This year marks two significant milestones.
Fifty years of NAIDOC.
Twenty years since the Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006 was enacted.
While these anniversaries sit alongside one another, they represent two very different histories.
NAIDOC was built through generations of Aboriginal political leadership, resistance, advocacy and self-determination. Its foundations were laid by those who organised, protested and fought for recognition, justice and the right of Aboriginal people to determine their own futures. This article stands in honour of that legacy and the people who continue to carry it.
The Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act was established by the State as a legislative framework for recognising, protecting and conserving Aboriginal cultural heritage across Victoria. Twenty years on, it is worth asking not only what the Act has protected, but also how it has been interpreted.
The distinction matters.
One milestone celebrates Aboriginal-led self-determination.
The other marks twenty years of State recognition and regulation.
NAIDOC reminds us of something important. Culture survives because people continue to live it.
The Act established a framework for managing Aboriginal cultural heritage. It was never intended to determine who holds cultural authority, who carries knowledge, who teaches language, who leads ceremony, or who participates in the cultural life of their community.
Yet, across Victoria a heritage management framework has increasingly come to be treated as something much broader. What began as a system for managing heritage has, in many settings, become a system through which cultural legitimacy is determined.
A heritage structure is treated as the cultural voice. A statutory body is treated as the community. A compliance process is treated as culture itself.
Over time, heritage management and cultural authority have increasingly become conflated. This has had, and continues to have, real consequences.
Across Victoria, many Elders, families, knowledge holders and Traditional Owners have found themselves excluded from cultural activities, language programs, community partnerships and cultural engagement processes on their own Country. Not because culture rejected them, but because administrative systems increasingly recognised only a narrow range of voices.
This is about more than exclusion.
It is about administrative recognition being mistaken for cultural truth.
Culture has never belonged to a single organisation, corporation or government structure. It lives in relationships. It lives in families, communities and kinship networks. It is carried through responsibility, memory, knowledge and connection to Country. It is held by many people, often in different ways, across the same landscape.
No single structure can contain the full complexity of a living culture. Yet administrative systems naturally seek certainty. They seek clear boundaries, recognised representatives and defined points of contact.
While this may simplify administration, it narrows the diversity of voices that are seen, heard and recognised.
In many settings, these administrative boundaries become treated as cultural boundaries. Organisations often look to state-recognised administrative structures as the primary source of cultural authority, legitimacy and certainty. Yet administrative lines were created for governance purposes. They may define a statutory process, but they do not define culture.
The result is that systems established to manage heritage can become gatekeepers of culture. This raises an important question. When did a heritage management framework become a framework for determining cultural authority? And who benefits when administrative recognition is treated as the measure of cultural legitimacy?
These questions are not about whether heritage management matters. It does. They are about whether the systems created to manage heritage have, intentionally or unintentionally, concentrated authority in ways that distort the broader cultural landscape they were established to support.
For many Aboriginal people, this is no longer a theoretical concern. It is a lived reality.
People with deep cultural knowledge, family connections and responsibilities to Country continue to find themselves overlooked because administrative structures have become the primary reference point for cultural engagement.
The challenge for the next twenty years is not simply managing heritage. It is ensuring that heritage management does not become a substitute for culture itself. Because heritage and culture are not the same thing.
The Victorian Aboriginal Heritage Act establishes a framework for managing Aboriginal cultural heritage. It does not establish a framework for the broader living cultural ecosystem that includes language, kinship, ceremony, relationships, responsibilities, knowledge, governance, participation and connection to Country.
As we celebrate fifty years of NAIDOC and reflect on twenty years of the Act, a deeper question remains. How do we manage heritage while ensuring that living cultures remain larger than the systems created to manage them?
Because culture did not begin with legislation.
Administrative certainty is not cultural truth.
Culture belongs to the people who continue to carry it.
Caroline Briggs-Martin is a Boonwurrung and Wemba Wemba woman, founder of Yalukit Marnang Consultancy, and the great-great-granddaughter of Boonwurrung matriarch Louisa Briggs. She is a cultural leader, policy reformer, and advocate for First Nations sovereignty, truth-telling, and systemic transformation.
