Leading filmmaker Rachel Perkins echoes the Uluru Statement from the Heart in the first of her ABC Boyer Lectures:

I am reminded of the distinguished poet and stateswoman, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, when she wrote:

"Let no-one say the past is dead.

"The past is all about us and within."

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images of people who have died.

For Indigenous people have not lost from our minds the history of our nation, not only its deep past of thousands of years, but also the events on April 29, 250 years ago, when James Cook ordered his men to fire upon the two men on the shore.

It is likely they were Gweagal warriors, who stood before him in defence of their family behind them on the beach. Cook's action signalled the Crown's intentions; the transfer of a continent, from one people to another, by force if necessary, a phenomenon we politely call colonisation.

Our generation wasn't standing on the deck of the Endeavour or on the shores of Kamay Botany Bay in 1770, just as we weren't present during the massacres as the colonial frontier progressed from south to north.

However, as my father Charles Perkins, the Indigenous leader who came to prominence in the 1960s for leading the Freedom Ride, said:

"We cannot live in the past, but the past lives in us."

Charles Perkins was driven to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians. ( Getty: John van Hasselt/Sygma )

The past has made us. We are its inheritors, for better or worse, and this is now our time.

How we move forward from this moment will set the course of relationships between Indigenous people and their fellow Australians into the future.

A 'hybrid heritage'

I was bought up surrounded by politics, trailing after my father from meeting to meeting.

Making endless cups of tea was my primary role, so as a girl, I witnessed the hard work required to achieve understanding and consensus, and I also witnessed the extraordinary change it can bring.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Cook anniversary provide a moment in time, a catalyst to see each other better, to strive for a more holistic national identity.

The delegation at Uluru watches on as the statement is read. ( ABC News: Stephanie Zillman )

My heritage reflects the nation's evolution over millennia. I am Arrernte and Kalkadoon, desert peoples, but I am also a descendant of immigrants: a poor Irish miner and German farmers.

I hope this hybrid heritage enables me to identify with these diverse parts of our nation and see it from multiple perspectives.

I am no expert, not an elder, politician, or lawyer, but I am Australian, and the aspirations articulated in the Uluru Statement about our shared country are for us, the Australian people. And that is why the statement is addressed to us, not the government of the day.

Indigenous aspirations consistent

The statement is the result of more than a decade's consideration and discussion around what has loosely been called Indigenous recognition — how the nation acknowledges its Indigenous history and resolves the legacy of colonisation within our contemporary society.

Over the past decade, this challenge has been considered by two parliamentary committees and two independent expert panels, who have reported to no less than five prime ministers.

Malcolm Turnbull was accused of trying to shut down discussion about Indigenous recognition. ( Getty: Stefan Postles )

Many thousands of Indigenous people have met from across the country to discuss what constitutional recognition might mean to them and what might be tenable for the broader Australian community.

These discussions are far from new, however.

In 1995, my father chaired 34 meetings with Indigenous people across 17 regions, to discuss what was referred to as 'the social justice package'.

It was intended to deal with issues that the Mabo Native Title Legislation could not address, and was commissioned 'in acknowledgement of continuing disadvantage and dispossession'.

Back then, the approaching anniversary was the 2001 centenary of Federation. My father and his committee members lodged their report and his words in the introduction strike me as being as relevant now as they were 20 years ago.

"This report is about recognition, rights and reform ... Our focus is on institutional, structural, collaborative, cooperative reform. This is not an invitation to sweep it under the carpet. It is a request to ensure it is properly considered and responded to in a timely and responsible manner," it read.

The report was swept under the carpet with a change of government.

The other milestone, of course, was the bicentennial, marking the 200th year of British occupation, celebrated on January 26, 1988.

With this important date approaching, Indigenous people from the Northern Territory, had prepared The Barunga Statement. It was a message to the prime minister Bob Hawke bordered with an expression of Aboriginal law, through the painted images from the dreaming, the Altyere, in my language.

People travelled from across the country to attend bicentennial celebrations in Sydney. ( Getty: Penny Tweedie )

Inside this border was a statement seeking a national Indigenous representative body, national land rights legislation (this was before the Mabo decision) and a treaty to be negotiated between the federal government and Indigenous Australians.

The prime minster agreed to these things, and hopes were high for a treaty process to begin.

So, there we were, on January 26, 1988 with great expectations.

As festivities to celebrate the arrival of Governor Phillip were underway down at Circular Quay, we walked en masse in procession through the streets of Sydney to make the Indigenous presence felt. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had travelled from across the nation to be in Sydney.

I was there alongside my countrymen and women, their bodies glistening with red ochre.

They had made the 3,000-kilometre journey from the red centre, to hear the promises delivered.

Their boomerangs clattering, the sound ricocheted off the sandstone underpass as we walked under the trainlines at Central Station.

Our fellow Australians were also beside us, in numbers that hadn't been seen since the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s.

It was an incredible moment, but its resolution was the anti-climax of the century.

Something we did not ask for

The promise, as Mandawuy Yunupingu and Paul Kelly wrote in their epic song Treaty, disappeared, like writing on the sand.

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Instead, we were given something else, something we did not ask for.

I remember after the crowds had left; the Sydney streets were littered with pamphlets the government had given us.

I held one in my hand and wondered what it meant. The smiling face of the minister for aboriginal affairs featured on the pamphlet and I remember the printed words.

They said something like 'Aboriginal leaders have been talking about reconciliation for many years'.

The pamphlet announced the government was embarking on a new process called Reconciliation.

Not a treaty.

Growing up around Aboriginal politics all my life I had never heard this word as a key priority, but there it was, a new policy that we were to march toward for the next 10 years, and then, when the destination was not arrived at, it was announced that it would take another 10.

Indeed, it is a process that seems to have no end.

Reconciliation is taking a long time to achieve. ( Twitter/ANTaR National )

A determination to be hopeful

I take you back into this past not to dwell on, but to demonstrate how Indigenous aspirations have been consistent, and that, despite disappointment, there is a determination to be hopeful. This is the fuel firing the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Fast forward to 2017. We are seated in the enormous auditorium at Uluru. I have bought in my luggage a massive 10-metre-wide Aboriginal flag that my sister-in law, a non-Indigenous woman, had sewn for my father's funeral 10 years prior.

It now hangs from the ceiling to the floor in the auditorium, alongside an equivalent scale Torres Strait Islander flag.

Three hundred delegates, flanked by these enormous flags, wait.

I think of my Dad, how he didn't live to see his country come to the resolution he had worked so hard for, and I remember his words, "we cannot live in the past, but the past lives in us".

This is an edited extract from the first of Rachel Perkins's Boyer Lectures. Her complete series of lectures, titled The End of Silence, will be broadcast on ABC RN.