Description
This article uses the Yoorrook Justice Commission as a critical site for understanding how contemporary truth processes engage with ongoing empire. Yoorrook, a Royal Commission on the events and enduring impacts of British colonisation in the Australia state of Victoria, represents the most ambitious attempt to date to reckon with the legacies of colonisation within a settler polity, combining First Peoples leadership, public hearings, thematic inquiries, and an explicit mandate to address structural harm. Yet its design and operation also reveal the limits of truth-telling confined to a single jurisdiction: the state remains both subject and arbiter of truth, material repair is deferred to policy, and imperial structures that extend beyond national borders remain out of reach. Drawing on submissions, hearings, and institutional design documents, complemented by 34 interviews with those involved, the article distils what Yoorrook gets right and identifies where it falters. Mapping these lessons against a broader architecture for reckoning with empire, it proposes key design principles for future processes: transnational jurisdiction and standing; community-governed archives and evidentiary parity; and mechanisms that connect findings to redistributive action. The argument positions Yoorrook not as an endpoint but as a generative experiment in 'learning forward', a model whose tensions illuminate how truth-telling might evolve to meet the global scale of imperial harm.
