Queen Victoria Markets is a shining example of a reactive industry only doing something when it affects them.

The year is 2005, I am 13 years old walking down Marine Terrace, the main street of Jambinu (Geraldton) on Yamaji Country.

An old white man runs a tourist shop, I don't remember him as a particularly kind person, but that shop is still there to this day.

He sells all sorts of things, from the iconic Skippy with the dangling cork cowboy hat to demeaning and incorrectly-shaped boomerang dotted with cheap storyless designs mass produced overseas with only profits in mind.

Back then as a child I didn't understand the impact something like this had, but was always told what he did was wrong and perhaps that's why he wasn't as nice as I remember.

I was just a cheeky child with a chip on his shoulder.

It is now 2022 and I walk through Naarm's (Melbourne) Queen Victoria Markets with my headphones on.

I happen pass a stall manned by a group of men of Asian descent.

I don't know their story, I don't know their lifestyle, I don't know their wealth. I can't pass judgment on them.

But my eyes glance at the boomerang with the sticker Made in China.

No story attached, no artist name and no authenticity.

I wonder by now surely people would know not to buy these imitation pieces.

I wonder also why this can still happen now in what I would assume to be one of Australia's most progressive cities.

Queen Victoria Markets chief executive Stan Liacos has said many people would be surprised this kind of thing is still going on right across Australia.

Many people, but still I think no one is as surprised as Aboriginal people, especially when we grow up watching as the grey nomads pass through town to buy their 'authentically inauthentic' piece of Aboriginal art.

Selling inauthentic products isn't just disrespectful to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, it is dishonest to customers.

Yet Mr Liacos allowed this to happen in a city of five million people at the nationally-accliamed QVM.

This was not some backwater town no one has heard of, north of the world's most isolated city.

"We're not waiting for new national laws to come into place - we're acting now," Mr Liacos said with pride as he announced the ban to come into effect next year.

You have waited for the minute before the white 'law' changes to eventually reflect how bad and damaging to Indigenous people, the Blak Economy and Blak prosperity selling fake Indigenous souvenirs in your market is.

It is now October 2022 and that old white man who runs the tourist store in Jambinu is no longer working there, but his granddaughter has the store.

I call home to Jambinu and ask a friend working in the local Yamaji Arts Centre to go across the road and see if the tourist store has changed it ways.

They have not.

But occasionally an artefact pops up in that store and a member of the Arts Centre is quick to rush there and purchase it back.

Stan Liacos may never read this, but I believe he has been in that position and alive long enough in this country we now call Australia to realise what was happening at the QVM was wrong many years ago.

Maybe like the old white man back in Jambinu he doesn't care until he is forced by a 'Voice' to care.

• Tamati Smith is of Yamaji - Wajarri/Badimaya and Maori - Ngapuhi heritage and a Journalist with the National Indigenous Times.