My name is Shirley Firebrace, I am born and bred in Echuca
which it's traditional name is 'Etchuka' and descendant
of the Yorta Yorta people. It's a really important issue 
because I believe that it's part of a genocidal thing
to emotionally and spiritually destroy Aboriginal people.
And I suppose the best way that I can tell it is by when
a non-Aboriginal person said to me 'And what are you?
Are you a half-caste, quarter-caste, 'quadruplin''
or whatever they say, and I said 'No, I'm Aboriginal'.
And then I said to him, 'And what are you?'. I said,
'Are you a half-caste Australian, quarter-caste Australian
or a quadruplin'?'. And he looked at me and he said
'No, I'm Australian', I said 'Yeah, but you don't look it'.
And then the power of that really hit him and gave him the 
sense of not belonging anywhere or being connected
to a race of people or to the country, the land and the water 
and the air of this place, so he was confused!
And so he was able to understand then about his language 
and what that does to us as Aboriginal people of this nation. 
So I think that we need to be a lot more aware 
about the emotional and spiritual dissection of Aboriginal people 
of who we look like. They say 'But you don't look Aboriginal' 
and they dissect you. So who else do they do this to in the world? 
Why do they dissect us like this?
And I think it's part of emotional and spiritual genocide.