Anzac booers were a ‘God moment’: How Uncle Ray’s grace answers the graceless

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In the middle of this week, a London-based friend of Uncle Ray Minniecon’s called him, incredulous. “What the hell have you been doing?” he asked. “You’ve been on the news all the way over here!” They both fell about laughing.

“What else can I do?” Uncle Ray tells me.

It’s been a strange week for Uncle Ray, a respected pastor, community leader and veteran, ever since he rose in the dark to do an Acknowledgment of Country for the Anzac Day dawn service in Sydney’s Martin Place and was rudely booed by a bunch of goats. It has been, he says, “a little bit crazy”.

But now, after a chorus of people said they were disgusted by the disrespect, he’s beginning to think it may have been a good thing. It could even have been a “God moment”, he says, a time when the ugliness that Aboriginal people are routinely exposed to has been revealed. “Like putting a prick in a boil,” he says, lancing the pus of hate. Showing the rest of the country what racism looks like, how it simmers on our streets and can noisily erupt even when a man of Uncle Ray’s standing speaks with reverence of those who fell for our country.

One of the booers, a 24-year-old man, has been arrested for “an alleged act of nuisance”, while others were moved on by police.

The booing of Indigenous Australians involved in Anzac services didn’t just happen in Sydney, but in Melbourne and Perth, too.

The hatefulness that most of us don’t see – because it is not directed at us – was........

© Brisbane Times