The debate about the Voice to Parliament, as I see it, is part of our search for a national Australian identity: Who are we? What are our values? How do we wish to be known in the world?
Australia's national identity changes as generations are born, and immigrants arrive. Young people explore their world and seek new paths. Immigrants bring long histories and rich cultures from other places. All contribute to the mix.
But I believe that our national identity will - in the end - be grounded in our special place: the land, the rivers and seas, the animals, and the plants of our continent.
It can't be any other way.
Our various traditions will contribute to an Australian identity, but - in the end - it is our relationship to our unique land that will shape Australian character.
Indigenous Australians and the land have nurtured each other for millennia, and the relationship between the people, the land and its plants and animals, gives direction for the rest of us in our quest for identity.
Our First Nations cultures are vastly different to our post-1788 cultures. Indigenous Australians are the colonised, and the rest of us are colonisers. We are the invaders, and they are the invaded.
Of course, my half-dozen convict ancestors and my numerous free immigrant forebears had no idea that they were part of the invasion: but the British crown did, and the vast numbers of post-1788 immigrants are minions in the invasion. And beneficiaries of it.
It is our First Nations' history and culture that makes a Voice to Parliament appropriate for them, and them alone. Current questions about why we should treat one group in a special way with a Voice to Parliament has its answer here.
Only one group was here before 1788, and they were here from the deepest of human time. The rest of us are new.
The meeting of Indigenous Australians and Europeans saw perhaps the strangest cultural dissonance in human history.
Yet Indigenous culture has done much to shape the country. Australia is probably best known in the world for its Indigenous art and culture. It is valued on every inhabited continent.
Indigenous art plays a role in how we see ourselves, and how others see us. It is a major contribution to the formation of our identity.
The negative effects of colonisation on the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians are well known ('Gap Report Highlights need for a Voice', Editorial, 14/7).
Ultimately, it is probably the horrendous inroads colonisation made to people's sense and sensibility, their inner core, that is the worst of it.
My mob - the British - and those who followed, expected the Indigenous to speak our language, to adopt our religion, to wear our clothes, to eat our food, to engage with our culture, and to reject their heritage. This forced destructive change in their world view and a contrived re-engagement with the cosmos.
Of course, the colonisers bought knowledge and skill of value to Indigenous people, and not all colonist-colonised relationships were negative, but the dispossession and genocidal waves they endured caused immeasurable harm.
To understand The Voice we can read the Uluru Statement, and then the various discussion publications and web sites.
The Voice will give Indigenous people a strong voice on issues such as the high rates of incarceration, how to provide education that best suits their needs, and how to bring better health outcomes to First Nations people. Had there been a Voice at the time, the intervention of the 1990s could have been avoided.
The Voice will add agency to Aboriginal people and help them - and all of us - to live in greater dignity.
The Voice would bring practical benefit, and it would bring spiritual benefit. The Uluru Statement invites all Australians to "walk together in a movement of the Australian people for a better future".
It is a simple, warm, and generous invitation.
It is an act of kindness. The rest of us should now respond with similar warmth, generosity, and kindness.
- Dr Roland Bannister is an ethnomusicologist and family and community history researcher who lives in Newcastle
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