I can’t believe this old line is running wild again. We have had land rights decisions (“They’re gonna take your house and barbecue pit, mate”); the Mabo decision (Again, “They’re gonna take, etc,”); followed by the Wik judgment of 1996 (“Mate, your swimming pool too!”); and now that crude three-times-disproved claim is back, with all the other astonishing lies. They burn like lurid rockets in our sky. And those who launch them, knowing that they will harm all who gaze upon them, are proud of them! Yet if in a public setting you accused these folk of being dishonest, they’d want to fight you to assert their honour.
They pretend that the new advisory body, the voice, representing 3% of us, will persuade the government to pass some berserk law that will disadvantage the other 97% of the vote and thus be sure to lose power at the next election! And in the gloom of mendacity, the small plea of First Nations people burns on: let us counsel you on what will work for us. In health, housing, schooling let us help ensure against waste and ill-aimed expensive policies that have no chance of working. And help us live as long as you.
The no campaign is telling us lies based on a system of government that has never existed in Australia. They will do damage far beyond the vote. For example, there’s no capital punishment in Australia, is there? Good for us! Yet there has been, since the royal commission into Indigenous deaths in custody in 1992, in excess of 550 First Nations people who have died in forms of custody. There’s your capital punishment. Death for Aboriginals. We’ve done better than Texas.
I knew in the 1980s, long before the royal commission, an immensely gifted man who died in custody; an Aboriginal performer with whom I travelled and whom I saw enchanting audiences at the Long Wharf Theatre in Connecticut. Back in Australia, he took a car to which he had regular access, but in this case the owners reported it missing and he was stopped and arrested. Was he capable of assuming he had permission when he might not? Sure. But is assuming permission a crime deserving death? He was found hanging in his cell even before Indigenous deaths were particularly noted except by the extremely well-informed, of whom I was not one.
But now there are juveniles in our adult prisons – just as on the First Fleet – and the majority of them are Aboriginal. They will continue to be locked in adult prisons and only Aboriginal advice will alter what is an appalling, disgraceful national fact. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are asking for a non-legislative obligation to craft policies that will alter Australia for the better. To refuse this chance, to vote no, is a form of assent to these and other pyramids of Indigenous death.
One of the most demeaning lies is that First Nations people who have succeeded in white culture are elites with nothing to tell us of their own people. For over 80 years now I’ve heard the complaints about how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people won’t take advantage of opportunities, but now we have many who have. “Elite” is a common word used by the press. It turns, for those at whom it is levelled, a right to say the truth into an arrogant presumption.
When I was young and still had auburn hair, I wrote a novel about one Jimmie Blacksmith, who goes berserk when being told that if he makes himself white in behaviour, he will be respected as a white proves untrue. This is the greatest lie, the “elite” lie, and it is one imposed against the talents of notable First Nations people. Let me honour some of them here: Alexis Wright, Marcia Langton, Stan Grant, Ellen van Neerven, Melissa Lucashenko, Anita Heiss, Ali Cobby Eckermann. The term “elite” implies a slippery escape from the ranks. To label such stars elite is an insult to rival all other insults.
Only a yes vote can erase such silliness. Only a yes vote opens the gate that has been closed for 250 years and – according to the no campaign – can continue to be closed for another skein of years. As for yes, I have been driven, in my last two weeks of being merely 87, to address my demographic of old folk in a clunky bush rap and to urge that we must not go saying no.
“Yes” is the kindly river in an equal land:
“Yes” is the close of fight, and peace as planned.
Vote “Yes” and end the fatal wars
Of weapons and of laws.
Say, “Yes” and bless the field where seed is cast,
Say, “Yes” and shame the bullets of the past,
Say, “Yes”, old woman and old bloke,
At last put out the fires the haters stoke.
While all the normal talk-jocks tell you, “Wait!”
Ask what they have to gain through their stale hate?
They live off Us-All versus Them, not off you and me,
In equal status of the truly free!
In equal status then! Save us from ourselves. Vote YES!
• Thomas Keneally is a novelist. He is the author of more than 40 books, including the Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark
