so many of you here and many of you are first years and second years and hopefully we will

see a lot more of you over the next three years as you complete your degrees.

My name is Simon Forrest. I'm the Director for Aboriginal Studies at the Centre for Aboriginal

Studies here. I'm a Whadjak Nyungar man, from Whadjak country. This is my mother's maternal

country and we can trace her family back to her great grandmother living in Middle Swan

and her name was Mary Ah Tsing. She was the child of an Aboriginal woman and a Chinese

market gardener and my mother grew up at her great grandmother's camp up in Middle Swan

just to the north of Perth.

Kaya wanju, kaya whanju, whajak nuwak pujeh. That's welcoming you to my mother's country

and my country here on the Swan Coastal Plain which stretches Whadjak country from about

50 kilometres to the north of Perth to about 50 kilometres to the south and about a hundred

kilometres to the east.

Moulak just flying over us just then - a white tailed black cockatoo to welcome you too to

the Centre for Aboriginal Studies.

So part of my welcome ceremony is the smoking and I acknowledge my father's country by using

some sandalwood from his country, as part of the smoking. My father's country is Yamtjewongoy

country to the north and the east. So I will put some sandalwood on there and I will take

some gum off the balga or grass tree as you see as you enter through the door. The crushed

up gum is part of the smoking.

Come on down. Come and get some smoke on you.

Opari is singing out too to you fellas. The Centre for Aboriginal Studies is an Aboriginal

place, a Nyungar place for us fellas and we are in an educational institution that is

mainly a non Aboriginal place and we come to this learning. What you are coming here

to get is to learn and do things and basically you are learning about whitefellas and how

they do business and what I say is that so we can infiltrate and get the best of what

we can from the whitefella system for our people whatever way that is.

And in terms of this rope, you come to this place iwth a set of knowledge and values and

ways of knowing and doing for over 50,000 years before present. This rope helps to explain

that. It is 25 metres long, this rope, and at this end there is 50,000 years before present

at the Escarpment in Arnhem Land. This is 40,000 years before present - this is Middle

Swan - this is my mother's people. This is land in the Swan Valley here, 40,000 years

before the present.

And we go along here and there is various things along this timeline. The earliest cave

paintings in France, 30,000 years ago. The earliest evidence of the Indigenous people

of Japan, the Haiynu people. And you keep going along this rope till we come up to here,

2,000 years ago, the life and times of Christ. 1788, the First Fleet arrived here in Australia

over on the Sydney coast.

So here's us and here's our knowledge system and our culture. That's what we have got.

That's what we have in our values and in our knowledge system.

This institution here represents this and the building behind me represents all of that.

So you are here and you are bringing all this knowledge, all this collective knowledge for

over 50,000 years and use it to your benefit. We are here, we are the dominant force in

this place in the Centre for Aboriginal Studies, we are. black people, we are the dominant

force.

So use that to your advantage and welcome to the Centre for Aboriginal Studies. Thank

you.