Final Thoughts for 2022

I don’t know about that you, but 2022 seemed like the longest year of the pandemic. Time didn’t move along slowly, it grinded, it stuttered and seemed to wrestle with each of us as it saw fit. Leaving so many of us exhausted and bewildered as we tried to navigate the ‘new normal’, a place more menacing and tiring than all we knew before.

For those of us residing in the place now known as Victoria, two elections and all the toxicity associated in the exercise of democracy. Both elections were an exercise which had been gamified by seen and unseen vested interests and their pawns in the media and in our parliaments. It didn’t help much our sense of wellbeing and connectedness with our fellow citizenry.

It meant in 2022, the practice of being a merely decent human being in the face of all that was dumped on us was, in itself, a radical act.

For us First Nations mob, we will once again find ourselves the subject of a national conversation, a dialogue on top of the loathsome culture wars. Once again will be the subject of a referendum.

The challenge for us is not to be the object of these political machinations around the voice and all the comes with it, but to lead the conversation, to shape it, no matter which side of the debate we fall, the difference of views is something we must always value.

My main hope is that in all the passion that wells up over the course of the next 12 months, that we, as mob, treat each other with respect. There is already too much lateral violence flying about the place, we must remind ourselves to look after one another against the storm of formed and uninformed racism and hate that will be leveled at us from under the darker rocks of our society.

For me, all things going near enough to plan, I will hopefully release my first novel, although I will have plenty of other things to keep me busy, some things I’m yet to know are on my horizon, such has been the way of things for me over the last five years or so.

Whatever is on the horizon for you, I wish you and yours all the best for the year ahead. Remember, things can change in a heartbeat and it’s important that those you love know it.

Happy new year, let’s keep trucking.