Thank you all very much for your very warm welcome. Thank you Damein and the guides for showing us your country. All of us have been deeply moved to see such ancient structures of engineering. 7,000 years old, showing the ingenuity, the understanding of the natural environment by your ancestors - the Gunditjmara People, here on this lake, working with the landscape, understanding the country and building those remarkable structures, which are surely worthy of being on the World Heritage List.
Now this is an important step. It’s quite a process, the World Heritage Listing, so I’ll explain what we’re doing. We’re going to nominate the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape that we’ve just inspected with you guides – and thank you so much for the very warm welcome – the formalities may not have been in the right order but you welcomed us with your hearts. We knew we were welcome from the moment we arrived. We’re going to nominate the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape to Australia’s World Heritage Tentative List. This is a very strong statement of its importance and the value that governments, the community and - most importantly - you the traditional owners place on it. The sacred nature of the Budj Bim site to the Gunditjmara People, to all of you – you manage this site, this place through the Gunditjmara Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and its CEO Damien of course showed us around and working with the Windamara Aboriginal Corporation as well. If successful and we anticipate it will be, the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape will become the first Australia place to become World Heritage Listed exclusively for its aboriginal cultural values. You’ve all been tireless advocates for this. You all understand it’s global significance. It was the first place to be listed on Australia’s National Heritage List back in 2004. A world Heritage listing would be very appropriate recognition of its significance and its heritage values. If it is World Heritage Listed and we are very optimistic about that – it would be Australia’s first World Heritage place since the Ningaloo Coast in Western Australia was inscribed in 2011.
I want to just acknowledge the great goodwill of the community, the support of the Victorian Government, of course, whose Premier is here. You can see the strong support. The Mayor is here, your Worship the Mayor. Thank you. Good to see you. You have Roma, your local state Member. Of course Dan Tehan, the indefatigable federal Member and the Minister for the Environment, Josh Frydenberg. So we are all working together to support you. It’s a moving occasion.
I want to say too that I think it is a wonderful coincidence that we are making this announcement today and looking at this ancient work built by your ancestors, time out of mine in a week when Ken Wyatt, a proud Aboriginal man has been the first Indigenous Australian to be appointed to a Federal Government Ministry.
Ken of course is the first Indigenous Australian to be elected to the House of Representatives. He was the first, I appointed him as a Parliamentary Secretary, so he is the first Indigenous Australian to be appointed to the Executive and now he is the first to be a Minister. He is a great Australian, a proud Noongar man, a proud Australian, First Australian. We are very fortunate, all of us, on all sides of politics to have him as a Minister in the Government, as Minister for Aged Care and the Minister for Indigenous Health.
Thank you for the very warm welcome. We are honoured to be here among you and delighted that we are taking the steps to get the global recognition for this Budj Bim landscape that it deserves.
Thanks you.
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