‘These words cannot disappear’: Victoria’s historic treaty becomes law

As Rueben Berg sat at the same, intimate table as the Victorian premier to sign Australia’s first treaty with its First Peoples, he was struck by a powerful yet simple thought about what the agreement was about. This was a moment the Victorian government had been working towards for a decade, and Indigenous people much longer, one that unfolded early on Thursday morning within the 19th-century-era grandeur of the State Drawing Room of the governor’s mansion and witnessed by representatives of the state, parliament and the King. Yet for Berg, fellow First Peoples’ Assembly co-chair Ngarra Murray and the other assembly members whose names had already been inked on the agreement, it was the realisation of something more essential. “To my mind, we sat here as equals,” he said. “That is fundamentally what this process has been about – recognising our equal status to be able to sit at that table.