Kerrupmara Gunditjmara man Travis Lovett has completed a monumental 900km walk from Naarm to Canberra, meeting the Prime Minister in front of Parliament House to call on the government to fulfil its promise for a formal truth-telling commission.

Mr Lovett, the former Yoorrook justice commissioner — Australia's first formal Indigenous-led truth-telling inquiry — arrived on the steps of Parliament with a large crowd of supporters, many of whom had completed the walk with him.

Dubbed the "Walk for Truth", the journey saw almost 6,000 people take part over 39 days, while more than 10,000 signed an open letter calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to commit to implementing a national truth-telling commission.

"This is the moment that has come to meet you, this walk has reached the steps of Parliament, but it must not be allowed to end at the stone and glass of this place," Mr Lovett said.

"Let this be where the country turns its face towards the truth, let this be where the delay ends ... I ask this country to walk the next part with us."

He told the crowd gathered on the steps of Parliament that the walk was an "act of love, an act of kindness, an act of kindness in a less kind world".

"It is a refusal to surrender to the noise of cruelty of the moment to the powerful forces that fan division, turn neighbour against neighbour, and ask us to see one another as threats — instead of us as kin," he said.

"In a time where fear is organised, when lies travel faster than care, many, when many too many people in power mistake hardness for strength. This walk offers something different."

Reconciliation has a long way to go — PM

The government has been under pressure from Indigenous leaders to establish a truth-telling body. While Labor supported the unsuccessful 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum, the other two pillars of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, truth and treaty, remain unfulfilled.

A large number of Labor MPs attended the event, including Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy, Dorinda Cox, Marion Scrymgour and Senate President Sue Lines, alongside Greens MPs and independents.

The PM met Mr Lovett on the steps of Parliament, accepting message sticks from all the countries the Walk for Truth had traversed. He described reconciliation as "unfinished business" and accepted there was still a "long way to go".

Nonetheless, he noted: "The journey of reconciliation does advance. There are bumps in the road; it's not a straight journey — as progress never is."

Mr Albanese assured Mr Lovett the government would "continue to walk with you", noting Indigenous people are the "core" of the Australian story, but stopped short of committing to a national truth-telling body.

Instead, he argued Labor would "continue to engage".

"We will continue to have engagement and dialogue with you," he said, "on how we continue to walk towards that objective, which is in the interest, not just of First Nations people, but in the interest of uplifting all Australians as well".

Last year, Victoria's Yoorrook Justice Commission released its final report, which made 100 recommendations and collected testimony from thousands of people — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — including Stolen Generations survivors, descendants of colonisers and Premier Jacinta Allan.

Speaking to National Indigenous Times, Common Threads Indigenous Peoples Organisation chief executive, Larissa Baldwin-Roberts, whose organisation has worked with Mr Lovett on the Walk for Truth, said truth-telling work is "incredibly important".

"It's the basis of how we create solutions, it's the basis of how we move forward as a country," the Widjabul Wia-bal woman said.

While some states have progressed truth-telling processes, others have stepped away from them, citing the outcome of the Voice referendum.

Mr Lovett said Yoorrook had not hurt anybody, and neither would a national truth-telling body. Instead, he argued truth-telling could not be left to "governments alone or to the slow machinery of institutions that have too often arrived late to the suffering of our people".

"Truth has always moved first through the bodies of those who carried it," he said. "Through Elders who remembered when the records lied, through the families who kept speaking when the nation turned away, through communities who understood that silence was never peace — only the sound power makes when it gets away."

Addressing the PM, Mr Lovett said there is "unfinished business" in Australia, arguing it is not just political, but moral and national. A truth-telling process would not reopen wounds, he said, but rather "finally begin to tend to them".

"It offers Australia the chance to turn a page, not by forgetting what has happened, but by finally having the courage to know it together," he said.