Dozens of cars pass a handmade “vote no” sign stapled to a post on the side of the road near the centre of Deniliquin – one of many signs to appear in the New South Wales town as the referendum on the Indigenous voice to parliament creeps closer.
Jeanette Crew, a prominent Wamba Wamba elder known to locals as Aunty Jenny, says misinformation whipped up by the voice debate has made some feel “safer to come out and express their racial attitudes”.
She and her husband, David, received racist hate mail at their home in June containing images of the couple cut out from the local paper. It appeared to be in response to their involvement in National Reconciliation Week. The images had been labelled with personal and racial slurs.
This was the second such letter the Crews have received in the past 12 months. There have also been phone calls and visits to the Yarkuwa Indigenous Knowledge Centre, which Jenny chairs and where David works as the general manager. All incidents have been reported to the Deniliquin police station and police are investigating.
“When you have these types of conversations, these inflammatory words, it makes people feel threatened and it doesn’t go away,” David says.
For Jenny it brings up memories of moving from the Moonahcullah Aboriginal Station to the school in town in the 1960s.
“We’d constantly be fighting in the playground, being made fun of, kids being surprised that I actually had red blood,” she says. “Because the kids who we played with in the playground had this idea that we had ‘black blood’.”
More than 60 years later, she worries that these kinds of racial attacks may be happening again in local schools, fuelled by toxicity surrounding the referendum.
“Our little kids actually don’t understand that they’re ending up being the victims of something they don’t understand,” she says. “And it’s not fair, in any sense of the word.”
‘Serious misinformation’
David spoke out about the hate mail in the Deniliquin Pastoral Times in June. He says Yarkuwa has since received reports about “serious misinformation” about the voice being spread online and in the local community.
“A consultant came to me and said that she’d been hearing so much [misinformation] when she was out talking to people about the water history of the Forest Creek, and the voice came up,” he says. “Then they said that: the voice will take all the decisions away from us. They think this will lead to their farms being taken from them.
“This was the same fear when the NSW land rights legislation was passed in the 1980s and the native title legislation in the 1990s, yet no land was taken from anyone.”
He recalls the rancour when the Aboriginal Land Rights Act came into effect in 1983, from non-Indigenous locals who believed that it would result in them “losing their back yards”.
“If you go on Twitter or Facebook there’s so much misinformation there,” he says. “If that’s where you’re going to get your information, you’re going to get so much misinformation, so come and talk to us locally.”
Jenny says it is difficult to cut through that misinformation.
“It is of no threat to anybody,” she says of the voice. “It’ll just help our voices to be heard, to give the benefit not only to Aboriginal people but to our local economy and our own local society.”
The Deniliquin-based National party senator Perin Davey does not support a yes vote – arguing that “enshrining a representative agency that will and can only represent one cohort of our community” is not the right way to close the gap – but she says the debate should remain respectful.
“Racism should never be tolerated and I implore everyone to be respectful in their discussions about this important issue,” Davey says.
She says there have been attacks on people “on both sides” of the referendum debate.
“Just as we have seen the absolutely reprehensible attacks on David and Jeanette Crew, who I have the utmost respect for and who only want the best for their community, I have also seen vile attacks on people like my colleague and friend Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.”
‘I really dread a no vote’
Misinformation surrounding the referendum is causing “a lot of stress and distress” for First Nations people, Jenny says.
She believes if the outcome is a no vote it will have a devastating impact on First Nations people. To her it will feel like a rejection.
“A no vote would actually divide us even more, and I personally would feel unwelcome in my own country,” she says.
“If there’s a no vote, things are only going to get worse. It’s just another thing that will become part of the unresolved generational grief.
“I really dread a no vote.”
Fleur Connick is a journalist in central west NSW
