Patsy Cameron stands in her dining room in Tomahawk – a small fishing village on the north-east coast of Tasmania, Australia. She tells a story – a few decades old – of how she boarded a plane back from Darwin, her hands full of cultural objects she had bought. The man next to her turned and said: “They should have shot them all like they did to the Tasmanians.” She started crying. He responded by offering her a piece of cake, and an apology.
Behind her is a cabinet full of shell necklaces and drawings of her ancestors. The home she shares with her husband, Graham, is filled with cultural artefacts that the historian learned to make by reading diaries and anthologies of colonisers. Piece by piece she has put history back together. Piece by piece she is reviving her culture.
The reason she is having to do this is because of the persistent myth that haunts Tasmanian Aboriginal people – that they no longer exist.
It has its roots in the murderous colonial project that tried to wipe out the original inhabitants of the island in the 19th century, and the framing of the Nuenonne woman Truganini as “the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race” before her death in 1876. The myth spread across history books and in classrooms, carving a place in the minds of many Australians.
All of this helps to explain why 14 October is so important, not just to Cameron but to many other Indigenous people across Australia. This is the day the country will go to the polls to vote on whether to establish in the constitution the principle of an Indigenous voice – an elected body to advise the national parliament on policies that affect the lives of Indigenous people.
The proposal is backed by the government, many businesses, the national sporting leagues and other institutions, and supported by a large majority of Indigenous people, according to the polls. But it has come under sustained attack from, among others, the leadership of the Liberal and National opposition parties.
It has been a bitter and unedifying campaign, with accusations of racism, misinformation, bad faith arguments and divisiveness. Referendums to change the constitution need a simple majority of all voters, but also a majority of the six states to vote in favour. Polls showed initial enthusiasm for the voice, with more than 60% in favour, but as the weeks have passed the no side has taken large chunks out of that vote and the proposal seems destined to fail.
But in Tasmania things are different
There, the polls show the yes campaign still in the lead – it is the only state where that has been the case for the past month and more.
Cameron and her son, Nick, are leading the yes campaign in the north-east. They are direct descendants of Mannalargenna, a warrior who lived on the same patch of coast in the early 19th century before being exiled to the Furneaux Islands.
“The impacts of colonisation on the first peoples of Tasmania were so horrific and continue to the present day,” Cameron says.
Despite the relentless opposition to the voice from the federal Liberal party, the most outspoken campaigners in favour of it in Tasmania are Liberals – Tasmanian premier Jeremy Rockliff and MP Bridget Archer.
Archer lives in George Town, a small community north of Launceston that sits along the Tamar river. Before colonisation it was the territory of the Stony Creek people, but there are no known survivors.
“That entire people, they don’t exist any more,” Archer says. “If that happens anywhere else in the world, we call that genocide. That’s what’s happened in Tasmania.
“Within living memory, we have members of the stolen generation,” she says, “There’s injustice that has to be dealt with, that has to be addressed.”
Archer says the voice will provide the framework to consult communities on these issues, leading the process of reconciliation and lifting people out from under the effects of colonisation. “It’s been a hard debate. If it’s not going to affect 97% of the population, they’ll wake up the day after the referendum and nothing’s going to change. But for some of the most disadvantaged people in our country, it’s a chance for a brighter future.
“The time is now,” she says. “This is a once in a generation opportunity.”
On the north-west coast, the green rolling hills hold a heavy history. Perched on a windy hill above the town of Stanley is Highfield House. Built in 1826, the homestead was the headquarters of the Van Diemen’s Land Company – which took 140,000 hectares (350,000 acres) of land from Aboriginal Tasmanians to make money farming sheep.
Now it is a place where the past and the present meet. On one wall visitors find a diary excerpt from Rosalie Hare, the wife of a ship’s captain who stayed there in 1828.
“We have to lament that our own countrymen consider the massacre of these people an honour,” she wrote. “While we remained at Circular Head there were several accounts of considerable numbers of natives having been shot by them, they wishing to extirpate them entirely if possible.”
Politics among some of the Aboriginal groups on the island is fraught. There are long-held tensions over who can identify. The largest group, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (Tac), questions the authenticity of the regional organisation, the Circular Head Aboriginal Corporation (Chac).
Highfield House sits within the local government area of Circular Head, where 17% of the region’s 8,000 people now identify as Aboriginal – a figure that has become a source of contention between the two groups – compared with 5.4% across the whole state.
Adding to the tension is Preminghana – a heritage site on the north-west coast that is managed by Tac rangers. Chac sees the site as culturally significant but has no access to it.
But on the voice the two groups are united – they are advocating for a no vote, though for very different reasons.
Tac sees it as a toothless tiger. Its spokesperson, Nala Mansell, says they haven’t fought to be advisers.
The chair of Chac, Selina Maguire-Colgrave, was a yes supporter at first, but now says Chac will vote no. She says the organisation already has access to parliament through the local MP, Gavin Pearce (he did not reply to a request for an interview), and is worried it might lose that access if the referendum were successful – that the voice would leave them with no voice.
“I don’t think we would have such an issue with the voice if we knew [it] would be fair and equitable,” Maguire-Colgrave says. “They [Tac] are not recognising our communities as Aboriginal yet. So it’s kind of the cart before the horse for us. We don’t have a seat at the table.”
As the debate has heated up, the impact on First Nations people has been hard.
Lyndon O’Neil, who lives in Ulverstone, also traces his lineage back to Mannalargenna. O’Neil considers himself before he speaks – and as he talks tears form in his eyes.
He says he was prepared for division, but he’s worried about how it has affected his four children. He wants the voice to help people understand they are always connected to country.
Tasmania is a small place – the descendants of Aboriginal people live side by side with those of settlers, he says. “History will always be history, we can’t change that. But I think there’s lots of good things that we can focus on together and come together on.”
