The Bridge is a non-competitive learning tool designed to assist participants understand:
- Discrimination and oppression, in its many forms, as experienced by Indigenous Australian people;
- Indigenous Australian peoples' experiences from colonisation to current times; and
- The significant contribution of Indigenous Australian people to Australian society.
This game requires all players to work together while providing valuable information in the areas of law, sport, art, culture, history, politics and general knowledge.
Anywhere this game is used in the community, whether in a high school, at home, in the workplace, at university, TAFE or elsewhere, it will help build understanding and awareness and contribute towards reconciliation.
How The Bridge Works:
- Can be played by up to six people.
- Can be played in teams.
- Players can walk around a map of Aboriginal Australia.
- The letter R on the die is for "reconciliation", and carries the highest value.
- Players learn about co-existence and will negotiate treaties.
- If a player doesn't know the answer to a question, they will apply the word "sorry".
- As the game is co-operative and not competitive, players help each other build 'The Bridge'.
- Players learn important cultural rules.
Reconciliation is about mutual respect. It’s about taking steps to better understand Indigenous Australian history, culture and peoples, and the social, political, cultural conditions they historically experienced. It is about having respect and recognition for the many achievements and contributions made by Indigenous Australians, whether in politics, law, history, sport, art, culture and more generally in creating Australian society. It is not just about symbolism. It requires the pursuit of knowledge to overcome historical ignorance. It requires the achievement of cultural sensitivity to overcome assumptions, many of which are steeped in European tradition, which may be antithetical to Indigenous ways of being, doing and learning. It requires an appreciation and respect for differences and confrontation of prejudices. It requires a starting point of equality and respect. It requires an acknowledgment of the many wrongs meted out to Indigenous Australians since colonisation. It is about restitution for the oppression and discrimination experienced by Indigenous Australians.
It is also about ensuring that Australia's Indigenous peoples have returned to them what is rightfully theirs, including:
- preservation of culture;
- restoration of dignity;
- repatriation of land;
- equality of opportunity;
- real and practical support to overcome the attempted destruction of person, place, population, identity, community and culture, which has been the historical consequence of some non-Indigenous Australians' actions for centuries in this country.
It’s about ending the silence and learning anew. This requires the ending of ignorance and the pursuit of knowledge. Reconciliation means that it is no longer acceptable to say, “but I didn’t know”. Writing Australia's Indigenous peoples out of Australian experience, history, and lives by retaining European versions of history, politics, law, society, and economic and cultural achievements does not assist Reconciliation.
This is why the The Bridge - Towards Reconciliation has been developed. It is a beginning, but an important one.
Reconciliation between Australia's Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Australians will make us all better people, and in so doing will make a more just society and a better country.
