Rosie+Kunoth-Monks

And so the final word, appropriately, does belong to Rosie: here’s her response to a suggestion from fellow Q&A panelist Peter Coleman that Utopia – which helps to expose the lie of the NT intervention, and the Lateline program that led to it - is a “dreadful documentary”, and that assimilation for Aboriginal people is the only way forward.

“I have a culture. I am a cultured person (speaks in language). I am not something that fell out of the sky for the pleasure of somebody putting another culture into this cultured being. “John [Pilger] chose (to depict) what is an ongoing denial of me. I am not an Aboriginal, or indeed Indigenous. I am an Arrente, Alyawarra First Nations person, a sovereign person from this country (speaks in language). “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here…. I am alive. I am here and now. And I speak my language. I practice my cultural essence of me. “Don’t try and suppress me and don't call me a problem. I am not the problem. I have never left my country nor have I ceded any part of it. “Nobody has entered into a treaty or talked to me about who I am. “I am Arrente, Alyawarra female elder from this country. “Please remember that. I am not the problem.” And here's Rosie Kunoth-Monks' response to Jones’ question about whether or not things had improved for her people. “Nothing at all…. It doesn’t matter if the government changes. A white Australian policy… is alive and well in Australia, and it usually experiments on blacks in the Northern Territory, because we are not a state. “Come up and live with me some time. Live my life and I’ll show you."