The battle over the Indigenous voice to parliament looks different in Tasmania than anywhere else in Australia. For one thing, the polls show the yes campaign still in the lead – the only state where that has been the case for the past month and more. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is also the only state where none of the main representatives of the political parties are backing no – from the premier, Jeremy Rockliff, and the prominent Liberal MP Bridget Archer through to Labor, the Greens and the two senators from the Jacqui Lambie Network.
And then there is 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 from 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 slipped between generations – it spread across history books and in classrooms, carving a place in the minds of many Australians.
Patsy Cameron stands in her dining room in Tomahawk, a small fishing village on the north-east coast of the island. She is living proof that the brutal plan to destroy the Aboriginal people of the island was not successful.
She tells a story – a few decades old – of how she boarded a plane back from Darwin, 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 a cabinet is 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 learnt 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.
Cameron and her son Nick are leading the yes campaign in the north-east. They are direct descendants of Mannalargenna, a warrior who lived across 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.
“When we consider the families that have survived ... they come from about three nations out of nine or 13 that would have existed in those early colonial days.”
Neither of them were invited to the Uluru meeting in 2017 that produced the blueprint for the voice, but Nick, who leads the Melythina Tiakana Warrana (Heart of Country) Aboriginal Corporation, says they hope a voice will give them a seat at the table, and agency over their futures.
“The solutions for Tasmania are not the same solutions for Arnhem Land, because we are completely different people,” he says. “We might be First Nations, we might have similar cultural linkages, but we are all culturally unique.”
No known survivors
Despite the relentless opposition to the voice from the federal Liberal party under Peter Dutton, the most outspoken campaigners in favour of it in Tasmania are Liberals – Rockliff and 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.”
As an immediate priority, Archer wants to see levels of Indigenous incarceration fall – in 2021-22 one in four prisoners in Tasmanian jails were Indigenous, compared with just over 5% of the general population.
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 impacts of colonisation.
“The time is now,” she says. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
“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.”
Where past and present meet
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 350,000 acres (140,000 hectares) 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 between 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 – the number itself is a point of contention between the groups – compared with 5.4% across the whole state.
Adding to the tension is Preminghana, a heritage site on the north-west coast which 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 Aboriginal community in Tasmania have maintained that Aboriginal people have never ceded our sovereignty,” Mansell says. “We have a right to determine our own destinies and make decisions that affect our people.”
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. Ulverstone local Lyndon O’Neil also traces his lineage back to Mannalargenna. O’Neil considers himself before he speaks – and as he talks gentle 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.”
• This article was amended on 2 October 2023 to correct the spelling of Lyndon O’Neil’s first name and also Ulverstone.
