-sovereignty, First Nations Peoples are entitled to pursue the unceded right of self-government. We have never ceded sovereignty. Not at Botany Bay nor in any of the 260 years since. The High Court of Australia itself, in Mabo, acknowledged this. Our sovereignty predates the colonial claim. It was not extinguished by it, all that happened was that a false system was overlaid by force, and force is not legitimacy.
What I am proposing is not a geographical separation. I am not proposing a third nation between the existing states and territories. I am proposing a spatial nation, a federation of all First Peoples’ nations, represented by a council of elders, operating government-to-government with the Australian Parliament on matters affecting us, and operating independently of that Parliament on matters that are ours alone.
This body would not be legislated by the Commonwealth; we have seen what happens to bodies the Commonwealth legislates. ATSIC was dismantled on accusations that were never proven. The Voice was designed in response to a government ask, and rejected by the government’s own people.
Any body deriving its authority from settler legislation derives its existence from settler political will. When that will changes, and it always changes, the body goes with it.
The First Peoples Nation State would be legislated under First Peoples lore. Its authority would come from us. Its funding would come from royalties and rent levied on the corporations and companies using and profiting from Country. This will not be as a gift from those corporations, but as an obligation that has always existed and has simply not been collected. The moral and ethical case for that collection is not in dispute. The political will to enforce it has been absent. We will build the body that can speak for our right to it.
Membership would be elders, or those the elders’ delegate. Not Land Council representatives, Land Councils are legislated under government oversight and funded by governments. Not government employees. Members will be those who carry the lore and the authority of their particular nations, speaking for those nations in a council that speaks for all.
This is not an untested idea. It is a very old one. Before the colonial interruption, this Country was governed by an intricate system of family, clan, tribe and language group allowing for interaction, trade, conflict resolution, and custodial responsibility across the entire continent. We had what the colonial world did not and cannot: a form of governance sustaining life and Country without destroying either. The proposition of a First Peoples Nation State is not an invention. It is a restoration.
THE RECORD | The identified Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population has grown from approximately 160,000 in 1976 to 983,700 in 2021. The median age is 24 years, 14 years younger than non-Indigenous Australians. One in three of us is under 15. The First Peoples of this country are not a diminishing remnant. We are a growing, young, increasingly educated and economically active people. The nation state is not a dream for a people who have survived. It is a project for a people who are coming into their strength.
Fifty Years Deadly. What Does That Means Now?
NAIDOC 2026 asks us to look back across fifty years and call what we see deadly. In the original sense: strong, excellent, proud.
I want to say: yes. I want to say it without qualification, because the qualification is not ours to carry. The achievement, strength, culture, art, language reclamation, institutions we built, knowledge systems we maintained through everything the colonial project threw at us, they all belong to us. They were not given by the system, they were nurtured, fought for, and handed forward.
I also need to say what those fifty years cost. Because the NAIDOC theme, in a year when 33 of our people died in custody, when more of our children are being removed than during the Stolen Generations era, when the age of criminal responsibility for our children in the Northern Territory has been lowered back to 10, when neo-Nazis are marching in our streets and One Nation is gaining power, the theme in that year requires us to be honest about what deadly has meant for us in both senses of the word.
We have been deadly and the system has been deadly to us. Both are true. The celebration does not cancel the grief, and the grief does not cancel the strength.
What the last fifty years have taught us, what the last two years have made undeniable, is that the strength was built not because of the system but despite it. If the next fifty years are to require less strength for survival and more for flourishing, it will not come from the system reforming itself. We have watched that experiment run to its conclusion.
It will come from us.
From the gatherings, our lore and from the every’when, the understanding that those who walked this Country for 65,000 years are not behind us but with us, and those who will walk it for the next 65,000 are not ahead of us but also with us, andour obligation is to both, now, in how we choose to live, govern, resist and create.
The slogan is 50 Years Deadly.
The project is the next 50,000.
What I Am Asking of You
I said at the beginning that this paper is not for those who need convincing. So I want to end with what I am asking of us, not of them.
I am asking us to refuse the arrangement that makes us the face of the system that harms us. Not the organisations but the arrangement. The organisations we built are ours. The arrangement in which they are funded to implement decisions made by governments that we did not make is not self-determination. Name it. Refuse it. Advocate, loudly and continuously, for what genuine authority looks like: the power to decide, not just to manage.
I am asking us to stop measuring ourselves by their metrics. Closing the Gap measures whether we are becoming more like them. Our flourishing is not the closing of a gap between ourselves and white Australia. Our flourishing is the strength of our culture, the health of our Country, the transmission of our knowledge and language and lore to our children, the capacity of our communities to govern themselves according to their own protocols. Those things cannot be measured by a government dashboard. They can only be felt in a gathering circle. They can only be heard in language spoken by a young person who was not speaking it five years ago.
I am asking us to hold the every’when. In a climate of fear and polarisation, in a year when the far right is marching and the governments are retreating, it is tempting to shrink, to wait, to conserve. I understand such an impulse as it is my lived experience, retreating from the colleagues who would not shake my hand, from the spaces that made me small. The every’when tells us every moment of resistance in our history is present with us now. The Wave Hill Walk-off. The Tent Embassy. The Freedom Rides. The women who cultivated Murnong. The men who walked the old tracks and kept the law alive. They are not behind us. They are here.
I am asking us to build. The First Peoples Nation State is not a distant ideal. It is a practice that begins now, in the gatherings we hold, in the protocols we follow, in the decisions we make without waiting for government permission. Every time we govern ourselves according to our lore, we are already the nation state. The formal structure will follow the practice. The practice is already ours.
We are not waiting for Australia to be ready; Australia has had 260 years to be ready. We are the Country, the lore and the every’when. We are to begin.
A Note on the Statistical Record
This paper draws on a statistical analysis developed as part of a four-paper series: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians: A Statistical Overview of Key Social Indicators Since 1976 and its companion papers. All statistics cited are drawn from AIC, AIHW, ABS, and Productivity Commission sources and are current to December 2025. The statistical papers are available separately and include full source citations and fact-checker notes.
The statistics in this paper are used not as the centre of the argument but as its ballast, evidence that the system’s own data confirms what our people have always known about what the system does to us. The argument itself is not statistical. It is sovereign.
The theoretical framework draws on the work of Audra Simpson (refusal), Glen Coulthard (resurgence), Anne Poelina, Virginia Marshall, and Mary Graham, alongside the author’s earlier work Resurgence: Refusal, Renewal, and the Sovereignty of Country (2025). The First Peoples Nation State concept is developed from the author’s original framework in that work.