I've been casting my mind about, during the last few days, asking myself what it is that could possibly express the uniqueness of Veronica Green. I think it is all to do with liberation. She was a woman liberated. Her freedom was entire and irrevocable. And what is most important, it was a freedom which she herself won by dint of personal pain and personal inner struggle - personal experience. And that gave her a possession of an interiorness in the spiritual life which included an uncommon insight into the inner meaning of ordinary people's lives. It gave her a vision about the core meaning of living and a drive to unfold that vision to those of us who were hungering for it.

In this I have been struck by the striking resemblance. Veronica's life bears with two figures of depth and imagination. Francis Webb, the Australian poet, and Jacques Derrida, the Algerian philosopher. Each of these visionaries found in themselves a compelling need to identify with the marginalised - those who are most often pushed out of sight and left to struggle without support, and out of that need was born the determination to do away with constraining structures that imprison people in a state of disguise and pretence, the blinding structures based on power, that render blind people from knowing what it means to be human. The first call of humanity for all stands without option, to put first in our life what society regards as the last and. least.

St Mary's Cathedral Sydney

“Mum Shirl" was born Colleen Shirley Perry on 22nd November 1924 at Cowra. She was born into what many whites accepted as pre-ordained penury. It is significant that even the two surnames she ever bore were borrowed from an alien culture - Perry from Perry's Circus, and her husband Darcy Smith was assigned his name as a boxing pseudonym. That branch of her grandfather's proud traditional name, Boney, was destined to be consigned to oblivion. Like the shabby ill-fitting 2nd-hand clothing that aboriginal people are required to settle for, her family was supposed to accept a false and borrowed name. Such is the way of the inexorable effects of ongoing colonisation. The devastating spoliation extends even to nomenclature. Even the colloquial name for her birthplace Erambie, West Cowra, was "Bagtown".

One of my memories, and it haunts me still, even after as long as thirty years, is the death of an old Hungarian man who died in a nursing home without family or friends. He died a destitute and there was no-one to claim his body. I expressed the wish to bury him and I had to wait several weeks for the Government Contractor to accumulate enough bodies of derelicts from Sydney streets at night, to dump in a common grave. In white society, to be destitute is to be derelict. And to be derelict is a social shame.