<\/p>\n
Uncle Mark Brown’s Welcome to Country was met with boos and jeers from some in the crowd. (ABC News)<\/p>\n
“He got heckled and yelled at for doing the Acknowledgement of Country, but he had to do that because that’s his country,” Year 11 student Lakiah Chatfield said.<\/p>\n
Feeling out of place for representing her culture was an experience Lakiah knew from her own life.<\/p>\n
“At my school, when we had to do it in the mornings at our assembly, people get annoyed and say, ‘Why do we have to listen to this?'” the young Gamilaraay woman said.<\/p>\n
“It makes me feel frustrated and sad because we shouldn’t have to keep explaining why it’s part of our country’s shared history.”<\/p>\n
Lakiah decided to express her thoughts in a school essay centred around Stephen King’s quote from the 1978 novel The Stand, which reads: The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there \u2026 and still on your feet.<\/p>\n
The quote resonated with Lakiah and she decided to write about the Welcome to Country.<\/p>\n
\u00a0“I thought about what my culture means to me and how it makes me feel and just wrote it down,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ceremony turned into ‘spectacle of disrespect’<\/p>\n
In her essay, the high school student wrote that what happened at Melbourne’s Shire of Remembrance showed that more work still needed to be done to challenge attitudes that ridiculed Indigenous voices.<\/p>\n
“This moment should have been one of respect, a time to reflect on the sacrifices made by those who came before us,” Lakiah wrote in her essay.<\/p>\n
“Instead, it turned into a spectacle of disrespect.”<\/p>\n
Lakiah said her ancestors played a role in her writing.<\/p>\n
“My ancestors have always been an inspiration to me,” Lakiah said.<\/p>\n
Her essay has earned her first place in her age category and as the overall winner of the award out of 6,500 entrants.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Lakiah Chatfield receives the 2025 Whitlam What Matters Award. (Supplied: Whitlam Institute)<\/p>\n
“I’m 17. I shouldn’t have to feel ashamed of being proud. I shouldn’t have to sit in class and feel like my culture is being brushed off as ‘too political’ or ‘too much’. I want that acknowledgement to keep being said \u2026 loud, proud, and with meaning,” Lakiah wrote in her essay.<\/p>\n
After reading Lakiah’s piece, one of her teachers asked if she could submit her work to the Whitlam writing competition.<\/p>\n
The Whitlam What Matters writing competition is named after former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam, who fought for human rights both domestically and internationally.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari walked through Daguragu together. (Supplied: Darrell Lewis)<\/p>\n
It is open to students in Australia from years 5 to 12.<\/p>\n
“It’s made my confidence so high. I was very shocked. I didn’t think I was going to win,” Lakiah said.<\/p>\n
The high school student said she had never participated in a writing competition before, but one of her works had been published in a local magazine.<\/p>\n
Her win has inspired Lakiah to keep pursuing writing in the future.<\/p>\n
“I’ve always wanted to become a youth worker, but I just love writing,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When an Indigenous high school student from rural New South Wales saw an elder being booed while welcoming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":166865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[109495,64,63,109491,54742,109494,2966,85,18402,109492,109493],"class_list":["post-166864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-acknowledgment-of-country","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-coonabarabran-high-school","tag-gough-whitlam","tag-lakiah-chatfield","tag-racism","tag-sports","tag-welcome-to-country","tag-whitlam-what-matters","tag-whitlam-writing-competition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}