Last month, Brent McGregor gathered a group of six retirees at his seaside home to talk about the Indigenous voice to parliament.
The Torquay resident, a former theatre director, facilitated the conversation over a spread of dates, nuts and freshly baked scones, deploying the poise and confidence learned on the stage in an attempt to affect constitutional change.
“I was sitting there thinking, this is just like the first day of theatre rehearsal,” he says.
It was one of the first kitchen table conversations of the Together, Yes campaign – a grassroots initiative to help build knowledge and sharpen insights around constitutional recognition for First Nations people.
The 77-year-old decided to host the event after attending a Together, Yes forum in Geelong.
“Most people don’t have enough information because of the no campaign wanting to obstruct and confuse,” McGregor says. “And if they don’t know, they’ll go with the mantra ‘don’t know, vote no’ because it’s easy.
“We have to come up with a good oppositional mantra.”
Kitchen table conversations, the Together, Yes organisers suggest, should be a gathering of up to 10 people in comfortable and non-threatening environments, which allow participants to engage in an open and honest dialogue about the voice proposal.
Each group will host two conversations, with McGregor set to host his second at the end of June.
Each host is supplied with a special activities kit that provides information about the voice and the referendum process, as well as broader information on Australia’s Indigenous history.
“Part of the kit includes a series of cards which we are encouraged to put face down on the table,” McGregor says. “It’s the timeline of what’s happened with the Aboriginal people in their attempts to get a voice, going back 150 years.
“As we read those cards, the length of time it has taken for Indigenous people to get a voice dawned on everyone, and the mood changed. That was a key educational moment.”
The information cards include facts that may be assumed to be common knowledge, but which are relatively recent additions to school curriculums. “Quite a few people didn’t know the Indigenous people had been around for more than 60,000 years,” McGregor says. “They hadn’t seen that presented in front of them before.”
Therese Masterson lives in Cairns, where a Together, Yes forum was held in April. She held her first kitchen table conversation a few weeks ago.
She says she has been concerned about the lack of support for the voice in far north Queensland.
“It’s very negative up here, very negative,” Masterson says. “There are some strong anti-voicers and the media is not on side. There is a lot of scaremongering stuff going on.”
She says that negative messaging appears to have worked on “very good citizens and people you think should be more informed”, who have taken what she describes as a “shortsighted” view against the voice.
Masterson, who is a Sister of Mercy, rallied together a few people from her church for the kitchen table event.
“We have to do our little bit,” she says. “Whether anyone takes any notice is another thing.”
Alana Johnson is the chair of the Victorian Women’s Trust, the organisers behind the Together, Yes movement. She says the campaign hosted a number of forums as a precursor to the kitchen table conversations, to give prospective hosts the tools to “take the next step of being proactive in their communities and increase support”.
“The vast majority of people who came to the information sessions were of the understanding that voting yes is not enough,” Johnson says. “They felt an obligation to support the yes campaign and ensure the referendum is passed.”
Johnson says the kitchen table conversations model inevitably spark participants into action – an effect that has been evident since the Victorian Women’s Trust launched the movement in 1998.
“It never ended with a conversation. It always went from conversation to action and that’s the magic of it,” she says.
“Since these forums, people who want to take a leadership role in securing the referendum have been meeting together to take a collective approach to supporting the yes campaign in their towns. Some are having stalls, meetings, going doorknocking – so there’s a whole lot of things beyond the kitchen table conversations depending on what works in their community.”
McGregor says he is passionate about the voice becoming a reality. He plans to host a second kitchen table group in an effort to get more locals talking.
“It wasn’t an indoctrination session but an information session,” he says. “As people realise the enormity of the past, the pennies drop. The education process allows them to open up rather than have me forcing a point of view.”
