What can history show us about the significance of the referendum on 14 October? If “history is calling”, whose voices from the past can we hear?
In April, the Australian National University became one of the nation’s first universities to “unreservedly” declare its support for “enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice in the constitution”. Keen to offer further support, historians and other prominent Australians have provided informed, trustworthy and easily accessible historical information online that would help Australians to understand the long journey to the 2023 referendum.
The events we’ve highlighted aren’t the only examples of Indigenous Australians petitioning for their rights – there were also many statements, petitions, ceremonies and peace negotiations before 1901 – but they are certainly among the most pivotal since federation. Without knowledge of this history we believe it’s impossible for voters to understand where the campaign for Indigenous recognition and the voice has come from.
We believe that empathy can only be built on knowledge and understanding. In the words of Yorta Yorta man William Cooper in 1937, Aboriginal peoples’ memories of dispossession, violence and discrimination meant they had something in their “blood”, which “recall[ed] the terrible things done to them in years gone by”. In 1992, delivering the Redfern Park speech, prime minister Paul Keating reminded us we had failed “to imagine these things being done to us”; a point reiterated when we asked former prime minister Kevin Rudd to reflect on his apology speech in 2008. “The question I posed to the nation that day was a stark one,” writes Rudd. “What if that which had happened to Indigenous Australians had happened to those of us who are white Australians?”
Even a cursory glance at the history of Indigenous Australians’ struggle for rights and recognition demonstrates that many of the momentous achievements in the 20th century took years to achieve. As Prof Marilyn Lake explains, the 1967 referendum arose not from government but from more than a decade’s campaigning on the part of activists such as Jessie Street, Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs and many others. Equally, as Prof Henry Reynolds observes, the 1992 Mabo decision was first placed before the courts in May 1982 “when five Meriam people from Murray Island in the eastern Torres Strait began proceedings to assert their right to their traditional lands”. The referendum on 14 October is no different.
Like the Uluru statement from the heart and the coming referendum, the history of Indigenous protest and petitioning also demonstrates Indigenous activists’ respect for the institutions of governance and their willingness to work with them. The suggestion that Aboriginal people are seeking advantages not granted to other Australians by proposing a voice to parliament – a claim designed to stoke resentment and fear – crumbles when we listen to their countless calls for justice and recognition since the British invasion began in 1788. It’s their voices that are calling us on 14 October.
Like the voices of Wiradjuri elders Jimmy Clements and John Noble who, in 1927, walked over 150km from Brungle Aboriginal Reserve near Tumut in southern New South Wales to attend the opening of Canberra’s first Parliament House in the presence of the Duke and Duchess of York. At the very moment the sovereignty of the British crown was asserted they came to remind white Australia that their “sovereign rights” had not been ceded.
Then there are the countless voices for land rights and cultural recognition: the 1963 bark petitions, two of which became the first petitions presented to federal parliament in an Australian language; the 1967 Gurindji petition to the governor general (“We feel that morally the land is ours and should be returned to us”); the 1972 Larrakia petition to the Queen (“The British settlers took our land. No treaties were signed with the Tribes. Today we are … Refugees in the Country of our ancestors … We need land rights and political representation now.”)
One of the most powerful statements we received came from Djambawa Marawili, the leader of the Yolngu Yithuwa Madarrpa clan in Bäniyala in East Arnhem Land, and one of the artists who contributed to the Barunga statement in 1988. The statement seemed to speak for all Aboriginal people. The English text, which included demands for self-determination, a “national elected Aboriginal and Islander organisation to oversee Aboriginal and Islander affairs”, and a “compact” or treaty, is effectively a translation of the striking images that surround the statement, painted by nine artists from both regions. The text and images “cannot be differentiated” because the paintings are not ornamental; they are existential; they are the signature of the ancestors; they are country; they are the Barunga statement. Djambawa spoke of the connections between Barunga and the referendum on recognition and the voice:
Today, I’m not comfortable unless we reflect on the Barunga statement and learn from it. I think it about all the time. We need to go back and understand the journey of the Barunga statement, and the long history of our struggle. We knew where we were going. We were making a pathway for all Australians to walk together for generations to come – to open our minds, our blood, and our soul. But the treaty didn’t happen. Now, we’re trying again in a different way.
It seems remarkable that this “different way” – a simple request to be recognised in the constitution through the establishment of an advisory body – should have become the subject of so much “division”, fear and hysteria, especially when there is evidence of agreement across the political divide. When prime minister John Howard committed his party to constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians in 2007, he stressed that “while ever our Indigenous citizens are left out or marginalised or feel their identity is challenged we are all diminished. It’s about appreciating that their long struggle for a fair place in the country is our struggle too.”
Intentionally or not, Howard’s words echoed those of former prime minister Gough Whitlam when he launched Labor’s election campaign in 1972: “All of us are diminished while Aboriginal peoples are denied their rightful place in this nation.”
The same belief underpinned prime minister Anthony Albanese’s view of constitutional recognition and the voice when he delivered his first major Indigenous affairs speech as opposition leader at Garma in 2019. “Until it exists,” said Albanese, “We are all diminished … it would be the ultimate fulfilment of that most Australian of instincts: the fair go.”
Without a grounded understanding and appreciation of the past our democratic foundations are vulnerable to the misinformation which we are seeing in the current debate on the voice. This project highlights the potential to incorporate the voices of ordinary Australians in a national truth-telling process that the Uluru statement from the heart calls for. It reminds us that the telling of history is not static. It is forever changing and finding new ways to tell our future stories.
The referendum on 14 October is an opportunity to rise above needless fear and find common ground; to end our repeated failure to listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians and move forwards as a reconciled nation.
Mark McKenna is a writer and historian. He is emeritus professor in history at the University of Sydney and an honorary professor at the National Centre of Biography at the ANU
Peter Yu is a Yawuru man from Broome in the Kimberley region in Western Australia with over 40 years’ experience in Indigenous development and advocacy in the Kimberley and at the state, national and international level. He was recently chief executive officer of the Yawuru Corporate Group and is the inaugural vice-president First Nations at the Australian National University
The Quest for Recognition project launches on 11 September
