‘The nation stands still for Anzac dawn service so the nation should stand still for this,’ organiser says

In the pre-dawn light, Dja Dja Wurrung man Jida Gulpilil begins to sing. He has been tending to a fire, heaping gum leaves on a mound of sandy earth, and the fire is now lit.

It is time for the dawn service.

This is a different kind of service for Victoria. On Anzac Day in three months, hundreds of thousands of people will gather at cenotaphs and war memorials to commemorate those Australians killed in combat. But this service is for the untold thousands killed in the business of settling Australia, who were massacred or killed in the frontier wars.

Hundreds are present at the event, a mix of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people, who have come to mourn and reflect on 26 January, the 231st anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson and the establishment of a British colony.

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Behind him is the memorial rock of the Kings Domain Resting Place, marking the site where 38 people, representing clans around Victoria, were buried after their remains were repatriated from museums and private collections. It is just out of Melbourne CBD, near the banks of the Yarra River, yet most Victorians do not know it is here.

“We cleaned off bottles of beer that were smashed over that rock yesterday,” Lidia Thorpe, a Gunnai-Gunditjmara woman and former state MP, tells the crowd.

Thorpe organised the event as a day of mourning, harking back to the first official day of mourning protest in 1938. It’s the first time a dawn service has been held on January 26, Australia Day, a day that is protested as Invasion Day by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and an increasing number of non-Indigenous Australians.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The crowd was a mix of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people. Photograph: Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

“I thought we have got to have a day where we can reflect and quietly mourn,” Thorpe tells Guardian Australia. “The nation stands still for Anzac dawn service so the nation should stand still for this.”

Most of those in attendance, including Thorpe, will head to the Invasion Day rally at Parliament House in Spring Street later on Saturday morning, where numbers are expected to top 2018’s record of 60,000.

Thorpe says she is “overwhelmed” by the number who attended the dawn service.

She invites Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the crowd to come forward and read from a list of the 68 known massacres in Victoria, supplied by the Koorie Heritage Trust.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brunswick man Andrew Baker before the dawn service. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

“The anxiety that leads up to this day is really hard for each and every Aboriginal person in this country,” she tells the crowd. “Having to organise rallies every 26th of January, having to deal with the racism every lead up to 26th of January, having to live with the hope that this country just might get it one day.”

At the end of the ceremony, the 200 attendees form a long line to cleanse their hands with ochre and put a gum leaf in the fire. Among them is Noongar man Ted Wilks.

“I can feel the smoke and the power and the presence of other Indigenous people and other Australians were, which signifies that there is strength in numbers,” Wilks says.

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He says it is a sign of the way cultures evolve and change that Aboriginal peoples had adopted the dawn service from European traditions.

“There have always been good white Australians here, right from the first parts of the colony, and those people are the ones that are more knowledgeable about what has happened,” he says. “So it’s great to see all these people here.”

Meghan Kimber and Georgie Sworder, two non-Indigenous women, lived in Northcote during Thorpe’s 12-month stint as the local Greens MP.

“It’s a privilege to be around a culture this old,” Kimber says. “I feel like it’s important for me to do everything I can to connect with it and to acknowledge it.”