It poses an interesting question about power: how we get it and how we share it. I probably would have refused my invitation in the past, and I might in the future. That’s not to say that my values are flimsy – it’s that the sharing of those spaces could impact my life differently at different times.

If you’re the beneficiary of power and privilege, especially inherited at birth, perhaps the only way you see to rectify that imbalance is to share space with others who’ve had worse luck and lives. I know there are those among us who maintain the rage on behalf of us all and who want vengeance and reparations, but at this point in my life, isn’t being invited into these spaces what I’ve been asking for?

I’ve gone to the cradle of modern colonisation, the birthplace of the dispossession and oppression of my people, to study the policy and politics behind it at Oxford University. Wouldn’t it be remiss of me to refuse to go directly to the source? Sure, it would be easy to ignore the invitation, or to say thanks but no thanks, but who does that serve? I’d feel morally superior, but what about the work I aspire to do?

One of the projects I’d desperately love to work on while I’m away from Australia is the repatriation of Indigenous artefacts and remains. Every time I travel from Sydney to London I think about all the objects gathering dust in the basements of museums when they could be encased in glass and put on full display as a reminder of our brutal and uncomfortable past.

So, I went into the meeting with a plan, armed with briefings from friends who’d had knowledge of the repatriation of the Gweagal Spears and the people at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies who are doing incredible work to have these important objects returned to their places of origin.

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I knew that if I met the King or Queen, I didn’t want to just stand there and curtsy and giggle. I wanted to push something forward, to do something other than have a squiz inside in the palace (although that was part of the allure). In the end, I spoke with Queen Camilla about programs designed to prevent domestic violence.

On that day, I chose to engage because I saw no other way through it. Rage doesn’t fit my purpose. To disengage would be to forfeit indigeneity or wave a white flag. So, quietly, in the cradle of colonisation, I’ll carve some sort of path through these weeds, untangling my own thoughts and trauma as I go. I’ll try to make things a little better in any ways I can. Occasionally, that might mean accepting an invitation to the palace.

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