In 2017, Wajuk, Balardung, Kija and Yulparitja man Clinton Pryor was walking across Australia in protest of the closure of and poverty within Aboriginal communities.
The 27-year-old walked the 6,000km from Perth to Canberra in a year. During the journey, he received a Facebook message from a video journalist, Alfred Pek.
"He wanted to share it more with the migrant community by documenting it. But he also wanted to learn himself," Clinton told SBS Examines.
"It's that way as human beings, like you’ll notice something or someone doing something, but you don't know how to approach them yet and to actually take that first step. And that's what he did."
Alfred immigrated to Australia from Indonesia in his teenage years. He said Clinton's walk was a "watershed" moment for him.
"I didn’t know that as an immigrant, you are also a benefactor of the dispossession of Australia’s land. When I became Australian, that was not taught in the context of what it means to be Australian. I didn’t truly understand the extent of what the challenges were until I started working with Clinton Pryor, and that was a watershed moment for me," he said.
Their friendship was forged in the spirit of reconciliation, a movement that began with the first Reconciliation Week in 1996.
“The heart of reconciliation is actually allyship," said Shankar Kasynathan, adjunct senior research fellow at the National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth and Justice.
"We become a part of this Australian story, which brings with it responsibility . . . it’s about how we build relationships going forward.”
A Tamil man who fled civil war in Sri Lanka, Shankar works with multicultural communities on their reconciliation journeys.
"Many migrant and refugee communities understand dispossession. We understand forced displacement, we understand cultural erasure," he said.
"But we don't always make that link between our stories and our histories of our diaspora, and the stories of our First Nations people. I think once that connection is made, it becomes a powerful foundation for ongoing mutual support and allyship that I think is at the core of genuine friendships.”
This episode of SBS Examines marks National Reconciliation Week and explores the role of migrant communities in Australia's reconciliation journey.
