The problem is clear in the latest Closing the Gap annual report, a masterful example of sophisticated political management and bureaucratic obfuscation. This tightly organised combination of new and previous policy commitments, 2023 achievements and key actions for 2024 purports to outline the Commonwealth’s strategic priorities for the next year. But closer analysis reveals deep-seated flaws in policy design, strategic omissions and evasions and a deep-seated lack of ambition, all wrapped in a slick presentation replete with selective case studies, graphics, some useful governance charts and an avalanche of uninformative facts and figures. There is nothing strategic about this document.

The previous government was more inclined to blame the victim, cut funding and pursue punitive policies. It reshaped the Closing the Gap architecture, reconstituting and expanding its targets. Most importantly, it created a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap that directly engaged First Nations in shaping policy while shifting the bulk of political and policy responsibility — and future blame — to the states and territories.

For Labor, the failure of the Voice referendum has exposed a deficient policy framework and diminished its preparedness to pursue substantive reform. In desperation, it has fallen back — holus bolus — on the previous government’s policy architecture.

Despite their tactical and ideological differences, both major parties have used excessively complex bureaucratic processes, extremely low transparency, high-flown promises and the tactical politicisation of specific issues to divert attention from more important underlying issues. Their guiding principles appear to be to deflect, defer and delay.

A fundamental problem with the national agreement is that its policy architecture is extraordinarily over-engineered. It was designed not by a single committee of state, territory and Commonwealth bureaucrats but by negotiations between that committee and a committee of Indigenous representatives. The asymmetric power imbalance inevitably produced an imperfect structure.

It is hard to believe that the government negotiators didn’t see the ramifications of the extraordinarily complex structure that emerged from the negotiations. It created multiple choke points at which multi-party consultation and coordination is required, encouraging a culture of inertia and stasis.

To take just one important example, the agreement identifies nineteen targets and four priority reforms and allocates responsibility for implementation to eight state and territory jurisdictions along with the Commonwealth and the Australian Local Government Association. The Coalition of Indigenous Peaks — which itself has a nascent federal structure in each state and territory — is also ostensibly an equal partner.

No line of sight nor responsibility exists between any one target and any one government or minister: responsibilities and accountability are shared across a highly complex geographical and sectoral matrix involving layers of mainstream and Indigenous-specific programs. National-level data is deficient across all targets and all four priority reforms, at least partly because the targets themselves have been poorly chosen and loosely specified. Most importantly, the targets are not aligned with dedicated investment strategies.

The four priority reforms at the heart of the agreement would best be seen as overarching frameworks. But they have been broken down into arbitrary elements to be measured and reported on, notwithstanding the vagueness of these elements and their poor fit with existing data. Instead of bringing macro-level strategic coherence the four priorities have been converted into arenas of micro-focused navel-gazing.

While the agreement requires each jurisdiction to publish an annual report and develop an on-going implementation plan, the joint council that manages its operation decided some years ago to shift to annual implementation plans, adding a further layer of process. Instead of being a roadmap laying out each jurisdiction’s multi-year pathway to each target, the plans merely recount innumerable actions and funding decisions, most with limited timeframes.

The latest Commonwealth implementation plan lists sixty-five commitments of varying significance; state and territory plans are generally much more complicated. A requirement that jurisdictions explain how they would “close the gap” has been transformed into a requirement to publish a profusion of meaningless facts and intentions to develop plans.

By combining that latest implementation plan with its annual report the Commonwealth has signalled its unwillingness to develop and lay out a longer-term roadmap. Its decision-making is very much at odds with the recent Productivity Commission review of Closing the Gap, which recommends that implementation plans reflect a more strategic approach.

Any serious attempt to lay out such a roadmap would involve two elements that are seemingly anathema to the Australian government. First, the Commonwealth would need to establish a framework to coordinate the disparate and largely inadequate efforts of the states and territories. This is a glaring hole in Closing the Gap’s architecture and desperately needs attention not just from the Indigenous Australians minister but also from the treasurer, the finance minister and the prime minister.

Notwithstanding its potential to give First Nations people access to policymaking, the national agreement has formalised a regression across the federation towards the inertia last experienced before 1967. Labor would face few insurmountable obstacles if it resolved to reverse direction and effectively coordinate government efforts to deal with Indigenous disadvantage across the federation. A failure to do so will risk Closing the Gap imploding under its own weight.

The second element of a realistic and effective roadmap would be an estimate of the size of the multi-year investments required. This would facilitate better decision-making, assist in placing the myriad demands on governments in perspective and assess the financial costs — the imputed shortfalls in funding, in other words — that First Nations Australians continue to bear.

Unfortunately the Commonwealth’s latest implementation plan appears designed to preclude even modest reforms like these.

Many other questions and issues aren’t dealt with in the Commonwealth’s plan. There’s space here to look at just two of them.

The Community Development Program provides income support and job search for around 40,000 participants in remote Australia. This year’s Closing the Gap annual report lists a total 1950 new jobs employment placements/jobs created under CDP. Even so, the prime minister announced that the government was “moving on” from the “failed Community Development Program” and establishing a Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program to help community organisations create 3000 jobs over three years in remote areas, at a cost of $707 million. This funding for real jobs in regions where employment opportunities are scarce or non-existent is welcome and long overdue. Unfortunately, it is pathetically unambitious. And what is the future for the 37,000 CDP participants? Will they continue in a “failed” program?

A second example: the report lists ninety-eight actions from last year’s implementation plan and reports on their status. Most are mere process matters. Nine are listed as delayed; one as “stopped.” The latter is target 9b, relating to remote essential services infrastructure (though that’s not spelt out in the report). The target, which was approved by ministers in August 2022, states:

By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

• within discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard

• in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town…

Last year the Commonwealth declared that “delivering on Target 9b will provide vital infrastructure to support liveable, safe, sustainable and healthy communities for all First Nations peoples… The initial focus for the target will be on the development of a new Community Infrastructure Implementation Plan, in collaboration with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) and key stakeholders.”

Why then, without explanation, has work on the implementation plan for “vital infrastructure” been stopped? Perhaps the Commonwealth fears a remote infrastructure implementation plan would encourage the states to demand increased Commonwealth funding. So much for mobilising all avenues and opportunities to overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

All in all, the latest Closing the Gap report makes for depressing reading. It comes across as a convoluted box-ticking exercise, overflowing with plans, partnership committees, good news stories and the like. It makes no serious attempt to look behind the available data to acknowledge and reflect on the challenges of those families caught up in extreme poverty, cycles of alcohol-and drug-induced despair, youth suicides, and the trauma of extraordinary rates of incarceration and unfathomable out-of-home-care rates for Indigenous children.

The report’s implicit agenda is to defer committing financial resources, and delay making difficult decisions. Sure, governments can’t solve all the nation’s problems, but it is inexcusable that, where governments do invest, resources don’t flow equitably.

The Closing the Gap process is perhaps the most useful way to bring these problems to the nation’s attention. Its success will require vision, political commitment and a preparedness to think through the policy issues and make decisions commensurate with the size and severity of the challenges. The Albanese government, like the government before it, has so far failed on all counts.

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously wrote that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” It is time the government commissioned an independent strategic review of the Indigenous policy domain, akin to the recent 2023 Defence Strategic Review, aimed at bringing a much greater degree of discipline, rigour and, most importantly, urgency to a worsening crisis blighting the life opportunities of many tens of thousands of First Nations citizens.

The fact that the depth and severity of this crisis is largely invisible to most Australians increases the responsibility on governments to act; it is not an excuse or rationale for inaction. •

The post Gap years appeared first on Inside Story.

If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of  Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.

To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.

By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.

This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

The post Voices off appeared first on Inside Story.

Anthropologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century primarily described and analysed the “traditional” life of First Nations people who had experienced minimal contact with white settlers. An imagined dichotomy between “traditional” and “non-traditional” peoples was deeply ingrained in the field; those whose lands had been intensely occupied were assumed to have lost their culture and were therefore not seen as worthy subjects of anthropological study.

Rose’s book, The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962, was different. Set on a desert pastoral station, it focused on the changes in Anangu social and cultural life brought about by the encounter with tourists, cash and commodities .

Not surprisingly, The Wind of Change has largely been overlooked in the canon of desert ethnography. Rose was only incidentally interested the traditional life of Anangu, or what he referred to as their “cult life.” As a devout Marxist and committed member of the Communist Party, he filtered his ethnographic study through a materialist lens. A process of “detribalisation,” as he called it, was taking place on the station, accelerated by the commodification of material culture and the encounter with the cash economy that had emerged with tourism in the region. As he saw it, the “traditional” way of life on Angas Downs had virtually disappeared by 1962.

The strangeness of Rose’s ethnography struck me when I first laid eyes on it. As I flicked through the pages, my eyes danced over the text and tables and came to dwell on the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout that captured people and everyday life on the station. Unlike other ethnographies of the time, the people in The Wind of Change were photographed wearing settler clothing, collecting rations, receiving haircuts, playing card games and trading with tourists.

I was particularly struck by the last pages of the book — 150 black-and-white portraits of the people living on Angas Downs during the four months of Rose’s fieldwork. The photographs were immediate and intimate in their close focus on the faces of the people they captured. Some looked uncomfortable, as though Rose’s request to photograph them was perhaps an annoyance, while others were smiling and seemed happy to have their picture taken. The portraits, which represented several generations, are arranged in grids of three-by-three over sixteen pages.

No names accompany the photographs; rather, they are numbered from 1 to 150. Who were these people, I wondered, and what had drawn so many of them to this place?

In 2012, half a century after it was published, I took Rose’s The Wind of Change on a journey back into the country on which it was produced. I moved from Ngunnawal Ngambri Country, in the place now known as Canberra, to Mparntwe in Central Arrernte Country, otherwise known as Alice Springs.

Not long after I arrived, I took out a loan and bought a green 80 Series Toyota Landcruiser, which soon assumed the role of beloved and trustworthy travelling companion. Over the following four years, we travelled tens of thousands of kilometres throughout the Central and Western deserts. This act of travelling to the heart of the continent echoed the journeys of countless white settlers who came to this place before me, in search of something. Yes, I was seeking to learn about the history of Angas Downs. But I was also searching for insights into the settler historical imagination and ways of seeing the past.

As a white settler who grew up in a regional Victorian town which local memory didn’t acknowledge as being on Dja Dja Wurrung Country, I was troubled by the silences and white noise that dominated Australian history writing throughout much of the twentieth century. I wanted to explore the implications of different ways of knowing the world for historical research and writing in a colonised settler nation.

I also wanted to engage with my own nagging sense of dislocation. We all inherit the consequences of colonialism and, as psychologist Craig San Roque describes it, I have felt “displaced from my integrity by the very act of displacing others from theirs.” And so, in exploring other ways of knowing the past, I have also wanted to explore what it means to belong on stolen land.

When I began this project, I was acutely aware of the ways in which research and colonialism were deeply entangled in what Edward Said referred to as the West’s “will to power.” Here in Australia, as elsewhere, white settler researchers, academics and writers have sought to categorise, describe and speak for the “Other” in an effort not only to understand but also to control, manipulate and even incorporate First Nations peoples and ways of knowing.

Mindful of this, I sought to develop an approach to research that wouldn’t own or consume the knowledges I engaged with. Rather, I wanted to explore how engaging with these knowledges might help us to better understand our shared past.

Rose’s book was the catalyst for my encounter with Anangu in the remote community of Imanpa, a place with strong connections to Angas Downs. Around 200 kilometres southwest of Mparntwe, 160 kilometres east of Uluru and a few kilometres off the Lasseter Highway, Imanpa is home to mostly Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara speakers.

The Wind of Change is a rare book and most Anangu I met had never seen one before. They had no interest in the ethnography itself. Rather, it was the photographs they wanted to see. I became known as the “kungka [young woman] with the book.” When Anangu saw my Landcruiser arrive in the community and pull up at the store, I would inevitably hear shouts along the lines of, “Hey, kungka, I want to see that book!” Over a four-year period, I travelled from Mparntwe to Imanpa, and beyond, working with Anangu and learning how to see and understand this place.

The copy of The Wind of Change I carried with me bears the marks of the process — the front and back covers have fallen away, some pages have come out, and many other pages are dog-eared, stained and worn thinner by the countless pairs of hands that turned them over and over, and over again.

As Anangu mobilised Rose’s photographs to tell stories, this ethnographic artefact was made into a very different kind of object. The grids of numbered portraits were transformed into a family photo album. Holding the book in their hands, they would move through the portraits, one by one, and tell me who each person was, how they were related to them, and where the person, or their family, was now. Their reading of Rose stretched through time and space, weaving threads of memory that intimately connected the living present with the past world he captured.

Anangu stories tracked and traced the various social and cultural practices that intersected at Angas Downs, revealing how people came to make a place for themselves in the wake of colonialism. Listening to them, I heard histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station. What emerged was an understanding of this place as living — made and inhabited by Anangu, even though, at first glance, it appeared to be the product of white settler intervention.

The book that emerged from my research traces the rise and demise of Angas Station over half a century. It tracks the complex and creative social and cultural practices the Anangu mobilised to make sense of the places that emerged when white settlers came to the desert.

Top row, left: Sandra Armstrong at Bloodwood Bore, Angas Downs, in 1962. Sandra was “No. 90” in Frederick Rose’s portraits. Sandra Armstrong holding a photograph of herself from the Frederick Rose archive during a research trip to the Mitchell Library in 2013. Sandra said that she worked with Rose and would sit with him looking through his photographs and he would ask her “What do you call this one?” and she would tell him the language the names for kin relationships. SLNSW Frederick Rose Papers Box 8
Top row, right: Sandra Armstrong holding a photograph of herself from the Frederick Rose archive during a research trip to the Mitchell Library in 2013. Source: Shannyn Palmer
Bottom row, left: Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack at Bloodwood Bore, Angas Downs, 1962. This photograph is “No. 1” in Frederick Rose’s book, The Wind of Change in Central Australia: The Aborigines at Angas Downs, 1962. Placing Tjuki as No. 1 reflected Rose’s recognition of Tjuki’s senior status at Angas Downs. Sandra Armstrong too said of Tjuki’s authority, “Old Tjuki Tjukanku was really ninti [knowledgeable], he was number one.” SLNSW Frederick Rose Papers Box 8.
Bottom row, right: Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack on the veranda of his house at Imanpa Community in 2013. Rhett Hammerton.

When I first started visiting Imanpa, numerous people told me that if I wanted to learn more about Angas Downs I should seek out Tjuki Pumpjack and Sandra Armstrong, whose families were among the earliest arrivals at Angas Downs. They considered themselves, and are thought of by many, as having the most knowledge, and therefore the authority, to speak for this place.

I met Tjuki for the first time in June 2012. I had travelled to Imanpa to see Sandra, whom I had met previously, by chance, when she grabbed my wrist as I was walking past an ATM in Yulara and asked me to help her retrieve her card from the machine. She had no idea who I was, or what my interest in Angas Downs was, but I recognised her immediately.

On that day in June I was unable to find her in Imanpa and so I went to sit on a bench across from the community store. As I sat there, I noticed Tjuki and his wife Rosie slowly shuffling towards the store. As they approached, I asked them in Pitjantjatjara how they were and whether they had seen Sandra. They hadn’t. I explained that I had an old book with lots of photographs from Angas Downs and was hoping to find Sandra to talk to her about the station. Tjuki replied, “Angie Downs, that my Country.”

Tjuki and Rosie made their way over to where I was sitting on the bench and I handed him Rose’s book. Tjuki smiled and laughed as he flicked through the pages of photographs, and when he came across the portrait of himself, he turned to me and said, “That’s me when I young fella, no whiskers.” I had heard that Sandra was at Angas Downs, so I asked Tjuki and Rosie if they would like to come for a drive to the station to see if she was there. Tjuki stood up without hesitation and looked to me to point out which Landcruiser we would be travelling in. That was the first time I visited Bloodwood Bore, and the only time I spent on Angas Downs with both Tjuki and Sandra.

Tjuki Tjukanku Pumpjack was born around 1926–28.  His life history began before white settlers had really begun to penetrate the desert. Over four years we travelled together, recording his stories. It was important to me, and also for future generations of his family, that his life history was recorded in his language, Pitjantjatjara.

Tjuki, as he liked to be called, was a gifted raconteur, and many of his stories were long and detailed. My grasp of Pitjantjatjara was rudimentary at best when we first started working together, so we collaborated with oral historian and Western Desert language interpreter and translator Linda Rive. She travelled with us, interpreting Tjuki’s oral histories in place, and later translating and transcribing into English the recordings made with him.

Our trips “out bush” always revolved around food. Before leaving, I would prepare a meal in the camp oven, and when we arrived at our destination we would begin by building a fire. Once we were settled on camping chairs, cups of tea in hand, Tjuki would begin remembering while the food cooked among the coals. Where possible, he chose the locations in which the recordings took place, and who was present. He also decided which stories we would record once we got to a location, and these were inevitably shaped by the place in which we found ourselves.

Sandra Armstrong was born nearly a generation after Tjuki, in 1942. When I met with her at Bloodwood Bore on that day in June, Sandra told me that the place where we sat was her Country. She showed me where Anangu lived on the station; where the old homestead used to be; and the site of the “chalet” that catered to thousands of tourists who passed through Angas Downs station in the late 1950s and 1960s, on their way to Uluru.

As we sat drinking tea, Sandra motioned to the site of the old chalet and told me that she used to work there, preparing meals for the tourists and cleaning up after them. She also recalled that two men called Captain and Harry Brumby would go from Angas Downs to catch wild camels, and then bring them back to the station to break them in. Over the years that followed, Sandra and I travelled widely together, and much of what I learned from her evolved from many hours spent driving, sitting and talking.

Whereas Tjuki, Linda and I visited various locations on Angas Downs and the surrounding country, Sandra and I travelled further afield in the Central and Western deserts, and as far away as Sydney, as well as spending time together at Bloodwood Bore, Imanpa and Anthelk-Ewlpaye (Charles Creek) town camp in Mparntwe. Travelling to, and experiencing, the landscape was critical in my developing an understanding of this place grounded in its physical reality. Visiting ruins, rock art sites and water sources, and learning place names informed my developing awareness of Angas Downs as a place steeped in the Tjukurpa, deep time and historical time.

Learning while on the move, I also came to understand that mobility is a fundamental fact of desert life, and it was the path, not the place, that was the key to understanding Angas Downs.

Both Tjuki and Sandra were on a mission to have their knowledge and their relationship to Angas Downs recorded. They were aware that I wanted to learn more about Angas Downs in order to write a history of this place, but they had their own reasons for choosing to work with me. Despite the different circumstances under which they were recorded, Tjuki’s and Sandra’s life histories have a certain politics in common.

Although their experiences varied, their stories amplify a central statement about their identification with Angas Downs as ngura, or Country. Their oral histories are very much about a present concern that speaks to a fraught politics of place, recognition and sovereignty.

Places accrue people and stories, in multiple layers, over time. Some of these stories come to dominate how we see and interpret a place, while others are obscured from view. While Angas Downs is ostensibly a pastoral station, pastoralism is only a fraction of the story of this place. We can’t understand Angas Downs without the stories and the memories of the people who lived there. Listening to them, a very different kind of place emerges from that conjured in the myths and histories of pioneers and pastoralists that have dominated understandings of the past in Australia — particularly in the Northern Territory.

Travelling with and learning from Tjuki and Sandra, I came to understand that more than a spatial location, or simple stage for human action, places are complex constructions, made from local cultural material and practices, and the interactions between people, other species and the land. •

This essay draws on the introduction to Shannyn Palmer’s Unmaking Angas Downs, Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station, published last week by Melbourne University Press

The post Revisiting Bloodwood Bore appeared first on Inside Story.

Number one: she takes infinite trouble in giving equal time to her two subjects, the Wangal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales. These two came to know each other as a result of the British invasion and yet they led largely separate lives. Throughout the book, in a spirit of strict equity, Fullagar moves backwards and forwards from one to the other in a process of interweaving. For the reader moving through the book it is like handling particoloured rope.

And then, secondly, she tells their story, or rather their two stories, backwards.

Fullagar’s project for equality reminds me of the famous passage in Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) where the fictional elder Tirrawuul advances to meet Phillip during the first hours of invasion. Each man watches the other, eye to eye. “Tirrawuul saw a smallish man, quite incredibly ugly, with a pale face and a very large nose [and so on]… Phillip saw an elderly savage, quite incredibly ugly, with greying tangled hair, and alert dark eyes [and so on].” That is literary equity par excellence. What Dark achieved through the liveliness of historical fiction Fullagar manages in a more assiduous, methodical way. Reading Dark and Fullagar together shows up better the purpose of each.

Dealing one after the other with invader and invaded, Eleanor Dark gives a keen impression of mutual strangeness and of how each man searched the other’s face for a shared humanity. Kate Fullagar’s method is more roundabout — not so much literary as ethnographic. She gives descriptions, side by side, of how each man and his people enacted the rituals of death and burial, and their different uses of violence, including ceremonial violence, and of dance, dress and display.

Questions of culture and personality necessarily intersect. Neither Bennelong nor Phillip was perfectly typical of his kind, whatever that might mean. Bennelong seems to have had a strong emotional dependence on women, for instance. Phillip, on the other hand, seems to have needed female company markedly less than most other Englishmen of his day. One of the best things about Fullagar’s book is how she uses the grid of culture as a powerful background for personality. The tension between culture and individual character vividly complicates the tension between the two men, played out as it is in the highly dramatic circumstances of invasion.

There is another complication, less obvious but more profound. In her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum sketches the varied ways in which culture shapes feeling, while acknowledging it is often hard to distinguish the thing from its expression. Grief among the Balinese, says Nussbaum, looks and sounds very different from grief among the Ifaluk, a people of the Caroline Islands. The Utku people of northwest Canada condemn anger as childish but the ancient Romans saw it as manly and noble; the Utku keep a lid on it but the Romans made all the noise they could.

The anecdotes in Fullagar’s book show differences of the same kind, in feeling and expressions of feeling, between First Nations peoples and the invading British. Fullagar makes good use of this material, though she probably doesn’t push the question as far as Nussbaum might have liked. She quotes David Collins, Phillip’s secretary and judge-advocate, describing the mysterious combination of feeling and violence among Indigenous people. Men known to be good friends fought each other, so Collins said, “with all the ardour of the bitterest enemies,” apparently intent on wounding if not murder, and yet they were friends again afterwards. The officers were also baffled by Bennelong’s violence towards the young woman Kurubarabula, his promise to kill her, her running towards him all the same, and then their marriage.

The feelings of the invaders themselves must have been just as impenetrable to First Nations people, as they often are to us today.

Throughout the book Fullagar shows an ongoing interest in the possibility of a treaty engineered by Phillip, as governor, with Bennelong, as a representative of the invaded peoples. Phillip was anxious, for instance, that Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne should meet George III during their stay in England, 1793–94, because, Fullagar says, such a meeting might have led to a “formal agreement” between the British government and the Indigenous population. Something might have been done, in other words, to register Indigenous “consent” to the settlement at Port Jackson.

There was certainly talk now and again of the need for “consent,” but there is no surviving evidence that the British government ever thought of making an agreement of this kind. Unlike other Indigenous communities affected by colonisation, the people at Port Jackson were understood to be wanderers, “not attached to any particular spot.” After five years on the ground, Phillip knew this was not true. Individuals and groups were obviously attached to certain places, though exact ideas about possession were so far hard to decipher.

And yet, as far as we know, even Phillip never argued for any kind of agreement about land use. It would have been a feather in his cap if the king had deigned to notice Bennelong, however briefly, with an “audience,” but it seems likely that that was the limit of the governor’s hopes.

All the same, by circling as she does around the idea of a treaty, Fullagar hints at a larger and deeper question — the possibility of ongoing mutual respect, including the invaders’ capacity to listen, in an official sense, to Indigenous voices. Presentation to the king was called an “audience” because it involved listening by the executive. In this case, for whatever reason, the king chose not to listen. While in England, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne were dressed as English gentlemen and entertained with all sorts of display, military, theatrical and cultural, but they were not invited to perform themselves as a representative Voice. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So we come to the second distinctive feature of this book’s structure. Its story or stories are told backwards. In describing the lives of Bennelong and Phillip, Kate Fullagar begins with the end and ends with the beginning. In the first couple of chapters we hear about how each man has been understood since his death — the ups and downs of each “afterlife.” Combined with that and just as important is detail about the network of friends and kin each left behind him when he died. So we are introduced to each life as a creation of human circumstance, and to each individual as a focal point of feeling and attention. After all, other people make us what we are. It is a subtly powerful point, and it tends to pervade the book.

Ending with the beginning can have the same sort of effect. So, in the last chapters we read of Bennelong and Phillip, each in his own way, born into a family network and into a store of traditional knowledge — a rich cultural inheritance. Here is another point of creative tension. Quite apart from the inevitable push and pull that goes on between the two men during their period of contact, we sense a striking ambivalence in the way each of them stands out from their crowd of friends and associates while at the same time being continuously drawn back in. Such is life, now as then.

Fullagar offers an interesting explanation as to why she has chosen this back-to-front approach. Partly, it is another part of her project of equity between Bennelong and Phillip. Telling stories in the normal sequential way means giving preferential treatment to Phillip. Phillip represented an empire on the move. British energies and British achievements gave men like him a right to possess the future. He is a founder of nationhood, a cultural hero, and as such inevitably mythical in some sense. That makes Bennelong his antithesis, a figure attractive enough but doomed to fail. Phillip represents high-principled government, good order and the inevitable progress of Western civilisation. Bennelong stands in his shadow, childlike, irresponsible and ultimately tragic.

Fullagar is not entirely free herself from this framework of thought. In the European context she pits “conservatives” of the 1790s, including Phillip himself, against “the liberal spirit of French popular democracy,” and yet such terminology is surely imposed by us in retrospect. In those days, “conservative” implied a power to nurture and sustain life. The sun, for instance, was called “a conservative,” and by the same token words like “liberal” and “democracy” seem to jar with the actual methods of the Jacobin revolutionaries in France.

Altogether, British ideas about the relationship between past and future were still fairly fluid in the late eighteenth century. The mindset of the first invaders is a topic of enormous complexity and weight, and in tackling notions of time, “progress” and so on, it might be better to avoid such words altogether.

But then, Fullagar is right. Our own assumptions about “progress,” as she says, make the violence of empire “the unfortunate means to a justifiable end.” Telling the story in the old-fashioned way would also give a shallow idea of individual character, including moral character. An iconic and ideal Phillip, assimilated to the statue in Sydney’s botanic gardens, cannot be genuinely human. The same straitjacket gives a kind of narrative uselessness to Bennelong’s life during his post-Phillip years. No longer a valued go-between, he seems to be trampled underfoot by “galloping global empire.”

Freeing herself from this old paradigm, Fullagar also frees Bennelong and Phillip. The various life phases of each take on a new significance. More than that, invasion, occupation and settlement can be more clearly understood because nothing is preordained.

In 1788 nobody could have known whether there would be a second fleet or whether the settlement would survive at all. By 1800, if those questions were answered, no one could have known whether the occupiers would ever be more than a circumscribed small-farming community. When Bennelong died in 1813, settlers were beginning to take up large grants, suitable for sheep and cattle, and in the same year country west of the Blue Mountains was opened up for settlement. Even so, no one so far could have predicted occupation from shore to shore.

This was indeed a galloping empire, a brutal impulse of power that in the end passed Bennelong by. Whether his latter years were miserable or not, the balance of power that had seemingly existed between himself and Phillip had been radically undone.

The book is subtitled “A History Unravelled,” and in a couple of places Fullagar talks about lives “unspooled.” It is an interesting image. Cut loose from its conventional framework of long-term achievement and/or loss, the old Bennelong–Phillip tapestry comes apart, falling into a multitude of brightly coloured episodes and life phases. Each man is caught more completely in his own time — but caught, as it were, with no memory of earlier events, because with Fullagar’s chosen structure he has not got to those yet.

In short, her biographical method is not problem-free, but it serves a vital purpose. It will appeal to some readers more than others, but no one can avoid having their ideas about invasion challenged to some extent by this remarkable book. •

Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled
By Kate Fullagar | Scribner | $55 | 320 pages

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She is best known for her startling, sprawling novels, especially Carpentaria (2007), which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Since then, each of her new works has been a major literary event. There have been two further dizzying novels — The Swan Book (2013) and Praiseworthy (2023) — as well as the Stella Prize–winning Tracker (2017), a complex choral biography of Aboriginal activist Tracker Tilmouth.

Wright enjoys a significant reputation overseas, and her work has been translated into French, Italian, Polish and Chinese. The Chinese language translation of Carpentaria (2006) was launched by the Nobel Prize–winning author Mo Yan. In France, Carpentaria is the first Indigenous novel to be set for the Agrégation, the national civil service exam, and the first Australian novel since Patrick White’s Voss (1957) to have that honour.

It is difficult to encapsulate the full significance of Wright’s works because it is so far-reaching — cutting across boundaries of time, space and culture — and because it is still emerging. More than anything, her writing introduces into Australian letters a completely new form of thought and speech. In the linguistic universe opened up by Wright’s writing, the reader is made aware of ways of being in the world that are completely distinct from those of capitalist modernity. The achievement of her writing is that this does not come over as either a lost world or a forbidden enclave, but as an open challenge and invitation.

The mesmeric Prelude to her novel The Swan Book begins by asking its reader (listener) to entertain an image…

Upstairs in my brain, there lives this kind of cut-snake virus in its doll’s house. Little starts shining over the moonscape garden twinkle endlessly in a crisp sky. The crazy virus just sits there on the couch and keeps a good old qui vive out the window for intruders. It ignores all of the eviction notices stacked on the door. The virus thinks it is the only pure full-blood virus left in the land. Everything else is just half-caste. Worth nothing! Not even a property owner. Hell yes! It thinks, worse than the swarms of rednecks hanging around the neighbourhood. Hard to believe a brain could get sucked into vomiting bad history over the beautiful sunburnt plains.

What are we to make of this? The virus that lives in the doll’s house of this speaker’s mind is an intriguing revision of the angel in the house. This virus is the demand for an impossible purity, for an ideal purity that only exists to cast all real things into abject impurity.

This ideal, which is said to be far worse than the outward disparagement of “rednecks,” ignores all notices of eviction. It is not the emblem of any living value but the insidious product of “bad history.” It is at the same time something residing in the innermost recesses, and spewed forth in all directions across the plains. These “beautiful sunburnt plains” steal a wry glance at Dorothea Mackellar’s ubiquitous poem, but decide that, nevertheless, they are still beautiful sunburnt plains.

This kind of teasing circularity is the basic metier of Wright’s prose. She never lets you hold onto a metaphor too long before she gives it another twist and sends it in a new direction. She never lets her conceits become conceited. For this reason, her writing presents its difficulties. But it achieves its central aim when it forces you to stop and listen. If you try to skim ahead in Wright’s novels you lose the plot, even though in many cases the novels seem not to have one. But when you lose the idea that there is a plot, that means you have stopped listening, and it is time to slow down and bend an ear.

Reading an Alexis Wright novel is like being placed under a spell. When I teach Alexis Wright to my students at the University of Western Australia, I tell them not to read but listen. Her writing pulses with the unmistakeably cadences of the spoken word. The rhythm of this speech, even though it takes place in English, draws on an entirely different social world and cosmology. The voice in Wright’s work gains a substance and life that convert her writing into speech.

Wright’s adult life was forged in the rough and tumble world of central Australian Indigenous politics of the 1980s and 90s. Her writing, for all its wild wonder, is also intensely and intimately political. The politics is overt in her nonfiction works Grog War (1997), Take Power (1998) and Tracker, but is never far from the surface of her novels either.

Wright’s novels are often classified as magical realist. Certainly, a novel like Carpentaria is indebted to the tradition of writing that became globally influential with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late 1960s. But it is important to not lose sight of the “realism” in magical realism. What the concept of realism captures, on the one hand, is that Wright’s works deal with real-world problems — colonialism, climate change, family breakdown, sexual abuse, addiction. But more than these problems, Wright’s realism institutes a relationship with the real conditions of human life. Here there is a sharp break from Western secularism, because these real conditions are nothing other than the determinations of Country. In this respect, the real is exactly what we might, from a secular point of view, call magic.

Carpentaria begins with a cosmic joke about the fictional town of Desperance, where much of the novel is set. The town had been built at a river mouth to serve as a port for the surrounding region. Then, after a big wet, the river shifted course and decided to join the sea somewhere else. The town became pointless. A river port without a river. The real joke, though, is the town was always pointless and the river was simply drawing attention to this fact.

What becomes clear in Wright’s work is that Country has its moods, and if you have ever tried to reason yourself out of a mood, you will quickly meet the limits of reason. But though reason founders, knowledge continues, albeit a particular kind of knowledge.

It takes a particular kind of knowledge to go with the river, whatever its mood. It is about there being no difference between you and the movement of water as it seasonally shifts its tracks according to its mood. A river spurns human endeavour in one dramatic gesture, jilting a lover who has never really been known, as it did to the frontier town built on its banks in the hectic heyday of colonial vigour.

In Wright’s work, the living bridge of signification between day-to-day life and the insistence of Country is the basis of meaningful voice. The flawed father in Carpentaria, Norm Phantom, has many failings, but he possesses the gift of voice:

Norm had a hypnotic voice, his eyes cast spells, he distilled memory like the flooding river emptying into the sea. He made people wish they were there when it really happened. He made them feel that it was better to have been alive in the time of the real people, his ancestors.

It is one of the striking things in Wright’s work that someone who lives in a shanty at the edge of a country town in the middle of nowhere is endowed with this singular power. The power, that is, of carrying the world inside their voice. The power of connecting people to the ground of their being.

Wright’s work teaches us about the close relationship between voice and listening. For Wright, listening is the direct complement of voice. Everyone might think they listen, but more and more we seem to be entering an age of listening deficit disorder. Indeed, the refusal to listen has almost become a virtue, since it means you are no one’s fool, that nobody will take you for a ride. This points to the close correspondence of trust to listening. The refusal to listen is the triumph of non-trust. But Wright shows us that trusting what is good is the foundation for ethical life.

She seems to be saying that being taken for a ride is not the worst thing in the world. There is a soft spot in her writing for those who are prepared to take on the work of narrating the universe, from Norm Phantom in Carpentaria to Cause Man Steel in Praiseworthy.

The charisma of these rough-hewn men who speak without fear is something that Wright found fascinating in Tracker Tilmouth. She knows they are flawed and full of themselves, but she can also see the crucial thing that they offer their people, which is to remain uncowed. In Wright’s world you are stupid if you take these people too seriously, but you are even more stupid if you fail to take them seriously enough.

Having known Tracker for much of his political life, and having worked closely with him in a range of campaigns, it fell to Wright to find an adequate way to express the life of this extraordinary person. She knew instinctively that conventional biography was not the answer. What emerged instead was a sprawling oral history — an oral history of a man who was also an event.

This does not get rendered in the genteel distance of the “life and times” biography. Instead, it transpires in the real time of the spoken word. The book is written in a tumble of intersecting chapters by those who knew Tracker. Her informants include Tracker himself, who is able to maintain a sly detachment from his larger-than-life persona. The cast of authors spend time — they are in no hurry — recalling, reminiscing, castigating and fuming about Tracker and his exploits. Half the time, even in moments of great seriousness and the gravest importance, they just shake their heads and laugh.

One can sense a certain element of Tracker in many of the more memorable characters in Wright’s novels. One can also see something of the author herself. Her admiration for Tracker expresses qualities that are also the hallmark of Wright:

An extraordinary reader of the times, he spared no one from hearing his verdict on them, be it those from his own communities, politicians, business people or professional academics, whether they wanted to hear exactly what he thought of them or not.

Wright herself learned to write by listening, as she made clear in a lecture given at the Sydney Opera House in 2001 (published as an essay in Southerly magazine in 2002). She recalls a childhood spent listening to her grandmother:

[My grandmother] had stories to explain everything — who we are, who each of us were, and the place on our traditional country that was very deep and special to her. She was our memory. She was what not forgetting was all about. It was through her that I learnt to imagine.

Here Wright makes clear that her grandmother’s voice was not something that belonged simply to the woman who was speaking. Her grandmother’s voice was speaking the Country. Or more to the point, the Country was speaking through her. In Ambelin Kwaymullina’s lyrical treatise on Indigenous sovereignty, Living on Stolen Land (2020), she writes that “Life doesn’t move through time / Time moves through life.”

The voice of Wright’s grandmother instantiates this movement of time through the self. This voice held everything — memory, significance, relationships, rules, rights. It also provided the very ground of imagination. This fundamental precept of Indigenous cosmology — we don’t move through Country, Country moves through us — continually works its way through Wright’s work. This moving through is experienced as a voice. This is what makes listening so important in Wright’s world because in the act of listening, Country is given the opportunity to move through its human subjects.

The visionary characters in Wright’s novels, whether black or white, are marked by the fact that their voices are not their own. In Carpentaria, Elias Smith washes up miraculously one day on the mudflats near the town, where he is nursed back to health by Norm Phantom. His ocean ordeal has rendered Elias fully in the service of this deeper voice, in a way that clearly recalls Wright’s description of her grandmother.

Although Elias never remembered his origins, he was able to acquire other people’s memory. They gave him their imagination. Through adopting their childhood memories as his own, he was able to close the gap on the past he could not remember… He told his story so persuasively he was able to convince people just about anything.

In The Swan Book, set in a climate-devastated near future, we follow the life of an abandoned Aboriginal girl, Oblivia Ethylene, who finds herself catapulted into national life. While the book opens with an interior monologue in Oblivia’s voice, she never speaks in the main part of the novel. Instead, she is forever spoken for.

In this respect the novel offers Oblivia as the sine qua non of Australian Indigenous policy, in which the Indigene is a silent object whom everyone is trying to co-opt for a different purpose. At every point when Indigenous voice threatens to emerge — that is to say, in a politically meaningful way, rather than as multicultural ornamentation — the Australian polity reacts in a way to silence it. Or, to put it more accurately, to speak over the top of it.

But at the same time the muteness of Oblivia is also the face of genuine traumatic speechlessness. Wright’s novels are loquacious. The mainly Indigenous people constantly argue with each other over almost everything. Sometimes this is given in direct dialogue, but often we get it paraphrased by Wright’s narrator in their distinctive dry irony. But even so, this bubbling speech is occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden overwhelming traumatic stillness. Points at which speech stops.

Oblivia’s muteness is also an expression of this moment when speech, even the capacious, multitudinous vocality of Wright’s speakers, reaches its traumatic limit. Oblivia’s own people were brought to silence by the loss she embodied:

They were too speechless to talk about a loss that was so great, it made them feel unhinged from their own bodies, unmoored, vulnerable, separated from eternity. They had been cut off.

This kind of speechlessness was memorably dramatised in the harrowing scene in Warwick Thornton’s frontier film Sweet Country (2017) where the Aboriginal woman Lizzie is unable to provide testimony of her own rape, even though this testimony will likely save her husband who is on trial for killing the perpetrator.

In The Swan Book, we thus have this strange experience of a silent protagonist. But one who constantly attracts the speech of the other. Her subjectivity is not so much removed as collapsed, like a dying star into a darker denser orb. Is Oblivia a victim? Is she a figure of picaresque pathos? Is her silence really an oblivion? A mute silhouette in the space of subjectivity? She is, in the end, not quite any of these things because she is never really abandoned, for the simple reason that she is sustained by the narrative voice itself.

But how can we tell the difference between a voice that speaks for and over the top of Oblivia and one that holds her firmly in its metaphysical hands? The main difference is that the narrative voice, which is the characteristic voice we find in all of Wright’s novels from Plains of Promise (1997) to Praiseworthy, does not especially care for Oblivia.

It may seem a little paradoxical to assert that the voices that care most for Oblivia are the ones that suck the life out of her, and the voice that does not is the one that upholds her right to exist. Yet, this is the situation that Indigenous people have had to contend with insofar as their colonisation has been heavily mediated through the discourse of humanitarianism.

This aspect of what might be called tough love is something that we see throughout Wright’s writing. One of the attractions of her work is the rigorous way in which it denies certain convenient pieties. For example, while the white people in her novels are often mercilessly caricatured for their hypocrisy and venality, the Indigenous people are far from saints.

Her novels have little time for what is considered nice. They begin from the position that niceties never prevented, and will never prevent, the destitution of Indigenous people nor the continuing extraction of material wealth from their lands. Her novels do not depict Indigenous people as a deserving poor or make a case for charitable redress. Thus, her Indigenous characters, for all their flaws — and in a certain sense, because of their flaws — retain their sovereignty.

There is a strange double movement in Wright’s writing. On the one hand her novels activate the critical faculties, making you question things, weigh contending positions, see bitter ironies, appreciate the most profound dilemmas. But on the other hand, one is also compelled to surrender to the voice. As Australia votes on whether it is fitting to amend the Constitution to guarantee an Indigenous Voice to parliament and government, Wright’s work offers a sense of what this means and why it is important.

Indeed, Wright’s works are a living enactment of Indigenous voice, a subject that Australians have been asked to form a view on. Because it was immediately and brazenly converted into a culture war, this historic opportunity to listen might become yet another act of silencing. By rejecting the voice, Australia will not only reject a constitutionally recognised Voice but deprive itself of a mechanism to learn what it is to live in a world where voice is truly meaningful. •

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Attorney-general Mark Dreyfus’s representative in the Senate, Murray Watt, made that pledge to Senator Thorpe on 7 November last year. Lawyer Megan Davis, an adviser to the government on the vote, was equally emphatic: “A referendum to establish a Voice to Parliament will not impede an unceded, unextinguished sovereignty asserted by First Nations people.” As 2023 began, Dreyfus repeated his view that putting the Voice in the Constitution would have no impact on sovereignty. Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy gave a similar assurance on the ABC’s Q&A in late January.

But the government seemed reluctant to define what Indigenous sovereign rights entailed. During the July debate on the constitutional alteration bill, government speakers avoided mentioning that the Uluru Statement envisaged the Voice as a step towards a treaty. (The Greens were keen to make that point.) While the government remains nominally committed to implementing the Uluru Statement’s demand for Voice, Treaty and Truth, the fact that a Voice would enable a treaty has more often been highlighted by the No than the Yes campaign.

First Nations activists have good reason to explore the possible meanings of Indigenous sovereignty, but not all of them agree. Some Indigenous Australians, for example, reject “sovereignty” and “treaty” as counterproductive “separatism.” Some who want a treaty reject the Voice as an impediment (Warren Mundine) or as a diversion (Michael Mansell), while others who will vote Yes see the Voice as the body that could legitimately negotiate a treaty with the Australian government. Such diversity has been one of the revelations of the referendum debate.

Three clusters of First Nations thinking have become evident. Some, as mentioned, reject “separatism,” a term broad enough to include the Voice and any treaty. Others, supporters of “Blak sovereignty,” warn that constitutional recognition would pre-empt sovereignty recognised in a treaty. A third group takes a gradualist position, envisaging sovereignty as a steadily accumulating regional practice of land and native title rights.

Against “Indigenous separatism”

The anti-separatist position is exemplified by two First Nations participants in the referendum debate: academic psychologist Anthony Dillon and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Writing in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph on 24 April 2019 under the heading “Close the Gap on Myths,” Dillon attacked a series of “myths”: that only Aboriginal people are expert on Aboriginal affairs, that only Aboriginal adults can raise an Aboriginal child, and that government is totally to blame for the problems facing Aboriginal people.

It is also a myth, Dillon wrote, that “we cannot move forward until this country acknowledges the atrocities of the past” and that Aboriginal people are victims of colonisation. And it is a myth that “Aboriginal people are an homogeneous group with all members equally disadvantaged,” given that many are thriving. “When we speak of closing the gap,” he wrote, “let’s focus on those who are most disadvantaged.”

Dillon believes these myths distract us from “the important issues facing Aboriginal people, like the need for employment, job readiness, good schools, ready access to modern services, and good housing.”

More recently, in 2022, in an essay titled “The Voice: Self-Determination or Separatism?” Dillon argued that “self-determination” policies mistakenly assume that Indigenous Australians are essentially different from other Australians and essentially similar to each other. Many individuals’ access to education and employment had, he said, been weakened as a result.

For Dillon, the leaders of the Yes campaign are those who successfully grasped education and employment opportunities despite self-determination policies. The Voice would, he argues, empower these successful Indigenous people to entrench a policy paradigm that is failing other Indigenous people. If anyone needs a voice, he says, it is the Indigenous Australians whose lives are much worse than the lives of Voice advocates. He has since confirmed that he will vote No.

As a National Party senator, Jacinta Price can seem like a typical rural conservative populist, repeatedly positioning herself as a critic of urban elites. She gives this stance a particular inflection: as the champion of abused women and children in First Nations communities who can’t gain the attention of the powerful (including leaders of Indigenous organisations). We should “amplify” the regions, she says, so we can hear the unheard.

Yet Price and the Nationals haven’t endorsed the Liberals’ proposal for a legislated regional Voice, so it isn’t clear how they would amplify the cries of the unheard — other than by persuading them to vote National. The constitutionally enshrined Voice, says Price, is likely to be a “bureaucracy” controlled by those whom she has called “the Qantas-sponsored leaders of the activist industry.” She blames Indigenous policy failure on these activist elites.

Price is ambivalent about whether we should characterise “the regions” in cultural terms. Social policy should assist people according to their needs rather than their distinct culture and historical experiences, she says. But she also sees the problems of Indigenous remote communities as cultural. When she recently denied that Aboriginal people are suffering intergenerational trauma as a result of colonisation, she suggested that their lives are instead blighted by “something much closer to home” — violent ways continuing from precolonial times.

Campaigning for a No vote, Price has highlighted her own family’s experiences. As a second-generation agent of what anthropologist Paul Burke calls the “Warlpiri diaspora,” she grew up in a household in Alice Springs rather than in the Warlpiri homelands. In this location and in her choice of a non-Indigenous husband she has followed her mother. Burke describes the “Warlpiri matriarchs” of this Australia-wide diaspora as “refashioning” Warlpiri tradition by adding non-kin to their stock of social capital. Price has presented her family as paradigmatic of a unified Australia threatened by Indigenous separatism.

Blak sovereignty as a rupture with the past

Having left the Greens earlier in the year and announcing herself as a leader of the Blak sovereignty movement, Lidia Thorpe moved the following amendment to the referendum bill during July’s parliamentary debate:

Nothing in this Act shall be taken to cede or disturb the Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people means an unceded right held in collective possession by the members of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations which confers usage, access and custodianship to the lands, waters and natural resources of what is now known as Australia, and the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to exercise an unimpeded and collective self‑determinate governance over their political, economic and social affairs.

Two features of Thorpe’s thinking are worth highlighting. Although she has sometimes demanded that Australian law align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, she hasn’t acknowledged the UNDRIP’s approach to sovereignty.

According to Article 46 of the UNDRIP, Indigenous peoples’ self-determination should do nothing to “dismember or impair totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” In other words, the UNDRIP would require that First Nations sovereignty coexist with and pragmatically accept Australian sovereignty, working within Australia’s federal and state constitutions and laws. Yet Thorpe’s formulation of Indigenous sovereignty includes these words: “Sovereignty has never been ceded, our sovereignty does not coexist with the sovereignty of the crown.”

In their repudiation of Australia’s legal framework, the Blak sovereigns distinguish themselves from advocates of Indigenous sovereignty who see potential in Australia’s existing Constitution. One of them, Michael Mansell — a No advocate — believes parliament should create a seventh state of Australia, its territory combining all Aboriginal lands (as long as the owners consented).

Other champions of Indigenous Australia’s many emerging polities also see potential in federalism. As University of Technology Sydney legal academic Alison Vivian and her co-authors wrote in 2017, “divided sovereignty, shared jurisdiction and a capacity to evolve in response to changing community values are fundamental attributes of federations.”

Thorpe’s rejection of Australia’s legal traditions includes a dismissal of apparently progressive laws such as native title, which she has labelled “an insult.” Of the parliament in which she now sits, she has said, “Not one piece of legislation that has ever come out of this place has been good for us. You know why? Because it’s deliberate. It’s deliberate. This place is here because they need to get rid of the Black problem.”

Such words imagine Blak sovereignty as necessitating a revolutionary rupture from an entirely bad past. As I understand the Blak sovereign position, the rupture would be brought about by truth-telling — a process of enlightenment — that would leave Australians with such a sense of collective shame that they would sign a treaty establishing First Nations sovereignty in whatever terms First Nations wanted.

This scenario conceives human history in a way that owes much to a religious imagination. By picturing a moment of settler colonial awakening, confession and collective self-perfection, Thorpe turns her back on the opportunities created by recent Australian law and policy. Hers is a historical imagination alienated from messy, incremental politics.

This anti-politics can’t concede that settler colonial history is punctuated by moments of crisis, negotiation, compromise and concessions in law and institutional design. In the Keating and Howard governments’ responses to two High Court judgements that recognised “native title” (Mabo in 1992, Wik in 1996) we have recent history that discourages  this abject pessimism.

The Blak sovereigns seem unwilling to conceive Indigenous agency as experimental, and they too easily dismiss open-ended settler colonial ideologies and practices such as “recognition.” For example, University of South Australia legal academic Irene Watson writes that “there are no remedies in the recognition game; it is like the game of snakes and ladders, which goes up and down, but leads to only one ending, our assimilation into the white Australian nation. Genocide: there is currently no other alternative on offer.”

In recent Australian historical scholarship, the idea of a settler colonial society taking genuinely progressive steps has been under suspicion among historians and political scientists who take the “settler colonial studies” approach. This view aligns with Indigenous doubts that Australia could ever overcome its original sin. To quote Watson writing about the Voice in 2017:

The current discussion in Australia about possible constitutional recognition of First Nations is out there for public consumption, in an electorate noted for its conservatism. What it means beyond the terra nullius narrative is yet unknown, but there is little to suggest that it means much more than the continuation of that same narrative: the terra nullius body dressed in the costume of “recognition.”

Sovereignty as a steadily accumulating practice

In contrast with a rupture with the past, Indigenous sovereignty could also evolve from the imperfect structures of reformed settler colonial government, including the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976) the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act (2006), the various state and territory land rights acts, and the Native Title Act (1993).

Consider the following contrast. The “Detailed Outline of the Blak Sovereigns’ Position on the Referendum” declares that “Land rights are central to our Sovereignty. Native Title is not land rights. Our struggle for real land rights is an assertion of our Sovereignty.” Others, though, see native title legislation as the context for nurturing First Nations’ capacities for sovereignty.

That way of thinking gained academic impetus more than twenty years ago when Marcia Langton and her colleagues at the University of Melbourne joined with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in an Australian Research Council–funded project, “Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements in Settler States: Their Role and Relevance for Indigenous and Other Australians.”

In a 2002 paper, “The Nations of Australia” Langton celebrated agreements signed under the Native Title Act that acknowledged the “ancient identities” of nations such as the Wik, Thaayorre and the Alngith. Referring to Indigenous signatories as “Aboriginal nations,” she wrote: “Corporations acknowledge that pre-existing Aboriginal polities exist as a profound reality in our political and economic landscape. The Constitution does not.” She hoped that constitutional amendment would eventually acknowledge “the pre-existing Aboriginal polities, or Aboriginal nations.”

Twenty years later, proposals for amending the Australian Constitution have taken a different form — not the constitutional acknowledgment of First Nations as sovereigns but the inscription of an Indigenous Voice to advise federal parliament and the executive. But these two calls for constitutional recognition share a commitment to Indigenous regionalism — a commitment also sustained by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in the years 1990 to 2004.

Langton’s Negotiated Settlements project argued that the practice of native title — especially after the Howard government’s 1998 amendments to the Native Title Act — was a stimulus to the reformation of Aboriginal polities:

In the minimal form of Aboriginal land-holding corporation, we find that governance and dominion, such as those rights of possession asserted among Aboriginal groups in disputes over territory, are achieved both within and between such groups. As a result, we find that there are transactions that may be construed as governance in a larger entity than the clan itself.

Langton was arguing that asserting customary law in matters of land title is one stimulus for the capacity and will to act regionally. The Negotiated Settlements project concluded that “the making of agreements [has] become the principal form of engagement between Indigenous nations and the modern nation-state.”

The project never lost sight of the fact that in these dealings Indigenous Australians have negotiated not only with governments but also with non-Indigenous corporations. Private enterprises have had a material interest in recognising Indigenous polities by contracting with them.

Indigenous polities have not always had the human and material resources they need to deal with corporations and government agencies. In a paper published in 2015, Langton described the Prescribed Bodies Corporate, the organisations that hold native title, as overburdened and under-resourced. She warned against assuming that PBCs’ roots in Aboriginal customary law meant they possess sufficient social capital to do all that is expected of them.

Langton also pointed to a danger of excessive localisation and thus of “balkanisation.” To work well as polities, old forms of social organisation would have to do new things, such as forge regional alliances. She applauded native title holders who were seeking “economies of scale” through “regional governance bodies” and saw hope in the regionalist visions of Native Title Representative Bodies.

Pointing to the “conflicting values at work: traditional values to stay local on the one hand, and the pressures of the organisational world on the other,” Langton exhorted “Aboriginal people themselves to change their mindset about the highly localised social world that they prefer, and make a decision to escalate their administrative organisational capacity to a much higher level than they are accustomed to.”

With this background, Langton was an excellent choice to lead the design of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament with Professor Tom Calma. When it was released in December 2021, their model emphasised the local/regional foundations of the Voice. The boundaries of the thirty-five Voices would be determined by discussions between governments and Indigenous organisations.

In each region, a Voice would either be designed from scratch or (more likely) built on existing Indigenous organisations and so “leverage existing approaches… with adaptation and evolution as needed.” This continuity would give the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices legitimacy in Indigenous eyes.

Calma and Langton declined to present a blueprint for the Voices, instead suggesting nine guiding design principles. The legitimacy of the National Voice, they said, would derive from “the strength, legitimacy and authority of Local & Regional Voices.” They recommended that the National Voice not come into operation “until the vast majority of Local & Regional Voices are fully established.” The Langton and Calma vision of regionalism is descended from the regionalism that ATSIC (which had thirty-six regions) practised and that the Negotiated Settlement project theorised as the emergent practice of land rights and native title.

The contest between the Yes and No campaigns has been an opportunity for the Australian public to learn about First Nations’ political diversity. What has become increasingly clear is that the Yes/No contest has been a misleading guide to that diversity.

For example, the Yes/No divide obscures the common ground between Jacinta Price and Noel Pearson. Both Pearson (in his 2022 Boyer Lectures) and Price have argued that social policy should pay attention to socioeconomic need and not assume that Indigenous problems are distinct in causation and solution. Both of them were also very critical of the Albanese government’s abolition of the cashless debit card in 2022.

Price wins the applause of some conservative Australians by urging a critical appraisal of Indigenous traditions, but she is not the only First Nations person to urge Indigenous Australians to allow space for critically assessing the claims of “custom.” Revision of custom is part of Langton’s project too.

The building of First Nations is a concern of people on both sides of the referendum debate. Warren Mundine is a No campaigner, but he also advocates that First Nations be recognised by treaties with Australian governments. As chief executive officer of NTSCORP Ltd, the native title service provider for Traditional Owners in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory, Mundine’s approach to sovereignty emerges from the practice of native title. He believes that the path to First Nations treaties will be more direct without a National Voice in the Constitution.

The strength of the Indigenous opposition to the Voice amendment has surprised and puzzled Australians who pay attention to Indigenous affairs. But the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer, conducted between 21 July and 28 August last year (before and after the prime minister’s announcement of the draft amendment) provided clues to minority Indigenous disquiet about Yes campaign themes. While 57 per cent of Indigenous respondents judged it “very important” to protect a “First Nations Body” by putting it in the Constitution and a further 30 per cent chose “fairly important,” a substantial minority of respondents weren’t committed to some of the key ideas on which the Yes campaign has drawn.

About a quarter of respondents didn’t consider themselves to be well informed about the history of Australia, about the histories of First Nations people and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. The same proportion (but not necessarily the same respondents) disbelieve or feel “unsure” about the truth of some of the main themes issuing from the critical history of colonisation — the frontier wars and the stolen generations.

Asked how we should face up to the “wrongs of the past” (deeds not specified by the survey), about half the respondents chose “There should be forgiveness for the wrongs of the past and all Australians should now move on,” a higher proportion than those who chose “Must be rectified before all Australians can move on” (38 per cent).

On the causes of Indigenous Australians’ “disadvantage,” about a third of Indigenous respondents didn’t agree that “past race-based policies” were to blame, and they didn’t see disadvantage as “Australia’s colonial legacy.” Some flatly disagreed with this linking of cause and effect; others declined to express a view. When the survey listed nine kinds of “disadvantage,” the proportion denying that government policies had caused them ranged between 9 and 12 per cent.

In 2022, the Barometer didn’t ask respondents to agree or disagree with the statement “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are responsible for their own disadvantages today.” But in four previous Barometers (2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020) between a quarter and a third of Indigenous respondents agreed with that statement.

Some Indigenous support for voting No comes from those who prioritise a treaty as the guarantee of the sovereignty they believe constitutional recognition would deny. While the 2022 Reconciliation Barometer didn’t ask respondents to rank Treaty and Voice or to choose between them, it did show that Indigenous support for a treaty is on the same level (54 per cent very important, 32 per cent fairly important) as Indigenous support for a constitutionally entrenched “Indigenous Body.”

While the Reconciliation Barometer 2022 suggests that a very high proportion of Indigenous Australians support the Yes case, it also reveals Indigenous support for ideas about history, responsibility and treaty-making that resonate with the No campaign.

The Yes/No alignments of First Nations Australians may not be an accurate guide to their differing views about sovereignty, but the debate about how to vote has at least focused attention on larger questions that Indigenous representatives will probably need to debate if a Voice is established. I see four questions.

In what ways are First Nations people distinct from/the same as other Australians? This is a cross-cutting question, open to many contextual answers.

At what scale can Indigenous representation operate? Some would agree with Warren Mundine that there can be no effective representation of Indigenous interests above the level of a First Nation. Others argue that a national representative body is both possible and necessary.

What is the relationship between citizenship within a First Nation and Australian citizenship? This question arises when Indigenous Australians debate whether access to welfare should be contingent on the approval of local Indigenous authorities (as it has in the Cape York experiment).

The question arises also in debates about what role (if any) Indigenous community organisations should play in the authentication of the Indigenous identity of individuals.

As the Australian Indigenous project experiments with the political and legal devices that Australian history is making available, such questions will demand attention. In this sense, the recently revealed diversity of Indigenous opinion about the Voice is but a stage in the formation of First Nations’ political thought. •

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These fears echo critiques already in the Australian ether. You might have heard that Indigenous self-determination policy failed. Or maybe you have doubts that it was ever properly tried — that Indigenous people were ever given a chance to manage their own affairs. Either way, self-determination might seem like an empty promise.

The term itself is associated with policies introduced by the Whitlam government in 1973. Under the banner of self-determination, Gough Whitlam held a royal commission into Aboriginal land rights, set up a federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs, affirmed First Nations cultures and funded Indigenous corporations. Whether this amounted to the hoped-for “self-determination” — in the eyes of First Nations people themselves, or of the United Nations for that matter — is debatable. Regardless, many scholars and activists consider the 1970s and 1980s a high point for self-determination in Australia.

After that, supposedly, things fell apart. In the decades that followed, governments’ commitment to the language and ideals of self-determination faltered and even withered away entirely. Persistent socioeconomic inequalities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in the early years of the twenty-first century convinced some thinkers that self-determination had failed.

For conservative critics, self-determination through national forms of Indigenous representation contradicted the ideal of the equality of citizens and divided the nation. In 2005, reflecting those views, the Howard government dismantled the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which the Hawke government had set up to provide an elected national Indigenous structure of governance and representation. Then, two years later, it launched the Northern Territory Emergency Response, winding back many of the self-governing freedoms of remote communities while also boosting funding for Indigenous organisations on the ground.

Thinkers and activists on the left also argued that self-determination had failed, but for the opposite reason: true self-determination had never properly been attempted.

But we are not so convinced that self-determination, as either a policy framework or a political vision, was a failure. Although governments’ commitment to listening has at times waned, we’ve seen things improve when First Nations people have had a say on their own affairs.

One way First Nations people have done so is through their own organisations. The policy changes of the 1970s prepared the ground for the growth of an Indigenous organisational and institutional sector that now has a life of its own. Governments have certainly created the contexts that hinder or support Indigenous self-determination, but the self-determination genie is out of the bottle.

First Nations self-determination is not waiting for governments. The Indigenous community sector has been insisting on having a voice where policymakers would otherwise have forged ahead without their input. The long-term improvements in Indigenous wellbeing achieved by this sector reveal how much we might gain by creating a constitutionally enshrined Voice. First Nations people are asking governments to listen to their views, because that’s what works.

The Indigenous community-controlled sector is made up of an array of non-profit organisations based in Indigenous communities, governed by boards made up of Indigenous people and serving the interests of Indigenous people. Although Whitlam often gets the credit, this was not his invention. It began with the initiatives of First Nations people.

Aboriginal people in places like Redfern looked to the example of the Black Panther Party in the United States, which was running medical clinics and other urban survival programs for Black communities. The Aboriginal Legal Service opened a shopfront offering legal representation in Redfern in 1970 after activists began recording incidents of police violence. The Aboriginal Medical Service came the following year.

Then, in 1972, the Murawina preschool and childcare service opened as a breakfast program run out of the AMS, with Aboriginal women in full control from 1973. Around the same time, the Aboriginal Housing Company also began operating in inner Sydney. A group of these same community organisers from Redfern set up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in early 1972. Legal academic Larissa Behrendt (a Eualeyai/Gamillaroi woman) has argued that the embassy’s commitment to building Aboriginal-controlled institutions — the AMS, the legal service, Aboriginal community-controlled childcare and the Black Theatre — was its enduring legacy.

As that timeline shows, the Whitlam government’s commitment to self-determination was a response to the calls of First Nations people. Just as the proposed Voice emerged as a First Nations idea, an earlier generation’s self-determination also began as an Indigenous project rather than a government agenda. The Black Theatre, established in 1972, actually announced Whitlam’s election win during the interval of its performance of Basically Black in December 1972.

Whitlam’s new Department of Aboriginal Affairs had an enormous budget, and Aboriginal organisations in Redfern and elsewhere suddenly received generous funding with minimal government oversight, at least initially. Even in the 1970s, though, the Indigenous sector’s vision diverged from official views. Governments were mostly interested in achieving socioeconomic parity with the non-Indigenous population, but the Indigenous sector understood itself as something more; it was to be a means of achieving self-determination.

Gary Foley (a Gumbainggir man), for instance, explained that the AMS considered itself “in the context of the political struggle because we’re simply an extension of that struggle, working… to ease the plight of the people we are politically working for.” Funding to the AMS and other organisations allowed Indigenous people to present their voice.

Two key bureaucrats in the Whitlam government, H.C. Coombs and Barrie Dexter, likewise intended Indigenous organisations to become a means by which First Nations people could voice and achieve their political aspirations (as these organisations had already been doing). In other words, they were to have a representative function. And this was considered appropriate: they were locally based and drew on existing partnerships and networks. For the Whitlam government, the blossoming sector was an organic expression of an Indigenous polity.

This community-controlled sector evolved over the decades from a tiny cluster of organisations powered by a few volunteers and minimal grants to a professionalised enterprise. In the 1970s, the institutional structures that could be used to express self-determination were limited: a handful of community-controlled services and a couple of land councils. Today, health remains the largest segment of the community-controlled sector, but it also extends to legal, education and family violence prevention services, along with Aboriginal statutory land rights and native title organisations, and Indigenous regional governance structures.

The organisations in this sector are mainly government-funded services, with governance drawn from communities. Although they are publicly funded, the fact that they draw money from various levels of government means they avoid being entirely dependent on any. Many are represented by the national peak body, the Coalition of Peaks.

Today, a growing, highly educated professional class exists within the Indigenous community. Numerous Indigenous parliamentarians have been elected across Australia. The community-controlled sector has enabled First Nations people to challenge institutions, forge pathways into universities, create culturally safe spaces in schools and workplaces, and take up ranks in the professions and academies.

Of course, the appalling inequities in health, incarceration rates and education reveal that much more needs to be done. Far from rendering the proposed Voice redundant, these successes give us a glimpse of what can be achieved when First Nations people are empowered to manage their own affairs.

While both ends of the political spectrum were decrying the death of self-determination in the early 2000s, a coalition of grassroots Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations coalesced into a new campaign. They wanted to Close the Gap.

At first this was a community-driven movement promoted by people across the political spectrum searching for new policy consensuses in Indigenous affairs. Led by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (renamed the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2008) and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, Tom Calma (a Kungarakan/Iwaidja man), Close the Gap brought a human rights approach to questions of health equity. It campaigned for clear targets that would “close gaps” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

As governments became more involved, though, the Indigenous organisational sector was shut out of the movement. In 2007 and 2008, the Council of Australian Governments settled a series of agreements, referred to as Closing the Gap, that included Indigenous policy targets for life expectancy, infant mortality, early childhood education in remote communities, reading, writing and numeracy, retention rates to year 12, and employment outcomes. They also included national partnership funding agreements negotiated among governments. The Indigenous organisations that had campaigned for this approach were consulted but had no seat at the negotiation table.

Each year since 2009 the prime minister has tabled an annual Closing the Gap Report (to which the Australian Human Rights Commission has responded annually with its counter reports, Close the Gap). The outcomes have been disappointing.

Self-determination, meanwhile, seemed to be at a low ebb. When the authors of the Uluru Statement called for a First Nations Voice to achieve “justice and self-determination” in May 2017, the Turnbull government immediately dismissed the proposal. Like other conservative governments, it was suspicious of national articulations of Indigenous self-determination through representation, preferring instead to work with local Indigenous organisations.

In the meantime, governments had begun developing a Closing the Gap Refresh, and in October 2018 a newly formed Coalition of Aboriginal Peak Organisations intervened in the Refresh process. Labelling this intervention an “act of self-determination,” the Coalition of Peaks wrote to the prime minister, premiers and chief ministers insisting that Indigenous communities must be represented in these negotiations. They wanted a voice.

At that stage, the Coalition of Peaks was an alliance of thirteen organisations across the health, legal, family violence prevention and land rights/native title sectors. (It now comprises more than fifty peak and member organisations.) Governments had consulted them individually in the processes for setting priorities and targets, but they had not been included in drafting policy documents or the Council of Australian Governments’ decision-making process. They now insisted that governments go beyond consultation to shared decision-making with “those representing Indigenous communities.”

Once it was accepted, Indigenous involvement produced a markedly different agreement. Alongside greater involvement of First Nations people in decision-making it led to greater transparency and accountability. The new National Agreement on Closing the Gap included a significantly stronger focus on Indigenous-led data and evaluation processes; strengthened structures to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to share decision-making authority with governments and so accelerate policy and place-based progress; a stronger and defined role for the Aboriginal community-controlled sector; and a clearer policy objective in the reform of government systems.

The Coalition of Peaks is particularly concerned about improving the quality of Indigenous access to, control of and use of data. It also ensures that independent First Nations–led reviews will be carried out following independent reviews by the Productivity Commission. The idea was to create a mechanism whereby governments could be held accountable to First Nations people. It wanted to flip older models of accountability upside down.

Of course, the Coalition of Peaks is imperfect and limited in its representation of Indigenous communities. Not all its member organisations agree on all policy priorities and targets, nor do its positions represent the full diversity of Indigenous political interests. Significantly, the Coalition of Peaks is not a democratically elected representative body and most of its member organisations remain dependent on government funding, which is determined in turn by the political cycle. Its capacity to challenge governments, therefore, is necessarily limited.

The proposed Voice, on which Australians will soon have their say, will not share these weaknesses. Enshrined in the Constitution, outside short-term political cycles, it will be freer to speak more clearly than the Coalition of Peaks ever could. Selected by First Nations communities, it will be even more accountable to the First Nations communities it will represent.

If even the imperfect Coalition of Peaks has achieved greater accountability for governments and empowered local Indigenous leaders to address local concerns, we think the Voice could achieve much more.

So, did self-determination ever fail? As Wiradjuri scholar Robynne Quiggin has argued, Indigenous Australia is self-determining and calls on governments to catch up with its agenda. “The most consistent call from Indigenous Australia since the abandonment of self-determination policy is — ‘listen to us,’” she says. “Consistent with the fact that we continue to be self-determining despite government policy, we say… ‘work with us so that we can set our own course.’”

When Whitlam heeded Indigenous calls for self-determination and identified the emerging Indigenous community-controlled sector central to achieving that vision, his government set in motion a form of self-determination that can’t be contained. Indeed, the Indigenous sector has been described as the defining legacy of Whitlam’s self-determination policy.

Since the 1970s, and through the energy, experiences and empowerment of the Indigenous sector, new generations of First Nations leaders have emerged across the community, academy, public sector and business world. The Indigenous professional class is booming, growing in size by some 75 per cent between 1996 and 2006 and gaining on the professionalisation of the general population.

First Nations people are exercising increasing control of their own affairs in the domains of land rights, health, education and environmental management through Indigenous organisations, as well as self-government through local Aboriginal councils. Building on experiences in this sector, First Nations people within government bureaucracies and peak bodies are also advancing Indigenous interests. These successes show us this is what works.

But the Closing the Gap Refresh experience also shows that, while governments might listen to Indigenous communities, these voices can also be overpowered and even silenced when bureaucratic systems take on a life of their own.

We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of the National Agreement will be, and there is much the Coalition of Peaks was unable to achieve. Nonetheless, First Nations people created an interim form of Indigenous representation at the highest levels while the constitutional discussion rolled on. This, we suggest, is a kind of self-determination, particularly in the absence of other more fully representative options such as the Voice.

Given these successes, a constitutionally enshrined Voice is the obvious next step for Indigenous self-determination. What remains to be seen is whether Australians will be willing to take it. •

The post Self-determination works. The next step is the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

The stars are our ancestors lighting up their campfires across the night sky. The universe exploded into being fourteen billion years ago and is still expanding. As it cooled and continued to inflate, an opposite force — gravity — organised matter into galaxies and stars. Everything was made of the elements forged by stars. Around billions of fiery suns, the interstellar dust and debris of supernovas coalesced as planets, some remaining gaseous, some becoming rigid rock. Earth, with its molten core, its mantle of magma and a dynamic crust, was born. The planet is alive.

In the shallow waters off the western coast of the continent metamorphosed by the Dreaming sit solid mementos of the beginning of life. They are living fossils, cushions of cells and silt called stromatolites. After life emerged in a fiery, toxic cauldron in an ocean trench, bacteria at the surface captured sunlight and used it to create biological energy in the form of sugar. They broke down carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, feeding off the carbon and releasing oxygen as waste. Photosynthesis, Earth’s marvellous magic, had begun. It was just a billion years after the planet was formed.

To later inhabitants, oxygen would seem the most precious waste in the firmament. But it was a dangerous experiment, for the oxygen-free atmosphere that had created the conditions for life was now gone. Stromatolites hunched in the western tides descended from the creatures that began to breathe a new atmosphere into being.

Two billion years ago, enough oxygen existed to turn the sky blue. The same oxygen turned the oceans red with rust. Thus life itself generated the planet’s first environmental crisis. This ancient rain of iron oxide is preserved today in the banded ores of the Hamersley Range. The universe was then already old, but Earth was young.

The planet was restless and violent, still seething with its newness. When separate lands fused, the earth moved for them. Australian landmasses shifted north and south as crusts cruised over iron-rich magma. Large complex cells fed off the growing oxygen resource and diversified rapidly. For almost 400 million years the whole planet became gripped by glaciation and scoured by ice, and most life was extinguished. The long reign of the ancient glaciers was written into rock.

As the ice withdrew, life bloomed again. Organisms of cooperative cells developed in the oceans and became the first animals. Six hundred million years ago, a supercontinent later known as Gondwana began to amass lands in the south, and their titanic fusion created a chain of mountains in central Australia. Uluru and Kata Tjuta, inspirited by the rainbow python, are sacred rubble from this momentous first creation of Gondwana.

Life ventured ashore, protected now from dangerous radiation by the strengthening shield of ozone gas around Earth. Plants and animals sustained each other, the essential oxygen circulating between them. Gondwana united with other continents, creating a single landmass called Pangaea. When the planet cooled again, surges of glacial ice scoured life from the land once more. But life persisted, and its reinventions included the seed and the egg, brilliant breakthroughs in reproduction. They were portable parcels of promise that created a world of cycads and dinosaurs.

Earth gradually changed its hue over eons. Rusted rock and grey stone became enlivened by green, joining the blue of the restless oceans. Chlorophyll conquered the continents. Pines, spruces, cypresses, cycads and ferns found their way up the tidal estuaries, across the plains and into the mountains, but the true green revolution awaited the emergence of flowering plants. These plants generated pollen and used animals as well as wind to deliver it. Insects especially were attracted to the perfumed, colourful flowers where they were dusted with pollen before they moved to another bloom. It was a botanical sexual frenzy abetted by animal couriers. The variety of plants exploded. Nutritious grasslands spread across the planet and energy-rich fruits and seeds proliferated. As this magic unfolded, Gondwana separated from Pangaea again and consolidated near the south pole, where it began to break up further.

The cosmic dust that had crystallised as Earth, dancing alone with its single moon and awash with its gradually slowing tides, seemed to have settled into a rhythm. The bombardment of meteors that marked its early life had eased. Giant reptiles ruled, small mammals skulked in the undergrowth, and flowers were beginning to wreak their revolution.

Then, sixty-six million years ago, the planet was violently assaulted. A huge rogue rock orbiting the Sun plunged into Earth. The whole planet shuddered, tidal waves, fires and volcanoes were unleashed, soot blackened the atmosphere, and three-quarters of life was extinguished. The largest animals, the dinosaurs, all died. But the disaster of the death star also created the opportunity for mammals to thrive. The comet forged the modern world.

Flat and geologically calm, the landmass that would become Australia was now host to few glaciers and volcanoes. But ice and fire were to shape it powerfully in other ways. About fifty million years ago, in the final rupture of Gondwana, Australia fractured from its cousin, Antarctica, and voyaged north over millions of years to subtropical latitudes and a drier climate. Fire ruled Australia while Antarctica was overwhelmed by ice. The planet’s two most arid lands became white and red deserts.

The newly birthed Australian plate rafted north into warmer climes at a time in planetary history when the earth grew cooler, thus moderating climatic change and nurturing great biodiversity. It was the continent’s defining journey. It began to dry, burn and leach nutrients, the ancient soils became degraded and impoverished, and the inland seas began to dry up. In the thrall of fire, the Gondwanan rainforest retreated to mountain refuges and the eucalypt spread. Gum trees came to dominate the wide brown land. The bush was born.

Three million years ago, when North and South America finally met and kissed, the relationship had consequences. Ocean currents changed and the Pleistocene epoch, marked by a succession of ice ages, kicked into life. Regular, dramatic swings in average global temperature quickened evolution’s engine. The constant tick and tock of ice and warmth sculpted new, innovative life forms.

In southern Africa, an intelligent primate of the forests ventured out onto the expanding grasslands and gazed at the horizon. This hominid was a creature of the ice ages, but her magic would be fire. One day her descendants walked north, and they kept on walking.

By the time they reached the southeastern edges of the Asian islands, these modern humans were experienced explorers. They gazed at a blue oceanic horizon and saw that there was no more land. But at night they observed the faint glow of fire on a distant continent. And by day they were beckoned by haze that might be smoke and dust. What they did next was astonishing.

The people embarked on an odyssey. They strengthened their rafts and voyaged over the horizon, beyond sight of land in any direction — and they kept on sailing. They were the most adventurous humans on Earth. They crossed one of the great planetary boundaries, a line few land-based animals traversed, one of the deep sutures of tectonic earth. This was over 60,000 years ago. The first Australians landed on a northern beach in exhaustion, wonder and relief. They had discovered a continent like no other.

The birds and animals they found, the very earth they trod, had never known a hominid. The other creatures were innocent of the new predator and unafraid. It was a bonanza. But the land was mysterious and forbidding and did not reveal its secrets easily. The people quickly moved west, east and south, leaving their signatures everywhere. They had to learn a radically new nature. Arid Australia was not consistently dry but unpredictably wet. The climate was erratic, rainfall was highly variable, and drought could grip the land for years. The soil was mostly poor in nutrients and there were few large rivers. But these conditions fostered biodiversity and a suite of unique animals and plants that were good at conserving energy and cooperating with one another.

The first people arrived with a firestick in their hands, but never before had they known it to exert such power. For this was the fire continent, as distinctive in its fire regimes as in its marsupials and mammal pollinators. Fire came to be at the heart of Australian civilisation. People cooked, cleansed, farmed, fought and celebrated with fire. The changes they wrought with hunting and fire affected the larger marsupials which, over thousands of years, became scarce. People kept vast landscapes open and freshly grassed through light, regular burning. By firing small patches they controlled large fires and encouraged an abundance of medium-sized mammals. As the eucalypt had remade Australia through fire, so did people.

They had arrived on those northern beaches as the latest ice age of the Pleistocene held the planet in its thrall. Polar ice was growing and the seas were lower, which had made the challenging crossing from Asia just possible. People could walk from New Guinea to Tasmania on dry land. This greater Australia, now known as Sahul, was the shape of the continent for most of the time humans have lived here. People quickly reached the far southwest of Western Australia and the southern coast of Tasmania. From the edge of the rainforest they observed icebergs from Antarctica, emissaries from old Gondwana.

For tens of thousands of years after people came to Australia, the seas continued to retreat and the new coastlines were quickly colonised. Every region of the continent became inhabited and beloved, its features and ecologies woven into story and law. Trade routes spanned the land. People elaborated their culture, history and science in art and dance, and buried their loved ones with ritual and ceremony in the earliest known human cremations. Multilingualism was the norm. Hundreds of distinct countries and languages were nurtured, and the land was mapped in song. This place was where everything happened, where time began.

As the ice age deepened, the only glaciers in Australia were in the highlands of Tasmania and on the peaks of the Alps. For much of the continent, the ice age was a dust age. Cold droughts settled on the land, confining people in the deserts to sheltered, watered refuges. Great swirls of moving sand dunes dominated the centre of the continent but the large rivers ran clear and campfires lit up around the lakes they formed. About 18,000 years ago, the grip of the cold began to weaken and gradually the seas began to rise. Saltwater invaded freshwater, beaches eroded, settlements retreated, sacred sites became sea country. The Bassian Plain was flooded and Tasmanians became islanders. Over thousands of years, Sahul turned into Australia.

The rising of the seas, the loss of coastal land, and the warming of average temperatures by up to 8°C transformed cultures, environments and economies throughout the continent. People whose ancestors had walked across the planet had survived a global ice age at home. In the face of extreme climatic hardship, they continued to curate their beloved country. They had experienced the end of the world and survived.

The warm interglacial period known as the Holocene, which began 13,000 years ago, ushered in a spring of creativity in Australia and across the planet. Human populations increased, forests expanded into the grasslands and new foods flourished. Australians observed the emergence of new agricultural practices in the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea but mostly chose not to adopt them. They continued to tune their hunting and harvesting skills to the distinctive ecologies of their own countries, enhancing their productivity by conserving whole ecosystems. A complex tapestry of spiritual belief and ceremonial ritual underpinned their economies. The sharing of food and resources was their primary ethos.

Strangers continued to visit Australia from across the seas, especially from Indonesia and Melanesia. Four thousand years ago, travellers from Asia brought the dingo to northern shores. During the past millennium, Macassans from Sulawesi made annual voyages in wooden praus to fish for sea cucumbers off Arnhem Land where they were generally welcomed by the locals. The Yolngu people of the north engaged in trade and ceremony with the visitors, learned their language, adopted some of their customs and had children with them. Some Australians travelled by prau to Sulawesi.

In recent centuries, other ships nosed around the western and northern coasts of the continent, carrying long-distance voyagers from Europe. One day, early in the European year of 1788, a fleet of tall ships — “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark” carefully stowed with seeds, animals and a ballast of convict settlers — entered a handsome harbour on the east coast of Australia and began to establish a camp. These strangers were wary, inquisitive and assertive, and they came to stay. They were here to establish a penal colony and to conduct an agrarian social experiment. They initiated one of the most self-conscious and carefully recorded colonisations in history on the shores of a land they found both beautiful and baffling.

They were from a small, green land on the other side of the world, descendants of the people who had ventured west rather than east as humans exited Africa. They colonised Europe and Britain thousands of years after the Australians had made their home in the southern continent. They lived in a simplified ecology scraped clean by the glaciers of the last ice age, and were unprepared for the rich subtlety of the south.

For 2000 years before their arrival in Australian waters, the Europeans had wondered if there might be a Great South Land to balance the continents of the north. By the start of the sixteenth century, they confirmed that the planet was a sphere and all its seas were one. They circled the globe in tall sailing ships and voyaged to the Pacific for trade, science and conquest. The British arrivals were part of the great colonialist expansion of European empires across the world. For them, success was measured through the personal accumulation of material things; Australians were the opposite.

On eastern Australian beaches from the late eighteenth century, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

The British did indeed find the Great South Land of their imagination seemingly waiting for them down under and they deemed it vacant and available. It was an upside-down world, the antipodes. They would redeem its oddity and emptiness. The invaders brought the Bible, Homer, Euclid, Shakespeare, Locke and the clock. They came with guns, germs and steel. With the plough they broke the land. They shivered at “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth.” They dug the dirt and seized it. Sheep and cattle were the shock troops of empire; their hard hooves were let loose on fragile soils and they trampled them to dust. Australian nature seemed deficient and needed to be “improved.” Colonists believed that the Australians were mere nomads, did not use the earth properly, and therefore did not own it.

But the true nomads were the invaders and they burned with land hunger. War for possession of the continent began. It continued for more than a hundred years on a thousand frontiers. Waterholes — the precious jewels of the arid country — were transformed into places of death. It was the most violent and tragic happening ever to befall Australia. So many lives were sacrificed, generations of people were traumatised, and intimate knowledge of diverse countries was lost.

Australia entered world history as a mere footnote to empire; it became celebrated as a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. A strange silence — or white noise — settled on the history of the continent. Nothing else had happened here for tens of thousands of years. Descendants of the newcomers grew up under southern skies with stories of skylarks, village lanes and green hedgerows from the true, northern hemisphere. And they learned that their country had a short triumphant history that began with “a blank space on the map” and culminated in the writing of “a new name on the map” — Anzac. So the apotheosis of the new nation happened on a distant Mediterranean shore. The cult of overseas war supplanted recognition of the unending war at home, and the heroic defence of country by the first Australians was repressed. They were disdained as peoples without agriculture, literacy, cities, religion or government, and were allowed neither a history nor a future.

The British and their descendants felt pride in their new southern land and pitied its doomed, original inhabitants. Colonists saw themselves as pioneers who pushed the frontier of white civilisation into the last continent to be settled, who connected Australia to a global community and economy. They were gratified that their White Australia, girt by sea, a new nation under southern skies, was a trailblazer of democratic rights: representative government, votes for working men, votes for women. But the first Australians lay firmly outside the embrace of democracy. They continued to be removed from country onto missions and reserves; they did not even have a rightful place in their own land, and every aspect of their lives was surveyed.

The invaders lived in fear of invasion. Had they used the soil well enough, had they earnt their inheritance? Would strangers in ships, boats, threaten again? Had they reckoned with their own actions in the land they had seized? There was a whispering in their hearts.

New peoples arrived down under from Europe, the Americas and Asia, and the British Australians lost their ascendancy. Australia became the home again of many cultures, vibrantly so, and a linguistic diversity not seen on the continent since the eighteenth century flourished. Many languages of the first peoples persisted and were renewed. The classical culture of the continent’s discoverers endured; their Dreamings, it was suggested, were the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. A bold mix of new stories grew in the land.

The invaders of old Australia did not foresee that the people they had dispossessed would make the nation anew. The society they created together was suffused with grief and wonder. The original owners were recognised as full citizens and began to win their country back through parliament and the courts. They believed their ancient sovereignty could shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

But now the planet was again shuddering under an assault. The meteor this time was the combined mass of humans and their impact upon air, oceans, forests, rivers, all living things. It was another extinction event, another shockwave destined to be preserved in the geology of Earth. The fossilised forests of the dinosaurs, dug up and burnt worldwide since Australia was invaded, had fuelled a human population explosion and a great acceleration of exploitation. Rockets on plumes of flame delivered pictures of spaceship Earth, floating alone, finite and vulnerable in the deep space of the expanding universe. Ice cores drilled from diminishing polar ice revealed, like sacred scrolls, the heartbeat of the planet, now awry. The unleashing of carbon, itself so damaging, enabled a planetary consciousness and an understanding of deep time that illuminated the course of redemption.

The Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

The continent of fire led the world into the new age of fire. But it also carried wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Humans, as creatures of the ice, were embarked on another odyssey. It would take them over the horizon, to an Earth they have never before known. •

References: The stars are our ancestors: B.T. Swimme and M.E. Tucker, Journey of the Universe • “the most precious waste in the firmament”: Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography • “The planet is alive”: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse • iron oxide, the seed and the egg: Reg Morrison, Australia: Land Beyond Time • the true green revolution: Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey • expanding grasslands: Vincent Carruthers, Cradle of Life • distinctive in its fire regimes and mammalian pollinators: Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush • conditions of biodiversity: Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters • Sahul and the last ice age: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming • conserving whole ecosystems: Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? • “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark”: First Fleet surgeon George Worgan in Grace Karskens, People of the River • agrarian social experiment: Grace Karskens, The Colony • guns, germs and steel: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel • “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth”: George Farwell, Cape York to the Kimberleys • “the true, northern hemisphere”: Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus • “a blank space on the map”: Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia • a whispering in their hearts: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts • “the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia”: Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place • “a bold mix of the Dreamings”: Alexis Wright, The Swan Book • “we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”: The Uluru Statement 2017 • a great acceleration: John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration • “the heartbeat of the planet”: Will Steffen • the new age of fire: Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene.

The post Odyssey down under appeared first on Inside Story.

It was “completely outrageous,” the opposition leader thundered to Fordham. “Australians want a fair election, not a dodgy one.” That turned a storm in a teacup into mainstream news.

Soon enough, the Australian Electoral Commission felt obliged to point out that “the formal voting instructions for the referendum are to clearly write either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ in full, in English.” In the 1999 republic referendum, said the AEC, a tiny 0.86 per cent of votes were informal (the accompanying constitutional preamble question got a slightly higher 0.95). Given that there are obviously many ways of voting informal, these numbers represent the very maximum number of ballot papers discarded because they were marked with a cross.

The current interpretation of ticks and crosses was adopted in the late 1980s. The Coalition has never expressed any concerns about it, and certainly didn’t this year when many of its MPs voted to pass the Voice referendum legislation in March. The interpretation isn’t in any legislation, but it’s in legal advice obtained by the AEC.

This sudden kerfuffle is of course part of the No side’s grievance campaign: the government and other elites, it says, are pulling a swifty on ordinary voters. One likely outcome of the beat-up will be more ticks and crosses on ballot papers than would otherwise have been the case.

An irony of all this is that when jurisdictions across the country count ticks and/or crosses as formal, they are deemed to mean the same thing: a vote for whatever party or candidate they are written next to. In the Senate, for example, a tick or cross is taken to mean a “1.” It’s the same in NSW elections: a cross or tick next to a candidate or party is interpreted as a “1.”

The last twenty constitutional referendums (there have been forty-four since Federation) have used the current ballot paper design. It might be reasonable to wonder, soberly, whether the legal advice should be overridden by legislation. It could be done: parliament sits this month. But sowing confusion — “If you don’t know vote No” — was the real purpose of the exercise.

The evolution of the referendum voting paper illustrates two features of Australian elections: that instructions for one ballot paper can have a negative impact on how voters mark another paper they must fill in on the same day; and how the AEC uses “savings provisions” to deal with some incorrectly filled-in papers.

A well-known case of the unintended crossover arose when the Senate ballot paper was redesigned in 1984. This was the first outing for two new features: group voting tickets and the above-the-line option of simply putting a tick (a cross was also accepted) next to a group. The chief purpose was to reverse the explosion in informal Senate votes, which had reached 9.9 per cent in 1983. The above-the-line option worked a treat, cutting Senate informality by more than half to 4.7 per cent.

Unfortunately, some voters applied the Senate instructions to the House of Representatives ballot paper as well, and informal votes for the lower house more than tripled, from 2.1 in 1983 to 6.8 per cent. Oops.

(Thanks partly to a voter-education campaign, lower house informality subsequently decreased, but it has never again been as low as 1983’s 2.1 per cent. The lowest in the past four decades was 3.0 per cent in 1993. These days the main causes of informal votes — not necessarily in this order — are increasing candidate numbers, more voters from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the confusion created by optional preferential voting at state or territory level, and a rise in the number of people deliberately voting informal. Group voting tickets were abolished in 2016.)

The savings provisions, meanwhile, allow the AEC to count a ballot paper filled in incorrectly — with ticks or crosses against candidates’ names, for example — so long as the voter’s intention is clear.

People of a certain age might recall what became known as the Langer vote, a savings provision introduced in the 1980s for House of Representatives elections. Despite the stated requirement that voters number all candidates, the AEC accepted ballot papers where a voter appeared to have inadvertently failed to fully comply with preferencing (by numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, for example).

Like most savings provisions, the difference this made to the count was tiny, but it wasn’t long before interested parties cottoned on to the fact that a voter could use it, in effect, to make a full allocation of preferences optional. Most importantly — at least from the major parties’ point of view — you could cast a valid vote without your preferences ending up with either Labor or the Coalition. Parliament’s first response was to make it illegal to urge anyone to vote in this manner; after a series of court cases, and after an activist called Albert Langer did time in the slammer, parliament got rid of the Langer vote altogether.

Several Australian jurisdictions have laws against advising voters to avail themselves of savings provisions. During a NSW campaign, for example, it is illegal to “print, publish, distribute or publicly display any electoral material that encourages any elector to place a tick or a cross in a square on a ballot paper” even though, as described above, it would still in many cases be counted as formal.

The current referendum ballot paper, which has just one square and instructions to write Yes or No inside it, was first used for the 1967 referendums. Since the 1980s the AEC has acted on legal advice to accept ticks as “Yes” but throw crosses onto the informal pile. I haven’t been able to find out how the commission and its predecessor treated ticks and crosses at referendums from 1967 to 1984.

A sketch of the journey of referendum ballot papers goes like this. The first ones, created and used in 1906, contained two boxes, next to the words Yes and No, and voters were instructed to put a cross inside the box next to the option they wanted. Referendums in that first decade of federation were held with general elections; voting for both houses of parliament also required putting crosses in boxes (one cross for the lower house, three for the upper) and that left little potential for confusion.

(Those three referendums, in 1906 and 1910, still had rather high informal votes, much higher than the accompanying elections.)

In 1918 the federal government replaced first-past-the-post with full preferential voting, requiring the ranking of all House candidates with numbers, like today. (At the next election, in 1919, informality for the House increased only slightly, but this was masked by the fact that voters who persisted in writing a cross next to their desired candidate benefited from savings provisions that counted their vote as formal if only two candidates ran in their electorate, which was the case for 64 per cent of those votes.)

The two referendums held with the 1919 election used the 1906 ballot paper, and average informality was a very big 13.6 per cent. Two midterm referendums in 1926 averaged a low 4.5 per cent informality. So it seemed reasonable to surmise that running referendums with elections caused some confusion.

In 1928, two months before an election at which a referendum would also be held, the ballot paper was radically redesigned. Referendum voters were still presented with Yes and No with a square after each, but now they had to put a “1” next to their choice and “2” next to the other. No more mentions of crosses on any ballot instructions (although — hullo savings provision! — a ballot with a single cross was still counted as if it was a “1”). Relative to the pair of referendums held with the 1919 election, informality dropped dramatically to 6.6 per cent.

This referendum ballot design remained through to 1965, when the Menzies government changed it to what we have today: just one square, with instructions to write either Yes or No. Country Party MP (and future party leader) Doug Anthony told parliament it would be “a more positive and, I believe, a more correct form of voting at a referendum.”

Anthony also noted that the “present provisions which provide that a ballot paper marked only with a cross or marked only with the figure 1 constitutes a formal vote will no longer be appropriate.” Back then, of course, a cross was accepted as indicating support for either Yes or No. Did this influence the later legal advice to the AEC regarding crosses? I’m no lawyer.

In 2023, it’s not even clear that most people who put a cross inside the referendum box are expressing opposition. Many times — in banks, at hospitals — they will have been asked to mark their preference with a cross. A more responsible party leader would have politely declined the invitation to buy into this ridiculous circus, but we are where we are, with ticks and crosses in the news and the commission having to devote resources to answering questions about them, sincere and otherwise. •

Update: Kevin Bonham covers similar territory, in parts in greater detail.

The post No diversion unticked appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its election record, which for the last thirty years has been the gold standard, Newspoll’s status derives from its longevity (Roy Morgan Research is the only polling brand that has been around for longer), where it is published (an upmarket newspaper read by most federal politicians, with an online presence featuring excellent graphics) and its frequency (unmatched). Poll addicts crave nothing more than a known quantity, easily accessible trend data and a regular fix.

It’s not just the percentages Newspoll generates that matter; it is also the way the Australian interprets the figures. How much the figures themselves matter, and how much the Australian’s interpretation matters, is difficult to say. Both are recycled by politicians and journalists, among others, without much thought being given to whether they make sense.

In the latest poll, conducted 12–15 July, Labor’s primary vote was down (from 38 per cent, 16–24 June, to 36 per cent), as was the Coalition’s (35 per cent to 34 per cent), but Labor’s two-party lead grew from 54–46 to 55–45 — rounded, as are all Newspoll figures, to the nearest integer. As Adrian Beaumont noted in the Conversation, Labor “may have been unlucky” in the rounding of the two previous Newspolls but it “was probably lucky” this time.

At the Australian, the judgement of long-time political editor Simon Benson was unequivocal. Focusing on the fall in Labor’s first-preference support rather than the rise in its two-party share, he declared: “Labor’s honeymoon is officially over.” “Officially”? It was as if Newspoll should be recognised as having the same sort of status as the Australian Bureau of Statistics, say, or the Australian Electoral Commission. If, as Phillip Coorey observed, “the latest Newspoll” was merely “the latest to declare the government’s honeymoon over” (it was the Australian not Newspoll that declared it) then it was uniquely the Australian that made it “official.”

Benson took it for granted that Labor’s “honeymoon” came to an end once its first-preference support declined to a post-election “low” by an amount Benson judged to be significant. No matter that this support for Labor was still well above the 32.6 per cent (primary) or 52.1 per cent (two-party) vote recorded at the May 2022 election. The “honeymoon” had ended, and that was now “official.”

An electoral honeymoon, unlike the real thing, can end it seems — or begin to end — at whatever moment a poll-watcher chooses. Last September, when Labor’s two-party support in Newspoll reached 57 per cent — just two points higher than its current level — and its primary support stood at 37 per cent (one point ahead of where it currently sits), Benson judged that “the electoral honeymoon for Anthony Albanese continues”; in the preferred prime minister stakes, Albanese (61 per cent) was well ahead of Dutton (22 per cent), figures virtually unchanged from July.

This year, at the beginning of March, when Labor’s two-party support was at 54 per cent (three points lower than it had been in September) but its primary support still on 37 per cent, Benson took it as “a sure sign that the romance of the honeymoon phase is coming to an end for the government.” At 54–28, the Albanese–Dutton head-to-head had changed as well, but not dramatically. By mid May, however, when Newspoll estimated Labor’s two-party support at 55 per cent (its current standing) and its primary support at 38 per cent (higher than its current 36 per cent), he wondered whether it was “now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon”; head-to-head, Albanese was still ahead of Dutton 56–29.

The day after the Australian published Newspoll’s figures for July, Nine’s metropolitan dailies published the latest figures from their July poll, the Resolve Political Monitor. Resolve’s percentages read as if Labor’s honeymoon was still in full-swing: Labor on 39 per cent, not 36 (the Newspoll figure); the Coalition on 30 per cent, not 34 (the Newspoll figure).

Political polling is nothing if not competitive. Making its own call about the end of Labor’s honeymoon, Resolve was not to be outdone. In March, after his poll had produced exactly the same figures (39–30) it would produce in July, Resolve’s director Jim Reed took Labor’s fall from 40 per cent in his previous poll as “another confirmation that the honeymoon highs have come to an end.” In June, Resolve had Labor back on 40 per cent. What had previously been a “honeymoon high” was now a sign of something quite different; in May, after all, Labor’s support had been 42 per cent, two points higher. Resolve, the Sun-Herald reported, “had started noting declines in Albanese and Labor’s honeymoon ratings early this year.”

Clearly, the only rule these commentators seem to follow in declaring an electoral honeymoon to have ended is that the level of support for the government in the latest poll is lower than the level recorded in the immediately preceding poll. Neither absolute levels of support nor the longer-term record count. If subsequent support for the government rises and falls — even if it is to a level higher than the previous high — one can declare an end to the honeymoon all over again. Neither the rise nor fall need be outside the poll’s margin of error — a figure the Australian and the Nine newspapers parade endlessly but their commentary studiously ignores.

Poll-watchers who have insisted for years that the Australian interprets its Newspoll data to cheer up or cheer on the Coalition may have noticed that its reading of the latest Newspoll backed up the interpretation of the Fadden by-election offered by the Liberal National Party candidate in Fadden, Cameron Caldwell. The Australian gave Caldwell’s interpretation the hortatory headline, “Fadden result ‘shows the honeymoon is over for Labor.’”

As well as spelling the end of the honeymoon, the result in Fadden showed “concern over the Indigenous voice” to be “high,” Caldwell argued. Columnist Joe Hildebrand — a vocal Yes supporter — recycled and generalised Caldwell’s line in the Daily Telegraph: “It could not be clearer,” he wrote, “that voters are rewarding the Prime Minister for his moderate and centrist direction and punishing him for the one aspect of his government” — the Voice — “that has been cast by his critics as radical or woke.”

Perhaps voters in Fadden were concerned about the Voice. “Using Fadden as a trial run,” Coorey had written on the eve of the by-election, “Dutton is attempting to turn the Voice into a lightning rod for broader discontent with the government.” After the by-election, however, another senior journalist, Paul Bongiorno, was equally adamant that “Dutton didn’t push his opposition to the referendum in the campaign”; having “raised it in a doorstop a few weeks ago, he dropped it as the poll neared.”

How anyone could conclude that Dutton had succeeded in making the Voice an issue based on nothing more than the result in Fadden, neither the Australian nor Hildebrand explained. One needs survey data, not a set of electoral returns, to determine whether Caldwell’s claim has merit. Bongiorno reports Caldwell saying that “people raised the Voice with him quietly because they didn’t want to be accused of racism or prejudice if they raised it publicly” — raised with him, he might have added, because they assumed Caldwell would not have thought such concerns racist or prejudiced. But Coorey, citing another LNP source, discounts the idea that views about the Voice affected the result: “the Voice had little impact either way,” he reports.

Even if the Voice was not shifting voters against Labor, were voters shifting against the Voice? As luck would have it, Newspoll’s latest poll also included a question on “whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice.” For the Yes side, the topline numbers brought no more cheer than Caldwell: Yes, 41 per cent; No, 48 per cent; Don’t Know, 11 per cent. The corresponding figures after the same question was asked three weeks earlier: 43–47–10.

The changes between June and July may have been small but they played to the dominant media narrative about the Voice: that support is declining; that No has now overtaken Yes; that the referendum, if not doomed to failure, is not on a path to success. In June, Benson had cautioned that it would be “foolhardy” to “make a call… four months out from polling day” (expected mid October), and that it was “not over yet for the voice.” Now, just three weeks later, with the margin between Yes and No growing from four points to seven — well within what the Australian describes as Newspoll’s “theoretical margin of error” — Benson concluded that “the voice referendum [was] in serious trouble,” support “gradually collapsing” with “confusion over the detail, the scope and the function of the voice… killing any goodwill many undecided voters may have had.”

More striking than the topline figures was a startling shift in the differences between women’s responses and men’s. The new poll reported a seven-point rise in support for Yes among men and a ten-point fall in support among women. Suddenly, from being more likely to vote Yes than to vote No (a six-point gap), women were more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a gap of eleven points) — a turnaround of seventeen percentage points. And from being more likely to vote No than to vote Yes (a fourteen-point gap), suddenly men were almost as likely to vote Yes — a twelve-point change.

By any measure, these were remarkable changes. The movement of one-in-five women from the Yes column (48 per cent down to 38 per cent) to either the No column (42 per cent up to 49 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 13 per cent) in such a short time — and before the start of the formal campaign — is difficult to credit. The movement of one-in-ten men from the No column (52 per cent down to 47 per cent) or the Don’t Know column (10 per cent up to 8 per cent), while only half as big, also stretches credulity.

Since the shifts were in opposite directions, they largely cancelled each other out. Had the shift among either group been less dramatic, the topline results might have looked quite different. For example, if support among women had declined by no more than half as much as Newspoll reports, support for the Voice would have stood at 43 or 44 per cent and opposition at 45 or 46 per cent. This would have represented an improved result, not a worse result, for the Yes camp than Newspoll’s figures of three weeks before. What might the headline have been then?

When Newspoll asks about the Voice, Benson writes, “female voters have until now been significantly overrepresented among the undecideds.” Now, when Newspoll asks those respondents who initially say they “don’t know” whether they “approve” of the alteration to the Constitution, “which way they would lean if forced to profess a view,” things are different: “women voters are now significantly more likely to say No.”

Neither Newspoll nor the Australian is keen to disclose the patterns of response to the initial question — before respondents were leant on to choose Yes or No — in the last three polls. Benson failed to reply to a request that the Australian do so; YouGov, the British-owned firm that conducts Newspoll, said it “can’t really comment.” As a consequence, Benson’s account can’t be confirmed independently. Yet the rules of the Australian Polling Council, of which YouGov is a founding member, say that if “voting intention figures are published with the undecided participants excluded, the proportion who were thus excluded should be published.”

Why might women have moved from Yes to No? Benson attributes the shift to the “targeted campaign by the No camp.” Crucial to this was the fact that the government, “in its contortions over the voice,” had “vacated the field of talking to voters’ primary concern — the cost of living.” Noting that “any pollster… will tell you female voters are more highly attuned to cost-of-living pressures than male voters” — though “cost of living is by far the issue of most concern to a majority of all voters” — Benson insists this gave the No camp a “strategic edge.” The No campaign had also “spent significant funds directly targeting women.” This, in his view, “appear[ed] to have paid off.”

To have “paid off” to anything like the extent Benson implies, the No campaign would have needed not only to have targeted female voters but also to have done so across most of the social media platforms on which the No campaign’s advertising, coordinated by Advance Australia, has largely been conducted. But targeting of this kind is not what the evidence shows. An analysis of the three Facebook pages — Fair Australia, Not Enough, and Referendum News — that Advance Australia has been populating concludes that only one (Not Enough) was targeting voters in the two largest states.

If the other two pages were “essentially ignoring New South Wales and Victoria” — the two states where the majority of women (and men) reside — the No campaign can hardly have been reaching the majority of female voters. Moreover, while the ads on Referendum News skewed “towards a female audience,” the ads on the other pages skewed to different demographics.

Assuming, for the sake of the argument, that the No campaign did enjoy the kind of success Benson attributes to it, are we to conclude that as well as shifting women in extraordinarily large numbers to the No side, the No campaign — in a terrible own goal — also shifted a large number of men across to the Yes side? If not, what did shift these men? This is not a question Benson attempts to answer; everything he has to say goes to explaining why support for the Voice should be falling rather than why, among men, it might have risen.

The explanation for the “rise” in support among men may lie in nothing more profound than the vagaries of polling. Newspoll has asked its Voice question with its current response architecture three times (the first is here). If one looks at all three polls — not just, as Benson does, the last two — among men the Yes–No split is 45–46, 38–48, 45–47: it’s the second (June) poll, not the third (July), that is the odd one out. If the second poll underestimated support among men, the most recent poll may simply be correcting that.

Before the latest Newspoll, only one poll had ever reported finding more men than women in favour of a constitutionally inscribed Voice. Conducted in December 2022 by Freshwater Strategic, it showed only the narrowest of differences in support between men (51 per cent) and women (50 per cent); but even in this poll, more men (30 per cent) than women (22 per cent) were opposed. The most recent poll to use the same response architecture as Newspoll — a poll conducted by Essential Media (5–9 July), a week ahead of Newspoll — shows women (49 per cent) more likely than men (44 per cent) to support Yes, and men (47 per cent) more likely than women (40 per cent) to say No.

None of this appears to have registered at the Australian. For Benson, the referendum had “suffered a collapse in support among women voters,” with women “for the first time… now more likely than men to vote no, a central change to core support.” The precipitous fall in support among women was noted by the paper’s national editor, Dennis Shanahan. The story about a new gender divide got a run in an editorial on the day it broke, and another run the next day. Other outlets, too — seemingly less concerned with objectivity, which requires critical evaluation, than with neutrality, which requires no more than reporting what is newsworthy — reproduced the figures.

Could such a shift have happened? Bongiorno — another strong supporter of a Yes vote — thought it not only could have happened but had happened, even as he took out the standard insurance against being held personally responsible for his report. “If you can believe the opinion polls,” he reported, “regional Australia has gone very cold on the idea of a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to Parliament.”

Perhaps Bongiorno also had in mind a poll published a couple of weeks earlier by the Canberra Times, not referenced by the Australian. The poll was conducted online by Chi Squared (the research arm of the Canberra Times’s owner, Australian Community Media) among readers of fourteen daily newspapers “serving Canberra and key regional population centres such as Newcastle, Wollongong, Tamworth, Orange, Albury and Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Ballarat, Bendigo and Warrnambool in Victoria, and Launceston and Burnie in northern Tasmania,” to which 10,131 readers had responded.

Chi Squared purported to show that “in the regions” the level of support for establishing the Voice (the question was not disclosed) stood at just 35 per cent. While this figure was not very different from Newspoll’s estimate, the “poll” was conducted from 16 to 26 June — at a time when Newspoll, using sampling techniques better suited to the task, not simply self-selection, was reporting a 40–51 split in the regions rather than Chi Squared’s 35–57. If regional opinion had shifted between June and July in the way Newspoll suggests, why might it have shifted? Benson doesn’t venture an answer; nor does Bongiorno.

“The bottom line,” says Benson, “is that the trend towards a No vote is increasing and it is expanding in the wrong demographics for the yes camp.” What the “right demographics” might be, he doesn’t say. The Yes camp needs a majority of the national vote and would be happy, one assumes, to accept contributions from all demographics. No demographic — certainly not women rather than men, or regional rather than metro voters — is “right” or “wrong”; if support is slipping, it is slipping largely across the board. To win, Yes also needs majorities in the majority of states; any four will do, though a victory in one or more of the bigger states will do more to secure a national majority vote than a victory in one or more of the smaller states.

To see whether the latest Newspoll has got things horribly wrong on the Voice — or whether, on the contrary, it should be recognised for being the first to detect an extraordinary change in the gender gap and a substantial expansion of the metro–regional divide — we will need to wait for the next polls, whether from Newspoll itself or from Resolve, Freshwater or Morgan.

Finally, a word about an unreported upheaval at YouGov. Between the June poll and the one conducted in July, virtually all of those working in the public affairs and polling unit at YouGov left; the departures included the head of the unit (and chair of the Australian Polling Council), Campbell White.

Did the number and quality of the personnel heading out the door have an impact on the analysis of the more recent poll? If the changes at YouGov have affected data quality or the quality of the analysis, and aren’t corrected, then — much like support for Labor or support for the Voice — Newspoll’s status in Canberra might slide as well. •

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The No pamphlet: equivocations and divisions

The negativity of the No pamphlet is striking, but it also raises a broader and more important question: what if its arguments are so effective that the No case wins? Apart from acknowledging that “we all want to help Indigenous Australians in disadvantaged communities” the pamphlet has nothing to offer if the referendum is lost. Labor may legislate the Voice anyway, but would the Coalition — which dominated the drafting of the No case — support such a bill?

The No pamphlet quotes a December 2022 warning by former High Court judge Ian Callinan: “I would foresee a decade or more of constitutional and administrative law litigation arising out of a Voice…” But the quote omits significant words that immediately follow: “… whether constitutionally entrenched or not.” What Callinan really believes, in other words, is that even if the Voice were merely legislated, as the Liberal Party has proposed, its actions would be subject to litigation in Australia’s highest court. The No pamphlet’s view is that such litigation risks creating “delays and dysfunctional government.”

The pamphlet’s omission of the words “whether constitutionally entrenched or not” is significant because Callinan was questioning Liberal policy, not just Labor policy. The Coalition had committed to legislating for a Voice, allocating $31.8 million towards that goal in the March 2022 budget. And Peter Dutton has since goaded the Albanese government to take the legislative path, saying this is the only way voters will know whether the Voice is worth having.

The pamphlet evades the question of a legislated Voice by declaring “There are better ways forward” but failing to propose any such way. It mentions a “less risky Voice option” without saying what that might be. Indeed, it suggests we should be satisfied with Australia’s existing machinery for Indigenous representation:

There are currently hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative bodies at all levels of government. This year the Government has allocated $4.3 billion for the National Indigenous Australians Agency, which has 1400 staff. This Agency’s website and corporate plan says: “We… ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have a say in the decisions that affect them.” There is no suggestion that this Voice will replace any of these. It will operate as one bureaucracy among many.

We can deduce from the No pamphlet that the Coalition is reluctant to take a clear position on a legislated Voice. It is keeping open its option to oppose; it will sniff the wind after the referendum. Partisan tactics determine the No pamphlet’s equivocations.

One of the Coalition’s tactical needs is to preserve a semblance of unity on the issue of Indigenous representation. This is difficult because among the No camp there are those who, on principle, reject not only a constitutionally enshrined Voice but any Indigenous Voice at all. Some of them present themselves as strict liberals, affirming a principle of formal equality that would never countenance any institution or law that differentiated among Australians. “Enshrining in our Constitution a body for only one group of Australians,” says the No pamphlet, “means permanently dividing Australians.”

There are two things to say about this assertion. First, merely legislating such a body would also “divide” Australians (if not “permanently” then for as long as that body existed). So (again) is the No camp for or against a legislated Voice?

Second, what is meant by “dividing”? In law and policy, governments are always making distinctions. Distinctions of age and income determine who is entitled to an age pension and who is not. Distinctions of region are part of our tax administration via the remote area tax offset. The Native Title Act and our heritage protection laws make use of the distinction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Both sides of politics accept the necessity of such distinctions. So no principle is violated if a parliament legislates a representative institution for Indigenous people. To enshrine such an institution in the Constitution would simply give a greater degree of permanency to a distinction that law and the policies of both sides of politics have been making for years.

The pamphlet implies (and invites you to agree) that any government that treats some people differently from others violates the principle that all Australians are “equal before the law.” This is nonsense presented with solemnity. The principle “equal before the law” is not violated when governments “divide” Australians in ways that are relevant to governing them. The point of a Voice — whether or not it is the subject of a referendum — is to give Indigenous Australians a say in how they are differentiated.

So the No pamphlet not only fails to be clear on the question of a legislated Voice, it also engages in muddled word play with the terms “divide” and “equality.” The primary purpose of the No pamphlet is to evoke risk and advocate No as prudence. There is no telling what the Voice might do; it “opens the door for activists.” Best keep that door shut.

To a remarkable extent the No pamphlet evokes danger by quoting the aspirations of Yes advocates — Megan Davis, Gabrielle Appleby, Thomas Mayo (twice) and Teela Reid. What they want is what we should fear, it implies. The pamphlet also quotes Greg Craven’s warning that the Voice may comment on “everything from submarines to parking tickets.” In what may be read as a dig at voting “from the heart,” the pamphlet tells us that Craven has said he will set aside his critique (“fatally flawed”) and vote Yes.

But the No pamphlet is no less emotional, appealing not to our hearts but to our self-preserving flight reflexes: “If you don’t know, vote no.” The pamphlet encourages readers to feel that the world is unknowable and we are menaced by “activists” who could even cancel Australia Day. This characterisation of named Indigenous Australians as a threat is intended to counter the aura their Indigeneity has acquired.

Reverence and gratitude for Indigenous Australia have been prominent themes for Yes. In the parliamentary debate on the referendum bill, nearly all the Yes advocates urged recognition of the duration of Indigenous occupation (sixty to seventy thousand years) as the nation’s ancient lineage. The Yes pamphlet restates the view that a Yes vote respects this deep history.

In the 118 speeches on the referendum bill, MPs differed in their treatment of the Uluru Statement. Nearly every Coalition MP simply ignored it, as if there had never been a Referendum Council (2015–17), twelve regional dialogues, a national assembly at Uluru in May 2017, and the poetic, consensus Statement from the Heart.

To ignore the Referendum Council process is essential to the No case, for it was in these meetings and in their eloquent climax that Indigenous Australians told fellow Australians the form they want constitutional recognition to take. The No speakers and the No pamphlet — while professing support for constitutional recognition — turn away from the dignity of that utterance and the integrity of the process that produced it. The only “process” to which the speakers and the pamphlet refer is the one they say the government denied them: “a Constitutional Convention to properly consider options and details.” The government, it says, has been “rushed and heavy-handed.”

In only one sentence does the 2000-word No pamphlet concede that the Uluru Statement exists: “the Uluru Statement from the Heart says a Voice is a first step, before a treaty and truth telling.” More to fear! For, as the pamphlet explains, “a treaty is an agreement between governments.” Although the Uluru Statement was careful to say that Indigenous sovereignty “is a spiritual notion” and that it “co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown,” the No pamphlet traduces the Uluru Statement as foreshadowing an Indigenous government.

The Yes pamphlet: usefulness above all, but where’s parliament?

Most Labor and Greens speeches during the May–June debate on the referendum bill celebrated the Uluru Statement, some explaining that it was the product of a long, unprecedented and decentralised process of deliberation. Many Yes MPs enriched their speeches with phrases and sentences they clearly admired as eloquent and poetic. Many characterised the Uluru Statement as gracious, generous and a gift.

While the Yes pamphlet continues with the argument that a Yes vote will pay “respect to 65,000 years of culture and tradition,” the tone seems to have shifted since the parliamentary debate ended on 16 June. The Yes pamphlet eschews the Uluru Statement’s rhetorical firepower; in fact it doesn’t quote the Statement at all, simply saying that “the idea [of the Voice] comes from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” and “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have given us a once-in-a-generation chance.”

The Yes pamphlet’s primary argument is that the Voice will be useful. It will improve life expectancy, infant mortality and health, education and employment. Why? Because listening to the clients of a policy improves the effectiveness of the policy. How do we know this? Because although “the current approach isn’t working,” here and there governments are already listening.

The pamphlet offers three examples of programs that work well because Indigenous people are involved in their implementation: community-controlled medical services, a school in Arnhem Land, and Indigenous Rangers working on country. At this point, a reader undecided about how to vote might ask: but if such programs are already possible, do we really need to change the Constitution? Why doesn’t the government just legislate for Indigenous involvement in the design and implementation of every program?

The closest the Yes pamphlet comes to addressing this question is to say that “putting the Voice in the Constitution gives it stability and independence, now and into the future,” enabling Indigenous Australians to give “frank advice” and to avoid “getting caught up in short-term politics.” “The current approach is broken and the Voice is our best chance to fix it. No one thinks the Voice will instantly solve everything — but we will finally have the right approach in place.” These words illustrate the difficulty of the “useful” argument: the causal chain between constitutional entrenchment and “outcomes” is long.

The Yes pamphlet responds to the No camp’s months of fear-mongering by quoting Robert French (a former chief justice) and Geoffrey Lindell (a University of Adelaide emeritus professor of law) saying that constitutionally entrenching the Voice brings a “low risk” of litigation “for a high return.” Strangely, the Yes pamphlet doesn’t make the point that parliament — subsequent to the referendum — will have every chance to further reduce that “risk.”

In the weeks immediately before the Albanese government introduced the bill, much more attention was given to the role parliament would play in designing the Voice. The No pamphlet elides this step, implying with its analogies (buying an unseen house or an undriven car, signing a blank cheque) that the victory of Yes in the referendum would immediately bring the Voice into being.

When the No pamphlet mentions parliament, it implies that it is a weak body, subordinate to the government and likely to be weakened further by a bossy High Court. “Once the High Court makes an interpretation, parliament can’t overrule it.” While this is not wrong, it understates parliament’s authority.

When the High Court said in 1992 that “native title” exists, the parliament couldn’t say “no it doesn’t,” but it did have discretion over how to legislate native title. The case law on the Native Title Act refers to the legislation as authoritative, applying the principle that parliament, the locus of popular sovereignty, is the supreme maker of Australian law. If the referendum endorses the Voice in principle, parliament will have much scope to mould it.

The Yes pamphlet could have made much more of parliament’s post-referendum role. It makes clear that the Voice can only advise parliament and executive, but it fails to mention that parliament will ultimately design the Voice and determine its budget. Was it not worth a paragraph to assure voters that parliament will design a Voice it can live with?

Even more surprising is that the Yes pamphlet doesn’t make a feature of the eight “design principles” Linda Burney began to promote at the Woodford Festival in December last year — her response to the demand for “detail.”

Whether through evasion, negativity or omission, neither pamphlet makes a particularly impressive contribution to the referendum campaign. •

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A key question for campaigners is whether voters are switching from “undecided” to No or from Yes to No. “What worries the government,” says columnist George Megalogenis, “is the recent narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters, which reflects a greater shift from the undecided to the No column than from Yes to No.” Another columnist, Janet Albrechtsen, calls Noel Pearson’s highly personal attacks on those disagreeing with him a boon to the No side because “more undecided voters might ask themselves ‘would I want this man running the Voice?’ and shift into the No side of the ledger.”

Is the rise in No being driven by “undecided” voters coming off the fence or by less “committed” Yes voters jumping the fence? That could depend on how “undecided” is defined. In talking about the “undecided,” Albrechtsen and Megalogenis may be focusing on quite different sets of voters.

In any poll, the “undecided” are defined not by the poll’s question but by the question’s “choice architecture” — the range of possible responses the pollster offers respondents. On the Voice, the polls have attempted to measure the “undecided” in at least three different ways. Some polls have offered respondents the opportunity to indicate they have no clear opinion; hence, the “Don’t know” option, or something similar. Some polls have encouraged respondents to express an opinion that has more nuance than Yes or No, enjoining them to indicate whether their views are held “strongly” or “not strongly”; views not strongly held, arguably, are another form of indecision. And some polls have presented respondents with a similar range of responses, but with another possible response — “Neither support nor oppose” — in the middle.

These don’t exhaust the range of possibilities. Some polls have asked respondents, directly, how likely they are to change their positions — “somewhat” or “very” likely — which is another way of indicating that while they appear to have made a choice, their decision is not final. Others have asked respondents who have indicated support for Yes or No how likely they are to turn out and vote.

Still other architectures remove the “undecided” option altogether. Both the most favourable and the least favourable polls for the Yes and No sides are polls of this kind: the latest Resolve poll, which has Yes trailing No, and the latest Essential poll, which has support for Yes a long way ahead of support for No (60–40); each restricted respondents to a Yes or No.

Not to distinguish among these response architectures — some of which allow for further variations — is to risk drawing comparisons between polls that can’t readily be compared, even where the questions asked are similar. It is also to risk inferring trends based on polls that offer respondents very different choices: none of the graphs tracking the narrowing of the gap between Yes and No appears to take any account of the various choice architectures involved in generating the numbers. Not to be aware of these different architectures also risks focusing on only one version of what is going on. Thus, the attention paid to the latest forced-choice Resolve poll or the latest Essential poll is disproportionate.

Depending on the chosen architecture, the “undecided” vote can vary enormously — from more than half, when respondents are invited to consider a middle option in a five-point scale, to zero, when being “undecided” is designed out of the choices on offer. In other words, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” is a function, in part, of the choice architecture. Nonetheless, across all choice architectures, the boost to the No vote by the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

Three types of response architecture: In the standard architecture — following the kinds of questions pollster George Gallup promoted in the 1940s as a “sampling referendum” — respondents are presented with two options (Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on) plus a third, for those who don’t want to choose either.

On whether to put a Voice into the Constitution, the standard architecture offers various choices: Yes/No/Don’t know (Newspoll’s most recent polling for the Australian; YouGov for the Daily Telegraph); Yes/No/Undecided–Prefer not to say (Freshwater Strategy for the Australian Financial Review); Yes/No/Undecided (Roy Morgan Research); Yes/No/Unsure (Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs); Support/Oppose/Don’t know–Not sure (Dynata for the Australia Institute); Yes/No/Need more information–Can’t say” (JWS).

Three things are worth noting. One is that these polls don’t imagine respondents having no opinion. The third choice they offer allows for respondents who have conflicting opinions that leave them “undecided,” qualified opinions that don’t readily fit a straight Yes or No, or Yes/No opinions that reticent respondents may prefer not to declare (a possibility acknowledged explicitly only by Freshwater).

A second point to note is the near-universal assumption that anyone who ticks Yes/No (Support/Oppose) has decided where they stand, at least for the moment. Those who haven’t decided are captured under a residual term: Undecided, Unsure, Don’t know, Can’t say. If some of those — perhaps most of those — who tick Yes/No (Support/Oppose) are still not entirely decided, this particular architecture provides no way of indicating it.

Third, some pollsters (JWS; Resolve Strategic, below) have offered respondents a residual category that conflates two quite different things: not wanting to align one’s views with Yes/No (Support/Oppose) and having a particular reason (“lack of information”) for not wanting to do so. Not only might those in the residual category place themselves there for reasons other than wanting more information, respondents who answer Yes/No (Support/Oppose) might welcome more information too.

In Gallup’s day, a response other than Yes/No, Support/Oppose and so on was usually left to respondents to volunteer. Pollsters have always been keen to promote the idea that the public’s views fit whatever categories the pollsters choose; a choice outside these categories is not something they are generally keen to encourage. With online polling, which means almost all polls these days, respondents can only be offered a residual option — as they should be — as an explicit alternative.

In what we might call the non-standard architecture, pollsters offer a set of response categories designed to distinguish respondents who hold their views (in favour/against) strongly from those who don’t hold their views strongly — the latter sometimes described as being “softly” in favour or “softly” against.

This is one of the two architectures Resolve has used. Since August 2022, it has asked whether respondents support a Voice in the Constitution and, it seems, offered these alternatives: Yes, definitely; Yes, probably; No, probably not; No, definitely not; Undecided/Not enough information. Since April, though, and possibly earlier, the final alternative has read Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote, a category that mixes up the one thing that necessarily distinguishes these respondents from the other respondents (Undecided in the sense of “none of the above”) from other things that may not (Not enough information and/or May not vote).

Before switching to a standard format at the end of May 2023, Newspoll used a similar non-standard response set — something that has been a hallmark of its issue polling over nearly forty years. On three occasions, Newspoll sought to identify those “strongly in favour,” “partly in favour,” “partly against” and “strongly against,” offering “Don’t know” as a residual category. (In principle, there is no reason why one could not also distinguish a strong “Don’t know” from a somewhat “Don’t know,” but that is a distinction that pollsters never draw.)

In the third choice of architecture — one that resembles the non-standard architecture but needs to be distinguished from it — response options take the form of a five-point scale with “Neither support nor oppose” (or some neutral equivalent) in the middle. These scales are known in the trade as Likert items, after the American survey researcher Rensis Likert. The use of “Neither support nor oppose” distinguishes a Likert item from the non-standard architecture,  which has a “don’t know” at the end but no middle option.

SEC Newgate has asked respondents regularly whether they “Strongly support,” “Somewhat support,” “Neither support nor oppose,” “Somewhat oppose,” or “Strongly oppose” the “creation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” The Scanlon Foundation has adopted a similar approach. So, too, has Essential — but only once, with another option, “Unsure,” added at the end of the scale.

Accepting versus squeezing: architectures that make the “undecided” visible: Do the various choice architectures affect the proportion of respondents who are “undecided”? If we compare the “undecided” in the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) with those who tick “Neither support nor oppose” on the Likert items, the answer may be no. In the standard format, the proportion “undecided” about a constitutionally enshrined Voice averaged as follows: 27 per cent (across three questions) between May and September 2022; 19.5 per cent (two questions) between October 2022 and January 2023; and 22 per cent (five questions) between February and May 2023. Given other variations among questions, these are not very different from the proportions ticking “Neither support nor oppose” in the Likert items: 23 per cent between May and September 2022 (four items); 25 per cent between October 2022 and January 2023 (one item); and 23 per cent between February and May 2023 (two items).

Eliminating the “undecided” — architectures of denial and removal: Pollsters have developed ways not only of reducing the “undecided” votes but of making them disappear. The most extreme of these methods is a binary response architecture that imposes a strict two-way choice: Yes/No, Support/Oppose, and so on. These polls give no other option. If we ask whether the choice architecture affects the proportion that shows up as “undecided,” nowhere is the answer clearer than here.

How many respondents have refused to answer when the question is asked in this way is nowhere disclosed; Essential Research, whose polls are published in the Guardian, says it doesn’t know the number. What happens to respondents who refuse to answer is not something pollsters are keen to disclose either. Resolve, which has used the binary format in relation to the Voice since August 2022, appears not to block these respondents from taking any further part in the poll. But in the Essential poll, respondents who baulk at the binary are removed from the sample.

What the process of deleting respondents does to the representativeness of a sample is something pollsters don’t openly address. In an industry that encourages the belief that sampling error is the only kind of error that matters, this is not entirely surprising.

In estimating support for a constitutional Voice, a number of pollsters have resorted to the binary format either wholly (Essential, Compass, and Painted Dog in Western Australia) or in part (Resolve). Their justification for offering respondents just two options is that at the referendum these are the two choices that voters will face. This is misleading. Voters will have other choices: not to turn out (acknowledged by Resolve in the response options it offers in the preceding question) or to turn out but not cast a valid vote. On the ABC’s Insiders, independent senator Lidia Thorpe said she was contemplating turning out but writing “sovereignty” on the ballot.

Binaries are not favoured by the market research industry. In Britain, the Market Research Society Code of Conduct states that “members must take reasonable action when undertaking data collection to ensure… that participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express, including don’t know/prefer not to say.” This code covers all members, including those whose global reach extends from Britain to Australia (YouGov, Ipsos and Dynata).

In Australia, a similar guideline published by the Research Society (formerly the Market Research Society of Australia) advises members to “make sure participants are able to provide information in a way that reflects the view they want to express” — a guideline almost identical with that of the MRS, even if it stops short of noting that this should allow for a “don’t know/prefer not to say.” Whether such guidelines make a difference to how members actually conduct polls is another matter; of the firms that have offered binary choices on the Voice, some (Essential) are members of the Research Society, others are not (Compass, Resolve).

But a binary is not the only way to make the “undecided” disappear. Some pollsters publish a set of figures, based on the standard architecture, from which respondents registered as “undecided” have been removed using a quite different technique. In its latest release, for example, Morgan publishes one set of figures (Yes, 46 per cent; No, 36 per cent; Undecided, 18 per cent) followed by another (Yes, 56 per cent; No, 44 per cent), the latter derived from ignoring the “undecided” and repercentaging the rest to a base of 82 (46+36). This is equivalent to assuming the “undecided” will ultimately split along the same lines as those who expressed a choice. In publishing its figures, with the “undecided” removed, Freshwater appears to do something similar.

Whether the basis on which Morgan (or Freshwater) reallocates the “undecided” is correct is open to doubt. Morgan acknowledges this: “past experience,” it cautions, “shows that ‘undecided’ voters are far more likely to end up as a ‘No’ rather than a ‘Yes’ vote.” Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney, who is said to be “completely confident the Yes campaign will convince undecided voters to back the Voice,” expresses the opposite view.

In considering the narrowing lead of Yes over No, we should ask how the “undecided” have been acknowledged, defined and dealt with in each poll’s response architecture.

What the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t Know) shows: Between June and September 2022, the three polls that used a “Yes/No/Don’t Know” response architecture (two by Dynata for the Australia Institute, one by JWS) reported that an average of 55 per cent of respondents said they would have voted Yes, 18 per cent would have voted No, and 27 per cent would not have put their hand up for either.

Across the following four months, the corresponding averages (for the two questions asked by Freshwater and Morgan) were 51.5 per cent, 28.5 per cent, and 20 per cent. (Omitted is a poorly constructed question conducted by Dynata for the Institute of Public Affairs.) From February 2023 to the end of May, when Freshwater, Morgan, and JWS  asked five questions between them, support for a Voice in the Constitution averaged 43 per cent, opposition 34.5 per cent, and the “undecided” 22 per cent.

Since May 2022, support for Yes has declined (from 55 per cent in the first four months to 43 per cent in the most recent quarter) and support for No has risen (from 18 to 34.5 per cent), quarter by quarter, but the decline in the proportion supporting neither Yes nor No (from 27 to 22 per cent) has been relatively small. So, while the 16.5 percentage point rise in the No vote is not entirely accounted for by the 12 percentage point fall in the Yes vote, the contribution to the No vote of the “undecided” appears to have been much smaller than the contribution of those who switched from Yes.

In some cases, pollsters have tried to reduce the number of “don’t knows” by asking these respondents a follow-up question — known in the trade as a “leaner” — designed to get them to reconsider; this might be seen as a way of distinguishing “soft” don’t knows from “hard” don’t knows.

Some of these pollsters have published the figures both before and after the leaner (JWS) or made them available (Freshwater). On these figures (one set from JWS; three sets from Freshwater), the proportion of “undecided” respondents was 8 percentage points smaller, on average, after the leaner than before. Except for one occasion when they split evenly, more chose the Yes side than chose the No side. So, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, squeezing the undecided widened the gap.

What the non-standard architecture (Yes, strong/weak; No, strong weak; Undecided) shows: In the first four months after the 2022 election, none of the pollsters who asked questions about support for the Voice used the non-standard architecture. That was to change, first through Resolve, then through Newspoll.

Between September 2022 and January 2023, Resolve adopted this architecture twice. Averaging the two polls, support stood at 50 per cent, opposition 29.5 per cent, Undecided/Not enough information 21 per cent. Between February and May, across three more polls, the corresponding figures were 45 per cent Yes; 34 per cent No; 20 per cent Undecided/Not enough information/May not vote. So, over the two periods, Yes dropped by 5 points, No rose by 4.5, and those opting for the residual category dropped by just 1 point. The rise in opposition is almost entirely accounted for by the fall in support.

Taken at face value, the three Newspoll surveys, conducted in the last quarter, tell a rather different story: 54 per cent Yes; 38 per cent No; 8 per cent Don’t know. But they can throw no light on the shift from quarter to quarter because Newspoll’s figures indicates the size of the “don’t knows” after the leaner; asked to divulge the proportion before the leaner, Newspoll declined.

Could the leaner — or the “squeeze’,” as Freshwater prefers to call it — explain the difference between the size of the “don’t know” response with the standard architecture and the size of the “don’t know” response in the non-standard architecture? In the standard (Freshwater) format, the “don’t knows” averaged 15 per cent, squeezed; in the non-standard (Newspoll) format, the “don’t knows” averaged just 8 per cent, squeezed. (Resolve’s data is not squeezed.) This suggests that, compared with the standard architecture, asking about the Voice while offering a non-standard set of response options makes a difference to the number that finish in the “undecided” column; the non-standard architecture lowers the number markedly.

What the Likert items (Yes, strong/weak; Neither…nor; No, strong/weak) show: The Likert items confirm these shifts. In the first four months, when four Likert items (from Essential, SEC Newgate and the Scanlon Foundation) featured in the polls, the level of support for the Voice (“strongly support” plus “somewhat support”) averaged 57 per cent; the level of opposition (“somewhat oppose” plus “strongly oppose”), 17.5 per cent; those inclined neither one way nor the other, 34.5 per cent. In the next quarter, SEC Newgate produced the only Likert item: 55 per cent supported the Voice, 19 per cent opposed, and 25 per cent neither supported nor opposed. In the most recent period, which saw two (SEC Newgate) items, support averaged 52.5 per cent, opposition 24 per cent, and 23 per cent were neither for nor against.

While the proportion of respondents only partly in support appears to have declined (from 24.5 to 21 per cent) the proportion strongly opposed appears to have increased (from 17.5 to 24 per cent). But the proportions strongly in support or partly opposed have barely shifted. This lends some support to Dennis Shanahan’s remark, seemingly based on private polling, about the “start” of a “drift from soft Yes to hard No.” But on whether this is due to “young people and Labor supporters,” as Shanahan believes, there is room for doubt; although SEC Newgate does not report separately on the demographics of those who are partly in support or strongly in support, the drift away from the Voice has been much more marked among older than among younger voters and much more marked among Coalition than among Labor voters, in their polling.

Compared with results obtained with the standard set of responses, the Likert items point to much smaller shifts away from support and towards opposition: a drop in the level of support for the Voice of just 4 percentage points, not 12; a rise in the level of opposition of just 6.5 points, not 16.5; and a falling away of the “undecided” vote — here, the proportion neither in favour nor opposed — of just 1.5 percentage points, not 5. As with the standard architecture, most of the additional No vote appears to have come from those who supported (strongly or somewhat) the Voice in earlier polls, with the decline in the “Neither… nor” group appearing to contribute much less to the growth in the No vote.

What the binary architecture (Yes/No) shows: Binaries are designed to eliminate the “undecided.” But when they are asked in the wake of response architectures that recognise the undecided, they can tell us one important thing: what happens to the “undecided” when they are forced to choose.

If we compare the results Resolve produced when it used the non-standard architecture and followed up with a binary, it is clear that the Yes side enjoyed a greater boost than the No side when the “undecided” were forced to choose. In other words, far from contributing to a narrowing of the gap between Yes and No, eliminating the undecided widened the Yes vote’s lead; this is consistent with the picture that emerges from other architectures when the “undecided” are squeezed. The one exception was Resolve’s June poll, its most recent, where the “don’t knows,” given a binary choice, appear to have split in favour of the No side (7 Yes, 11 No), causing the overall balance to shift to the No side (49–51).

“Undecided” — differences across the complete catalogue of measures: Across the pollsters’ questions, “Undecided” is hardly a fixed category. Typically, moreover, the “undecided” vote varies with the choice architecture.

Some commentators base their discussion of the “undecided” on the standard response format: Yes/No/Don’t know, “can’t say,” “not sure,” and so on. Megalogenis is one; constitutional lawyer and columnist Greg Craven is another. Each estimates the “undecided” vote to be “around 20 per cent” — a number clearly based on the (unsqueezed) numbers published in relation to questions that offered the standard response options. This proportion was lower in polls that used a leaner: 20–22 per cent before the leaner, quarter-by-quarter; around 15 per cent, it seems, after the leaner.

What of the non-standard format? Though the Resolve poll asks respondents to classify themselves as either “definitely” or “probably” (Yes/No), the Sydney Morning Herald and Age have never published a set of results for any of the samples that separates the “definitely” from the “probably.” Looking at the figures, and the limited detail about the polls that the papers choose to publish, a reader could be excused for thinking that Resolve used the standard rather a non-standard response architecture. A reader could certainly conclude that its publisher didn’t think the distinction mattered.

In Newspoll, those who described themselves as “partly” in favour (28 per cent) or “partly” against (13 per cent) represented a much bigger proportion of the electorate than is represented by the “undecided” (even before the leaner) in polls that used the standard format. If we add those who answered “Don’t know” (8 per cent), we get a combined figure of 49 per cent — half the electorate — who are neither strongly Yes nor strongly No.

Craven speculates that “Once someone congeals [sic] to No” — after shifting from “Don’t know,” presumably — “they will not be shifted.” This implies that even someone only partly against the Voice should not be considered “undecided.” But in support of his opinion, he offers no evidence.

The use of Likert items lifts the proportion of the electorate we might regard as “undecided” to a slightly higher level still. Adding in those only somewhat in support (21 per cent), those neither in support nor opposed (23 per cent) and those only somewhat against (9 per cent), we reach a number of 53 per cent for the most recent four months; that is, over half.

“Undecided”: Further questions, different answers: Some questions in the polls have sought to establish how many respondents are “undecided” about the Voice not in any of these ways but by asking respondents how sure they are that their preferences won’t change. In response to a question Freshwater asked in December 2022, and repeated in April and in May 2023, only 39 per cent (on average) of those who favoured a constitutional change were “certain” they would “vote this way”; among those opposed to a constitutional change, the average was 61 per cent; these are figures not previously published.

Nonetheless, the proportions that said they “could change” their mind or were “currently undecided” remained substantial: 34 per cent (December), 31 per cent (April), 31 per cent (May). Of these, about a third could change their mind, the other two-thirds being currently “undecided.” Among those who could change their mind, the proportion was consistently higher among those who intended to vote Yes than among those who intended to vote No: 17–11 per cent (December), 12–6 per cent (April), and 10–7 per cent (May).

The number of voters who are persuadable could be even greater. Common Cause is reported to have “identified” 20 per cent of the non-Indigenous population as “strong Voice supporters,” 15 per cent as “opponents,” with the other 65 per cent “open to being persuaded either way.”

Two polls also asked respondents how likely they were to actually turn out and vote. Here, too, the response architecture mattered, with JWS using the non-standard response architecture and Resolve using the standard architecture. In February, when JWS asked how likely respondents were “to attend a polling booth (or source a postal vote) and cast a formal vote in this referendum,” more than a third of its respondents said “somewhat likely” (17 per cent), “unlikely” (8 per cent) or “can’t say” (10 per cent). In April, when Resolve asked how likely it was that respondents would “be registered to vote” and would “turn out to cast a vote in this referendum about the Voice,” similar proportions said they were unlikely to cast a vote (10 per cent) or were “undecided” (9 per cent); in the absence of the other JWS categories — extremely likely, very likely and somewhat likely — the rest of the sample (81 per cent) could only say that they were likely to cast a vote.

How different were the likelihoods of Yes and No supporters actually turning out? In the JWS poll, fewer of the Yes (48 per cent) than the No supporters (56 per cent) said they were extremely likely to cast a formal vote — though the gap narrowed (72–69) when those very likely to do so were added. Between those in the Resolve poll who intended to vote Yes (89 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out) and those who intended to vote No (87 per cent of whom said they were likely to turn out), there was hardly any difference. In both polls, more No supporters than Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out. In the JWS poll, 11 per cent of No supporters compared with 4 per cent of Yes supporters said they were unlikely to turn out; in the Resolve poll, the corresponding figures were 10 and 8.

More striking than either of these sets of figures were Resolve’s figures for those “undecided” about whether they favoured Yes or No: 44 per cent of these respondents said they were either unlikely to vote (14 per cent) or were “undecided” about whether they would vote (30 per cent). If nearly half of the “undecided” (on the standard measure) were not to vote (JWS did not publish its figures), allocating the “undecided” to either the Yes or No side would be defensible only if the allocation didn’t assume that these respondents would cast their lot with the No side (Morgan’s hunch) or with the Yes side (Burney’s hope).

The government’s explanation for the “narrowing of the gap between committed Yes and No voters,” as reported by George Megalogenis, is not borne out by any of our measures. On the standard format, the “narrowing of the gap” between May 2022 and May 2023 appears to have been due to respondents moving from Yes (down 12 percentage points) to No (up 16.5); the shift to No from among the “undecided” (down 5) appears to explain much less of what has happened. In the non-standard architecture, the combined support for Yes has slipped (down 5) over the last eight months while the combined support for No has grown (up 4.5), the “undecided” (down 1) having hardly moved.

Moreover, any narrowing of the gap between those “strongly” committed to a Yes vote and those “strongly” committed to a No vote has been due to the number “strongly” Yes shrinking and the number “strongly” No expanding; it has not been due to a reduction in the proportion that “neither supports nor opposes” having the Voice inscribed in the Constitution. Responses to the Likert items over the last year also suggest a decline in support (down 4) and a rise in opposition (up 6.5) without a marked reduction in the proportion registered as “neither… nor” (down 1.5). Binaries, posed hot on the tail of questions that have offered a non-standard set of responses, have not narrowed the gap between Yes and No; except for the most recent of these questions, they have widened it.

Every measure leads to the same conclusion: the gap has narrowed because the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support. Each of these measures, it has to be conceded, is based on cross-sectional data — data derived from polls conducted at a particular time that reveal only the net movement across categories. Since the gross movement is certain to have been bigger, panel data — data derived by interviewing the same respondents at different times — might tell a different story. But every claim about how opinions have moved has appealed, if only implicitly, to the evidence provided by the cross-sectional data; panel data have not rated a mention. (So far as we know, no panel data exist.)

The choice architecture makes no difference in establishing that the gap between the Yes and No has narrowed. It makes some difference in showing whether the narrowing is due to a gain of support on the No side rather than a loss of support on the Yes side (suggested by the standard architecture and by the non-standard architecture) or a loss of support in almost equal measure on both the Yes and the No sides (the Likert items). And it makes a big difference in determining the size of the Yes and No vote (the binary architecture being particularly powerful), in estimating the proportion of respondents’ undecided (less so with the standard architecture compared with Likert items), and in identifying the proportion that might be persuaded to change their minds.

To say that the choice architecture makes a difference is also to say that it may not be possible to express one form of the architecture in terms of another; when Newspoll switched from the non-standard to the standard form of response, the previous results could not be converted into the standard form. It follows that changes in support may be difficult to track when the choice architecture changes.

This should not be read as an argument against changing architectures; the more closely the response architecture mimics a referendum, the better it is likely to be. Gallup’s  standard architecture — with or without a leaner — is to be preferred to a binary, a form that offers too restricted a range of choice. The standard architecture is also to be preferred to the non-standard architecture or to a Likert item, forms that offer too wide a choice.

This analysis also does not mean that other, more direct measures of uncertainty should be discarded or not introduced. On the contrary, different measures may serve well as forms of validation and as sources of insight. •

The post “Undecided” on the Voice appeared first on Inside Story.

At the beginning of April, when Newspoll last reported on support for putting a Voice into the Constitution, it estimated the level of approval at 53 per cent and opposition at 39 per cent; 8 per cent said “Don’t know.” Two months later, the corresponding figures are rather different: 46–43–11.

On the face of it, this looks like support has declined by seven points, the opposition has risen by four points, and the “Don’t knows” have gone up by three. And it looks like that’s the result of a couple of months in which the No side has campaigned hard and the Yes side has been on the back foot, with some of its erstwhile supporters either switching to No or putting off a firm decision and “parking” their vote, as Newspoll’s former boss Sol Lebovic used to say, under “Don’t know.”

Thus, Dennis Shanahan, in a comment for the Australian: “The latest Newspoll figures… suggest there is an across-the-board movement against the voice and a surge in uncertainty.”

Not so fast. There are two reasons for caution when comparing the June results with the April results: a change in Newspoll’s question and a change in what we might call, borrowing a phrase from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, its “choice architecture.”

The question: The Australian notes that the question asked in its latest poll is not the same as the question asked in its previous polls. The obvious implication is that its figures need to be interpreted with care.

In April, Newspoll explained that “There is a proposal to alter the Australian constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.” It then asked: “Are you personally in favour or against this proposal?”

In its latest poll, Newspoll used a slightly different preamble: “Later this year, Australians will decide at a referendum whether to alter the Australian Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice”(with those italicised words underlined in the questionnaire). It then asked: “Do you approve this proposed alteration?” This made it “the first Newspoll survey to present voters with the precise question they will be asked at the ballot box when the referendum is held later this year.”

If the differences in the wording of the two questions explains, at least in part, the differences in the two sets of responses, it is not clear how it does. Did the reference to “recognition” deflate support? That seems unlikely: since “recognition” has wide public support, its inclusion is more likely to have boosted support than deflated it. Did the prospect of having to vote at a referendum boost opposition? Again, that seems unlikely, though at a time when voters may have more pressing things to worry about, it’s probably the better bet. Perhaps the heavy black underlining of the proposal caused concern.

According to a quote in the Daily Telegraph, another News Corp masthead, polling analyst Kevin Bonham believes Newspoll is “likely more accurate” than many other polls because it has been the first to use the exact wording of the referendum proposal. However commendable that might have been, we cannot assume that the wording necessarily makes a difference to respondents.

A polling purist might baulk at Newspoll’s switch from: (a) asking respondents whether they are “in favour or against” (balanced alternatives) a proposal to alter the Constitution to establish a Voice; to (b) asking respondents whether they “approve” this proposed alteration, with no balancing alternative (“disapprove”). It might also have been better practice to ask respondents how they intended to act (that is, vote) rather than how they felt (“in favour or against”; “approve”).

The choice architecture: What the Australian overlooks — and what Newspoll itself fails to note — may be something more important than the change in the question: the change in the poll’s choice architecture. In April, Newspoll not just posed a different question; it also offered a different array of response options: “Strongly in favour,” “Partly in favour,” “Partly against,” “Strongly against,” “Don’t know.” In its most recent poll, by contrast, the options offered to respondents were simply: “Yes,” “No,” “Don’t know” — a set of responses, it should be acknowledged, better suited to a referendum than the set Newspoll previously offered.

How might this change have affected the results? With a wider number of response options, the proportion that chose “Don’t know” was relatively small; in April’s Newspoll, it was 8 per cent, with the numbers in February (7 per cent) and in March (9 per cent) having been almost the same. Polls by other companies in February, March or April that offered the same sort of choices as Newspoll offered in its latest poll reported higher figures for “Don’t know,” just as Newspoll now does.

The assumption that we can compare polls that use different architectures (Yes/No/Don’t know as against Strongly in favour/Partly in favour/Partly against/Strongly against/Don’t know) simply by collapsing categories (Yes = Strongly in favour + Partly in favour) is mistaken.

It is difficult to say how much the change in the Yes and No responses can be explained as an effect of the change in the choice architecture. But this doesn’t leave us without any bearings. As we would expect, the “Don’t know” number in June (11 per cent) is higher than it was in April (8 per cent); the “surge in uncertainty” is therefore almost certainly an illusion — an effect of changes in the response categories.

If the “Don’t know” number is higher, then the Yes and/or No vote has to be lower. In this Newspoll, the Yes vote is lower but it is also lower than we might have expected on the basis of a switch in choice options alone. And the No vote, far from being lower, is higher.

Allowing for changes in the choice architecture, this suggests that, over the two months since Newspoll’s last survey, the Yes side has lost support and the No side has gained support.

This is hardly news: a tightening of the contest is what almost all the polling has shown for some time. The intriguing question is how much of a tightening would Newspoll have shown — with or without its new question — had it not changed its response options.

Nor is it news that fewer than half of those polled intend to vote Yes. Since March, none of the polls that use the standard architecture (Yes/No/Don’t know) — Freshwater, Morgan, Resolve — have reported Yes majorities. The only way of conjuring Yes majorities from these polls has been by assuming either that the “Don’t knows” won’t vote or that enough of them will vote — and vote Yes — to get the proposal over the line.

According to Simon Benson, who wrote the Australian’s main story, the Newspoll results “suggest the debate is now shaping up as one being led by elites on one side and everybody else on the other.” What this means is unclear. There are “elites” in both camps. But even if the “elites” were only on the Yes side, the polls don’t show “everybody else” on the other. Benson has reprised a dichotomy, pushed by some on the No side, without thinking it through. The poll results, he says, “stand as a warning sign for advocate business leaders that their customer base and employees may not necessarily be signed up to the inevitability of the referendum’s assumed success.”

Is the Australian’s clearest contribution to the debate its headline? In February, the website run by Fair Australia, the name under which senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s Advance is campaigning against the Voice, advertised its plans to “build an army of Aussies” to “defend our nation.” Now, told by the Australian that most “Aussies” don’t intend to vote Yes, the undecided may draw some reassurance that it’s okay to vote No. •

The post Losing ground? appeared first on Inside Story.

That fragment of a story began its evolution when the well-known Melbourne Aboriginal activist Gary Foley came across a brief report about the event in a newspaper of the time. In an essay published in 1997 he drew a connection between the League’s protest and the event now widely known as Kristallnacht, a Nazi-sponsored pogrom against Jewish people. Foley believed the League was the first group in Australia to try to formally protest against the German government’s persecution of Jewish people, but his main aim was to draw attention to Australia’s persecution of Aboriginal people by noting the comparison with the Nazis.

The story Foley told about the League’s protest piqued the interest of staff at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (known widely at the time as the Jewish Holocaust Centre). It no doubt struck them as a good example of a people seeking to combat racism, and especially anti-Semitism. Telling a story about it would be a means of advancing the centre’s educational goal.

In the years that followed, the thread of the story told by Jewish institutions and organisations, here and in Israel, solidified into the account we know today. The protest at the consulate was the heroic work of one man, William Cooper, rather than the political organisation he represented, let alone any broader political movement of which it was a part.

According to this account, Cooper’s was the only non-governmental protest made in Australia, or even the world, against the Nazi persecution of Jews. In raising his voice, Cooper was bearing witness to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. His act sprang from his courage, humanity and compassion, and his empathy with the Jewish people, rather than any intention to advance his own people’s interests. It was all the more remarkable and worthy because he was standing up for the rights of Jewish people despite having no rights himself.

How did the story come to take on mythological qualities in this way? When they learned of Foley’s discovery, leading figures at the Holocaust Centre may well have also been influenced by two other narratives: that Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish people, which culminated in the Holocaust, and that tens of millions of gentiles had stood by while the Holocaust took place.

Foley’s argument that the League had been the first Australian organisation to raise its voice against the pogrom provided a striking counterpoint to the behaviour of other bystanders, or so it was believed. Just a few years earlier, Steven Spielberg’s remarkably popular Hollywood movie Schindler’s List had told a similarly uplifting story about an unlikely figure who rescued hundreds of Jews from the Nazi genocide.

I imagine the Holocaust Centre — and Melbourne’s Jewish community more generally — would also have been attracted to the story of the League’s protest because a particular kind of politics had become increasingly influential in Australia and many other Western societies — the politics of recognition, whose key words included remembrance, rights and reparation. Many non-Aboriginal people, or at least Anglo-Australians, now felt moved to tackle what was called “the great Australian silence” about Australia’s history of Aboriginal dispossession, displacement, destruction and discrimination. Increasingly, some were characterising this history as genocide — most recently in a report for the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission about the stolen generations.

The Holocaust Centre’s key figures would likely have been influenced, too, by a shift in how the past was being recounted and how people were relating to it, namely the rise in both scholarly and public circles of what was called “memory,” especially in the form of testimony, which had occurred most notably in accounts of the Holocaust. Those who had experienced a historical event had come to be seen as the most authoritative bearers of the truth about the past, so much so that “memory” was increasingly regarded in the media, and even by some scholars, as a substitute for history as told by academic historians, rather than just a supplement to those accounts.

An emerging scholarly and popular discourse also encouraged dividing those present in difficult historical circumstances into perpetrators, victims, collaborators, bystanders and resisters. In the case of settler societies, Indigenous people were called on to recall the past as victims; and non-Indigenous people were urged to listen to their testimony, acknowledge the truths they uttered, recognise the pain they had suffered, repudiate a past in which European ancestors were held to have been perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders (though sometimes resisters), and make amends for its legacies.

Over many years, this story has been told repeatedly in myriad forms outside the Jewish community: in commemorations, memorials, exhibitions, re-enactments, naming ceremonies, news reports, radio programs, books, magazine articles, essays, plays, paintings, musical compositions, blogs, videos and podcasts. It has been taken up by numerous government institutions and embraced by many sympathetic Anglo-Australians.

In December 2010 the largest and most senior Australian parliamentary delegation ever to visit Israel travelled to Jerusalem to participate in a series of events commemorating the League’s protest. In November 2017 a representative of the German government responsible for relations with Jewish organisations and issues relating to anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, accepted a document purporting to be the petition in Berlin, and in December 2020 he issued a formal apology for the German consul’s refusal to accept the petition some eighty years earlier.

In Australia, government bodies decided to name places in Melbourne in Cooper’s honour — a federal electorate, a building that houses several law courts and legal tribunals, an institute at a university, and a footbridge at a train station — and in each instance reference was made to the protest to the German consulate. The Aboriginal filmmakers Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole saw no reason to discuss the protest in their 2008 documentary First Australians; in 2020 the Aboriginal radio broadcaster Daniel Browning commissioned an episode of the ABC’s AWAYE! about Cooper that was framed by the story.

Cultural institutions have followed suit. The National Museum of Australia’s website feature “Defining Moments in Australian History” includes the story. Heritage Victoria has taken an interest in two of the houses in which Cooper lived, each of which displays an account of the story. The Victorian government department of education and training has included the story in its curriculum. And a historical society in Cooper’s traditional country has created an online exhibit about Cooper that focuses on the protest to the German consulate.

In the account of the protest I give in my life history of William Cooper, key historical facts are different. For example, the deputation to the German consulate can’t be attributed to Cooper alone, for while he was the Australian Aborigines’ League’s principal figure, League members (who included a whitefella by the name of Arthur Burdeu) played a major role; and the League, let alone Cooper, was by no means the first in Australia to formally protest against the Nazi German persecution of Jews after Kristallnacht, for two left-wing organisations had already tried to deliver a protest to the consulate in Melbourne. Nor can we be sure that Cooper was present when the attempt was made to hand over the petition — indeed, it is quite likely that he was not, as his health had declined considerably by this time.

More importantly, in the story that I tell, the meaning of this event is different. My point of departure is that the League was quintessentially a political organisation — and an Aboriginal one at that — and that it consequently went about its work in a strategic fashion, always considering what might be the best possible ways to fashion a case that could persuade white Australians to support its struggle to improve the lot of its people.

In the month prior to drawing up its petition, the League had evidently been conducting much of its political work by drawing parallels between Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jewish people and more than one Australian government’s treatment of Aboriginal people. It pointed out that the persecution of Indigenous people in Australia was akin to that experienced by racial minorities in Europe, and asserted that Australia should be as concerned about the rights of its people as it was about the rights of those other minorities.

One sentence in particular in the League’s petition — or what has survived of it — provides evidence that this was the point of its protest: “Like the Jews, our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another race.”

Other parts of the historical record also suggest that the League’s protest sought to draw attention to similarities between the treatment of the Jewish minority by the Nazi German government and the treatment of the Aboriginal minority by Australian governments.

Barely ten days after the League left its petition at the German consulate, a letter in Cooper’s name sent by the League to a federal minister said, “We feel that while we [Australians] are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we [Aboriginal people] are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered.” Several months later, in a letter now held in the National Archives, Cooper told prime minister Robert Menzies, “I do trust that care for a suffering minority will… not allow Australia’s minority problem to be as undesirable as the European minorities of which we read so much in the press.”

Shortly afterwards, following the outbreak of war, Cooper spelled out the kind of connection he and the League were trying to make in protesting against the Nazi persecution of German Jews. “Australia is linked with the Empire in a fight for the rights of minorities…” he told Menzies. “Yet we are a minority with just as real oppression.” A year later, Cooper’s protégé Doug Nicholls posed this rhetorical question to a congregation in a Melbourne church: “Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?”

My interpretation of the League’s protest rests not only on these written historical records but also on a source that can be seen as the product of collective memory or tradition. About a year before the League’s deputation to the German consulate, Cooper, in the course of speaking at length to a white journalist, referred to his people’s “horror and fear of extermination,” saying: “It is in the blood, the racial memory, which recalls the terrible things done to them in years gone by.” (His most important political act, a petition to the British king, also expressed a fear of extermination by speaking of the need to “prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race.”)

These statements give a sense that the League was drawn to make its protest to the German consulate because, consciously or unconsciously, its members identified themselves with German Jews as a result of their own people’s experience of violence.

The story I have told of the League’s protest makes clear that the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler has leached the event of the meaning it had at the time for those responsible for it, and the meaning it could have today.

In everyday parlance, “myth” refers to a statement that is widely considered to be false. In using this word to describe the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler I don’t want to exclude this connotation, but I have something more ambiguous in mind.

Most myths have a genuine link to a genuine past. To be considered plausible, an account of the past must have at least a partial relationship to past reality, and thus to what is regarded as historically truthful. In this instance, it is a historical fact that the Australian Aborigines’ League sent a deputation to the German consulate in Melbourne in December 1938 to present a petition in which it protested against the persecution of the Jewish people.

But the rest of the story is a good example of what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm once called “the invention of tradition.” It has been created by projecting onto Cooper a purpose and a character that the storytellers wish him to have had. The historical fact of the deputation aside, none of the story has been formed on the basis of the historical record.

Like most myths, this story achieves its most powerful effects not by falsifying historical material — though one of the organisations that has played a leading role in producing the story has fabricated the petition the League presented to the German consulate — but through omission, distortion and oversimplification.

Consequently, Cooper is recognised not because of his people’s loss, pain and suffering, but because he recognised the Jewish people’s loss, pain and suffering. This is the point of the storytelling. As a result, the popular account deflects attention from the devastating impact of racism and colonialism on this country’s Aboriginal people, and their struggle to lay bare its legacies and get them redressed. Such can be the cunning of recognition. What might purport to recognise the history of Aboriginal people misrecognises it.

The degree to which this myth has distorted how Cooper should be remembered — and the costs of that distortion — is highlighted by comparing it with what Gary Foley was doing. He was practising history in keeping with the discipline’s protocols, which include the recovery of the relevant historical texts and historical contexts, and was also adopting the techniques of Aboriginal history, a subdiscipline that seeks to make sense of the past and its presence by engaging with Aboriginal historical sources, subjects, agency and perspectives. The evolving story of Cooper’s protest ignored Foley’s main aim: he was seeking to draw attention to parallels between the murderous Nazi German campaign against the Jews of Europe and what had happened and was still happening to Aboriginal people in Australia.

In Australia, as elsewhere, history as a way of knowing and understanding the past threatens to be displaced by myth and memory (or what is deemed to be memory) that make claims about the past that are seldom tested and provide little explanation for what happened and why. Yet, as historian Allan Megill has suggested, “truth and justice, or whatever simulacra of them remain to us, require at least the ghost of History if they are to have any claim on people at all. What is left otherwise is only what feels good (or satisfyingly bad) at the moment.” •

The post The evolution of a myth appeared first on Inside Story.

A few days after the report’s release, a Resolve poll showed a further decline in support for constitutional change. The finding served to highlight the notions of “risk,” “pragmatism” and “compromise” that are central to the committee’s report.

Pragmatism in particular — as strength or weakness — quickly became a theme of public debate. Encouraged by the minority report of the committee’s Liberal members, former Indigenous social justice commissioner Mick Gooda counselled the government’s Indigenous advisers to give up the hope of the Voice having the constitutional right to advise the executive. Responding on ABC Radio National, Noel Pearson spurned Gooda as a compromiser, leaving the public to infer that Anthony Albanese’s Indigenous advisers, having made compromises in the past, have now drawn their line in the sand.

The committee was examining the wording of section 129, which has four elements: introductory words recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia; subsection 129(i), providing for the establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; subsection 129(ii), saying that the function of the Voice is to make representations to parliament and the executive; and subsection 129(iii), giving parliament power to legislate the Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

Because Section 129 is intended as an act of “recognition,” it faces a decisive test: does it attract the assent of those to be recognised? On the basis of the evidence it received, the committee accepted that “the Voice, as established by the Bill, is the preferred method of recognition sought by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution.”

The National Party member of the committee, Pat Conaghan (MHR for Cowper), didn’t agree that recognition should take this form. His dissenting report asserts that the bill “conflates two entirely separate issues”: whether to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution at all; and whether a constitutionally enshrined advisory body should be the form recognition takes. He didn’t declare his hand on the first issue, but he is clearly in the No camp on the second.

But if recognition is a reciprocal process — with recogniser and recognised negotiating agreement about its terms — then voters have only one issue to decide: whether to demonstrate recognition by putting a Voice in the constitution. A majority of committee members were satisfied that “the words contained in the Bill do give effect to what Indigenous Australians have asked for, in processes such as the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Final Report to the Australian Government on the Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process.”

Law professor Megan Davis, one of the key figures in development of the Uluru Statement, reinforced this point when she appeared before the committee on 14 April. Referring to a January 2023 Ipsos poll, she declared that “80 per cent of our mob support… constitutional recognition to empower their people.” (She could have added that only 10 per cent of Indigenous respondents to Ipsos said they opposed the constitutional amendment, with 10 per cent undecided.)

Davis also referred to Reconciliation Australia’s latest Reconciliation Barometer: “They’ve got the number at 88 per cent.” The Reconciliation Barometer 2022 asked Indigenous respondents to rate the importance of protecting the Indigenous Voice by putting it in the constitution: 57 per cent said this was “very important” and a further 30 per cent “fairly important.”

The question of what proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians really wants the Voice matters because Indigenous dissent is being highlighted by the No campaign. Dissident figures Nyunggai Warren Mundine and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price have emerged as the faces of the official No campaign’s advertising and media appearances; and at the other end of the political spectrum, senator Lidia Thorpe — who I understand has not yet finalised her position — urged ABC Radio National’s Patricia Karvelas to hear the “progressive no” case. According to Senator Thorpe, Indigenous people are being drowned out by a “loud” Yes campaign bankrolled by corporate Australia.

In raising doubt about what Indigenous Australians want, the No campaign received assistance from Liberal committee member Kerrynne Liddle, an Arrernte woman who represents South Australia in the Senate. She persistently questioned Indigenous witnesses about whether it was possible for a national representative process to cover the diversity of their opinion.

On 14 April she posed such a question about the regional assemblies that culminated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. On 17 April she asked a Wiradjuri witness similar questions: “Who was your representative at that dialogue? Are you aware who that was? Did you have anybody from here [Orange] that was a representative at that dialogue?”

On the assumption that the government will legislate the model proposed by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton, Liddle expressed doubts about the new body’s capacity to represent Indigenous diversity. She asked witnesses from Queensland whether the Calma–Langton model gave enough seats to Queensland. She asked Western Australian witnesses whether the regional diversity of their state would be adequately represented.

In pursuing this line, Liddle was following her leader. Peter Dutton has said that a body that aspires to be representatively “national” will succeed only in becoming a “Canberra” Voice — though he may have surprised his own colleagues when he made this point. When the Liberal Party met to confirm it was in the No camp, according to the Nine papers’ David Crowe, its position had three facets: recognition of “First Peoples” in the Constitution; legislated local and regional Indigenous bodies; and a legislated national Voice. At his press conference after the meeting, Dutton rubbished the idea of a national body, legislated or otherwise.

Liddle also wondered what the amendment would really recognise. “Have you actually looked carefully at the words to see whether it really, truly even acknowledges us, as opposed to acknowledging a Voice, and do you have any thoughts on that?” she asked former Liberal Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt on 28 April. Why no mention of “First Nations,” she wondered. (The phrase in the amendment is “First Peoples.”)

On the same day, Liddle challenged George Williams, a professor of constitutional law, with the observation: “An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice is referred to three times in the wording of the three paragraphs — not Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people, not a Voice separately, just an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.”

When Warren Mundine and his lead researcher Vicki Grieves Williams each appeared before the committee, they too stressed Indigenous diversity, arguing that the structures of the Voice (as imagined in the Calma–Langton report) are not authentic to First Nations culture. Grieves suggested that historians and anthropologists know this to be true but are holding back.

In her evidence on 14 April, Anne Twomey, another professor of constitutional law, defended the proposed amendment but scrupulously refused to speak with certainty about what Indigenous Australians want by way of recognition. “My only knowledge, to the extent that I have any, was of the views of the Referendum Working Group,” she said. “But other people may argue that the Referendum Working Group is not sufficiently representative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and I can’t speak to that…”

Yet Liddle and two Liberal colleagues, Keith Wolahan MP and senator Andrew Bragg, made no mention in their dissenting report of these doubts about how Indigenous Australians wishes have been represented and will be represented in the future. So why do I mention them at all?

Doubts about “what Indigenous people really want” — doubts that evoke Indigenous Australia as too diverse and localised to have an identifiable aggregated interest — are likely to remain prominent No campaign themes. Pitched to voters who would like to be recognisers — people of goodwill — they will create uncertainty about whether the government has found the form of recognition that pleases the largest possible proportion of Indigenous Australians.

Even if such doubts are in the minds of only a small minority of voters with weak attachment to the Yes side, the effect could be damaging to Yes. Pitched to those who are already poised to vote No, they provide a socially acceptable reason for voting No.

After the referendum — whether it is carried or not — will come further debate about what Indigenous Australians want and who speaks for them. This will be the inescapable context of parliament’s debate on a bill to set out the form, functions and powers of the Voice. The path to the Voice is land-mined with the very questions about representation that the Voice proposal is meant to resolve.

Risk in another key theme of the No forces. As Keith Wolahan (Liberal MHR for Menzies) remarked during the committee’s questioning, “Our task as a parliamentary committee is to assess and quantify risk.” He and others agreed that there were two kinds of risk to consider: the risk to our system of government of a weakening of executive power, and the risk to national unity if the referendum resulted in only a slender Yes majority or — worse — a majority No vote.

A strand of Australian political thought holds that the unelected judiciary should have as few opportunities as possible to use its power to challenge decisions by the executive. This view has been acclaimed as “conservative,” though how widely it is shared remains an open question. The Liberals’ dissenting report explained the danger of judicial overreach by pointing to what it sees as a great strength of our Constitution: it “confers very few rights” and “instead leaves it to the parliament to make laws providing for rights where necessary, with the flexibility to adjust to changing circumstances over time.”

Viewed from this perspective, the problem with the words in the proposed section 129 is that the High Court could interpret them “in a way that imposes duties on the executive.” What duties? A duty to consult, and a duty to consider.

Under a duty to consult it would be mandatory for the executive to give the Voice an opportunity to submit a representation before making decisions on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Under a duty to consider, it would be mandatory for the executive to consider representations from the Voice before making decisions on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. According to these Liberals, executive duties that derive from the Voice’s “right” to be consulted and considered, would have “profoundly disruptive effects on the operation of government.”

Would a High Court ever deliver judgements that profoundly disrupted the operation of government? Those who are happy with the amendment as it stands think this very unlikely. “I don’t think the High Court is in that business,” says former High Court chief justice Robert French. “Do we really seriously think that the High Court is in a position that it would do that?” asks Anne Twomey. “And my answer is: no, I’m sorry, I don’t.” Former High Court justice Kenneth Hayne took a similar line.

Why are Liberals not reassured? Wolahan made it clear that he is troubled by what has happened to Australia’s system of government in the era of human rights. Like other liberal polities, Australia has tried to reconcile executive efficiency (the ability of ministers and their public servant delegates to make binding decisions within timeframes judged as reasonable) with our commitment (in statute and treaty) to human rights. In Australia the difficulty has been felt most acutely in decisions about who is entitled to be in Australia.

As Wolahan asked one legal expert on 1 May, “If we were to compare the migration area of law in the review that occurs in that area of law, we would see that there’s broad agreement that there is more red tape and delay [in] those decisions. Is there not a risk that that gets expanded to a broader array of executive government decision-making?”

In their dissenting report, Bragg, Liddle and Wolahan list recent senior court cases they believe to have trammelled the executive, remarking: “There are many other examples of decisions that have invalidated legislation or government decisions, especially in the field of migration.” Yes, many people have noticed that, but not all of us lament the trend.

The argument over the Voice has become the latest flashpoint in an ongoing struggle over how to build “human rights” into Australia’s system of government. When Mark Latham and John Howard agreed in 2004 to abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, they taught Indigenous Australians an unforgettable lesson in the frailty of legislated rights.

And the political risk? The committee considered the possibility the referendum might be lost. Most members and most witnesses dreaded that outcome. “A referendum failure would haunt our country for decades; it will haunt all of us,” the Liberals’ Julian Leeser said. “The question will be: did we make it as easy as possible for Australians to vote yes?”

In contemplating that possibility, the benchmark of the 1967 referendum, when 91 per cent voted Yes, seemed to weigh heavily. Sean Gordon, chair of Uphold and Recognise, laid out the Yes advocates’ dilemma. “The most important thing,” he told the committee, “has always been that we need to put forward a position that is worth winning from the perspective of Indigenous people, but it also needs to be winnable, given that we need 90 per cent of the population to support this.”

Why 90 per cent? Gordon recalled the 1967 referendum as a “nation-building” moment. He wants the 2023 referendum to be another: “a 51 per cent win isn’t going to create that nation-building effect.” Questioned by Senator Liddle, Ian Trust, chair of the Empowered Communities national leaders’ group, agreed that a 51 per cent victory would raise a “question… as to how much it is supported… 51 per cent is obviously not high enough.”

When Liddle repeated this enlarged notion of referendum success to Leeser, he first reminded her of the constitutional definition of a successful referendum. He then added that he wants the referendum to win “handsomely, because I think that is better for the reconciliation process and… for national unity…” Constitutional lawyer Father Frank Brennan remarked, “Let’s try and get the wording as right as we can so that we can really get the country to ‘yes,’ and not just get over the line but do it in a way which attracts mass support.”

The ambition to win “handsomely” to create “national unity” gives impetus to the changes to the proposed amendment suggested by these men — changes that would reduce the possibility of the High Court one day ruling that the executive has a duty to consult the Voice and a duty to consider what the Voice says. In the words of Senator Bragg, “If the legal risk is minimised, then the chances of a successful referendum are maximised.”

Bragg joined constitutional lawyer Greg Craven in proposing that when the bill is legislated subsection (iii) should include seven more words: “and the legal effect of its representations.” The practical legal effect of this amendment would be “to guarantee the parliament’s capacity to legislate the scope of the Voice’s representations and manage future legal effects.”

Bragg assumes that parliament can be relied on to design a Voice whose rights are legislated but not subject to judicial review. He assumes that Indigenous Australians (forgetting the fate of ATSIC) will accept recognition in this form. He claims to know a lot about what Indigenous Australians will accept as recognition and what will reassure a voting public worried by the possible disruption of the system of government.

Two changes discussed in the committee — each advocated as a means of making it easier for voters to say Yes — focus on the proposed subsection (ii). Brennan would like the Voice to be constitutionally restricted to addressing only one part of “the executive,” the “ministers of state.” Leeser would prefer that all of subsection (ii) be deleted. Uphold and Recognise points to yet another pathway to a win for Yes: they would like the referendum to amend section 75 of the constitution to enable parliament to prevent or restrict the Voice from pursuing judicial review proceedings in the High Court.

By rejecting all of these proposed changes, a majority of the parliamentary committee placed some of these risk minimisers in a delicate position. Leeser, Craven, Brennan, and Uphold and Recognise have all said they will vote Yes, even if the government goes ahead with the words they have sought to change. Each of them dreads the defeat of constitutional recognition more than the “legal risk” to executive efficiency.

So, will they continue to feed political risk by persisting in speaking and writing about the “legal risk” they see in the recognition on offer? What will they say when the No campaign quotes their arguments? Brennan believes that he has acted in consideration of a section of the voting public who “want to be sure that what is there is legally watertight.” If the government goes ahead with the words that he has found risky, will he urge voters to join him in taking the risk? •

The post The referendum’s lines in the sand appeared first on Inside Story.

If the Yes campaign continues to frame voters’ choice as one between recognising and not recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, and if the attempt gains public traction, then the debate about how the proposed amendment refers to the Voice will become less significant.

But the words of the amendment — minutely examined and debated by Australia’s finest legal minds and endorsed on Friday by a joint select parliamentary committee — matter little to Yes23’s judgement about how the referendum should be presented. Its ad, running mainly on social media, attempts to persuade voters that the campaign is “really” about “recognition.”

Between February 2012 and early 2017 the Australian government funded Reconciliation Australia to promote “recognition.” What form it would take was not specified, but the campaign helped “recognition” gain wide acceptance — but only if it is detached from some of the forms that recognition could take.

Meanwhile, the debate about alternative forms of constitutional recognition had failed to reach any agreement. Then, after the Referendum Council’s report to the Turnbull government in July 2017, “the Voice” entered the debate and quickly became the only form of constitutional recognition under consideration. For their part, Coalition governments under Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison argued that the Voice was not the right form for constitutional recognition to take.

Five years later, in an address to the Garma Festival in July last year, prime minister Anthony Albanese committed his government to a referendum on an Indigenous Voice “in this term of parliament.” His speech began by recognising “all the elders, leaders and families” who had “made great contributions to our nation,” but “recognition” was not among the seventy words the prime minister wanted added to the Constitution.

Now that the campaign has stepped up a notch, however, “recognition” is back — in fact, for Yes23, it has moved to the centre. Pushed into the background is the fact that recognition will take the form of the Voice.

In the first of the Yes campaign’s online ads, rolled out on 26 April, the emphasis was on recognition. Its thirty seconds contrasted Indigenous occupation (65,000 years) with the period in which Australia has had a Constitution (122 years) and played with the notion of coming together and making the nation complete. Viewers were invited to “join us” — the “us” being Indigenous Australians, the viewers being overwhelmingly non-Indigenous Australians.

The ad’s theme of Indigenous exclusion implicitly recalled the 1967 referendum, when over 90 per cent of the formal vote endorsed the idea that “Aboriginals” should be “counted.” The closest the advertisement came to mentioning the Voice was in calling for Indigenous Australians to be able to have “a real say,” something that surely was “fair enough.” “#Voice” appeared in small type at the end.

Perhaps the emphasis on recognition reflected nothing more than the fact that the ad was sponsored by Australians for Indigenous Constitutional Recognition, or AICR, just one of several organisations that have come together under the banner of Yes23. But in the run-up to a referendum that has seen much more emphasis on the “practical” implications of the Voice than on the “symbolic” act of recognition, even the AICR might have been expected to argue, above all, for the Voice.

Then, a few days after the ad’s release, the prime minister issued a statement to say that the national cabinet had “reaffirmed” its “commitment to recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution.” Not a word about national cabinet (re)affirming its commitment to the Voice — though the prime minister and all the premiers are committed to it — and not even a commitment to Indigenous Australians having “a real say.”

Has the Yes campaign just wrong-footed the No side? A letter to the Australian Electoral Commission from Advance Australia, one of the organisations campaigning for a No vote, suggests it has. The AICR ad, Advance Australia complained, omitted “any reference to the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Voice to parliament” — an element “so integral that it is the title of the bill.” This meant that “Yes23 may be intentionally misleading the Australian public on the nature of the referendum.” Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price — the Coalition’s newly appointed shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, the Country Liberal Party’s senator for the Northern Territory, and the most prominent No campaigner in the National Party–CLP alliance — attacked the ad as “deceptive” shortly after it went to air.

Responding to the complaint, Yes23 reportedly said that it welcomed Advance Australia “drawing attention” to its campaign. That it feared an adverse finding from the Electoral Commission is to be doubted. As the AEC’s website shows, its remit appears not to stretch to the kind of complaint Advance Australia has made.

If that is the case, the AEC won’t feel bound to consider a complaint from Yes23 that an advertisement attacking the Voice — produced by Fair Australia for the No campaign and focused on Senator Price and her family — omitted any reference to “recognition” other than Price’s remark about her “recognising what we have in common.” But perhaps, in the name of publicity, the No side is as happy to welcome any comments on its campaign as the Yes side is to make them.

While the Voice is “integral” to the bill to amend the Constitution, so is “recognition.” Indeed, the heading of the Constitution’s proposed Chapter IX (within which falls section 129, “Aboriginal and Torres Islander Voice”) reads “Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Islander Peoples.” Advance Australia is not contesting that; what worries it is the Yes campaign’s omission of one element in order to emphasise the other.

The No campaign has reason to be worried. “Recognition” offers Yes23 a stronger way of framing the referendum than does the Voice. It does this because the Indigenous demand for “recognition” is more widely known and a good deal more widely supported than the Indigenous demand for the Voice.

Polling conducted online last September by Resolve Strategic for the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald estimated that 85 per cent of the electorate were “definitely aware or knew at least some detail” of a “campaign for Indigenous recognition in the Constitution.” Awareness of a referendum to “enshrine the Voice in the Constitution” was much lower, at 65 per cent.

Since then, the gap is likely to have narrowed but not necessarily closed. In a poll conducted by Resolve in January, no more than 77 per cent indicated that they had “heard of the ‘Indigenous Voice’” — and even fewer, presumably, had heard of the referendum on the Voice. In another online poll, conducted as recently as last month (9–12 April) by Freshwater Strategy, 75 per cent of those who responded — up from 63 per cent in December — indicated that they were “aware that there will be a referendum on whether Australia should change its constitution to allow for a body, called a Voice to parliament, to have the right to advise the Australian Government on matters of significance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.”

Awareness of the push for recognition is unlikely to have declined in the past six months or so, though we can’t be sure how it has moved because questions in the public opinion polls about recognition (rather than the Voice) have come to a stop.

More important than levels of awareness are levels of support. The last time any of the polls gathered data on support for constitutional recognition, estimated support outran opposition by at least three to one. Asked whether they would vote “for or against” if a referendum “was held to include recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution,” 57 per cent of those who were polled online in June–July 2021 by Essential Media said they would vote “for” and no more than 17 per cent said they would vote “against.”

In the Australian Election Study, meanwhile, conducted between 24 May and 30 September 2022, no fewer than 80 per cent of the respondents who expressed a view on the matter said that “If a referendum were held to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution” they would “support… such a change”; only 20 per cent said they would “oppose” it.

Recognition is supported not only by Labor but also by some, if not all, of the parties that constitute the parliamentary opposition. A referendum on recognition (without the Voice) is something the opposition leader Peter Dutton (Liberal National Party) has said he would support. Nationals’ leader David Littleproud has said his party would “help print the ballots” for a referendum purely on constitutional recognition.

Senator Price took a slightly different line at the media conference the Nationals called to announce their opposition to the Voice. She was quoted as saying that “Indigenous Australians are recognised,” an indication of her sense that the matter was relatively unimportant compared with taking “practical measures,” and that the matter was already settled. (Earle Page, leader of the Country Party from 1921 to 1939, believed that for a referendum proposal to pass it should do no more than enshrine a set of practices in place and accepted already.)

The ratio of support to opposition for the Voice — three to two — is no more than half the corresponding ratio in favour of “recognition.” In the polls conducted in April 2023, levels of support for inscribing a Voice in the Constitution outran levels of opposition by margins that were generally even smaller than that: 42–34 (Freshwater, online); roughly 46–31 (Resolve, online, numbers derived from its graph); and 46–39 (Morgan, SMS). The two polls that forced respondents to choose between Yes and No, both online, also produced a distribution in which Yes outran No by no more than three to two: 58–42 (Resolve) and 60–40 (Essential).

Since Labor came to office in May last year promising to “embrace the Uluru Statement from the Heart” and “answer its patient, gracious call for a Voice enshrined in our Constitution,” support for the Voice has not remained steady, as one polling analyst is reported to have said. Nor has it increased, as another has claimed. Support for the Voice has decreased.

On the polls’ standard approach — with respondents asked whether they favour or oppose putting the Voice into the Constitution but given the opportunity to say they “don’t know” or are “undecided” — the fall has been quite sharp; so, too, has the rise of opposition. In the three polls taken in the first four months after Labor’s victory (between June and September last year) support averaged 59 per cent, and opposition 16 per cent; in the two polls taken in December (the only such polls conducted in the next four months) the support average had declined to 51.5 per cent (opposition 28.5 per cent); and in the five polls taken since February 2023, the average in favour dropped to just 44.5 per cent (opposition 33 per cent). (These calculations are based on reported results before those without an opinion were asked — as they occasionally were — to which side they were “leaning.”)

Binary questions — with respondents restricted to answering Yes or No — produced a less dramatic decline. In the three questions asked from August to September, support was 65 per cent (35 per cent opposed); in the four from October to January, it was 61 per cent (39 per cent opposed); and in the six asked since February, it has been 59.5 per cent (40.5 per cent opposed). How many respondents baulked at this forced choice, none of the pollsters say.

Where polls have presented respondents with response options arranged in what survey researchers call a Likert scale — typically from “strongly support” and “somewhat support,” through “neither support nor oppose,” to “somewhat oppose” and “strongly oppose” — the decline in support for constitutional change was more modest and less even. In the four questions of this kind asked from May to September 2022, support (“strongly support” plus “somewhat support”) was 57 per cent (with 17.5 per cent either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed); in the two between October 2022 and January 2023, 51 per cent (24.5 per cent either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed); and in the five asked since, 53 per cent (32.5 per cent being either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed).

With these different measures of public opinion showing that support for the Voice is slipping and opposition rising, the gap between support for “recognition” and support for the Voice is likely to have widened. If it has, Yes23’s framing of the referendum as a decision about recognising Indigenous Australians makes sense.

About the trend in support for “recognition” we can only speculate. Not only have standalone questions about awareness of recognition disappeared from the polls, but so too, until very recently, have questions that mention “recognition” in the context of the Voice.

Since May 2022, thirty-three national public polls have been conducted: twelve of the binary kind, eleven of the Likert kind and ten of the standard kind (including two polls our analysis has put to one side as flawed). Yet of all the questions polls have asked about the Voice, only the three most recently taken by Essential and Resolve have included a statement about the referendum as a proposal to “alter the Constitution to recognise the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice” (emphasis added). In none of the others does the word “recognise” even appear. Clearly, the No campaigners are not the only ones to have let the question of Indigenous recognition disappear.

Most of the polls have been unhelpful in other ways, too. Considering how much debate there has been about the whether to include the word “Executive” in the second sentence of Albanese’s draft, it is surprising that, when explaining to the respondents what the Voice would do, few polls have referred to either “the executive government” (the exceptions being Resolve’s polls and those taken by JWS in August and February) or the “government” (apart from the two Freshwater polls taken in December and April). Keeping questions reasonably short while hoping that respondents share a common understanding of the key terms is a difficult challenge to meet.

One strength of the No campaign ad featuring Senator Price is that it includes the names and faces of prominent Indigenous individuals. According to a YouGov study conducted in March for the Uluru Dialogue, only 40 per cent of voters believe the majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people support the Voice.

Dee Madigan, who ran Labor’s 2022 election advertising campaign, saw the inclusion of Indigenous figures in the Yes23 ad as a “good strategic start by the Yes camp,” according to the Australian. The ad was “about inoculating against accusations that [the Voice is] Canberra-centric and foisted on Indigenous people and that Indigenous people aren’t supportive,” she was quoted as saying. But Madigan’s observations, almost certainly correct, may not capture what is most significant about the ad. For Toby Ralph, who worked on John Howard’s election campaigns, it was a “reasonable opening shot” that avoided “the contentious stuff.” Assuming “the contentious stuff” is a reference to the Voice, his observation seems closer to the mark.

Whether a focus on “recognition” is the opening shot or the shot that keeps being repeated remains to be seen. But this framing appears to have wide appeal among the key players attempting to mobilise a Yes vote. Lawyer Danny Gilbert, an adviser to From the Heart and co-chair of AICR, suggests that the campaign should avoid legal questions about the wording of the Voice and concerns about whether “it’s constitutionally unsafe.” He wants to focus instead on the idea that “it’s about time we recognise the First Peoples of this country,” that what has “happened to date has not worked” and that “it’s time to give them the opportunity to have a say in the future of their lives.”

If support for recognition is high, so too is support for allowing Indigenous Australians to have “a say.” Asked in July–August 2022 whether it was “important or not for First Nations people to have a voice/say in matters that affect them,” almost everyone interviewed for Reconciliation Australia by Polity Research considered it “fairly important” (33 per cent) if not “very important” (60 per cent).

If Yes23 can persuade voters that the referendum is about “recognition” and Indigenous Australians having “a say” rather than about an Indigenous Voice, the polls might be at risk of asking the wrong questions or of not asking enough questions.

What, then, are the sorts of questions pollsters could ask if they wanted to better understand voters? Perhaps something along these lines, with “Voice” and “say” offered to different respondents in questions two and three to test their relative impact:

1. At a referendum on whether to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution, would you vote in favour or against?

2. At a referendum on whether to have an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and the Australian government on matters to do with Indigenous Australians, would you vote in favour or against?

3. At a referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, would you be more likely or less likely to vote in favour of recognition if recognition meant adding to the Constitution an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] to advise the national parliament and the Australian government on matters to do with Indigenous Australians?

Differences in the levels of support elicited by these questions would go some way to telling us how attractive “recognition” is compared with either the Voice or “a say”; hence, how much there is for the Yes campaign to leverage and the No campaign to fear.

To understand what voters themselves think the referendum is about, pollsters could also ask respondents whether they think it is about (a) Indigenous recognition, (b) having an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and government, or (c) both Indigenous recognition and having an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ [Voice or say] in the Constitution to advise the national parliament and government.

Polls could also ask an open-ended question along the lines of the one Roy Morgan asked in 1967: “What would you say the chief effect will be if the referendum on Aboriginals receives a ‘Yes’ vote and is carried?”

If Yes23 thinks its best chance of persuading waverers is to keep the campaign as low-key and unthreatening as possible — a matter of being civil and accepting an “invitation” — then it might well present voters at polling places with a slogan like “Vote YES for Recognition” or “Vote YES for a Say.” Since it pitches itself as a campaign “talking to everyday Australians about the opportunity to be part of a successful referendum,” then giving “everyday Australians” a sense that they are on to a winner — with luck, creating a bandwagon — could be very much part of its play.

The No side couldn’t try to mobilise last-minute deciders with a slogan remotely like “Vote NO to Recognition” or “Vote NO to a Say”; it would need to come up with something that didn’t refer to “recognition” or “a say” at all.

Many more ads are yet to come. But these opening shots might well have set the tone of both campaigns. •

The post From Indigenous recognition to the Voice, and back again appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one thing for a prime minister with authority, such as Malcolm Fraser in 1977 or Harold Holt a decade earlier, to hold referendums and campaign in unison with the Labor opposition; it’s quite another for a Liberal opposition leader to support a Labor initiative. Some form of federal opposition naysaying was always a fait accompli (even if Dutton and shadow minister Julian Leeser didn’t realise it until early this year), though the form it took, of binding shadow cabinet, was at the severe end of the spectrum. Total freedom à la Republic 1999 would surely have made life easier for everyone, including the leadership.

Why did Dutton choose this path? The answer must be the Aston by-election, when those several hours of counting on April fool’s night gradually turned into a wrecking ball aimed at the Liberal leader’s already modest authority.

Now, it is my firm belief that by-election results don’t actually tell us much about anything — certainly not the next general election result.

(When I chatted with The Tally Room’s Ben Raue a couple of days after the vote, he made the excellent point that even if by-elections did portend the next general election result in a particular electorate — which they certainly don’t because who will govern isn’t up for grabs — seat swings themselves vary wildly at elections. In 2022, for example, the national 3.6 point shift to Labor translated on the ground to everything from 14.2 to Labor in Pearce, Western Australia, to 7.2 to the Liberals in Calwell, Victoria. What would a 7.2 per cent swing to the Liberals at a Calwell by-election in, say, 2021, have told us about the 2022 general election? Nothing.)

But by-elections enjoy divine status within the political class, and Dutton, suddenly insecure, did what such leaders often do: he embraced the party’s true believers, the self-proclaimed “base.” It’s the opposite of what rational analysis would suggest, which is to try to elevate one’s standing in the general community, but it is the path of least resistance.

In this case the “base” is the party’s right wing, for which the current party room isn’t actually a bad proxy. (According to some reports, Dutton piled extra humiliation on the phone-box-full of remaining “moderates” by excluding from his public announcement an agreed-on legislated Voice.)

The reaction has been condemnation in some quarters and exuberance in others. For the latter — in opinion pages and, one imagines, on Sky after Dark — the leader is finally standing for something. No guts, no glory.

And so the referendum is cast as Dutton’s big gamble, with a big payoff coming if the No case prevails. But politics doesn’t really work that way.

It might be true that a Yes victory would destroy him. But it’s not the case that the opposite would mean salvation. People of a certain age might recall Liberal leader John Howard celebrating in September 1988 after successfully opposing a set of four Labor-initiated referendums that recorded the biggest loss in history. Eight months later he was out of a job. Opposition leaders’ fates ultimately depend on their public standing, largely reflected in opinion polling, and there is no reason to believe a No win would endear Dutton to the electorate.

Would it damage prime minister Anthony Albanese, which in a zero-sum game might be an equally positive outcome for the Coalition? It would affect medium-term perceptions of the prime minister’s political nous and prowess, which would influence media coverage and probably shift the opinion polls a little. But it’s all rather transitory. The caravan moves on. In terms of the next election, and in the long run that’s what matters for Albanese, it will mean little.

Internal Labor skulduggery would be an outside risk, but Rudd’s Rules put an institutional plank under Labor prime ministers these days.

When a leader prioritises singing to the choir it is a symptom of leadership decline, and usually also ends up being a cause. That makes it difficult to see Peter Dutton lasting until 2025. Perhaps his best chance of contesting the next election as leader is if Albanese is foolish enough to, as some contemplate, call an early one off the back of a successful referendum.

Hot off the presses — in for a penny, in for a pound — he’s appointed the combative Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to replace Liberal Julian Leeser in the shadow Indigenous Australians portfolio. While Leeser’s other portfolio, attorney-general, has gone to Liberal Michaelia Cash, this represents an improvement in the Nationals’ front bench representation. Nats, whoever they are, don’t get a vote in the Liberal leadership.

And what of the referendum itself? The Yes case is lumbered with the reality that Albanese is not a details man. During a constitutional referendum the attorney-general is normally the go-to minister for curly questions; on this occasion it’s Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney, who is no lawyer. Both Albanese and Burney have made misstatements requiring backtracking, and are likely to make more.

The nitpicking, the “gotchas,” are only getting started. “If you don’t know, vote No” is the standard theme against any political change, even if it’s not always an official slogan. Mounting the case for change is challenging, even in government.

I’ve generally been pessimistic about the Voice’s chances, but am slightly less so after Aston. Referendums can be a chance for some voters to deliver a kicking to a government, so the apparent absence of such an anti-Labor dynamic in Aston can’t be ignored.

Nor can the incompetence of the No campaign. The proposal to hold another referendum to recognise immigrants as well as Indigenous Australians is a doozy, creating a target where none was needed. It also eliminates what has historically been a key substructure of No cases: that this whole exercise is a waste of money by a self-indulgent government. Warren Mundine himself was running the price-tag line only days before his second-referendum brainwave.

The public face of Recognise a Better Way is also very last century; did I actually hear former Nationals leader John Anderson recently intoning about “intelligent Aborigines” in a radio interview?

Every state premier and territory chief minister has announced in favour of Yes. The fact that Tasmania, whose vote has made the difference at three of the five “double majority” referendum failures, has a sympathetic Liberal government bodes well in the event of a close outcome. Ditto the fact that the high-profile Liberal member for Bass, Bridget Archer, will be campaigning Yes. (Is this combination of universal second-tier support and a lack of federal bipartisanship a first? Probably.)

The federal opposition leader doesn’t enjoy wide appeal. The campaigning on Alice Springs crime, like John Howard’s 2007 Northern Territory intervention, is at its heart designed to kindle fear of Aborigines “out of control.” It has a limited constituency, and voter cynicism about such tactics abounds.

One day Mundine will be interrogated about his “recognise immigrants” plan. (Like, what constitutes an immigrant?) Other prominent figures on the No side, Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott, are niche products. (Of the No campaigners, John Howard is probably the only one the Yes camp would love to have onside.) Meanwhile the opinion polls continue to show majority support in every state. (Even the recent Newspoll, once you eliminate undecideds.)

But there’s still six months to go. And it’s a Labor government referendum held in the teeth of federal opposition. Historically, these are very, very difficult obstacles to overcome. •

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What upset Craven was not the new words in the third sentence:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relating to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice, including its composition, functions, powers and procedures.

This sentence makes it absolutely clear that parliament can design the Indigenous Voice as it wishes. It can specify not only its “composition, functions, powers and procedures” but also anything else about the Voice, including its dealings with Commonwealth public servants.

No — what worries Craven is that the Voice will have any entitlement to talk to public servants. In common with the draft constitutional amendment announced at Garma last July, the second of the three sentences issued last week by the prime minister mentions “Executive government,” which takes in ministers and the public service:

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Flanked by his Indigenous advisers, the prime minister thus rejected the advice of those who think it would be “constitutionally unsound” (Craven’s phrase) for an Indigenous Voice to speak to the executive. The “sound” option preferred by constitutional conservatives would have an Indigenous Voice making representations only to parliament.

Rather than being technical, the distinction between “sound” and “unsound” rests on one’s tolerance for risk. If the Voice is empowered to speak to the executive, there is a risk (acknowledged by attorney-general Mark Dreyfus on yesterday’s ABC Insiders) that interactions between Voice and executive will be subject to litigation in the High Court. The government accepts that risk.

Once the Voice is up and running, someone might conceivably bring an action in the High Court alleging that the executive failed to pay due attention to the Voice’s advice when it made a particular decision. The High Court might respond by setting out protocols obliging the executive to demonstrate that it really has taken account of the Voice’s advice. It could say, for example, that the executive is constitutionally obliged to publish reasons for not following the Voice’s published advice.

Some commentators see this as an appalling possibility, and it certainly provides a theme for those writing the official No case. They will present as an intolerable risk the possibility that a government will be obliged to demonstrate that it has really listened to the Voice’s advice. As Tony Abbott wrote recently, the possibility that such a Voice “would have to be listened to” is a reason to vote against the amendment. Craven has speculated that many voters are constitutional conservatives, fearful that future governments will be crippled by a new line of accountability.

Because the High Court declines to hear litigation about how parliament does its business, the conservatives believe a “constitutionally sound” option — a Voice speaking to Parliament only — would keep the High Court at bay.

It is a striking feature of Australia’s political culture that so many politicians and commentators see the High Court of Australia — one of the three branches of the Commonwealth — as a threat to the process of government. They condemn as “judicial activism” any judgements they disagree with. For these observers, the Mabo and Wik judgements left a wound that will never heal.

The critics who apprehend a future of hog-tied governments have characterised the prime minister’s announcement last Thursday as a victory for radical advisers over those who have counselled the more cautious option: an Indigenous Voice authorised to speak only to parliament. True, it was a victory for these ascendant “radicals,” but they still face a political task that will arrive only after the referendum: persuading the Indigenous public that the Voice is worth having.

It is all too easy to forget that this referendum is different, in one fundamental respect, from any other that has been presented to the Australian people. It proposes an act of recognition for a segment of Australian society that has emerged, in the last fifty years, as an Indigenous public. For an act of recognition to be effective, it must be expressed in terms agreeable to those who are to be recognised. To recognise someone in terms they find repugnant or trivial is to misrecognise them, making the relationship worse rather than better. What the Indigenous public thinks therefore matters.

The Indigenous public has already shown it can matter. Encouraged by the Referendum Council (a body established by Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten in 2015) and enacted as a series of assemblies, it produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document of undoubted political consequence. (Craven thinks it “sublime.”) The Indigenous public will start to matter even more if the Yes vote triumphs at the referendum, for Indigenous Australians will then say yes or no to the details — so far undetermined — of the Voice’s design.

How will this Indigenous public speak if it is not yet “the Voice”? After the referendum — if it succeeds — the government will have voters’ mandate to formulate a Voice bill, but this mandate is not enough to give it a free hand. It has promised to consult Indigenous Australians about the detailed design of the Voice.

How will we know if those to be recognised in the Constitution wish to be recognised in a particular way? Consultation on the post-referendum bill must augment the work of parliament.

Last September, UNSW lawyers Gabrielle Appleby, Sean Brennan and Megan Davis recommended that the post-referendum consultation process itself be the subject of legislation to be passed (but not “commenced”) before the referendum. This legislation would provide for a Voice Design Council, guided by an Indigenous steering committee, to come into existence if the referendum is passed.

The council would do something similar to the work performed by the Referendum Council: it would conduct regional dialogues. First Nations delegates would deliberate on the Voice’s design, and the dialogues would culminate in a national convention to write drafting instructions for the bill. The Indigenous steering committee would then work with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel to draft the bill. A joint parliamentary committee would consider public submissions and then recommend to parliament that it pass the final bill.

Why go to all this trouble after the referendum? Isn’t the referendum the decisive moment? For the Indigenous leaders of the constitutional recognition campaign, the referendum is but one (vital) step in a recognition process. What they must then do is engage with the Indigenous public on the question of what is acceptable as a form of recognition. An ongoing intra-Indigenous political process is clearly already under way; this will continue after the referendum.

If the referendum attracts a Yes majority among all voters and among the six states, the Indigenous leaders who have been advising Albanese will have the wind in their sails. But we shouldn’t underestimate their task. It has become clear that Indigenous Australia abounds in sceptics poised (for a variety of reasons) to say the Voice is not an acceptable form of recognition. These leaders will need to be able to say to the sceptics that the Voice is worth legislating because its design, after the referendum, has been determined by Indigenous wishes.

By accepting the risk of what Craven calls a constitutionally unsound amendment — a Voice speaking not only to parliament but also to the executive — Albanese has given elbow room to those who, in this consultative process, will draft the Voice legislation. The advisory Voice minimally described in the constitutional amendment will have a purchase on government attention not only via parliament but also via the executive, and the High Court may be asked to prescribe the executive’s listening procedures.

By accepting the risk of Indigenous empowerment (via a justiciable right to be listened to), the government has reduced the risk that the Indigenous public will say, after the referendum, “The recognition you offer is not worth having.” A Voice that could advise only through parliament would attract no shortage of Indigenous scorn. The decision to continue to include the executive in the amending words gives Albanese’s Indigenous advisers a stronger platform from which to say to the Indigenous public, after the referendum, that this Voice has been worth the fight. •

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Conflating these two questions is easy, and not necessarily illogical. After all, if you think the Indigenous Voice to Parliament is a bad idea then your arguments against it apply to legislating for it as well as mentioning it in the Constitution. Still, the distinction between “We don’t want to alter the Constitution to provide for a Voice” and “We don’t want an Indigenous Voice to Parliament at all” is worth keeping in mind.

There is also a third question — one that the referendum pamphlet(s) will need to avoid. What is the best design for an Indigenous Voice? That isn’t a Yes/No question, and it isn’t the referendum question, but I see little to stop it from becoming, eventually, the question.

The editors of the new book Beyond Belief: Rethinking the Voice to Parliament, Peter Kurti and Nyunggai Warren Mundine, have allowed their contributors — most of whom oppose the Voice — to range over all three of those questions. The strength of this approach to “rethinking” lies in the fact that, even if voters say No to the constitutional amendment, a future government will probably legislate a Voice. If that happens, or if indeed the referendum passes, legislators’ thoughts will be stimulated by some passages in this book.

So we can welcome Warren Mundine’s thoughts on Voice design for their pertinence to a later debate — though he would prefer to have that debate now. His argument for voting No in the referendum seems to be that he can’t be sure that a Yes vote will lead to the kind of Voice he could accept. The extant Voice models — of which Marcia Langton and Tom Calma’s is the best known — strike him as “race-based” because they postulate pan-Aboriginal structures that would override the authority of traditional owners, whom he sees as the only legitimately Indigenous political units.

The book’s more immediate value is in those passages that are pertinent to the more pressing challenge: the referendum. Should we pass the proposed amendment or not? That is the proper topic of the Yes and No pamphlet that will arrive in our mailboxes sometime this year.

Imagine you are responsible for drafting the pamphlet’s No case. Could Beyond Belief help?

Some essays are on point, spelling out why their authors believe an Indigenous Voice in the Constitution could damage our system of government. Economist Henry Ergas expresses this view eruditely, citing political theorists in support of “the bedrock concept of political equality in the Western intellectual tradition,” and particularly “the principle that all citizens should have the same weight in the process of political decision-making.” He believes that a Voice would give a named “national minority” — that is, Indigenous Australians — “special access to the legislative process.”

What’s wrong with that? In Ergas’s view, to institutionalise group representation of that kind suppresses differences of opinion within the group and exaggerates the group’s loyalty to values and identities that (they think) define them. This scenario disturbs Ergas, but others would welcome it as confirming Indigenous peoplehood.

By perpetuating the idea that Indigenous Australians are essentially different from other Australians, Ergas argues, a constitutionally enshrined Voice would fuel demands for “a formal treaty which would make Australia into some type of bi-national state.” Thus, without saying so, he evokes the vision of “Blak Sovereignty.” The Blak Sovereigns — unpredictable, if Lidia Thorpe is their leader — are shaping up to vote No because they see constitutional recognition as threatening their sovereign right to negotiate a treaty. The writer of the No case should strive to give equal weight to Ergas’s and Thorpe’s conflicting reasons for voting No.

Like Ergas, Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen opposes putting the Voice in the Constitution, but the crux of her argument is that it will change the relationship between the three branches of the state. A combination of High Court litigation over the scope of the Voice and parliament’s obligation to respond to Voice advice will effectively transfer its design from legislators to judges.

As a result, Albrechtsen predicts, the Voice is likely to be more powerful than parliament intends. Those commanding the Voice “will have leverage over the parliament that previously they, and we, never imagined possible.”

Again, we see an argument for No that darkly warns of a scenario many other Australians favour. “All of Australian political life will have to be conducted with one eye on the Voice,” says Albrechtsen. What’s not to like, many will respond. Albrechtsen despairs of such complacency, excoriating the political and corporate elites — blithe sentimentalists racked by colonial guilt — who ignore her risk assessment. The country’s leaders have lost their reason, she believes, and woke elites are bullying business figures and professionals.

Albrechtsen has long been scolding the Yes camp. But the writer of the No case, who would be wise to avoid ad hominem statements, won’t be able to use some of the ammo offered by this columnist.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott is frankly opposed to giving Indigenous Australians more say over the government. He agrees with Albanese that only a “brave” parliament and government would reject the Voice’s advice. If the voters amend the Constitution by adding the words proposed by Albanese, writes Abbott, “there would have to be a Voice; it would have to be listened to; and its powers and functions could be as wide as a parliament might make them.” Well, yes… that’s the idea.

When Abbott explains why he is worried by that scenario, he makes three points. First, Indigenous persons would have two votes, despite there already being a “surfeit of Indigenous consultation mechanisms.” Second, passing legislation would become more difficult. (Amanda Stoker also presents this as a reason for voting No in her essay.) Third, if a government were “brave” (and both Albanese and Abbott imply that governments seldom are), the spurned Indigenous leaders would complain to the High Court that the Constitution was being ignored, further delaying laws and decisions.

Abbott thinks that voters — as horrified as he by these possibilities — will reject the amendment. And this, he warns, will set back reconciliation. He acknowledges that a referendum defeat (and the blow to reconciliation) would be less likely were the Coalition parties to campaign for Yes. This points to one reason why the Liberals might endorse Yes: it isn’t hard to imagine a Liberal MP (Julian Leeser, Andrew Bragg) citing Abbott’s point about reconciliation when urging Dutton to commit to Yes or to allow Liberal MPs a free vote. They probably have already.

The arguments for No presented by Ergas, Albrechtsen and Abbott bear a strong resemblance to many people’s reasons for voting Yes. Competing visions of Australia’s past and future stand in this zone of overlap. A culture war is being fought here — unavoidable and, in my view, necessary.

Abbott is not the only contributor to consider the referendum’s risk to reconciliation; it is also on the mind of Chris Merritt, a former legal affairs editor at the Australian. He speculates that a successful referendum could have a number of unfortunate sequels. Those who voted No because they thought that they didn’t have enough information “could argue that the Voice has been secured by deception — poisoning community relations and bringing the new institution into disrepute.” Those who voted Yes could be unhappy if they find the legislated Voice to be much less powerful than their referendum mandate warranted.

Merritt also mentions the High Court — a body with a poor reputation among contributors to this book. Those who fear for the sovereignty of parliament, Merritt and others argue, will discover that enshrining the Voice in the Constitution has made the High Court — nor parliament — the Voice’s effective designer. The drafter of the No case should tread very carefully here — evoking, without endorsing, the view that the High Court has become a threat to good government.

Another question facing the drafter will be how much weight to give to the argument — made here by Merritt and by lawyer and Sky News pundit Caroline Di Russo — that we don’t yet have enough information to cast a referendum vote. For Merritt, voting No is “the only safe course” if we don’t know what the form and functions of the Voice will be. Di Russo has “yet to form a firm view.”

That cautionary argument for No could lose force if the government can persuade the public that its statements about design principles are meeting the demand for “information.” But it isn’t clear what information would convince Di Russo that “one race should have its own ‘voice’ under the Australian Constitution.”

Several other contributions to this book will be of little use to the drafter of the No case because they do their “rethinking” of the Voice in such a way as to leave readers guessing which way they will vote.

Educational psychologist Anthony Dillon, for example, says he is not definitely a No voter. He wants more information before making up his mind, but he dismisses as “alarmist” the fear that the Voice will “create two Australias.” His concern is that the Voice, by assuming that Indigenous Australians are essentially different from other Australians and essentially similar to each other, will give bad policy advice.

Indigenous Australians are divided, Dillon says. The leaders of the Yes campaign are those who somehow escaped the blight of collective self-determination, grasping education and employment for themselves. He worries that an Indigenous Voice will empower them to entrench a policy paradigm that is failing others. If anyone needs a voice, he says, it is the Indigenous Australians whose violent lives are so different from the Voice’s advocates — hence his openness. He awaits a design of the Voice that would represent those failed by self-determination.

Dillon shares some ground with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who argues in her foreword to Beyond Belief that the Voice would empower “a self-serving ‘industry’ that seeks to maintain its relevance.” She predicts that the people who make up this “industry” — “Aboriginal service providers, bureaucrats, academics, and politicians” — won’t be able to correct the failed policies of the past, and the Voice will thus fail to “close the gap.” Instead, the referendum risks constitutionally enshrining the idea that “Aboriginal people are perpetual victims forever in need of special measures.”

Unlike the No-leaning Dillon, Price is emphatically in the No camp. The two of them share the expectation that the Voice will offer bad advice and that governments will take it. Public policy analyst Bernard Samuelson agrees: the Voice will probably express the views of Indigenous Australians whose promotion of self-determination, including “the separatist ‘homeland’ movement,” has already done harm. Former Liberal National senator Amanda Stoker accepts that some “race-based” law, such as native title, is necessary but argues that we shouldn’t put the Voice in the Constitution because we don’t know whether it will improve “life outcomes.”

Scott Prasser’s essay — a Pol Sci 101 primer — assures readers that to vote No is socially acceptable, part of a proud Australian tradition of referendum negation. Witness, he says, Bert Evatt in 1951. What may distinguish this referendum, he fears, is the “opprobrium” attaching to No. That the No case may want for champions is underlined by his own essay’s exemplary reticence.

Like Dillon, Stoker criticises the referendum question for assuming that all Indigenous Australians think alike. Like Mundine, she insists that we keep in mind those Indigenous Australians who don’t want to be recognised in the Constitution — or, if they do, don’t want recognition in the form of the Voice. One argument that the No case could advance would be expressed as a question: how can we be sure that this amendment to the Constitution will be an act of constitutional recognition that Indigenous Australians accept? What the “recognised” think, after the vote on the principle, is decisive here.

Perhaps without realising it, Stoker has touched on a confirmatory political step acknowledged by Voice advocates. They want the referendum, if successful, to be followed by consultations with Indigenous Australians to confirm that the Voice — as outlined in a draft bill — is the form that constitutional recognition should take. The recommended assemblies will take place in 2024, seven years after those that culminated at Uluru. How do we know, the No case might ask, that the recognised will confirm the Voice — that is, the model that a government is then prepared to legislate — as the form that constitutional recognition should take?

At this point questions of Voice design will be central. The debate over constitutional recognition since 2012 has encouraged the expression of Indigenous diversity and promoted non-Indigenous interest in it. Dissenting Indigenous opinion will probably be conspicuous in the post-referendum consultations promised by the Albanese government. Equally likely is that such post-referendum assemblies will reiterate the Uluru Statement’s demand for a Voice, tweaking and endorsing the model offered by the government and looking ahead to truth-telling and work on a treaty. But we ain’t there yet. •

Beyond Belief: Rethinking the Voice to Parliament
Edited by Peter Kurti and Nyunggai Warren Mundine | Connor Court | $29.95 | 240 pages

The post Where No meets Yes appeared first on Inside Story.

For Wild and other opponents of the Indigenous Voice, only one hope remains. Will the Liberals join the Nationals and campaign for a No vote? The widely held belief that referendums fail without the support of both major parties has given Peter Dutton’s Liberals an aura: when we know their position we will know the result.

The Nationals have already demonstrated how costly it can be to take a clear position on this referendum. Putting themselves in the No camp at the end of November, they immediately lost one of their MPs, Andrew Gee, to the crossbench. The National Farmers’ Federation, pondering the diversity of rural opinion, has since decided that it will endorse neither Yes nor No.

Will David Littleproud relish sharing a podium with Pauline Hanson at No rallies in the bush? He would certainly feel more comfortable with Dutton at his side.

Some see an implicit No stance in the letter Dutton sent to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 7 January, in which he asked fifteen questions about the design of the Voice. Until the government answers those questions, Dutton declared, the Liberals can’t say whether they will endorse Yes or join the Nationals and One Nation in the No camp.

While we puzzle over the parties’ alignments on the proposed constitutional amendment, we shouldn’t forget their common ground. Liberals, Nationals and Labor all agree that Australian governments need advice from an Indigenous Voice. The Coalition government committed $31.8 million in March last year to setting up such a body; it then lost office to a Labor Party that promised to defer creating an Indigenous Voice until after a referendum confirms that the electorate wants it embedded in the Constitution.

Since the change of government, both Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Peter Dutton have declared that Labor should legislate now, rather than waiting for a referendum, if it believes in the Voice.

So what is the underlying, longer-term debate about the Voice really about? In essence, the major parties differ on two questions. First, what form should constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians take? Both sides say they want the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians in some way, but the conservative parties insist that enshrining the Voice in the Constitution is a bad way to do it.

Then there’s the design of the Voice itself. Labor insists that this discussion be deferred until after the referendum, when parliament will consider a yet-to-be-written bill. Others want to start the design conversation now. Even those on the right who want to see the referendum carried — people like legal scholar Greg Craven, Liberal MPs Julian Leeser and Andrew Bragg, and journalist Chris Kenny — have either raised questions about the shape of the Voice or asked for the government to publish a draft bill.

These questions have exasperated many of the people committed to voting Yes in Labor’s referendum. Asking the government to detail the form and functions of the Voice is bad faith, they say; the Liberals are needling the Yes campaign without defining their own stance. They fear that to answer every question now will plunge supporters of Yes into dispute with each other, and that some Yes voters, not liking the answers, will defect to No.

Dutton undoubtedly profits by continuing to ask questions about Voice design. He can avoid alienating Liberals who want a constitutionally enshrined Voice while keeping at bay the Liberals who, for a variety of reasons, would like to join the Nationals in the No camp. But characterising his questioning as a political tactic is persuasive only up to a point. What it overlooks is the fact that a debate about Voice design is already under way — a debate that some wish to suppress for now, and others wish to join.

From the Liberals’ point of view, creating a debate about Voice design makes sense, no matter what position they take on the referendum. A legislated Voice is likely, whether or not the Yes case wins, because both Labor and the Coalition want one. The conservatives are seeking Labor’s commitment to a Voice of a certain kind — a Voice that resembles, in some respects, the body that they began to design in 2016 (by some accounts, as long ago as 2013).

Dazzled by the apparent belligerence of Dutton’s 7 January letter to Albanese, some commentators have not noticed the punches it pulled.

Many on the right — journalists Peta Credlin, Janet Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and Greg Sheridan, for instance, and former PMs Abbott and Howard — have been publicly counselling Dutton to oppose the Voice as a “race-based” assault on liberal equality. Yet Dutton’s questions made no appeal to a principle of formal equality and avoided the “race-based” tag.

Nor did he raise the threat to parliamentary sovereignty some believe would be posed by the High Court. Anti-Voice conservatives have asserted that Albanese’s constitutional amendment — no matter how cleverly worded — will encourage litigation. Litigants will demand and receive the High Court’s help in intensifying the government’s obligation to listen and respond to the Voice and to license it to choose whatever matter it wishes to speak on.

Instead of taking up these fears, Dutton’s letter and questions essentially linked the effectiveness or otherwise of the Voice to its representativeness.

His first three questions concerned who can vote for and serve on the Voice. Questions four, nine and ten were about election/appointment and ongoing accountability. Question eleven named a constituency that the Voice must be designed to represent: “those who still need to get a platform in Australian public life.”

Questions twelve and fifteen hinted at what the Voice should be concerned with (closing the gap and “the real issues that impact people’s lives daily on the ground in the community”); question thirteen invited the government to assure us that the Voice would not negotiate a treaty.

Dutton’s polemical phrasing stoked anxiety about several questions. But they are nonetheless matters of structure and purpose, and they embody an underlying idea: that the Voice will not help the most disadvantaged unless it is designed to amplify their influence on governments.

So it is significant that Dutton’s fourteenth question linked this ethically attractive idea to an actual design proposal: “Will the government commit to Local and Regional Voices, as recommended in the report on the co-design process led by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton?”

That is a confronting question for Labor, which has sought to say as little as possible about Calma and Langton’s report since it was released in December 2021. Albanese said immediately after his Garma speech that the report was central to his government’s thinking, but neither he nor Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney has revealed which features of the model the government does and doesn’t like. Albanese’s recent radio interview with Ben Fordham revealed that he does not have some features of the Calma–Langton model at his fingertips.

The plan for Patrick Dodson, chair of the joint parliamentary committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, to circulate a substantial outline of the Voice by Christmas 2022 seems to have been dropped, though it has been minimally fulfilled by Burney’s listing of several design principles: that the Voice will be advisory, will not deliver programs, will not have a veto over parliament, will be “accountable and transparent,” will be chosen by First Nations people, will be gender-balanced and will include young people.

Calma and Langton went much further than this. In particular, they presented the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices as the foundational tier of the Voice, and argued that this tier must thus be created first. Only when the “vast majority” of Local and Regional Voices are in place, they said, will it be possible for the National Voice to be added — perhaps two years after work on the Local and Regional Voices had begun. (Until then, they suggested, there would be an Interim National Voice.)

It made sense to defer the National Voice, they pointed out, because its members should be chosen by the Local and Regional Voices rather than by the votes of a national Indigenous electorate. In Calma and Langton’s conception, the National Voice gets its representative legitimacy from the Local and Regional tiers that precede it and on which it depends.

Calma and Langton say that the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices will not arise de novo but should build on and extend “existing local and regional decision-making arrangements.” As examples they mention the NSW Local Decision Making initiative and the national Empowered Communities scheme — the latter giving their plan a conservative lineage, for it was established by the Turnbull government in 2016.

Empowered Communities sought to cultivate “partnerships” between government and community in eight regions: Cape York, NSW Central Coast, Inner Sydney, Goulburn Murray, East Kimberley, West Kimberley, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and Ngarrindjeri. The scheme analysed data, built “baselines” and identified “service delivery gaps” in order to produce “long-term Regional Development Agendas.”

In some of the Empowered Communities the Morrison government quarantined welfare payments through the Cashless Debit Card. When Labor abolished the CDC in September 2022, some critics argued that the government had failed to heed the wishes of many in those regions.

Within the Turnbull and Morrison governments, Empowered Communities were seen as promising exercises in forming what Calma and Langton would come to call Local and Regional Voices. But Liberal MP Tim Wilson doubted in August 2018 that anything would be gained from giving constitutional recognition to such bodies: they got their legitimacy, he asserted, from their representativeness.

By the time the Coalition’s Aboriginal Australians minister Ken Wyatt convened his co-design committees in early 2020, the Morrison government seemed to be anticipating that the regional structures of the Voice would resemble and build on the “partnership” forums of the Empowered Communities program. Empowered Communities were among the seeds from which Calma and Langton expected Local and Regional Voices to grow. But Wyatt’s terms of reference prevented them from advocating for their model of the Indigenous Voice to be constitutionally enshrined.

Only a few months before the Morrison government lost office, Calma and Langton were arguing that the Voice should be legislated so that voters would get to know it as a useful rather than threatening part of Indigenous politics before any constitutional referendum. Wyatt didn’t get his wish to legislate on the basis of their report, but Langton publicly welcomed the last Coalition budget’s allocation of money towards what Wyatt called “more detailed co-design of implementation requirements for each jurisdiction” so that Local and Regional Voices could be formed.

As Australia passed from Coalition to Labor rule, the conservative provenance of the Calma and Langton model made referring to it politically awkward. Calma and Langton have continued to promote it, but they have adjusted their advocacy to the new sequence: their report is to be read now but acted on only after the referendum.

Without dismissing it, some advocates of a Yes vote treat the Calma–Langton model with great reserve. The co-chair of the Uluru Dialogue, Megan Davis, subtly distanced herself by referring to it as “the Wyatt report.” “There are many useful aspects of the Wyatt report that will inform the way forward,” she wrote in July 2022.

Davis’s wariness about the “Wyatt report” would be evident to anyone who noticed how Calma and Langton had responded to her proposal to the co-design committee that the National Voice have the “powers and privileges of a parliamentary committee to compel people to appear as witnesses or produce documents.” Reporting to a conservative government, Calma and Langton had thought it prudent to label that an “inquisitorial” approach and to suggest that a “good-faith partnership” was a better option.

The feature of the Calma–Langton model that (probably) endeared it most to the Morrison government was the emphasis on the Local and Regional tier: the thirty-five Voices that would speak to state, territory and local governments about programs and development opportunities.

But in the eyes of some who want an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the Calma–Langton model does not show how regions can be represented. In the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2022, lawyer Teela Reid wrote that “each First Nation ought to have input” and therefore that “First Nations people want a nation-based Voice.” She described as “artificial” the local, regional and state boundaries “endorsed in the government report into the Voice co-design process by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.”

A month later, Davis and fellow lawyers Gabrielle Appleby and Sean Brennan released a paper, “Finalisation of the Voice Design,” in which they acknowledge the persistence of public demands for more information about the Voice. While referring respectfully to the Calma–Langton report, their paper warns us not to consider as “final” the model it produced. They have “process-related concerns” about the report.

Appleby, Brennan and Davis want to rule a line under all the design thinking done during the Coalition government and enunciate design principles reflecting the possibility of the Voice being a constitutionally based body. In particular, they depart from Calma and Langton’s emphasis on the Local and Regional tier.

“The Voice is primarily a Voice to Parliament,” they write, “informing the ultimate national law-making authority, but it must also be engaged with government in the development of policies and legislative proposals” (my emphasis). They also want the government and parliament to have “an obligation to engage with the Voice in certain defined areas” (my emphasis).

Appleby, Brennan and Davis observe that no report has ever outlined a body that — by virtue of the referendum — is to be a constitutional entity giving Indigenous Australians constitutional recognition. This unprecedented design task, they say, requires significantly augmenting the work of parliament by a process of Indigenous consultation. They outline their preferred process and argue it should be “set out in a bill that is passed by parliament and (in an uncommenced form) is an Act available to the public voting at the referendum” (my emphasis).

Under this legislation an appointed Voice Design Council, guided by an Indigenous Steering Committee, would conduct regional dialogues at which First Nations delegates would deliberate on the design of the First Nations Voice. These dialogues would culminate in a National Convention that would write drafting instructions for the bill. The Indigenous Steering Committee would then work with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel to draft the bill. A joint parliamentary committee would consider public submissions and then recommend to parliament that it pass the final bill.

The Albanese government has not commented on this proposal for a post-referendum design process, but it continues to promise “consultation” before it presents a bill to parliament. Without disputing that parliament will write the Voice legislation, Appleby, Brennan and Davis have spelled out who should be consulted and the form that “consultation” would take: “Sufficient assurance must be given to First Nations people that the design of the Voice… will not be imposed on them by the parliament without their input.” That assurance, they say, should take the form of an act of the parliament.

By proposing a post-referendum “consultation” process that resembles the dialogues orchestrated by the Referendum Council in 2016 and 2017, Appleby, Brennan and Davis are hoping that the process that produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart is widely respected. They are banking on the possibility that the 2016–17 sequence of regional dialogues and its crowning national assembly has become paradigmatic of the Indigenous public.

“Recognition” implies there is such a thing as an Indigenous public that can accept or decline the proposed terms of recognition. But the “Indigenous public” is no more than a rhetorical construct unless it finds credible institutional expression. Until there is a Voice, this is what the series of Indigenous assemblies can be. Indigenous assemblies are currently the only political technology that can credibly answer the question: in what terms do Indigenous Australians want to be recognised?

In laying out their preferred post-referendum process, Appleby and her colleagues give less emphasis to the law-making sovereignty of the parliament, though they don’t dispute it. Their bid to write Indigenous assemblies into the post-referendum design process asserts an Indigenous prerogative we are at risk of not making room for: the prerogative to say yes or no to the offered recognition.

For “recognition” to be effective, the recognised must determine its terms. Appleby, Brennan and Davis are reminding us that this amendment, unlike any constitutional amendment in Australia’s history, will work only if it empowers an Indigenous interlocutor to say whether the recognition afforded by Australian voters is a recognition worth having.

Australians’ evident willingness to recognise Indigenous Australians in some way has empowered those to be recognised. The current diversity of viewpoints among Indigenous figures (Price, Davis, Lidia Thorpe, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and others) may dismay some as a cacophony. But the fact that Indigenous Australians are now disputing with one another about what would be recognition’s optimal form is one manifestation of their empowerment as the soon-to-be-recognised.

Mundine has spent the past twelve years letting us know his reservations about constitutional recognition, and about the Voice in particular. But he has also said recently that if the Voice is established he will contribute to making it work in order to get government “off our backs.”

Lidia Thorpe wants a truth-telling process, a treaty that recognises sovereignty and then — only then — a Voice, but we can be sure that if a Voice is established first she will assess its usefulness to her sovereignty agenda. With her strong commitment to women and children, Jacinta Price is unlikely to neglect a Voice as a means of formulating social policy — including (possibly) a revival of something like the Cashless Debit Card.

When Labor faces Liberals’ demands for detail — as it is likely to do right up until the day of the referendum — it will have to summon the nerve to continue offering only broad answers. A minimalist approach to releasing “details” will allow for a post-referendum process of further Indigenous deliberation about what kind of Voice is wanted.

While Linda Burney has mostly shown the stomach for minimalism, she has sometimes sought to appease questioners by assuring them that the Voice will deal with education, health, housing, domestic violence, childcare, native title, land rights, cultural water allocations, and other policies that have a “direct effect” on Indigenous Australians — and not “things like taxation or defence.” I suspect that her Indigenous advisers — especially Davis — have warned her against sliding into such pre-emptive talk.

Meanwhile, invoking the voters’ right to know what they are voting on, Dutton and others will solicit all the pre-emption they can get. Their pressure was evident in Julian Leeser’s announcement on Saturday that his support for Yes is weakening in the absence of Labor’s answers to Dutton’s questions. The Coalition parties will store up every “detail” they extract so they can point to it after the referendum as a design feature already endorsed (or rejected) by the Australian public.

The politics of Voice design has already begun. Whether the Liberals decide on a Yes, No or “free vote” approach to the referendum, the one thing that matters to conservatives now is to concede as little as possible of the Voice design process to those who seek to be recognised. •

The post Peter Dutton’s questions appeared first on Inside Story.

Income management has been facilitated by two schemes: the Basics Card, introduced in 2008, and the Cashless Debit Card, or CDC, which was launched in 2017. Each card was designed to stop people on welfare from making purchases deemed harmful to them and/or their communities.

What makes income management an “Indigenous issue” is that most people who must use these cards identify as Aboriginal: as of 27 May this year, more than eight in ten of the 24,825 people on the Basics Card and half of the 17,322 on the CDC. The six regions in which the CDC was introduced between 2016 and 2020 — Ceduna, East Kimberley, the Goldfields region, Bundaberg and Hervey Bay, the Northern Territory and Cape York — all had large Indigenous populations.

A high proportion of welfare recipients using these cards haven’t chosen to have their expenditure managed. Someone else has decided for them: the Australian government or (in Cape York) a community-based panel working under the local Family Responsibilities Commission. These organisations have declared that certain welfare recipents can’t be trusted to spend their money wisely or deserve protection from others’ predation.

While some welfare recipients have found these constraints helpful, many would like to have had the option of agreeing to or refusing such help. Many feel stigmatised by “the Card,” or at least unreasonably inconvenienced by it.

In September this year Labor abolished the CDC, and many of its users are now being “transitioned” to the Basics Card. Critics of compulsion were encouraged by Labor’s decision: they hope the Albanese government will soon take the next step and make the Basics Card optional, giving the swelling ranks of its users the choice of whether to continue under its discipline. Some critics would prefer the government to go further and abandon income management programs altogether.

Labor has promised to consult widely before making further decisions about the Basics Card. The momentum is in the direction of an optional card because recent discussions have revealed wide agreement — among both its defenders and its critics — that it is a more “primitive” (Noel Pearson’s term) tool than the CDC.

Because the CDC used existing banking infrastructure, cardholders could shop at around a million outlets with EFTPOS facilities, and could also shop online and internationally. The Basics Card can be used only at a dramatically more limited number of stores individually approved by the Australian government.

To acknowledge the defects of the Basics Card is one thing; to make its use entirely optional is quite another. The idea that some authority should control the spending of irresponsible or vulnerable welfare recipients still has firm defenders. But if compulsory income management is to remain in the social policy toolkit, who should decide which welfare recipients will be controlled, and by what criteria will they be selected?

It is an orthodoxy of our times that only extensive Indigenous consultation will assure good Indigenous program outcomes. Among the Coalition’s objections to Labor’s decision to abolish the CDC was the accusation that the Albanese government didn’t sufficiently consult affected communities. If the Voice were up and running — both nationally and at the local/regional levels — it could advise the government about the principles that should govern Indigenous Australians’ (and others’) welfare entitlements. The thirty-five Local and Regional Voices might even be able to propose regional variations on the modes of welfare delivery, which are already emerging.

Despite criticising the Albanese government for failing to consult on the CDC, the Nationals’ Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a senator from the Northern Territory, has pledged emphatically to oppose the Voice, and she has the National Party behind her. But her position is not as clear as it could be. After all, as partners of the Liberal Party, the Nationals supported allocating $31.8 million in the March 2022 budget to establishing Local and Regional Indigenous Voices, with a view to legislating them some time in the future.

Has the National Party in opposition repudiated a position on the Voice it supported in government? Has Price withdrawn her own taunting suggestion to the Albanese government in August 2022: “If this government is so hellbent on establishing this Voice then it needs to first demonstrate it can be successful, by legislating it rather than enshrining it”? One thing that is clear is that Price and the Nationals don’t want an Indigenous Voice to be enshrined in the Constitution.

Price’s recent pledge to lead the No campaign in the referendum was scornfully slapped down by one of the leading advocates of a Yes vote, Noel Pearson. On 29 November, he dismissed Senator Price as trapped in a “redneck celebrity vortex.” But this spectacular confrontation on the referendum issue obscured the extent to which Price and Pearson are in agreement on the question of whether Labor erred in abolishing the CDC. Both of them believe compulsory income management should continue for individuals whose unfettered use of welfare income poses a threat to their community.

Price and Pearson’s convergence in defence of compulsory income management — with the CDC as its tool — was on display in August at the Senate inquiry into the bill that abolished the CDC. Senator Price was asking questions; Pearson was among those answering.

What did they say?

As one of three representatives of the Cape York Institute appearing before the Senate committee on 16 August, Pearson described how income management commenced in 1999–2000 on Cape York. At first, recipients had volunteered for the scheme, some of them as a justification for telling importuning kin that they couldn’t oblige demands for cash because their spending was being controlled.

For these welfare recipients, compulsory income management was a way of resisting “demand sharing” — a practice honoured by Indigenous custom but fatal to the wellbeing of many. The legislation to abolish the CDC, said Pearson, “will wipe out twenty years of my work.”

According to Pearson and his colleagues, the most important achievement of the Cape York Family Responsibilities Commission, or FRC, had been identifying local authorities with the capacity to decide whose income should be managed. Local commissioners and local elders identify errant or defenceless members of participating communities and put them on the card. “Your own people will hold you to account,” explained Pearson, urging the government to “fund similar decision-making mechanisms” in other communities.

“Our work in Cape York will be severely kiboshed if we don’t have a card facility attached to the FRC,” Pearson claimed. The CDC was the better card for the FRC to work with because it offered greater flexibility to the small number of Cape York people (around one hundred at any one time) on whom budget discipline is imposed for three to twelve months. Labor’s legislation would force them back to the “primitive” Basics Card.

The entire Senate committee found the Cape York Institute presentation persuasive. The majority report (senators Marielle Smith, Janet Rice, Louise Pratt, Anne Urquhart and David Pocock) recommended the CDC be abolished, subject to the government working with the FRC to ensure that it could find a practical substitute. The Coalition senators (Slade Brockman, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Anne Ruston, Wendy Askew and Matt O’Sullivan) used their minority report to wholly endorse Pearson’s objection to terminating the CDC, pointing out that the thousands of people in the Northern Territory who had transferred from the Basics Card to the CDC would now have to return to a card they found less useful. They criticised the government for not revealing its plans for those on compulsory income management, and slammed it for inadequate consultation.

How the users of the CDC will be affected remains to be seen. If the FRC is frustrated by the transition to the Basics Card, we can be certain that the Cape York Institute won’t remain silent. Pearson is a formidable advocate. Whether the government will encourage bodies equivalent to the FRC to form in other regions is hard to predict. If ever the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices come into existence, I imagine some of them will examine this possibility.

Senator Price made it clear she is impressed by the Cape York approach to compulsory income management, referring to it several times at committee hearings subsequent to Pearson’s presentation. Addressing witnesses from Ceduna, she acknowledged that committee members were aware of the FRC model and “how this sort of program might actually benefit other communities,” especially those that are “tight-knit.” She asked another witness whether she thought the FRC “framework” demonstrated that “a form of income management that is tailored to a community can work.”

At another point Price asked a witness from Change the Record (a coalition that wants all forms of income management abolished) to consider the help that the FRC would give to a victim of domestic violence or to neglected children. She drew another witness’s attention to “a framework in Cape York where the community understands the circumstances of individuals within a family group” and intervenes “to ensure that those vulnerable people are taken care of.”

All of this means that Price must have been shocked on 29 November to hear Pearson excoriate her for the Nationals’ position on the Voice. “Ultimately it’s a tragic redneck celebrity vortex that she’s caught up in,” Pearson told ABC radio, “and it involves right-wing people, particularly… the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies. They’re the string pullers… and their strategy was to find a Blakfulla to punch down on other Blakfullas.”

“I am no stranger to attacks from angry men,” Price responded, adroitly transforming Pearson from protector of women and children to “angry man.”

Those words reflected Price’s seemingly deep ambivalence about the representative capacities of organisations that claim to speak for Indigenous Australians who suffer at the hands of family members. Implicit was the question: are organisations critical of compulsory income management (really) a vehicle for men’s interests?

This is the kind of gender-nuanced question the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory has long asked of the powerful statutory land councils. Price speaks from within that tradition of conservative political discourse that highlights the vulnerability of women and children to men.

“I know it’s easy for organisations to be heard and speak up,” Price said at another point in the committee’s proceedings. “Has it been difficult for some of the vulnerable people to be heard?” Time after time, she raised doubts about the “governance” of organisations that oppose compulsory income management. Responding to research criticising the practice, she contrasted organisational views with the outlook of “the individuals themselves.” Price was alive to the possibility that an organisation’s view could be more reflective of its leaders’ attitudes than of “those they serve.”

Price’s own experiences give her the confidence to make this sustained critique of existing instruments of Indigenous representation. Her political persona derives not only from being the child of a Warlpiri mother and white father, raised in Alice Springs, but also from being a woman and a mother herself, a member of a structurally vulnerable category that includes her relatives and friends.

“Do people in your organisation have lived experience in some of these places?” she asked one critic of compulsory income management — “particularly places like remote communities in the Northern Territory?”

She is also one of the few politically successful Central Aboriginal people for whom none of the large “Indigenous sector” organisations (including the Central Land Council, Tangentyere Council and Central Australian Aboriginal Congress) is a power base. Making a virtue of her tense and sceptical relationship with such bodies, she has thrived in elected office under the patronage of a Country Liberal Party that claims to speak for the Aboriginal people neglected by the Indigenous sector.

This way of relating to her home region differentiates Price from Pearson and helps to explain their opposing positions on the Voice. While Pearson’s voice has been facilitated nationally by the Murdoch press, his power base is in the regional Aboriginal organisations he has helped to build since the 1980s. It is there in Cape York that he has conducted social policy trials persuasive enough to win financial patronage and delegated responsibilities from federal and state governments.

Indeed, Pearson is Australia’s leading theorist and practitioner of Indigenous regionalism. He also conspicuously refuses to be party political. Implicit in his political trajectory has been the choice not to stand for elected office as the preselected candidate of a major party.

If the Indigenous Voice were established, and if it included a strong regional tier (as recommended by Tom Calma and Marcia Langton in their final report on the Indigenous Voice co-design process), Price would find herself marginal to any Central Australian or Northern Territory Indigenous Voice(s). This is because they would probably be fashioned from the very NT Aboriginal organisations against which Price defines herself as the tribune of the vulnerable and unrepresented.

Pearson, by contrast, could vaunt the Cape York structures with which he identifies as prototypes of regional Indigenous empowerment. He was making that case, very effectively, in his August pitch to the senators against Labor’s abolition of the Cashless Debit Card. •

The post Price and Pearson, uneasy allies? appeared first on Inside Story.

Full disclosure: like Private Neville White, I began PhD fieldwork as a mature age anthropology student in a remote Arnhem Land community in the 1970s. Unlike White, I was studying social rather than physical anthropology. White gave up his research in favour of providing financial and practical help to a Yolngu community at Donydji. I continued research with Rembarrnga people around Bulman and in the archives.

What keeps me connected to Arnhem Land are friendships that are indistinguishable from family ties, as well as an ongoing interest in the way conditions there are being “developed” by the peculiar, problematic governmental processes that also intrigue the author of this rather baffling book. Arnhem Land is indeed Another Country, as David Gulpilil says in the film of that name.

The Passion of Private White opens in 2005 with Watson’s first arrival at Nhulunbuy, a town on the Gove Peninsula, where he is met by his old friend Neville White. This, he says, is “mining, hunting, and fishing country, and Aboriginal country, so it is also Toyota HiLux country.” The cafe–store is named Captain Cook, a hint of the casual racism that pervades Australia’s remote mining towns.

Watson introduces Tom, Neville White’s main Yolngu friend, as “the senior man” at Donydji, one of many scattered outstations in the Arnhem Land bush and the main site of White’s efforts. He smiles at Watson and climbs into the HiLux beside him. Tom has “only a few words of English,” which made me wonder whether either Watson or White spoke Kriol. After several hours’ drive on the dirt track that is also the Central Arnhem Highway, they reach the outstation.

From the start Watson interweaves his own experiences with accounts of White’s past and present projects, and with fragments of history — Yolngu contact with Makassans and missionaries, the depredations of pastoralists and police — as well as more recent events and scattered quotations from anthropologists (on one page, fifteen are named). The narration is confident, as if the past is settled and known and the present readily understood, but Watson’s diary-like depiction of events and his speculations and evaluations reflect balanda (whitefella) common sense. His stories of White’s efforts are those of a surprised stranger revealing Australians’ colonising passions. The practices and priorities of the colonised remain obscure.

Chapter two provides harrowing details of Neville White’s Vietnam experiences. While critical of the war, he didn’t refuse the call-up and in Vietnam found himself engaged in hideous combat and moral dilemmas that haunt him to this day. Bitter experiences upon his return added damage to body and soul, now evident in PTSD.

White attended university after his tour of duty, eventually undertaking doctoral fieldwork using biological methods and oral histories to ascertain facts about population flows in the deep past. He collected fingerprints and blood samples from 2360 people, and “walked the country,” covering large areas with local guides and informants. His research was applauded in the academy and published extensively. Now, decades later, local rangers are able to rely on his maps.

Gradually, his academic work gave way to a passion for helping. Decades after receiving his doctorate he continues to visit Donydji, building houses, toilets, a school and a workshop, installing water pumps and solar panels and providing equipment, often using money he raises in Melbourne. We are not told of requests from the Donydji residents nor of any negotiation about what is built, or where or when.

White found the work therapeutic and recruited Vietnam vet mates who make short visits, camping separately from the community and working efficiently from dawn to dusk. When Watson first visits, a contractor is building a school with the help of Neville’s volunteers from Melbourne. A few Yolngu participate but most appear as passive observers of White’s projects. There is no mention of whether these strangers, or Watson himself, are properly introduced to Country.

When they arrive at Donydji, Watson sees half a dozen houses, an airstrip, and about eighty Yolngu whom he cannot communicate with. They unload supplies at the various camps. With Rotary funds White has built a workshop that houses vehicles and equipment to enable young men to “learn the trade and make an independent living” as mechanics, although there is no working economy here. Watson later describes the amazing skill of one Yolngu bush mechanic, but as shown in the Walpiri film Bush Mechanics, such skills are usually deployed locally and voluntarily. Donydji women garner sustenance from the bush, men shoot and butcher buffalo, and fish are caught in a distant river. Demanding and dangerous bush expeditions reveal beautiful dramatic country, but its meaning to Yolngu is touched on only briefly.

Tom is Neville White’s close friend and trusted informant at Donydji and authorises White’s activities. Tom tells White that Tom’s authority and plans are being threatened by a Yolngu man known here as Cowboy, who wants to establish a cattle station in the area. We are told that Cowboy is an illegitimate interloper whose plan is a threat to traditions rather than a possibly viable enterprise that could provide an income. Later, though, Cowboy’s presence at Donydji is treated as legitimate. White and the author appear unaware that lengthy negotiations over competing claims and plans are typical of Yolngu politics. The anthropologist Les Hiatt’s film Waiting for Harry illustrates such a process.

Arnhem Land, an area of 97,000 square kilometres, was designated an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931 after a century of intermittent, violent intrusions. Several pastoral and mining ventures had failed, and many and varied missions established. When bauxite was discovered at Gove in the 1960s, the government ignored the reserve’s status and the Yolngu protests and allowed a large mine, refinery and town to be established.

Since the 1970s the federal government has supplied modest funding for outstations to enable a “return to Country” from missions and towns. Outstations like Donydji rely on government support and services that are often appallingly unreliable and inadequate, as we see in Watson’s later chapters. One small but telling example involves the Donydji teacher, who is employed three days a week but spends two of those days travelling.

It is government incompetence that energises White’s work, along with his determination to provide what he sees as necessities. Yolngu live largely outside during the dry season, but houses have become necessary as they have accumulated possessions. In balanda eyes the buildings are the very core of community life, more important than the service and shelter they supply.

Neville White is engaged in a sort of “borderwork,” a term anthropologist Barry Morris coined for work at the interface of the cultural worlds of Indigenous people and Europeans — also known as Yolngu and balanda, natives and settlers, blackfellas and whitefellas, or “them” and “us.” Neville White is intent on improving things in this “remote Indigenous community,” a concept that was cruelly pathologised in the national imagination when the NT Intervention was launched in 2007.

I admired Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), a kind of ethnography of the cultural realm that politicians create and inhabit in Canberra. Watson understood that setting well and could assume readers’ knowledge of how Australia’s political system works.

He is less comfortable in Arnhem Land. His broader erudition is clear from a multitude of quotations and aphorisms from dozens of local and international anthropologists, along with citations of intellectuals from Lucretius to Simone Weil and Sontag, Sophocles to Hume and Camus, and of the Bible. I wondered if he was offering readers alternatives to his own ambivalence about White’s quixotic efforts. Or was he excusing his own bafflement, which is partly a consequence of his inability to communicate with Yolngu residents?

Watson makes several more visits to Donydji with White, describing several individual veterans and relating numerous exciting, surprising or humorous events. White’s work includes training Yolngu men in building and mechanical skills, but his efforts are up against floods, droughts, distances and wild animals. A septic tank floods, a badly installed generator fails, solar panels cease to work. Government stuff-ups cause further frustrations.

Cooperation seems to be lacking from those White believes he is helping, as evident in an apparent carelessness with the things he has supplied for community use. Expensive new tools are locked in the workshop, but returning from Melbourne White finds the lock broken and tools scattered or lost. He describes this as a break-in, ransacking and stealing. But the workshop was intended for community use, and it turns out that there was a desperate need to repair a vehicle. Most of the equipment is retrieved.

When a house is damaged White tries to shame the owner, saying the house was bought with money he collected in Melbourne. The offended owner responds, “Your money; my house.” White and Watson seem oblivious to this clue to a different system of ownership, responsibility and authority.

Bafflement is not surprising in the face of a traditional society organised in ways fundamentally at odds with those of Europeans. There are other clues to these balandas’ misunderstanding of Yolngu social structure. When Watson says White was “granted the name Balang” and, later, that balang means brother, he shows a common confusion about the everyday language of kinship. Personal names are private and not used as English names are. A “skin name” like balang refers to one of the eight categories that position everyone within a system of relationships Yolngu absorb in infancy. Because I became ngaritjan, my husband became balang, and my children gamarang and gamayn.

Everyone is enfolded within this system and everyone is family. Some are close, others distant, and their roles carry specific but not necessarily strict obligations and expectations. English terms such as brother, mother and cousin mean quite different things here. Concerns are all personal but not individualistic, meaning that an impersonal “community interest” is often absent. Moreover, one does not interfere with others, something “we” balanda do constantly with our opinions and judgements.

Watson is not to blame for misunderstanding Yolngu naming practices and interpersonal manners and protocols that are quite different from those of English speakers. Like an unfamiliar language, they can be learned only with experience.

Similarly, the frequent mention of clans, language groups and owners of Country shows understandable confusion; these are matters of multiple, cross-cutting and often disputed rights and obligations, making the term owner inappropriate. Attachment and responsibility for Country are more useful terms, and these are linked to positions in the kinship system. Shared and competing obligations — to mothers’ country or to fathers’ country — are expressed in the roles taken in the major ceremonies. These are negotiated over extensive periods, and particular individuals’ responsibilities are never settled once and for all. I claim no special expertise in these matters, but their significance and meaning in everyday social interaction becomes apparent in any sustained participation in Yolngu community life.

It was not inaccuracies in Watson’s account but the constantly implied sense of “our” normality that kept me on edge. Watson’s own view of what he is observing is both elusive and intrusive. Early in the book, while trying to describe rather than analyse what is going on, Watson notes White’s zealotry, commenting on his “characteristic short, rapid strides: the driven soul’s indifference to anyone else’s capacities or inclinations.” I was reminded of the self-important way the manager hurried around the Bulman community and the concealed mirth it evoked among Rembarrnga women. They recognised his pedagogic intent as they sat around the fire, but were far too kind to let him know. Women’s “domestic” and “social” work was invisible to him. Private White, too, appears to largely ignore the women, at least until one throws a spear at him, skilfully missing.

Watson’s comments on Yolngu character and behaviour can seem presumptuous. As such descriptions unquestioningly accrue, Watson inadvertently endorses the familiar view that traditional Yolngu practices are no longer appropriate in contemporary conditions.

Yet we can thank him for illustrating the profound contradiction within Australian public discourses; we are urged to celebrate “the oldest culture in the world” while refusing respect to those who carry its original form. In the name of “equal human rights,” Indigenous peoples are being induced to accept the authority of outsiders with their mysterious access to apparently limitless resources. The sophisticated Yolngu system of order and authority, achieved through everyday interpersonal negotiations between people related in embedded, normative ways, is invisible to colonisers.

Later in the book White announces plans for an elected council, with a general manager, an administrator and other positions. Tom accepts these strange ideas and asks White to write an agreement. Tom doesn’t speak or read English, but recognises that writing carries authority. When Watson and White return, though, they find “grass and weeds… halfway up the red, yellow, and blue plastic slide in front of the new school” and Watson says that Donydji is “slipping between Chaos and Eden.”

“Weeds”! Here we see a link between aesthetic, moral and political judgements. Watson’s renderings are morally ambiguous, but his comments on Yolngu attitudes often struck me as misperceptions, perhaps based on White’s understandable frustrations. It is difficult for balanda to respect people who appear to resist the hard work we do for them. But look closer and we see that our insistent concern interferes with Yolngu’s own ways of adjusting to colonised conditions and the strange, intrusive habits of outsiders.

Watson’s dry wit and clever, often ironic phrasing are born of his interest in Private White’s passion rather than his own experiences in Arnhem Land. He wisely limits his explanations and judgements of Yolngu; those he does offer can be disturbing. In the wake of the workshop destruction, he says: “Nothing so grieves a balanda — especially, perhaps, a balanda army veteran — as the casual anarchy and selfishness the [Yolngu] philosophy allows” (my emphasis).

What Watson and presumably White judge as “casual anarchy and selfishness” is better understood as a deeply held belief in individual autonomy, often expressed as “I am boss for myself.” Yolngu people don’t moralise, instruct or interfere with each other in ways familiar and normal among balanda. Nor do they expect interference and instruction, especially from people from elsewhere. Yolngu communal enterprises require careful suggestions and inducement rather than taken-for-granted cooperation or attention to “time constraints.”

The anthropologist Kenneth Maddock described the Aboriginal polity as “a kind of anarchy, in which it was open to active and enterprising men to obtain some degree of influence with age, but in which none were sovereign.” And Hiatt wrote that “few peoples can have placed higher value on altruism and mutual aid than the Aborigines of Australia. The genius of the Australian polity lay in its deployment of the goodwill inherent in kinship as a central principle… Government in these circumstances is otiose.”

Thus, the affront to Yolngu is profound when balanda take it upon themselves to assume authority in Yolngu country. Even as Private White tries to rectify government incompetence he embodies the common sense of the Australian state. Yolngu’s slow and subtle ways of practising politics are frequently interrupted by urgent and arrogant balanda intrusions. But balanda are unavoidable and Yolngu are dependent. The uncomfortable modus vivendi can be seen as an ongoing struggle between cultural norms.

Don Watson is a gifted writer, but his casual wit, irony and poetic style in telling of White’s heroic efforts fail to recognise that Yolngu do things very differently. Their different language and different conceptual framework are up against implacable, pervasive change that some try to embrace and others resist. Even their practical, everyday knowledge of the bush is challenged by balanda equipment and desire for comfort, arrogantly displayed as if unambiguously superior.

An anthropological maxim is relevant here: we are particular, not universal human beings. Our impulsive judgements as well as our deepest convictions are context-bound, cultural, shaped by the social world we assume to be normal, even natural. In other human worlds a different normality exists. The perceptive reader will find much to ponder in Watson’s book. •

The Passion of Private White
By Don Watson | Scribner Australia | $49.99 | 336 pages

The post Ambivalent in Arnhem Land appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a brave act, then, to see ourselves as Indigenous authors and researchers responsible for telling histories from a first-person perspective, and to radically decolonise that writing by others. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou godmother of Indigenous methodologies, forged these two powerful Indigenous methodologies and taught us that our voices need to “talk back to” and “talk up to” research. The academic drive to speak for and about us through a Western cultural lens is starting to be deeply interrogated and increasingly found unhealthy.

In Tasmania, the need for local Aboriginal voices to “talk back to” those who profit from our dead, our dispossession and our trauma is imperative. When the strangers in the boats appeared on our trouwunna shores in 1803 to claim our country — by any means — in the name of a faraway British Empire, they really meant it.

In less than thirty years our plentiful peoples were reduced to a handful by planned massacres and declared war, theft and slavery of women and children, and the impact of being treated as less than human. By 1876, with the death of our countrywoman Trucanini, we were subject to mythical extinction, extirpation and elimination.

Yet we did survive after 1876. We survived in the pockets and shadows of colonial Tasmania to raise families and communities. We survived in out-of-the-way places like Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, and in the middle of townships like Latrobe in the northwest.

Among these survivors, one amazing family was never far from the colonial capital city of Hobart — the family of the matriarch Fanny Cochrane Smith. Fanny, who died in 1905, was the ultimate survivor of the abuse that the colonisers so freely gave in return for taking our lands. Now, one of her great-great-grandchildren, Joel Birnie, has decided to tell her history, and his family story, of surviving colonisation.

Joel’s reclamation of important ancestral and familial women in My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania is a shockingly rare example of a Tasmanian Aboriginal history told through the research of a Tasmanian Aboriginal person. From the narratives of others, he retrieves Fanny, her sister Mary Ann Arthur and their mother Tarenootairer — women who shaped colonial moments and spoke their own truths even while captive and exploited — and returns them to Country and power.

Joel offers readers hospitality to join him on his family’s journey. His introductory section regenerates the “Song of Welcome” that Fanny recorded on a phonograph in 1903. From there he returns to the first years of the damnation wrought on our people, when Joel’s many-times grandmother Tarenootairer was stolen as a young girl for slavery, her life thereafter shadowed by the evil that men did to her as a chattel. By creating her own family, Tarenootairer is one of the only women to have create generations that survived the colonial genocide.

Joel restores one daughter, Mary Ann, from the periphery to her rightful place as a central figure in the first Australian call for recognition of land and sovereign rights in 1846. While her death in 1871 was a solitary and degraded affair, her afterlife now becomes rich with heroic dimensions of meaning and survivorship.

Mary Ann was able to use her “educational instruction” to talk back to the colonisers through her letters, and to leave a legacy of women’s advocacy as a natural way of being Tasmanian Aboriginal. Joel follows in her footsteps, for in his writing he too talks up and back and recovers the space to write and speak, in reshaping both Mary Ann’s legacy and his own as an Indigenous academic.

Tarenootairer’s younger daughter, Fanny Cochrane Smith, while suffering the same kinds of degradation as her sister in early childhood — stripped, whipped and tied to a kitchen table, locked in a crate, separated from her mother to be housed in an “orphan” school — veers away from Mary Ann’s organised marriage and childlessness to become an eminent member of colonial Tasmanian society.

Fanny’s reputation and standing as an “industrious” Christian and an Aboriginal woman meant she lived apart as one of the first Tasmanian women to be given a land grant south of Hobart. Parliament debated the paradox of granting land to a recognised Aboriginal woman when the colonial government, vociferously defending their extermination of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, could not acknowledge what she was known for.

All three women lived lives of hardship and poverty. They were all under an intense colonial gaze, though neglected in every other way, but Joel is able to emblazon the spaces where they resisted colonisation. He shows us Tarenootairer laughing, smoking and sharing her life with a group of kinship women in the mission gulags of Wybalena and Oyster Cove, privately communicating in ways that cannot be known by the colonisers, and yet out in the open as a resistance taunt.

He shows us Mary Ann’s feverish writing at her desk, her contributions to political discussions led by the men, and her absolute care for her younger sister Fanny, all hard fought for, on her terms and in defence of her right to belong to Country as a free woman. He shows us Fanny and her husband, newly married, opening a boarding house in Hobart that became a refuge for her family and others, a place where she gave privacy and comfort to our peoples outside the colonial gaze.

In every way, these three women, while subject to deprivations, survived on their own terms to poke back just a little bit.

Joel’s work is an exceptional piece of accessible and vivid writing that smashes the colonial, racist depictions and brings to the surface stubborn, vital Tasmanian Aboriginal women. He has given back to Tasmanian Aboriginal communities a story of ourselves and a template of how we might proceed to think of other men and women who need to be reclaimed.

A small quibble is that the book is written as a third-person narrative of “them” and “theirs,” even when these women are his family. It is disconcerting to read — a reminder of the unconscious adoption of the academy that displaces Indigenous peoples into the “you” not “us,” but this speaks to the infancy of an industry of Indigenous authors and academics within Western spaces rather than a deficit within us. Our minds were conditioned all that time ago, when the boats came and the strangers took our lands, a reckoning that Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests is still ongoing; but at least we now have a way to proceed to untangle the colonial from the Indigenous and to tell our stories.

My People’s Songs is a book that should evoke pride in Tasmanian Aboriginal people, helping us see ourselves and speak to the courage of our survival. It may not be joyous to read of the horrors of what happened to us, but in Joel’s decolonising of the old narratives we find a space to simply be, to breathe easy in having confirmed what we already knew — we come from warriors, we protect fiercely what we love, and we will always be strong Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. •

My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania
By Joel Stephen Birnie | Monash University Publishing | $34.95 | 256 pages

The post The matriarchs appeared first on Inside Story.

When did it become the practice at Aboriginal funerals to cover the grave mound with artificial flowers? In the deep desert they left the corpses to desiccate in the spinifex. Evelyn’s people built platforms out of branches, and suspended the bodies above flat stones, reading into the spatter of dissolving body fat the story of who was responsible for the death.

While I’m pondering my choices, a swarm of Aboriginal children enters the shop, splitting into ones and twos, and moving with practised efficiency down the aisles. A girl of twelve or thirteen saunters past, sizes me up, and palms a small bottle of perfumed oil. She knows I won’t give her away. A matronly shop assistant swoops on the girl, grips her wrist, and peels the bottle from her hand, gesturing with her jaw towards the door. “Out!” The child swans away, followed by her cohort, shrieking and giggling as they make off down the street.

It’s a seamless piece of choreography, everyone playing the part they’ve been cast to play, the moves as familiar and practised as a long-running piece of theatre. When I pay for my flowers, the shop assistant shakes her head. “Little ratbags,” she says, without anger.

The funeral is a day’s drive from Alice Springs, in Western Australia. When my car breaks down 600 kilometres up the Tanami Road, 300 kilometres short of my destination, it feels like a replay of the trip I made fifteen years earlier with my friend Pam Lofts to attend the funeral of another Aboriginal woman, Patricia Napangarti Lee. That time, we made it with the help of the local station people and the staff of the Granites goldmine, and I know that the same network will get me there this time. In the years between now and then, Pam has died, too, of motor neurone disease.

I’d been aiming to camp at the turn-off to my old home, the cattle station my family established in the 1960s, and it’s when I stop near the abandoned roadhouse of Rabbit Flat that I realise I have a problem. Hanging onto the bull bar of my twin-cab utility while I squat to pee, it takes me a moment to realise that the detached idler arm is the reason for the peculiar angle my steering wheel has adopted in the last half hour, and that I’m in trouble.

It’s not far off sundown, and I’m not far from where I had intended to camp, so I drive in the lowering light to the station turn-off, choose a clear space near a stand of mulga trees that will provide morning shade, let Pirate the dog out, collect some firewood, and think about what to do. The mulga branches make their familiar tracery against the fading red horizon, and my body makes its cellular adjustments of recognition that we are back on home ground.

My mobile phone shows a single bar of reception. This amuses me, given I am in one of the remotest locations in Australia and until six months ago it was rare to get one bar of reception where I live, thirty kilometres from Canberra, the national capital. When I climb onto my roof-rack, the phone shows three bars. I get down and light the fire, feed Pirate, make myself a gin and tonic from the emergency supplies in the esky, climb back onto the roof-rack, and consider who to contact.

On a whim, I text my youngest brother in Brisbane, not because he can do anything to help, but because we have made several trips out here together, and he will know exactly where I am and how it feels — the night falling, the mulga wood fire flaring, the particular Tanami stillness we internalised as children and which bonds us across political and other differences.

Within a few minutes, he rings back.

“If anyone else was broken down on the Tanami, I’d be worried,” he says.

I have a flash of regret that I’m someone no one worries about, followed by the knowledge that being worried about has always irritated me, and that it’s been part of my life’s project to become someone people don’t worry about. We chat for a while, and I flag my options — to contact the station and see if I can borrow a vehicle to drive to the funeral, or to backtrack to the mines and hope to get my car repaired in time to make it under my own steam.

My brother rings off and I call the station, leaving a message when no one picks up. I also text my colleagues in Alice Springs, the team I’m taking leave from to attend the funeral, to let them know that I’ve broken down and will keep them in the loop.

During the night, the fire burns down to a bed of coals, and I wake early to the intrusive presence of the small, persistent, moisture-deprived flies that appear every decade or so in response to some inscrutable climatic rhythm. While I’m boiling the billy for my morning cup of tea, the phone rings — it’s the station manager, Mark, who has just picked up my message. I explain my situation, and he says he will come out and see what he can do to get me on the road. It’s a fifty-kilometre drive, and it will take him a while to organise the tools he needs, so I brew another billy of tea, move the car so that the front end will be in the shade all morning, and settle down to wait.

The current station manager is the youngest son of the only other white family that settled in the Tanami in the 1960s. As part of a move to rationalise the viability of Aboriginal-owned cattle stations, the lease was recently put up for tender and taken over by Mark and an older brother. My family left and his family stayed, but we share the knowledge of what it means to live here.

Mark understands my imperative to get to the funeral. Evelyn’s brother worked as a stockman for my family in the sixties, and Evelyn took to heart the fact that as a baby I was given the skin name of Napurrula, making me her sister in the Aboriginal kinship system. Apart from the relationship we had and the personal grief I feel, I am family, and this is something I have to do.

The other urgent reason to get to the funeral is that, at the request of Evelyn’s daughter Megan, I’m bringing food for the wake. There’s a crate of potatoes, onions and sweet potatoes on the tray, and the back seat is loaded with boxes of lettuces, tomatoes and avocados. Covered with wet towels, the salad vegetables are travelling well so far, but there’s a time limit to their viability.

A LandCruiser pulls up beside me, with a toolbox and a welder tied down on the back.

“G’day,” Mark says. “Let’s have a look at the problem.”

He squats by the front wheel of my car and assesses the damage. It’s a year since we last spoke, apart from the telephone conversation this morning.

“Don’t you have a partner who can come on these trips with you and keep you out of trouble?”

“No,” I say. “It’s one of the things I forgot to do.”

He laughs, crawls under the vehicle, and sets about welding up the broken part. It’s a serviceable job, and will get me back to the Granites, but probably won’t stand up to 300 kilometres of corrugated road.

“Thanks, Mark. I owe you one,” I say.

I make my way back to the Granites turn-off and call the number for visitor enquiries. Time passes. Eventually, a woman emerges from the demountable building beside the entry boom gate, and invites me and Pirate into the airconditioned interior to wait for the return of the senior mechanic, who is out in the field on a job. She’s pleasant and friendly, and we chat for a while before she gives me the wi-fi password so I can use my laptop, and we both get on with some work while Pirate sleeps on the lino floor.

More time passes, and the mechanic arrives, checks my car, unbolts the idler arm, and takes it back to the workshop to be repaired by a professional welder. Half an hour later he returns, reattaches the part, and tells me I’m good to go.

Most of the day has been consumed by this process, and it’s late afternoon by the time I get back on the road, with 350 kilometres to travel and a load of food to deliver. The lettuces and tomatoes are still in good order under the wet towels, although the waxed cardboard boxes they are packed in are getting soggy.

Because there’s a time difference of an hour and a half across the border, it’s only seven-thirty when I arrive in the community, although it’s been dark for several hours. The Sorry camp is at Daisy Kungah’s house, where fires are burning and people are hunkered in groups that disperse into familiar individuals as they recognise my car and stand up to greet me.

“We was worrying for you. We thought you was coming this morning.”

“At least somebody worries about me. I broke down — took all day to get the car fixed.”

Given the unreliable vehicles everyone drives, breakdowns are too common to provoke comment. I made it, and that is all that matters. I find Megan, and embrace her while she keens, the ritual wail of shared grief I can never bring myself to make. Then I make my way around the assembled friends and relatives, embracing, shaking hands, beginning at last to feel my own sadness through this collective sorrow.

Once the Sorry business has been attended to, I unload the crates and cartons of food, hand out packets of tobacco, negotiate with Daisy that I will come back early in the morning to have a shower, and drive back to the river crossing, where I find a place to camp away from the road, collect firewood, light a fire, throw down my swag, and exhale.

Evelyn’s death has been sitting in my mind like a parcel waiting to be unwrapped. It has not been possible, in my other life, to feel the loss properly. I could only hold open the space of grief until I re-entered her world and the visceral knowledge of who she was. She stalks across my memory in a dress the colour of the dahlia flowers I’ve brought to grace her grave. •

This is an edited extract from Wandering with Intent, essays by Kim Mahood (Scribe $35).

The post Flowers for Evelyn appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the election, Anthony Albanese and his government have pushed ahead with yet another option — a referendum first, without too much detail about how the Voice would be formed and operate, with legislation to follow. At the Garma Festival on 31 July the prime minister provided the words he would like voters in that referendum to add to the Australian Constitution.

There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

That approach seems popular. Sixty-four per cent of the 3168 Australians surveyed by the Resolve Political Monitor in August and September said “yes” when asked, “Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

The government, Albanese added, is open to further consultation on the exact words to be added to the Constitution. Over the next few months, a series of expert workshops will consider Albanese’s words and perhaps suggest changes. How the Constitution should refer to the Voice’s scope is likely to be one theme of discussion: arguably, all matters dealt with by Australian governments are “relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” but some people will want to circumscribe the Voice’s attention.

At the same time, the government is seeking counsel on how to run the referendum itself. In August, it appointed a working group of First Nations leaders, including Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney and senator Pat Dodson, to advise on three matters: the timing of a referendum, the words of the proposed referendum question and the information about the Voice to be issued to the public before the vote.

To decide what to say about the Voice itself before the referendum is the most difficult issue facing the government. The Albanese government has said very little so far because it would like to distinguish two political tasks: the task of persuading voters to put an Indigenous Voice in the Constitution, and the task of persuading parliament to legislate the Voice in a certain form. But the distinction between the two has come under pressure: the government won’t be able to campaign for a Yes vote in the referendum without giving an outline sketch of the Voice. It will need to say something, soon, about the bill it would introduce after the referendum to legislate the Voice.

The government is correct in saying that parliament will have the final say in the Voice’s design, but parliament can’t deliberate without a bill to consider. Many want to know what would be in that bill. The prime minister’s plea at Garma that we endorse a change to the Constitution as an act of good manners has fallen flat.

Morrison’s road not taken

Before it was thrown out of office in May, the Morrison government had made two significant steps towards creating the Indigenous Voice. The first, in December 2021, was to release the final report of the Indigenous Voice co-design process chaired by Calma and Langton. The second was to allocate $31.8 million in this year’s budget “to progress the establishment of Local and Regional Voices,” in the words of the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians minister, Ken Wyatt. (Langton and Calma’s report received very little public attention, but I have provided an overview at Australian Policy and History.)

Langton welcomed the Morrison government’s financial commitment. Against those who want a referendum on the Voice as soon as possible, before the legislation is developed, she and Calma have argued for building the Voice first. Work would start on constructing the thirty-five Local and Regional Voices, which would then, after an estimated two years, choose the members of a National Voice to Parliament.

Only then, in this scenario, would a referendum be held — though Calma and Langton could not say this in their final report because Wyatt’s terms of reference forbade any mention of constitutional recognition. If the voting public saw the existing Voice as an effective and legitimate body, a future government committed to constitutional recognition would find it easier to persuade voters to put the Voice into Australia’s Constitution.

This legislate-first scenario had three political weaknesses. One was that Scott Morrison had followed his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull in saying that he would not submit the Voice to a referendum. Morrison was prepared to start building a Voice, but constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians, he said, should take some other form. The second was pointed out by those agitating for constitutional entrenchment to precede legislation. A Voice that was merely legislated would lack the moral and political legitimacy that a referendum would provide, making it less effective, less attractive to potential Indigenous leaders and always vulnerable to legislative dissolution — the fate inflicted in 2004–05 on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC, by a Coalition government with Labor’s support.

A third weakness was that a government and the voting public might say of the functioning Voice: is there any need to provide for it in the Constitution if it is already working well as a legislated body?

The election as mandate

Backing the referendum-first approach was one way for Labor to differentiate itself from the Coalition. But between the announcement of the election and polling day the major parties said little about the Voice or constitutional recognition. For voters concerned with Indigenous affairs the election did present a choice, however: Labor promised and the Coalition refused a referendum on the Voice. But both parties treated this difference as if it did not matter to voters.

The Voice advocates who assembled in April to make the Yarrabah Affirmation sought to make it matter. They framed Labor’s commitment to a referendum as voters’ opportunity to help stage national renewal. “History is calling,” they said.

Did the effort to promote a Voice referendum as a nation-defining opportunity make a difference to anyone’s vote in May? We can’t say, but it certainly gave Anthony Albanese the theme for his victory speech on election night. He chose to highlight Labor’s promise to hold a referendum in the next term of parliament, as if that had been what the election was all about. Labor’s triumph, he implied, was his mandate to conduct a referendum.

The change of government thus switched Australia onto a different pathway to the Voice. Instead of slowly constructing a legislated Voice, building from the local and regional upwards — without assurance that the Voice would ever be put to referendum — Australia will debate, between now and the end of 2024, whether to entrench the Voice in the Constitution. If the referendum is successful, the government will be obliged to legislate the Voice. If the voters reject the referendum, a government could still decide to legislate a Voice.

An almost-neglected model of the Voice

Having committed to holding a referendum first, the Labor government must now decide what to do with the model the Morrison government had budgeted for.

In the first week of August, after Garma, the prime minister acknowledged the existence of the Calma–Langton report and its relevance to Labor’s post-referendum drafting of a bill. But he would say nothing about what Labor likes and dislikes about the Calma–Langton model. Linda Burney was less circumspect. Evidently, she doesn’t agree with one of the report’s central recommendations: that the members of the National Voice be chosen by the Local and Regional Voices, meeting within their state or territory, rather than directly elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voters.

A few days after being sworn in as minister Burney was reported as saying that the Voice “needs to be elected, that it should have gender parity and that young people and the voices of Torres Strait Islanders must be represented within the body.” Burney didn’t acknowledge that she was here contesting a major Voice design issue.

The history of ATSIC suggests that only a small proportion of Indigenous Australians would vote in a non-compulsory poll. Rather than allowing all Indigenous Australian voters to elect National Voice members, Calma and Langton’s “structurally linked” membership model would, they suggest, secure the legitimacy of the National Voice better than the direct election of its members by a small proportion of Indigenous voters.

Little commentary on the Calma–Langton model has been published since Burney’s remark. Megan Davis, writing in the Australian in July, made two criticisms of what she calls “the Wyatt model.” She reminded readers that Wyatt had not allowed Calma and Langton to say whether the Voice should be entrenched in the Constitution. I understand Davis as saying that now Labor is committed to a referendum on the Voice any model that was conceived under Wyatt’s brief is less relevant.

Davis also said that the Wyatt model was “a voice to government, not a voice to parliament.” Actually, Calma and Langton proposed that it be both. Putting that aside, why should the Voice not be “to government”? Davis didn’t say.

Any discussion of how Indigenous Australians might use a Voice to speak “to government” will need to include Pat Turner, chair of the Coalition of Peaks, an alliance of Indigenous organisations that believes it has created a way of talking to government agencies delivering Closing the Gap programs. As far back as November 2019, Turner was quoted as fearing that a “messy, incoherent ecosystem of Indigenous representative mechanisms” was forming. Perhaps that is also Davis’s concern?

Wyatt invited Turner to sit on Calma and Langton’s advisory group, and it is likely that she contributed to their recommendation that the Local and Regional Voices be formed in a way that respects and complements the processes of Indigenous representation already established in each region. Such existing Indigenous organisations are the base of Turner’s Coalition of Peaks.

After the election of Labor in May 2022, Turner renewed her vigilance about Voice design. In June and July she was reported to be urging the government to issue more “detail on how a national Voice would work.” Marcia Langton felt obliged to assure Turner that “nothing in our [final report] will affect the Coalition of Peaks or efforts to close the gap.” Langton was also reported to be critical of Turner for saying that she couldn’t support the Voice until she sees some “meat on the bones.”

Though some Voice advocates have been irritated by Turner’s calls for detail, she has reportedly said that she is seeking merely to counter “unhelpful speculation” about the Voice. Here we see a puzzle facing those campaigning for Yes. Whose demands for more detail are merely mischievous (bad faith campaigning for a No vote, in other words) and whose demands arise from their legitimate interest in what the Voice could be?

Turner was also concerned that focus on the Voice was drawing the public’s mind away from the Closing the Gap agenda. “The Voice is easier to talk about than Closing the Gap. We need to do both,” she is reported to have said.

Thorpe and Price as outliers

Flanking this patchily reported Indigenous discussion of the Calma–Langton model are the dissenting commentaries of two senators, Lidia Thorpe, a Victorian Green, and Jacinta Price, an NT Country Liberal member. Neither seems interested in questions of Voice design.

Since choosing Thorpe to replace Richard Di Natale in June 2020, the Greens have opposed the creation of the Voice before the Australian government negotiates a treaty based on truth-telling. The May 2022 election gave Thorpe a further six years, and the Greens have made her their deputy leader in the Senate. Her strength within the party raises the question: would the Greens vote against a Labor referendum bill?

After the election, Yes campaigner Thomas Mayor thanked Greens leader Adam Bandt for saying that the Greens would not try to stop a referendum being held. Mayor also pointed to survey evidence that “more than 70 per cent of Greens voters support a Voice referendum.” But Thorpe also speaks for the Greens, and in June, according to the Australian’s Troy Bramston, she said that Australians aren’t ready to vote on the Voice and it would be risky to proceed before a treaty was negotiated between the Commonwealth and Indigenous Australians.

Looking for common ground, Burney and the Greens have conceded that the Voice, the treaty and truth-telling could be pursued simultaneously. As a quid pro quo, Thorpe has asked the government to commit to implementing all the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991) and of the Bringing Them Home report (1997), and to legislating the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) as Australia’s standard of Indigenous self-determination.

Labor would not have to find common ground with the Greens if the Liberal and National parties agreed to support a referendum bill and joined Labor to argue for Yes. A Yes campaign led by an Albanese–Dutton unity ticket would have a very good chance not only of winning but also of marginalising the Greens’ (or at least Thorpe’s) approach to Indigenous affairs.

When Dutton appointed Liberal moderate Julian Leeser as shadow Indigenous Australians minister he signalled that he is keeping the door to bipartisanship open. But Price pledged on 27 July, in her first speech to the Senate, to resist the opposition’s move to the political centre.

“This government has yet to demonstrate how this proposed Voice will deliver practical outcomes and unite, rather than drive a wedge further between, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia,” she said. Not all Indigenous Australians wanted the Voice, she went on, arguing that a Voice would, in effect, “disregard” Indigenous MPs such as herself. Narratives about Australia’s racism, she added, were being mobilised to promote a Voice that was itself predicated on racial division.

Hailing Price’s speech, some of the more right-wing Murdoch journalists regretted that Dutton had appointed the conciliatory Leeser.

More detail on the Voice?

If we take Thorpe and Price at their word, they are unlikely to be won over by more detail from the government about the Voice’s likely form, functions and powers. Neither of them has commented, as far as I know, on the Calma–Langton plan – for better or worse, the only published model of the Voice. For these two senators to grapple with issues of institutional design, they would need to climb down from the rhetorical plinth where each has become an icon of her constituency. We may yet see such engagement, but don’t hold your breath.

Political progress on the referendum is within Albanese’s reach if he discusses with the opposition the possible institutional meanings of the words “make representations to Parliament and the Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” Perhaps that discussion is already taking place in private. Some have suggested a parliamentary inquiry as a forum for such an exchange. It could lead to a set of principles — agreed between government and opposition — to guide the drafting of a post-referendum bill.

That possibility was touted by Malcolm Turnbull when he announced in the Guardian on 15 August that he would vote Yes. Turnbull spent much of his article respectfully summarising the Calma–Langton model, with the disclaimer that it is unlikely to be “the definitive last word.” Acknowledging that parliament, not Albanese and his colleagues, would design the Voice, he asked the government for “some clear design parameters.”

Such a move would give rise to more public discussion — before the referendum — of the form, functions and powers of the Voice. But is the government willing to stimulate such discussion? Since Burney presented her view that the Voice should be elected, she and the rest of the Albanese government have gone quiet.

They have justified their reticence by referring to the defeat of the 1999 republic referendum. On that occasion, proponents of a republic were divided on the question of whether a head of state should be chosen by popular vote or a decision of parliament. When the 1999 referendum question offered parliament as the body to appoint a head of state, some republicans who favoured direct election sided with monarchists rather than campaign for a “politicians’ republic.”

Burney fears alienating some supporters of the Voice by being too specific about its form, functions and powers. “I don’t know having a detailed model [of the Voice] out there would lead to a clean question about what should be observed in the Constitution,” she has been reported as saying. At the Garma Festival Albanese said that “one of the things I am trying to avoid” is “people looking for all of the detail and saying well… if you disagree with one of the fifty but forty-nine are OK, vote no. We’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. We’re learning from history.”

A No campaign would have a range of messages — not only the argument of principle to which some Liberals hold (that an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice privileges some Australians on the basis of their “race”) but also the cautionary argument that the Voice is an incalculable and unnecessary risk.

By showing that the Yes vote for the Voice is “soft,” Resolve’s poll pointed to an opening for the cautionary argument. It found that 64 per cent preferred “yes” to “no” when they were the only two answers allowed, but just 53 per cent said “yes” when “undecided” was an option, because one in five (19 per cent) respondents said that they were “undecided.”

A No campaign that targets those undecideds could refer to the Voice as a hazardous unknown. The risk in saying nothing about the model of the Voice is that voters who don’t feel sufficiently well-informed will be susceptible to that argument. •

The post The Voice: not enough “meat on the bone”? appeared first on Inside Story.

Pearson can be witheringly self-critical, publicly regretting positions he once took. But his writing is also shaped by continuities. He continues to disdain identity politics and to highlight the limits of using white racism as an all-embracing explanation for First Nations’ suffering. He worries that we don’t pay enough attention to class differences. He argues that each person has several identities, each contextually relevant.

He also thinks that multiculturalism must not be allowed to degenerate into “plural monoculturalism” — as if Australian are defined solely by ethnicity — because “identity fundamentalism is the enemy of the commonwealth.” This injunction to pluralise oneself for the sake of forging multiple allegiances is embedded in his belief that people have the power to make themselves up.

Sometimes people do this gullibly, he thinks, by uncritically internalising others’ accounts of them. In Mission’s oldest item — a 1987 paper co-written with Hope Vale Aboriginal community’s Merv Gibson — he warned Indigenous Australians against chaining themselves to others’ accounts of their beliefs and behaviour. In particular, he and Gibson suggested that too many Aboriginal people have embraced anthropologists’ accounts of their resistance. “Alcoholism and social irresponsibility” have become “associated with Aboriginal identity.” Aboriginal people have come to think that “achievement and social responsibility are the preserve of white people.”

Pearson often comes back to this idea that his people have uncritically internalised others’ versions of them. He gives the example of First Nations people accepting distinctions such as “moderate or radical, conservative or activist.” He is wary of the seductions of the word “community.” Insofar as First Nations people who reside in “communities” adopt the “fantasies of communitarianism,” they fail to see how weak and ineffective their informal solidarity has become.

What worries Pearson perhaps the most is that many Aboriginal people have come to believe themselves to be environmentalists. Conceding much of the Indigenous land and sea estate to the national project of protecting Australia’s biological diversity (in the Indigenous Protected Areas), they have effectively endorsed a “green terra nullius” promoted by a nature-loving politics.

Pearson’s conviction that personhood and culture are emergent and negotiable is consistent with the narrative turn in the social sciences: the argument that what people think and do is bound up with the stories they believe about themselves. From this insight, it follows that histories and labels are formative rather than merely descriptive. Pearson studied history at the University of Sydney in the mid 1980s, when historians were pushing stories of British invasion and Aboriginal resistance to the centre of the national narrative.

Pearson has reservations about how “black armband history” (as Geoffrey Blainey would label it) encourages certain Black identities. Revisionist history offered Aboriginal people “the language of victim politics,” he writes. While it “positioned the rest of Australia as guilty perpetrators,” it disempowered Aboriginal people. Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the stolen generations risked cementing “a detrimental psychology of victimhood.” Discussing the public response to the Bringing Them Home report, he observes that problems arise “when history as a discipline meets history as popular culture.”

Throughout Mission, we see Pearson continuing to digest his own experience of Hope Vale mission community as he seeks “a clear understanding of the good and bad in the past.” Against a “guilty perpetrators” story of the colonisation of Australia, Pearson has stressed Australian society’s demonstrated capacity for accommodating Indigenous Australia. It would be “dumb” Aboriginal politics, he argued in his 1993 Boyer lecture, not to make use of conceded rights or to ignore employment and educational opportunities. He doesn’t want the revised account of Australian history to encourage Indigenous identities of radical alterity, dedicated unrespectability and helplessness.

Negotiating native title in 1993 confirmed to Pearson that Australia is capable of accommodating a workable version of Indigenous rights. In speeches in 1994 and 1996, “cornerstone” was his metaphor for the High Court’s Mabo judgement. He credited the 1993 Native Title Act to the Keating government’s “inclusive leadership” — “an act of political decency” defying racist backlash. In articles not included in Mission he also criticised the limits set on First Nations property rights by native title determinations.

Having found a voice and national prominence under Labor, Pearson was forced to reposition himself during the four terms of Coalition government between 1996 and 2007. At first, his message was mixed. In 1997 he publicly retracted his warning that the Coalition was cultivating white resentment. When Howard began to persuade conservatives that Australia could accommodate native title as long as the legislation was substantially amended, Pearson reminded Liberals that their ideological principles included the rule of law and the defence of property against arbitrary seizure. He accused Howard of lying to justify “annihilating” amendments.

Howard’s legislation secured native title against conservative repeal. Pearson then redirected his attention from external threats to Indigenous rights towards threats — from within — to Indigenous capacities. Cape York society worried him. Typical of his historical approach, his analysis of First Nations’ malaise rested on his recasting of the nation’s history. In “Our Right to Take Responsibility” (2000) he periodised Australia’s colonial history in a way that better fitted communities like Hope Vale.

Pearson emphasised that Aboriginal people adapted after invasion, finding places in the new regional economies managed paternalistically by missionaries and pastoralists. During its time as a Lutheran mission, Hope Vale’s paternalism was not humiliating; rather, it created a new sense of community among those removed to it, and secured residents from the outside world’s humiliations.

This modus vivendi was subverted around 1970 when Aboriginal people became eligible for welfare. “After we became citizens with equal rights and equal pay, we lost our place in the real economy.” Possibly the most influential sentence Pearson will ever write, this encapsulated two important ideas. The first was that — contrary to progressive historical narrative — citizenship can have dire unintended consequences.

The second lay in the phrase “the real economy.” Pearson evoked it as a forfeited moral and psychological condition rather than a defined structure of institutions. What characterised a “real economy” was its moral structure: it rewarded those who took on the “responsibility” to support kin and it required “reciprocity,” with effort earning material support. The welfare regime on Cape York was not a “real economy,” Pearson claimed, and it was vital, “if we are to survive as a people,” to replace it with one. “The Hope Vale of today is socially and culturally weaker than the Hope Vale of my father’s day,” he lamented in 2014.

What measures would recover that old strength? With the take-up of the phrase “real economy” by policymakers, Pearson found himself aligned with a series of policy changes that set tougher conditions on the income support received individually or collectively by Indigenous Australians. In particular, Pearson’s distinction between “real” and “gammon” economies helped set the scene for extinguishing the Community Development Employment Projects scheme, or CDEP, from 2007.

The scheme had been necessary because remote Indigenous Australians are land-rich in regions that have long been capital-poor. By 1970 it was apparent that there would continue to be more Aboriginal people of working age in remote regions than there were jobs. By 1975, when the most remote Aboriginal people were declared eligible for unemployment benefits, the Australian government faced a crisis of labour excess.

The Fraser government’s solution was CDEP: from 1977 communities could apply to access individual unemployment benefits as a lump sum, topped up with a grant, and so become local employers, soaking up the excess of working-age Aboriginal people and — potentially — doing work that was meaningful to those employed and valued by the community.

Pearson didn’t explicitly denounce CDEP in 2000, but his description of the “passive welfare paradigm” implicitly included it. “The economy of the communities,” he wrote, “is artificially sustained by government funds.” For policymakers who had been debating whether to extend, cut back or abolish CDEP, this seemed to depict the scheme as a problem rather than a solution. As an “artifice” it could not be an institution of the “real economy,” so it must be a part of the “passive welfare paradigm.”

The long opening essay in Mission brings the news that Pearson has now repudiated that confident demarcation of public/artificial from private/real. Building on articles in the Australian in July 2020, he is calling for a “universal job guarantee” to “ensure all citizens wanting work have the opportunity, through public programs.” He admits that he used to dismiss “universal job guarantee” as a socialist demand: “We looked to the private sector to generate these jobs.” Now he sees complementary public sector employment as essential.

Pearson explains that he has observed the Morrison government’s subsidising of employers’ demand for labour during the pandemic, and he has also been reading Modern Monetary Theory. Practice and theory have combined to overturn his understanding of what a welfare-to-work program can do. If it is fiscally sound for governments to fund employment by going into debt, he reasons, then why don’t governments always create demand for labour wherever and whenever it is lacking?

This call could not be more timely, as the Australian government has recently abandoned a disastrous “welfare-to-work” experiment involving people living in remote regions. The Community Development Program, or CDP, was launched by the Abbott government on 1 July 2015; its termination (scheduled for 2023) was announced by the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt in May this year. A recent Australia Institute study shows how “CDP” effectively stood for Continuing Delinquency and Poverty: it tested working-age adults against a demanding standard of job-seeker motivation, failed them, and so plunged more households into poverty. Four out of five of CDP’s 40,000-odd clients are Indigenous.

Having recently modified CDP’s mutual obligation requirements, the Morrison government is calling for submissions on the design of a replacement scheme, to be launched in 2023. The Australia Institute’s Remote Access report outlines the principles to which a remote “welfare-to-work” scheme should adhere, and in a recent ANU seminar the authors judged Pearson’s ideas to be consistent, in most respects, with those principles. An Australian government taking advice from the Noel Pearson of 2021 would be heading in a progressive direction.

But “Our Right to Take Responsibility” had wider effects in the early 2000s than helping to put the skids under CDEP. Pearson invited champions of Indigenous rights to acknowledge that the evolved culture of some Indigenous Australians was disabling them. His essay offered progressive Australians release from a thought trap in which support for “self-determination” in principle had blocked unsentimental scrutiny of its practice.

Giving the Australian public permission to discuss “Indigenous dysfunction,” Pearson targeted what he saw as progressive shibboleths. His Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture (2000) warned that progressive thought — the work of “academics, bureaucrats and parliamentarians who became the intellectual trustees of the welfare state” — had fallen into “confusion.” Aboriginal Legal Aid, for example, was “part of the criminal justice industry… a sausage machine,” when “the real need is for the restoration of social order.”

Pearson urged us to cease explaining Aboriginal alcohol and drug abuse as the effect of “trauma, transgenerational grief, racism, dispossession, unemployment and poverty.” Questioning the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody’s reference to these as “underlying issues,” he argued that while these factors made addiction more likely, it is better conceived as a problem in its own right. He called for addictions to be mitigated by working on five factors that enable them: supply, spare time, disposable income, peer pressure and “permissive social ideology.” “Enforced treatment” was necessary, he argued.

Denying that he had shifted to the right, Pearson decried Labor’s unwillingness to use the phrase “welfare dependency” and welcomed non-Labor’s pragmatic openness “to dialogue about our immediate problems.” By failing to discuss individual responsibility, he said, the left was part of the apparatus of oppression. Against progressives’ libertarianism he invoked Amartya Sen in order to demand that social policy provide individuals with the capacities — not only income but “health, education and community life” — to make choices. This would require “more external expenditure, not less.”

The Australian (lavishly praised by Pearson on its fiftieth birthday) began to publish his essays criticising what he saw as the delusions and bad faith of “progressive” opinion. He presented his ideal: bicultural “orbiting.” First Nations people can and should become adept in both the remote Aboriginal community and the wider Australian society. Where should remote Indigenous children go to secondary school? Pearson encouraged attendance at distant boarding schools (his own experience), while not dismissing the possibility that public investment could bring quality to high schools in regional centres. The progressive shibboleth of “culturally appropriate” schooling, he told Queensland premier Anna Bligh, had become “an alibi for anti-intellectualism.”

The longest reprinted piece in Mission is “Radical Hope” (2009), in which Pearson argued for a prescriptive preschool and primary curriculum (“direct instruction”) to offset the uneven quality of teachers prepared to work in remote regions. In 2011 he explained that he sought “Aboriginal Australians’ internalisation of the Enlightenment” while they continue using their mother tongue. The survival of their languages, he says, is “solace” for their grief over lost sovereignty.

By the time Pearson began highlighting the significance of language to peoplehood he was not only reporting on his Cape York Partnership’s academic experiments but also helping an expert panel (appointed by Julia Gillard in December 2010) to draft amendments to the Australian Constitution. The panel urged that constitutional recognition include recognising that “the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are the original Australian languages, a part of our national heritage.”

Although he later (2016) claimed to be “the principal advocate of this proposal,” Pearson was soon advising Australians to give up on the expert panel’s entire package of amendments — not only the constitutional recognition of languages but also more contentious proposals to make it constitutionally invalid to legislate against Indigenous interests or to discriminate against any “race.” Why did Pearson ditch the panel’s embattled package?

Pearson first publicly considered this change in “A Rightful Place” (2014), in which he explained why conservatives did not like the panel’s proposals to amend the Constitution to prohibit racial discrimination and to secure the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. For the previous two and a half years, constitutional conservatives had been warning that the amendments would encourage Indigenous Australians to litigate in the High Court against laws that were not in their favour. Empowering the High Court in relation to legislators was anathema to constitutional conservatives’ “strong aversion to activist judges.”

To conciliate these critics (who published frequently in the Australian) Pearson offered a two-pronged alternative. A new federal head of power to legislate on “Indigenous people” need not proscribe laws considered “negative” by First Nations. Instead, they would get “a fair say in laws and policies about us” through a new constitutionally enshrined body, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament. By making this manoeuvre Pearson was enacting a concept that he had first propounded in 2005: the “radical centre” that “challenges the vested political interests of both left and right.”

By May 2017 Pearson had persuaded a series of assemblies of Indigenous Australians — climaxing in the Uluru Statement from the Heart — that the Voice should be the only constitutional amendment put to referendum. Some Australians who had supported the expert panel’s “rights” agenda took months to adjust to this substantial recasting of the Indigenous mandate for constitutional recognition. Dismay at Pearson’s manoeuvre lingers, in some quarters, beneath the rallying for the Voice.

Essential to the Uluru Statement’s appeal is that it rhetorically aligns the “spiritual sovereignty” of First Nations with the patriotism of all Australians. Pearson believes that constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians should express the nation’s unity. Twice in “A Rightful Place” he suggested that the test of a constitutional recognition proposal was whether it would attract a 90 per cent Yes vote.

It may be, as Pearson remarked, that “we cannot just seek the endorsement of friends and allies.” But was it wise to claim that “the cause of constitutional reform is lost” if less than “90 per cent of the nation” votes Yes? No public opinion poll has ever registered such high support for any recently discussed amendment. Could the “radical centre” be the lever of such a load?

We don’t know whether anyone in Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet was guided by Pearson’s demanding definition of referendum success, but it is on record that one of Turnbull’s stated reasons in October 2017 for refusing to hold a referendum on the Voice was that it would not attract sufficient support.

The frailty of Pearson’s rapport with Australian conservatives was exposed by Turnbull’s decision. In December 2017 Pearson wrote that he had now ended his “long game” of formulating an agenda for the “radical centre” — “a long and dirty experiment that failed.” A capacity for self-reinvention may sometimes occasion anguished regret: “I take responsibility for my fuck-ups and misplaced faith.”

This understandable gesture of self-flagellation is unlikely to be Pearson’s last word on “the radical centre,” however, for he considers it “still the right place to hunt” because it is where “the bulk of the Australian people” stand. Now that Pearson has added “universal job guarantee” to his causes, will he find the ear of any of the prime ministers now in prospect? •

Mission: Essays, Speeches & Ideas
By Noel Pearson | Black Inc. | $49.99 | 608 pages

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That’s just common decency, right? It’s a recognition that objects are part of the story of the land. And in any case, we know it is what traditional owners ask us to do.

I’ve been thinking about this encounter while reading Paul Cleary’s important and gutsy book Title Fight, which reveals the ways the mining company Fortescue Metals Group, or FMG, sometimes behaves in the presence of Indigenous people and how it treats their precious objects and land. And decency is not a word that comes to mind. In this often-distressing saga, Cleary opts for other words to describe FMG’s dealings with Indigenous people, especially the Yindjibarndi of the Pilbara — words like manipulative, aggressive and unconscionable, which he carefully justifies.

Under chairman Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, FMG has become the world’s fourth-largest iron ore producer by grabbing tens of thousands of square kilometres of mining tenements across the Pilbara. In some of these, the company’s strategy is to scrape low-quality ore from a large surface area rather than dig deep into rich deposits, meaning it can have a huge impact on the landscape and the heritage it contains. Forget small stone tools, we’re talking about shelters, ochre quarries, places of Dreamtime stories with evidence of thousands of years of human habitation.

We all know this happens, and particularly in the Pilbara, because Rio Tinto demonstrated it last year by obliterating the globally significant Juukan Gorge with its 46,000-year evidence of human occupation. What Title Fight makes clear is that FMG is also guilty of cowboy behaviour, perhaps on an industrial scale, despite its carefully crafted public image as a company that cares about Indigenous employment.

FMG’s aim was to be the world’s lowest-cost iron ore producer, and because it arrived on the scene relatively late and wanted to cash in on the great iron ore boom, it worked at a super-fast pace to broker deals, get approvals, build railway lines, and get ships loaded and despatched to markets in China. The company appeared to operate with a sense of entitlement, which may explain the manipulation and corporate bullying of traditional owners, who struggled with weak laws and inadequate resources to protect their land and rights.

But FMG met its match in the CEO of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, or YAC, Michael Woodley, who emerges in Title Fight as knowledgeable and magnanimous — a natural leader of the Yindjibarndi communities spread across the Western Pilbara. Woodley is recognised as a tharnga, or spokesperson for the land, representing a place called Garliwinjinha where FMG was developing its Solomon mine. He was schooled in the local Birdarra law and ceremonies and the stories of the Marrga spirits, whom the Yindjibarndi believe were sent by the God-being Minkala to create the Pilbara. But none of this stopped FMG trying to silence him to further its own interests.

Together with the neighbouring Ngarluma people, the Yindjibarndi won non-exclusive native title over a large area of the Western Pilbara in 2003. But the miners were still able to keep amassing tenements and mining licences. The Aboriginal communities then made an additional native title claim on country to the southeast. They did so because another tribal group, the Banjima, agreed that Yindjibarndi territory was much larger than the first claim suggested. The stakes were high: the claim covered the site of the Solomon mine, and if the Yindjibarndi won native title then FMG would be subject to a huge compensation bill.

Cleary demonstrates how FMG developed a playbook for dealing with difficult communities based on its treatment of the Nyiyaparli people of the Chichester Range 250 kilometres southeast of Port Hedland. The Nyiyaparli were also pursuing their native title rights and had passed the important registration milestone, meaning they had a strong negotiating position. Cleary says FMG “set about trying to exploit — or, indeed, foment — divisions in the community.” It seized a moment when they were disorganised to broker a land access agreement with some of the Nyiyaparli elders directly. They were flown to Perth, without legal representation, where they were handed a new agreement that “removed significant cultural heritage and environmental provisions” that had already been settled with the wider community.

Cleary describes the payment they were offered to turn their traditional lands into a quarry — unindexed royalties of 2.5 cents a tonne, with two Toyota Landcruisers “to sweeten the deal” — as “astonishingly small.” At the time, the more established mining companies were offering traditional owners around 50 cents a tonne, which would rise to $1 a tonne at peak times. The elders signed, and FMG celebrated on its website. But a day later, the elders said they’d been duped because they didn’t fully understand what they were signing and had felt pressured. The deal was eventually scrapped; but rather than vow not to do it again, FMG got busy refining its tactics.

The divide-and-conquer strategy has been at the centre of FMG’s dealings with the Yindjibarndi. Title Fight documents the process that led to the creation of the rival Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation and how FMG gave it preferential treatment and provided funding for it to undermine YAC’s status as the legitimate agency — or prescribed body corporate under the Native Title Act — to represent the Yindjibarndi’s interests. FMG paid for extensive litigation to undermine YAC and launched defamation proceedings to silence its critics.

In negotiations with the Yindjibarndi, FMG offered terms that were beyond miserly. Breathtakingly so. For a resource valued at billions of dollars, it offered the Yindjibarndi just $3 million a year and another $1 million a year for elders, plus a one-off signing fee of $500,000. The company made great mileage out of the claim that royalties for communities amounted to mining welfare and did more harm than good. But, as Cleary points out, it forgot to mention how it benefited from paying so little. And it failed to include guarantees that trusts would be established to ensure payments continued to benefit communities. Instead, it focused on job creation for Indigenous people, which it in part delivered by channelling huge contracts to the rival corporation that supported it.

And just when you thought FMG couldn’t behave any worse, the company carried out a “brazen undercover” operation to nullify YAC’s impending native title hearing. It did this by supporting the breakaway group when it formed yet another Aboriginal organisation that staged a vote to silence Woodley and pull back from the native title claim. It paid people to turn up with $400 Woolworths vouchers. But that eventually backfired too, when the Federal Court handed down a “withering assessment” of FMG’s attempts to orchestrate a result in its own interests, without revealing to the local community how it would lose out financially by supporting the proposal.

The 25,000 square kilometres of the original Ngarluma–Yindjibarndi claim and the 2800 square kilometres of the additional claim are the site of some of the richest Indigenous heritage found anywhere in the world. Cleary calls FMG out for its lax approach to protection. For example, it sacked two archaeological consultancies that had expressed alarm about impending mining in heritage sites. One of these firms claimed FMG had not asked the right people about important sites, instead involving only people from the compliant breakaway group.

Cleary shows that FMG threatened to withhold a $70,000 payment to one firm until important ethnographic information that FMG said was prejudicial to its interests was removed from a report. The consultancy it then engaged was accused by WA’s Aboriginal affairs department of under-reporting possible heritage sites by 30 per cent.

The same consultancy obligingly said that no more archaeological work should occur at fourteen sites that had been identified as significant by previous surveys. These included ochre quarries and rock shelters, some likely to contain burial sites, and the halt to archaelogical investigation meant they could be destroyed to make way for the Solomon mine. At one of these quarry sites the firm then determined that no further work was required because it was already earmarked for destruction, as long as the Yindjibarndi were in agreement. Cleary found no evidence local people were ever asked.

Because FMG was in such a hurry it sometimes carried out extensive blasting without granting the Yindjibarndi people access to culturally significant sites, contrary to mining lease conditions. The WA registrar of Aboriginal sites, Kathryn Przywolnik, found deficiencies in the heritage surveys and accused FMG of not telling the whole story about the extent of the Indigenous heritage. Another anthropologist, Brad Goode, was sacked by FMG for identifying sites of significance. More than 170 sites in the Solomon mining area were downgraded to a “stored data — not a site” classification, meaning artefacts would be preserved and the site could be destroyed. And on and on the evidence and allegations go.

If this story didn’t have the element of redemption, it would be about as depressing a tale as you can imagine. The sustained abuse and manipulation of the community by FMG, chapter after chapter, lends a kind of rhythm to the writing. First there’s some tiny concession or ray of hope indicating someone understands that the First Nations people have inalienable rights and legitimacy. Then comes that insidious word “but” before the text proceeds to explain how even that concession or understanding wasn’t enough to stave off another assault. I found myself wondering how Cleary had the stamina to recount all this, before realising that as impressive as his dogged research is, it is nothing to the resilience of the Yindjibarndi over so many years.

This is an important and timely book. Cleary manages to make sense of how this opaque and protected industry works within a legal framework that favours miners and does little to support the interests of traditional owners. It is backed by deep research but written with journalistic clarity and a compelling narrative that rightly pits two people, and the cultures they represent, against one another.

Woodley emerges as the victor, not just because the Yindjibarndi ultimately won exclusive native title and staved off a High Court challenge from FMG — which in turn sets the scene for a mammoth compensation payout — but also because he appears determined to heal and reunite the Yindjibarndi community, which FMG has done so much to divide.

Andrew Forrest fares much less well. At one point Cleary describes Forrest’s beloved Minderoo cattle station, where he was raised, and which he repurchased as an adult, and after which he named his philanthropic foundation. While Forrest was driven to mine vast tracts of Aboriginal land, Cleary writes, he fought tenaciously and successfully to stop mining companies entering Minderoo. Alas, this recognition that mining irrevocably damages heritage and landscapes, and that people have deep emotional and cultural connections to the land, does not translate to FMG’s wider operations. •

The post A miner meets its match appeared first on Inside Story.

He woke up, a bit dazed and groggy and then smiled, said hello, looked at me quizzically and said, “And to what paragraph of the Public Health Order do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

I didn’t want to plead civil disobedience and I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a care visit for a dying friend. Sensing that I didn’t have an answer, he looked at me, and smiled, and said, “I suppose it could be a care visit for a dying friend.” I smiled back.

For around two decades, I would catch up with Hal regularly, often every month, and we would sit down over lunch and discuss the state of the world. We discussed the law and Indigenous policy, and what George Bush or Donald Trump were up to. And we — though more him than me — would reminisce. Sometimes he told stories that I had heard before but usually they were new. Each time they were wonderful and told with a generosity and humanity that said much about the teller.

But that afternoon a few weeks ago, with Hal well aware that death was finally coming, I had the unique privilege of telling his stories back to him, reminding him of why his life was one of great meaning, why he had lived out his motto — “to thine self be true” — and why, in his own humble way, he had had an immeasurable impact on this country.

For a man with such a keen sense of humour, and who led such a reflective life, irony sometimes escaped him. I remember having lunch with him when he was eighty-seven and living up at Hawkes Nest. He was complaining that he was feeling a bit sore. I raised a curious eyebrow, but privately thought it was just an old person complaining about his ailments. However, he went on to say that earlier in the week he had used a wheelbarrow to move ten tonnes of soil from the front of the house, where it had been delivered, to the back. I asked him why on earth he would do that. His response: “I want to build up the garden beds so that when I get old, I won’t have to bend over so far.”

There has always been a certain restlessness to Hal, one that would cause him to spend two months walking the untracked reaches of the Snowy Mountains as a student; or to leave a prestigious city law firm, Minters, to join the Australian School of Pacific Administration and then head to Manus Island in New Guinea to undertake fieldwork; or to leave a lucrative practice at the bar and sell up his fledgling cattle enterprise in order to establish a law school when his only experience of teaching law had been as a part-time tutor; or to leave Australia in his late eighties to spend three months living in Ramallah in order to get a deeper understanding of the Palestinian predicament. Hal certainly gave licence to his curiosity, and the more any learning experience involved an element of adventure, the keener he was.

He once told me how he would continually ask his colleagues at the School of Pacific Administration — poets, historians, anthropologists and experienced kiaps (New Guinea field officers), many of whom had spent years working in very challenging environments — “Why?”; “Why do you say that?”; “Why is that the case?” He genuinely wanted to know the answer, but they came to think of him as the true intellectual among them for doing no more than constantly asking “Why?” That was something that amused Hal, and he continued to make good use of the technique throughout his life, often to the discomfort of his hyperbolic friends.

People often speak of Hal as a figure on the left of politics. Certainly, in his early days as a lawyer he was briefly a member of the Communist Party. It didn’t trouble the senior partner who employed him as his personal brains trust. But then Hal would later be the industrial lawyer of choice for the Packers (that’s Frank and Kerry, not the storemen) and the pastoralists. He was also the unionists’ lawyer of choice on occasion.

Whether he was for capital or labour, he was respected by both and independent of either. He was not just open to the arguments but determined to test his own assumptions and preferences. His compassion was never in doubt, but his intellect was always his guide. No one owned Hal Wootten, but he was loyal to people and causes.

Despite John Kerr’s very public shortcomings, Hal remained loyal to him. Kerr had taken Hal up as a protégé and was one of Hal’s early mentors, although never in the league of Hal’s mother and grandparents. But Hal was also one of the first to privately signal his disapproval after Sir John’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975. When Sir John rang him on the day it happened to seek affirmation of what he had done, Hal’s response — “I’m sure you must have had a very good reason” — delivered in his sceptical tone, would not have been the one Kerr was seeking.

Like all of us, Hal was not without his contradictions. He could show enormous patience and sympathy in some situations, especially in dealing with those who were struggling, and yet be short and even cantankerous in others.

One of the few times I encountered Hal in a professional capacity was in the early days of the Native Title Act, when he was conducting a mediation as deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal. The parties were a group of native title claimants at Peak Hill, for whom I acted, a gold mining company wanting to mine the old town reserve, the local council, and the NSW government. Peak Hill is south of Dubbo and the history of the Aboriginal people there, like elsewhere, had been one of dispossession, discrimination, suffering and exclusion.

In listening to each party speak, Hal was unrushed and very attentive. Occasionally he would ask an open question for clarification, but there was no judgement in his manner. He was there to listen and learn. Importantly, no lawyer spoke. It was the people at the heart of the dispute talking directly to one another, airing, in the case of the claimants, grievances that were generations old. The mayor acknowledged the wrongs but spoke of what the mine would do for the town; the miner’s CEO, confronted with a situation that he hadn’t experienced before, promised that they would be respectful of the community’s concerns and interests.

It was a genuine and moving exchange — until the state government, through its barrister and senior lawyers, delivered its legalistic position, which gave no scope for compromise or agreement. In an instant, Hal, the gentle grandfather, transformed into the very grumpy, acutely attuned judge. But there are limits to what a mediator can achieve in the face of intransigence, and with the state unwilling to shift, Hal terminated the mediation. Unlike so many of his successors on the tribunal, who kept matters in fruitless suspension for years, Hal knew there was no value in flogging a dead horse.

Hal had a number of important personal friendships with people “on whom the law bears harshly.” Frank Doolan, a renowned senior Wiradjuri man who is known across the state as “Riverbank Frank,” would introduce Hal to friends as “Gill’s legal aid boyfriend.” Frank, who always had a very deep affection and respect for Hal, remembers him as “a kind, gentle man with enormous strength of character.” He goes on: “Although I often argued (or tried to argue) about Black issues with him I can’t recall a single time when I won the argument. Hal would sigh, look at me, with the patience of Job and say, ‘Frank you’ve got to have a plan.’ The Aboriginal Legal Service, which was born in Redfern, actually came into being because Hal and people like Neville Wran, Frank Walker and Paul Landa supported Indigenous Australians and saw their great need for proper representation in the legal world.”

For some years until he was well into his nineties, Hal and Gillian would join Frank in quiet protest at Villawood Detention Centre each Australia Day. Hal was concerned for the plight of refugees in Australia, especially those arriving by boat. One was Ali Gulzari, who became Hal’s friend when Ali’s remarkable success as a new arrival at high school in western Sydney led to them being put in touch. The friendship between these two flourished and they both learned much about the world from sharing stories with one another, sometimes on long exploratory drives across the country, including visits to Richard Frankland, a respected Aboriginal leader from Western Victoria who assisted Hal in the landmark work of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Richard recalls that he first met Hal when he was about twenty-five. “We investigated First Nation deaths in custody together. It was a hard job, and we covered many miles together, over a period of about four years. As I watched Hal work, I was astounded at his ability to listen and actually hear what people had to say. We heard stories from many people who had lost a friend or family member in custody, stories about grief, injustice, systemic discrimination. Hal humanised what had been dehumanised. I once asked Hal what advice he would give a young man, meaning myself. He said, ‘Love with an open hand, have humility and give of yourself generously.’”

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hal was disturbed by events in the Middle East and the tensions between Islam and the West, so he decided to develop a deeper understanding of the roots of the conflict. In particular, he was concerned at the demonisation of Muslims. He returned to university, this time as an undergraduate student in Arabic studies. But this was not enough, and he decided to spend three months living in Ramallah, on the West Bank. It was a time in which he formed friendships on both sides of the border and made links that led to a program of Palestinian lawyers undertaking doctoral studies at UNSW. It also led to a close friendship with Naser Shaktour, the founder and director of the Palestinian Film Festival in Australia.

Hal was arrested among a group of Israelis defending Palestinian farmers from Israeli settlers in the West Bank. He insisted on the soldiers telling him under what law he was being detained. Eventually they released him without charge, but he refused to leave until all of the protesters were let go. After hours and hours of waiting around, the whole group was released.

Hal cherished his time as a barrister and a judge, but establishing the law school at UNSW was, for him, the highlight of his career and the source of his greatest professional pride. How a country trains its lawyers is no small thing. In setting out to change legal education, Hal was conscious of the impact that it could have on changing the country.

By the time I came to study law in the early 1980s, UNSW had already marked itself out as a progressive and highly innovative law school that broke with century old methods of how lawyers were to be trained. Importantly, the UNSW law school took seriously its obligation to engage students actively in their training, while inculcating a strong sense of professionalism and the responsibilities to society as a whole, especially “those on whom the law bore harshly,” who were the corollary of the privileges of practice. The pedagogy designed by Hal was based on the simple but effective principle of avoiding all that he had found miserable and useless in his own legal education. As time has gone on, elements of Hal’s approach have been adopted in every law school in the country, and overseas institutions, from Harvard down, have made efforts to explore UNSW’s approach.

No brief reflection like this can ever do justice to such a rich, purposeful and long life as Hal’s. Brought up by his widowed mother and her parents, he studied law part-time while working as a government clerk and went on to become a leading law student, adviser to the senior partner of a leading commercial firm as a graduate lawyer, New Guinea field worker, lecturer in law for colonial government administrators, leading industrial barrister, secretary-general of LAWASIA, foundation dean of a law school offering a new mode of legal education, founding chair of the first Aboriginal Legal Service, adviser to the government of the newly independent Papua New Guinea, Supreme Court judge, chairman of the NSW Law Reform Commission, chairman of the Australian Press Council, chancellor of NSW Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney), president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, royal commissioner into Aboriginal deaths in custody, deputy president of the National Native Title Tribunal, patron of the Environmental Defenders Office, Queen’s Counsel, Companion of the Order of Australia, farmer, activist, conservationist, humanitarian, friend of the downtrodden.

Hal was intellectually brilliant, warm, quick-witted, generous and humble. But of all his many wonderful qualities, three made him stand out.

The first was his vision of what could be achieved. He was so often the johnny-on-the-spot, trusting his instincts and judgement; he saw what others couldn’t but which in hindsight was so often blindingly obvious.

The second was his practicality. He didn’t hesitate in taking the first, often simple step and seeing where it would lead. He was courageous and tenacious in doing what needed doing.

And lastly, he was principled. One friend has said that he held a mirror up to the country, which he did, but not before he held it up to himself. •

This article is based on Andrew Chalk’s reflections at Hal Wootten’s funeral in Sydney on 6 August.

The post Why, and why not? appeared first on Inside Story.

Simms invited the onlookers to come closer to his smouldering fire of eucalyptus leaves, its cleansing herbal smoke wafting in the cool breeze around smiling faces. Feeling the smoke on your face, in your lungs, it feels good to know you belong here. Among the guests were planning and public spaces minister Rob Stokes, Sydney mayor Clover Moore and Suellen Fitzgerald, chief executive of the city’s newly amalgamated parklands authority, the Greater Sydney Parklands.

The inclusivity in Simms’s welcome — we all belong here, it’s your land as well as ours — feels generous given that this land, never formally ceded by traditional owners, was effectively stolen by the British. It also speaks to the way Australians of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent are increasingly working together to inscribe Indigenous ways of knowing and belonging into everyday culture.

Simms was inviting those present to see their place here through a Country-centred lens, a message affirmed by D’harawal Saltwater knowledge keeper and artist Shannon Foster, who created new interpretive signage for the trail. “Country unites us,” she explained to the crowd. “It’s still here, before the concrete and the glass.”

The idea of Country, an Aboriginal way of understanding connection to land, sea and sky, places the human within complex, animated landscapes of symbolically charged meaning — reviving pre-European ways of occupying Australian places. If the idea of Country is shaped by the retrieval of old ways, and of “deep time,” it is also being mobilised as a future-focused design language for Australian cities.

With momentum towards Country-centred urban design now growing, the next few decades may yet see a new Australian urban typology emerge. In this emerging future, Indigenous architects, designers and knowledge holders play the role of leader and vision-maker, their ideas and symbologies shaping built environments for future generations. How their visions are transcribed over coming years into new urban precincts — of concrete and glass, and of regenerated riverways, new community centres, housing typologies and building materials — will be worth watching.

From lost time to deep time

There is something exhilarating about this idea that we are living on a land where the energies of ancestors continue to enfold and enliven the spirits of everyday places, animating hard and soft matter and the air in between, taking us beyond the humdrum worlds of everyday streets and regimented lifestyles.

I am a non-Aboriginal person whose career has centred on the meanings and attachments we bring to places, and in particular how our various symbolic attachments to place are used to animate the collective arts of city making. Educated to understand history through a European lens, I quickly learned that to look for historical meanings and attachments to place, as an Australian, is to constantly negotiate sites of erasure. We are, as the late art critic and historian Robert Hughes remarked in a 1998 National Trust lecture, “a nation built on the need to forget.” Relatively little of the history of Australian cities remains etched in their built form: all too often we make new places of symbolic and cultural importance by erasing their past and starting again.

I am also an eighth-generation descendant of convicts and emancipists; I trace my line to the first generation of Australian farmers who worked the land for the Macarthur family. And I’m the third-generation descendant of a Queensland man who fell in love with the ancient landscape of Western Australia while based there during the second world war, uprooting his young family to move to a place that was, in his eyes, “closer to God.” I’ve always sensed a kind of hauntology lurking in my fascination with places, and their lost histories, perhaps propelled by a kind of ancestral desire to recover that which has been lost and displaced.

It’s not just me though. A sense of the hidden past pervades much writing and connection to Australian places. The poet Judith Wright wrote of this loss and erasure in her poem “Bora Ring,” conjuring the sense many Australians feel living in a land dispossessed, where “the song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth.” In her introduction to Dancing with Strangers, an account of the first moments of British arrival in Sydney Harbour, historian Inga Clendinnen laments how much was lost in those first years of settlement: “In my view the sacred world of the Australians in 1788 — the world of mind and spirit, none of it written but stored in landscape, artefact, dance and story — is closed to us outsiders.” In People of the River, Grace Karskens traces the “lost worlds” of early Australia, and wonders whether early settlers were forced into a state of disenchantment by their ignorance and neglect of Aboriginal spirituality.

A Country-centred orientation thinks differently about this sense of loss. To Aunty Rhonda Radley, a Gathang language teacher and Birpai Elder, “When we listen to Country, we learn that time isn’t linear. We can connect to people across many different times, around the idea of place, and of Country.” Many Indigenous people are guided by ways of viewing the recent and ancient past as at once personal, familial and geological. Loss is reframed as renewal. Nyura yin-gu mara-la barray-gu, nyaa-gi, ngarra-gi says Aunty Rhonda in Gathang, a language recently considered close to extinct but now undergoing a revival: “You all have come here, to this country to see, to listen, and remember.”

The city as Country?

Indigenous ideas of place often invoke a pre-settlement landscape in which the city is rendered a false artifice. In “Native Born,” Archie Roach sings about the cities and parks looking out of place, “because the spirit’s in the land.” If Australian cities are tamed, regulated, commoditised, and ultimately modern, then Country is ancient, and beyond suppression by humans, who gain their sustenance from its abundance. But that binary is starting to break down.

A cohort of Indigenous designers and architects — joined by many non-Indigenous practitioners across the built environment profession — sees cities as important sites for Country-centred transformation. In the words of designer Alison Page, the work of building can be a way to “sing creation stories into existence,” reinforcing ecological responsibilities to care for land, sea and sky.

Earlier this year Page, a designer of Walbanga and Wadi Wadi descent who grew up in La Perouse, released a new book called Building on Country. In it, Page and her co-author, architect and anthropologist Paul Memmott, describe a groundswell of professional interest in understanding how the rich and complex culture of Indigenous people can shape future design and architecture.

In New South Wales, this groundswell is being embedded within the planning process. Due to be finalised in coming months, a state environmental planning provision called Design and Place will require all projects to “start with Country as a foundation for place-based design and planning.”

What does this mean in practice? To Page, Country-focused design repositions the built environment as central to “ancient conversations about the human connection to nature.” For Danièle Hromek, a spatial designer of Yuin/Budawang descent, “When you start a project with Country and embed it all the way through as the heart of that project, that can inform the work of others, even before architects are brought in.” This positions Aboriginal people quite differently to more traditional forms of “Aboriginal consultation,” which risks engaging with traditional custodians too late in the design phase of a project.

A Country-centred approach allows Aboriginal perspectives to shape the very fabric, design and identity of a place as it is worked into being by a range of other contributing professions and traditional custodians, incorporating the work of architects, engineers, planners, community facilitators, approving agencies and more. Through her consultancy Djinjama Indigenous Corporation, Hromek works with a number of NSW government agencies on urban transformation projects. “I try to ensure Country is not only imprinted into a final work but also shapes the vision and intention of a place.” This vision might be expressed through its masterplan, which in turn guides the principles through which a place can be developed.

“We took the totem of the lyrebird,” she explains, “and used it to design a justice precinct in Campbelltown.” The lyrebird is known for its performance: it dances and contorts itself to create incredible mimicries for curious audiences, shifting the gaze of a potential predator towards itself, and away from its nest. The character of this totem bird inspires spatial ideas for design. “You ask people to look this way, while the people who need to be protected are over here,” says Hromek. “That creates a clever solution to a problem, which is directly informed by Country.” She locates the presence of sacred hills nearby: she uses these to inform the spatial orientation of buildings, allowing resident populations to maintain important sight lines to the hills.

Symbolic associations between people and place are imprinted into new precinct designs. “The soils, the ecological system as a whole, can tell us how we should behave here,” Hromek says. “We can ask Country, what should we do here? If you know how to ask, Country can communicate and can absolutely tell you.” She finds this approach can inform everything from where accessible lifts should be, to how a facade could look, or how to behave there. “Even if it’s not in actual form, it’s there in memory, still.”

Thinking and working differently

The NSW planning provision has been accompanied by a draft Government Architect framework called Connecting with Country, led by principal architect and Yugembir-Goori man Dillon Kombumerri. Kombumerri has spent much of the past three decades advocating for Indigenous-led design and architecture. The new framework centres on the need to acknowledge that “profound relationships have been forged with Mother Earth and other ancestral beings,” creating knowledge systems that are part of our spiritual practices and act as a “vast database of wisdom.” It asks government and industry decision-makers to “take up the challenge of thinking differently, working differently, and making decisions that prioritise Country.” Releasing the report, NSW Government Architect Abbie Galvin said, “If we care for Country, it will care for us.”

Rather than viewing land as property to be exploited for human ends, this approach positions our relationship to land as part of complex animated landscapes of ancestral energies and more-than-human perspectives. By extension, this means humans should no longer be the focal point for design decisions about how places are planned and built. Instead, “place making” becomes a practice that recognises the value of places for non-human species and life forms, as well as people. The making of places also becomes a practice of translating ancient symbols and stories into built form — radically reimagining how time is inscribed into environments, and what we can read into their material presences. “What a transformational perspective for Australian designers and architects,” Alison Page writes, “to be part of an Australian design ethos that views the construction of the built environment as an extension of our creation stories.”

We are now witnessing contemporary urban planning and design becoming infused with sacred songlines. These highly symbolic travel paths, connecting sacred places created by ancestors, contain within them what Page calls “vast amounts of ecological data without the written word” and can be used to create new wisdom and practice. Kombumerri talks about water songlines to his colleagues across the NSW government and beyond. These songlines run across the country, linking lakes, rivers, wetlands, aquifers, springs and soaks. From an Aboriginal perspective, many of these are physically and spiritually joined: “These links are reinforced by acts of travelling to sacred places, performing ceremony and singing up Country.”

As Kombumerri explains, a Country-centred perspective allows water to be respected for its spiritual and living rights, more than its functional necessity for human welfare alone. It supports the momentum to grant rivers legal personhood, just as the Victorian parliament did in 2017 when it passed the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act, the first legislation in Australia to be co-titled in a traditional owner language. The legislation translates as “keep the Birrarung alive” in Woi Wurrung, the traditional language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. It was an Australian first in legally identifying a large river and its corridor, which crosses many boundaries, as a single living and integrated natural entity for protection.

To give space for Country-centred knowledge in the planning and design of future places also points to growing confidence in a distinctively Australian urban vernacular, and a role for those working in built environment professions to reinvigorate what Page calls “ancient conversations about the human connection to nature.” It also places Aboriginal designers and thinkers at the heart of conversations about the future of our cities, and it invites non-Aboriginal people to connect in a meaningful way with the cultures of First Nations people. For Michael Hromek, an Indigenous designer of Yuin/Budawang descent, who works with global engineering firm WSP, the approach is far more empowering for traditional custodians and owners of Country, by allowing Indigenous-led perspectives to guide the vision and principles of a project, and to inform the work of other stakeholders, designers, engineers and communities.

Country-centred values of place?

Presented as a radical rethinking of the human relationship to place, the idea of Country can reframe the values underpinning built environment projects. If thinking through Country can influence the direction a building is oriented, or what materials are used, can it also shift how and what gets valued in a precinct development? To reverse the phrase, if Country cares for us, will we care for it? Can developer contributions from a new precinct, for example, be reinvested into regenerative habitats for at-risk species? If we view “places as Country” as lively landscapes of the human and non-human, deeply interconnected, then can new precinct designs for place support cooler, restorative habitats for both human and non-human life forms in more equal measure? And importantly, could a Country-centred perspective seek to evaluate the impacts and benefits of new developments across broader indicators, to encompass not only economic but also social, cultural, intergenerational and interspecies impacts?

How ideas of Country will negotiate Australian cities’ highly commodified urban landscapes over coming years — and how planning regimes adapt — will be interesting to watch. Some signs of stress are evident in the interaction of different Aboriginal organisations and groups. In New South Wales, Aboriginal sovereignty is enacted not only through traditional connections to Country (via native title) but also through acts of land reclamation. The state’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 aimed to compensate Aboriginal people economically for their historical dispossession; decades on, Deerubbin Local Aboriginal Land Council is Western Sydney’s biggest private landowner, and remains focused on its mandate to exploit the land for financial gain — a mandate that doesn’t rest on traditional claims of ownership or connection to Country, as is the case with native title.

For Naama Blatman-Thomas, a University of Sydney geographer who has partnered with Deerubbin LALC, commodified land offers “liberating possibilities” for Aboriginal communities. Funded by the UK’s Urban Studies Foundation, she is looking at how Deerubbin uses “non-traditional” mechanisms of private land ownership and reclamation to advance urban decolonisation and First Nations sovereignty.

But tensions exist between Deerubbin, and the traditional custodians of Western Sydney, the Darug people. The land council does not support membership by Darug people, and cites contests over Aboriginal knowledge of place and Country across Western Sydney in its July submission to the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment’s Design and Place guidelines. For many Darug people, among them descendants of Darug Boorooberongal Clan Elder, Yarramundi, Aboriginal identity was for many years forced underground, a “secret” shared only with a few family members. Today their role as traditional custodians of Country across Western Sydney is widely recognised, including by local and state government agencies, just as land claims by Deerubbin LALC continue to escalate across the region. These tensions are part of the rapidly-developing landscape of Western Sydney, a region where connections to Country and the work of Aboriginal land reclamation appear to be in conflict. (A more detailed discussion of this issue can be found in historian Peter Read’s essay, “Dispossession Is a Legitimate Experience.”)

Michael Hromek is optimistic that different Indigenous viewpoints can be reconciled. “A focus on Country can help different traditional owners and custodians come together around a common focus,” he says, citing his experience working on the $13 billion level crossing removal program across Melbourne. Country is ancient, and it is symbolically charged, but it also remains crisscrossed by waves of dispossession, loss, compensation and commodification, which also continue to animate the landscape. To me, a white Australian, learning to see place through the lens of Country, being led by Indigenous designers and storytellers feels like a powerful way to build future places. As historian Bill Gammage says, if we can succeed in understanding our country, “one day we might become Australians.” And our cities might also reflect the many languages and meanings of Country. Aunty Rhonda’s words come once again to mind: “You all have come here, to this country to see, to listen, and remember.” Nyura yin-gu mara-la barray-gu, nyaa-gi, ngarra-gi. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post “If we care for Country, it will care for us” appeared first on Inside Story.

Many people have been reminded of that novel — or the film version starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner — in the depths of the pandemic lockdowns. Despite the quip that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world,” falsely attributed to Gardner, the British-born Shute showed great affection for the city, and indeed for Australia as whole.

This bestselling British author had upped sticks and moved to Australia in 1950, and would spend the last decade of his life on a property southeast of Melbourne. Starting that year with A Town Like Alice, his immensely popular books portrayed Australia as a sunny land of opportunity — and plentiful steak and eggs — contrasted with a tightly rationed Britain in the grip of complacent civil servants and envy-ridden politicians. They helped fuel the surge of “ten-pound Poms” taking up the Australian government’s offer of assisted migration. When Shute died in 1960, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph ran an editorial declaring that “this country has lost one of its greatest friends and propagandists.”

And so, when a reporting trip recently took me to Queensland, I decided to look at the unlikely place where this infatuation began: the country on the southern shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. From November 1948 until January the following year, Shute and his friend James Riddell toured this region in a light aircraft they’d flown out from Britain. In those days, cut off during the three-month “wet” and baked dry for the rest of the year, the region’s human population counted in the hundreds.

At Normanton, not far inland, Shute and Riddell met pastoralist Jim Edwards, who had been a prisoner of war working on the Burma railway. For filching food from the Japanese, he’d been tied with wire to a tree for three days and bashed with rifle butts. He became the model for A Town Like Alice’s Joe Harman, the archetypal Australian bushman, laconic and true, played by Peter Finch in the 1956 film of the book and by Bryan Brown in the 1981 miniseries.

Immensely popular: Nevil Shute in London in 1953. Picture Post/Getty Images

Shute had also come across the story of a group of Dutch women and children who had been shunted around Sumatra for three years by the Japanese. He made them the novel’s English families, marched around Malaya by perplexed guards, with a Malay-speaking planter’s daughter, Jean Paget, assuming leadership. Barefoot, sarong-clad and, like all of Shute’s heroines, wise beyond her years, she was played by Virginia McKenna in the film and Helen Morse in the miniseries.

Shute joined his storylines in occupied Malaya, when Joe Harman, driving a truck for the Japanese, steals his commandant’s chickens to feed Paget’s group. He is caught, nailed through the hands to a post and left to die. Although he is rescued, he only learns much later that Paget and her group survived — and, moreover, that she was Miss Paget, not Mrs as he’d assumed.

Back running a cattle lease in the Gulf, Joe scores a modest lottery win and sets off to London to track her down. Meanwhile, Jean, now a secretary in a London leather-goods firm, has come into an inheritance (another favourite Shute plot device) and goes back to Malaya to repay the villagers who sheltered her group. Having learned that Joe had survived, she travels on to Australia to find him, first to Alice Springs and then to “Willstown,” where he now works.

After many crossed wires the pair meet in Cairns. Joe is somewhat awed by the smart English lady Jean has become, but the ice is finally broken on Green Island in the Great Barrier Reef when Jean dresses in her old sarong. Though the gates of passion open, they agree to wait until they are married.

Shute’s love affairs were always chaste until marriage. He boycotted the premiere of On the Beach because its director, Stanley Kramer, had the US nuclear submarine commander, played by Peck, consummate his relationship with his Australian friend, played by Gardner, instead of staying loyal to his wife, presumed dead in America.

Leaving Cairns and Green Island, Joe and Jean return to “Willstown,” where Jean sets out to revive the old mining town and make it “a town like Alice.” Her scheme is to set up a shoe-making factory using the handy local supply of crocodile skins and employing girls who would otherwise head for the big cities. With a supply of young white women enticed further by a new ice-cream parlour, open-air cinema and hair salon, young white men also throng to Willstown. Soon new houses are going up on abandoned lots and the footpaths are full of prams.

To get to the original of that fictionalised place, I take the Trans North bus from Cairns to Normanton, then rent a four-wheel drive with a strong bull bar for a 230-kilometre journey along Australia’s national Highway 1, hereabouts called the Savannah Way. If you follow for the next 13,000 kilometres, as a lot of grey nomads do, it will take you around the edge of Australia and bring you back to the same place.

Highway 1 is sealed by the Queensland state government from Cairns to Normanton. But from there to the Northern Territory border, about 700 kilometres, it is left to the two local shires to maintain, a task clearly beyond the means of their few hundred ratepayers. Strips of bitumen alternate with gravel and dried mud, though most of the frequent wet-season floodways have concrete paving. The trees are stunted except along creek beds, ant hills are ranked like tombstones, a wedge-tailed eagle gorges on the carcass of one of the wallabies lying dead by the road.

Before reaching the river named after the German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who traversed this country in the 1840s, I turn onto a dirt track and come to a lonely monument marking the northernmost camp of Burke and Wills in their hubristic attempt to make the first south–north crossing of Australia. Across the Leichhardt, I come to a strip of sealed road that leads into Burketown, the none-too-hidden model for Willstown.

Even after seventy years, it hasn’t become a town anything like Alice. The population is just 176, with 152 more in the surrounding 40,000 square kilometres of Burke Shire — not counting the temporary residents of its Century nickel mine, the dry-season tourists, or the 1200 or so people of the Aboriginal shire of Doomadgee, to the west.

Still, it’s a great improvement on the town Shute would have seen. For one thing it has trees, thanks to a permanent water supply from a spring-fed river up-country, and a central grassy park with sprinklers pumping away. The Commonwealth Hotel, where Shute would have stayed, burnt down in 1954; in its place is the Savannah Lodge, with cabins set among thick greenery around a Southeast Asian–style open-sided lounge.

When I phone him the next morning, Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp, is out on his horse somewhere on his cattle spread. He tells me that when he was a small boy in the 1960s conditions were still primitive. “If you wanted a power supply you had to generate your own, or use carbide or kerosene lamps.” No roads were sealed, he says, and there was a single telephone line. “You could wait up to three days to get a telephone call out.”

As in most towns across Australia with significant Indigenous populations, the local Aboriginal people lived in shanty settlements out of sight. “I can remember coming into Burketown as a kid and seeing a complex of buildings just outside town,” Camp says. “Most people referred to it as a compound.” The only Aboriginal people in Shute’s novel are out on the cattle stations, as stockmen or as domestic servants in the homesteads, speaking broken English, subservient, and bearing offensive joke names like Bournville and Palmolive.

“People here were pretty much enslaved out on stations,” community leader Murrandoo Yanner tells me later that day at the offices of the Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council. “They used to pay the mob in opium. Then they switched to paying us in tobacco, flour, sugar and tea, and one uniform a year. You got a pair of boots, a hat, and pastoral clothes.”

Murrandoo Yanner, who assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. Anna Rogers/Newspix

“We were all out on the fringes, on reserves on the edge of town,” recalls Yanner, whose first name means “whirlwind” or “waterspout” and replaces the “Jayson” he was first given.

His great-grandmother brought her children into Burketown after a massacre of Aborigines, including her husband, by police and pastoralists early last century. This was not the last clash: only five years before Shute’s visit, on Bentinck Island some forty kilometres from Burketown, spear-wielding Aborigines confronted a launch carrying Australian air force radar technicians from Mornington Island. They thought that the men, who had stopped for water on their way to Burketown, were about to abuse their women like a previous army survey team had done. One Aboriginal man was shot dead.

“It was worse than Soweto,” Yanner says of the fringe camp. “No water, no sewerage, you had to walk kilometres to get your water in buckets. Pit toilets, housing just tin shacks. People used to live off the land basically, aside from the rations they used to drop off. People controlling the rations would often rort that, keep half of it and sell it on the sly in the black market to their white mates.”

Shute didn’t show us this side of his Willstown, though he has entrepreneurial Jean Paget set up a separate space for Aboriginal customers in her ice-cream parlour, with an Aboriginal girl serving. Throughout A Town Like Alice, he used pejorative white Australian terms — “boongs” or “Abos” — while showing surprising understanding and respect for Malays and even putting some of the Japanese guards in a sympathetic light. The Aboriginal locals were just part of the background.

Shute was not outstandingly racist for his times. In an earlier novel, The Chequer Board (1947), he explored two examples of interracial marriage, a Black GI to an English girl, an English airman to a Burmese woman. In another of his Australian novels, Beyond the Black Stump (1956), he lampoons an American family for their appalled reaction when his Australian heroine mentions that her pastoralist father had fathered several children with an Aboriginal woman before her white mother arrived on the scene.

In a second novel derived from his time in the Gulf country, the weird and largely forgotten In the Wet (1953), he has a baby born to a Scottish stockman and his “half-caste” wife rising to become squadron leader David Anderson in the Royal Australian Air Force three decades later.

In the Wet’s picture of Britain in the imagined 1983 is grim, with rationing continuing under a miserable Labour government and pasty-faced people shuffling in bus queues. The white “dominions” are forging ahead, meanwhile, with the populations of Australia and Canada growing to near parity with Britain. Their dynamism is thanks to a modification of democracy, started in Australia, whereby one person, one vote is augmented by extra votes for having a university degree, overseas experience, raising two children to fourteen without getting a divorce, earning more than £5000 a year, being active in church, or being rewarded by royal decree.

As British prime minister Iorwerth Jones tightens the purse strings on the royal family, the Australian and Canadian governments, royalist to their bootstraps, each chip in a fully crewed jet airliner of the latest design (somehow this miserable Britain is still making advanced aircraft) for the Queen’s Flight regiment. When Anderson is tapped to fly the RAAF’s royal airliner, he asks if his race might be a problem. After all, he is a “quadroon” and commonly known as “Nigger” Anderson among his mates. Not at all, you just look a bit tanned, says Group Captain Cox, the Queen’s Flight commander. “We aren’t asking you to marry into the Royal Family.”

The dominions’ gesture only makes things worse for the royals. They secretly leave Britain aboard the two aircraft, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip travelling to Canberra in a jet piloted by Anderson and installing themselves at the vice-regal residence, while Prince Charles and Princess Anne disperse to Canada and Kenya. Her Majesty then appoints a tough army general, risen from the ranks, as governor-general of Britain.

Anderson meanwhile marries a Buckingham Palace secretary (another example of Shute’s stock heroine, a wise but intrepid young woman) who travels out with the Queen. She has checked out the possibility of a “throwback” baby, and been assured this could only happen if she too had non-European ancestry. On the flight out to Australia, it is Anderson who discovers a bomb in the cargo bay. “He was one quarter Aboriginal,” writes Shute, “not wholly of European stock, and in some directions his perceptions and his sensibilities were stronger than in ordinary men.” A 1970s movie version would have had a didgeridoo playing at this point.

In the Wet is the most bitter expression of Shute’s hatred of Clement Atlee’s Labour government and the welfare state bureaucracy he left behind. His autobiography, Slide Rule (1954), about his earlier career as an aircraft engineer, helps explain that hostility. During 1924–30 Shute had helped build a prototype airship, the British answer to Germany’s zeppelins, which made a successful flight to Canada. The rival public sector project, lavished with funding, crashed on its maiden voyage to India, with great loss of life.

Shute then founded his own aircraft company, Airspeed, and much of the book is about his struggle to raise capital. Government and banks were hopeless, he found, and the best source of funds was people with inherited wealth — the class found on the hunting field, the Cresta Run, the horse races and the yachting events. But they, he believed, were being taxed out of existence.

Tax was hitting Shute hard too. Having sold his shares in Airspeed for £3 million, and with his novels selling more than 100,000 copies in their first print runs and film deals starting to come in, he was a very wealthy man when he turned to full-time writing after spending the war thinking up fanciful weapons for the Royal Navy. By 1950, when he departed Britain, the top marginal tax rate was nineteen shillings and sixpence in the pound, or 97.5 per cent. Australia’s top rate was a less confiscatory 67 per cent.

He and his family settled on a small farm at Langwarrin, on the eastern side of Port Philip Bay, where he turned out more novels about Australia featuring lonely men and women finding each other in times of war or natural disaster, sprinkled with jibes at Atlee’s government and the miseries of postwar Britain.

Alice revisited: Bryan Brown and Helen Morse in Seven’s 1981 version.

While the British public lapped it up — A Town Like Alice sold 1.5 million copies — Shute’s infatuation with his new home country came to irk critics back in London. In Australia, though, there is little evidence that Shute’s portrayal was too cloying. It fed into self-laudatory stereotypes for decades, fuelling the huge popularity of the Seven Network’s 1981 miniseries of A Town Like Alice.

By then, of course, the country had changed in ways Shute couldn’t have envisaged. The exercise of Crown reserve powers in 1975, though not as drastic as the events in In the Wet, made us much more equivocal about the monarchy. The European migrants who figure in The Far Country (1952) had been augmented with Turks, Vietnamese and Lebanese. If he had existed, Squadron Leader (Retired) Anderson might have been joining a claim for his mother’s traditional lands. And Britain, far from being socialist, was getting tough conservative medicine from Margaret Thatcher.

Another forty years later, it’s not just the extra trees that make Burketown different. The 1967 referendum started profound social change, reinforced in economic terms by the 1992 Mabo judgement, for the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi peoples of the region. “It wasn’t always pleasant to upset the status quo,” Yanner tells me. “They were very violent in the upheaval that had to occur — the agitation of the soil to bring new growth.”

I query the use of that word, violent. “The miners, the pastoralists, were applying great levels of violence,” he says. “The police would come and arrest us if we were trying to defend ourselves. We drew a line in the sand and said, ‘What more can you do to us?’ We took it on the chin, went to jail but we stood up for ourselves. Till they realised we wouldn’t take any more pushing and they started to respect us. We were just defending ourselves and our rights, we weren’t attacking them.”

Aged only nineteen, Yanner assumed community leadership after the death of his father Philip in 1991. He was harassed by the Queensland police during agitation for compensation from the big Century open-cut mine southwest of Burketown, then owned by Conzinc Riotinto — events recounted in The Gulf Country, a book by University of Queensland anthropologist Richard Martin, commissioned by Burke Shire.

At one point, the police prosecuted Yanner under an obscure fauna protection law when they found two small crocodiles in his freezer. After a magistrate dismissed the charge, the government of National Party premier Rob Borbidge, who called the High Court judges in the Mabo case “historical dills,” appealed the decision. It went to the High Court, which upheld Yanner’s traditional right to catch crocodiles.

A spate of arson attacks followed. One destroyed Yanner’s house, another the council building. In 2002, someone torched a Coolabah tree on the Albert River blazed by explorer William Landsborough in his 1862 search for Burke and Wills, setting off fears that Aboriginal activists were intent on erasing the legacy of white pioneers.

But by 2015, the 150th anniversary of Burketown’s founding, the Century case had been settled by a court-initiated consent order with the state government. Millions of dollars were already flowing from the mine and the state into Aboriginal welfare and development projects. Large parts of Burketown were transferred to native title, including the town square, residential sites and industrial land, and the town now has an alternative Indigenous name, Moungibi.

Outside town, six pastoral leases came under Aboriginal ownership, making the Gangalidda, Garawa and Waanyi the biggest landowners in the shire. Their commercial arm bought out many of the businesses in Burketown, including the pub, the garage, the airport, the tourism centre and the Savannah Lodge.

The Carpentaria Aboriginal Land Council, from where these holdings are administered, is a kind of alternative government to the Burke Shire Council across the street, and the police and other Queensland government agencies.

“Most of Australia’s going to shit but here’s a place you can leave your key in your car, your house unlocked,” says Yanner. “Zero crime rate, no kids on the street, no mischief. No one beating their missus up, no one causing trouble. If they do, we restrict them access to our services and things and kick them out, because basically there’s dozens of people from less functional communities lining up to get in for their kids’ sake to a good community. We don’t do that with any state or government intervention, and deprivation of people’s rights, we do it ourselves: communally, locally. It’s far better than anything the government’s tried elsewhere.”

Doomadgee, to the west, Borroloola further along Highway 1 in the Northern Territory, and Mornington Island out in the Gulf are larger Aboriginal-majority towns notorious for problems of crime, addiction and poor health — and ineffective government interventions to deal with them. “The government doesn’t listen to the people’s ideas, or try out their ideas,” says Yanner. “They’re all concentration camps from the early days.”

He snorts at the idea of getting Aboriginal recruits into the police. “No, we wouldn’t accept it. They’d be the Jacky-Jackies. They’d be a tracker for them. Just like the old days. The only time Aborigines have been with the police is when you need an Aborigine to catch an Aborigine.”

Two of the shire council’s five members are Aboriginal, and a third is of Philippine descent, and Yanner says relations with the council are now cooperative. Ernie Camp, the mayor, concurs and adds to the account of community self-policing. “Sometimes it might be claimed nobody’s doing their parenting, single-parent families, but on the other hand everybody’s doing the parenting,” he says. “Everybody’s keeping an eye out, and certainly not going backwards in giving a shout-out if a kid may or may not be doing the right thing. It becomes community parenting, I suppose.”

Mutual advantage: Burketown’s mayor, Ernie Camp. Hamish McDonald

It’s not a community without problems, though. Youth suicide is a worry, Camp says, with one recent case involving a twelve-year-old, and social media grips young people who might previously have found solace looking after pet animals. Improving year-round road access would help reduce the sense of isolation, he thinks, as well as having national defence, biosecurity and a host of other benefits.

It still gets a bit fraught when, as mayor, Camp has to make a speech on Australia Day. He likes to use the analogy of a vehicle, with both a rear-vision mirror and a windscreen to look forward. “That’s the way life is, you need to have good vision going forward,” he says. “But we need to reflect on the past, and not to do the things again. It should be part of education to look back on history with no restrictions, and tell all.”

With our interview drawing to a close, Camp mentions how, in the midst of the heated negotiations over native title in the late 1990s, he was deeply touched when his three-year-old daughter wandered off from the family homestead and got lost in the bush. Yanner called and offered to bring out all his people in the search. (The little girl was found unharmed after many hours.) Anthropologist Richard Martin tells me that both sides had come to realise they could make native title and reconciliation work to mutual advantage.

The town now follows an annual cycle of tourism and cattle-raising set by the seasons. The three-month wet season, when the town is cut off by floods much of the time, is a wonderful, peaceful interlude, says Camp. “If you want to walk around naked all day you could — nobody’s going to bother you. Not that I’ve ever done it.” Then comes the annual barramundi festival, around Easter, timed so anglers can drive in from outside with the receding of the wet, but not so late into the cooler months that the big fighting fish has gone into semi-hibernation. Skilled fishers can still coax it to strike at the lure.

As the land dries out, it’s time for mustering the cattle. In September comes the unusual long cylindrical cloud formation known as the “morning glory.” Glider pilots fly their high-tech machines up from all over Australia to use Burketown’s airstrip as a base to ride its thermals.

Meanwhile, says Yanner, the Aboriginal peoples of the region keep up their traditions. “We are the only community in Queensland that still runs full tribal initiations here,” he says, holding an imaginary penis in one hand and bringing the other down in a slicing motion. “No painkillers, antibiotics, all that rubbish, no doctors, just the old days and the whole thing proper.”

The young float between the two cultures — among them Yanner’s son Mangubadijarri (“the barramundi jumping out of the water”), who has been studying law and international relations at Bond University on the Gold Coast and is currently managing the Burketown Pub.

One evening towards the end of my visit I took a “sunset cruise” run by the Aboriginal corporation’s tourism office. At the town jetty, I boarded a large, new steel barge and watched crewman Paddy Kunsing haul in a fine fish. Then we set off along the Albert River, the reddening sky reflected in its still waters.

Fish jumped along the shallows. A small crocodile lay on the mud. The crew broke out bottles of wine and beer, and laid out crackers, cheeses, olives and dips. My fellow tourists were eight well-off retirees on a bespoke tour of the Gulf, Cape York and the Torres Strait. Their pilot came along too, and extolled the capabilities of his aircraft, a Pilatus-12 turboprop with luxury seating that could still land on small, remote airfields.

Nevil Shute would certainly have cheered this aviation bit of the Burketown story. Who knows what he would have thought of Tony Abbott and his knighthoods, but I doubt he’d object to the notion of young Brits coming out to work on Australian farms under the proposed free-trade deal with the United Kingdom. And maybe he’d approve of the reconciliation painfully won in a town smaller but more inclusive than the “town like Alice” he envisaged. •

The post A town not quite like Alice appeared first on Inside Story.

In time exceptions emerged: northwest American hunter-gatherers stayed put, sub-Arctic reindeer herders spend months on the move; Scottish farmers burn heather to lure grouse hunter-gatherer style; Aborigines used practices associated with farming. Yet the Divide has value, and the idea sticks.

The madhouse was built when the Divide was infected by two calamitous notions: Civilisation, and Race. Both compare. To think of Civilisation is to invent an opposite, barbarism; to think of Race you need more than one. The Divide became a ladder of humanity, civilised farmers above, barbarous hunter-gatherers below.

For decades researchers have attempted to demolish this hierarchy, by demonstrating the skill and success of hunter-gatherers, or by revealing the barbarity of farmer colonialism. But in the big world the Divide remains hierarchical — less overt no doubt, but solidly entrenched. After talking publicly about 1788 land management, I might hear statements like “If they were in charge, nothing would’ve happened here in the last 200 years,” or be asked “Are you saying we should go back to 1788?” or, more innocently, “How can we improve our treatment of Aboriginal people?”

In specialist disciplines where jargon and theory are eminent, many academics simply don’t get such mindsets. They puzzle over why Dark Emu is so popular. At the recent Canberra launch of Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers, several speakers tackled this puzzle, pointing to factors including Pascoe’s forthright prose, and the moral guilt non-Aborigines might feel as the horrors of the frontier, the long institutionalisation of Aboriginal people, and the removal of children are exposed.

Not one explanation offered by the speakers was straightforward or aimed at a wider public; all were infused with possibles and alternatives. This was made clear when a tour operator asked how Aborigines could have cleared the grasslands on Victoria’s Tower Hill, as shown in von Guérard’s painting, if they walked about all the time? No answer said straight out that people didn’t walk about all the time, that they managed Tower Hill’s plants in due season yet still travelled purposefully to care for their country. The tour operator left early, not happy I thought.

Who are Pascoe’s critics talking to? They are alarmed by what the public is being led to think, by what might be taught in schools, by how much good research is overlooked. Their remedy is to talk to each other.

The gap can be bridged. History is the most open of disciplines, the readiest to ignore jargon and theory, though some historians use too much of both. History is so open that other academics seem to think they don’t need to be trained in it. Yet, thanks largely to Henry Reynolds’s work, historians have demolished the old myths of a peaceful and beneficent frontier and a generous and appropriate treatment of Aboriginal people. If there is a sense of public moral guilt, or of a need to remedy past and present injustices, it is thanks to historians like Reynolds.

How far does Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers bridge the gap? Dark Emu is a history and a polemic; the most balanced response I’ve seen to it is by a historian, Tom Griffiths. Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers is a detailed response from an anthropologist and linguist, Peter Sutton, with two chapters and an appendix by an archaeologist, Keryn Walshe. My health stops me from reading all their book, so I’m obliged to cherrypick.

I began by searching Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers’ index for references under “Gammage” to my The Biggest Estate on Earth, which Pascoe uses extensively. Brief mentions apart, I noted two longer comments by Sutton, plus one for which he has apologised.

Of stone houses at Lake Condah in western Victoria, Sutton quotes my statement that they “could hold about 700 people” and continues: “Estimates of the entire pre-colonial population of Victoria range from 5000 to 15,000. The proposition that most of them lived at Lake Condah, leaving the rest of Victoria mainly uninhabited, is untenable.”

Yet not even Pascoe, with his suggestion of 10,000 people living in the area, proposes that “most” Victorian Aborigines lived at Lake Condah. Sutton and Walshe’s claim makes even less sense if you believe — as Sutton said at the Canberra launch — that Australia’s pre-contact population was between 750,000 and a million and that western Victoria and the lower Murray were among the country’s most densely populated regions.

“Another thing Gammage and Pascoe share,” says Sutton, “is the preferencing of early explorer and settler accounts over the studies of anthropologists and archaeologists, and the reconstruction of vegetation history.” Odd to require historians to prefer the evidence of people who weren’t there over people who were, especially as Sutton later criticises me for doing exactly that: “Gammage… thus claims to know more than [Augustus] Gregory about what people were doing on the west coast of Western Australia prior to 1882.”

This remark stems from Gregory’s observation that “they invariably re-insert the head of the yams so as to be sure of a future crop, but beyond this they do absolutely nothing which may be regarded as a tentative in the direction of cultivating plants.” Sutton objects because I put this among “wrong” statements.

History 101 on classing evidence. Gregory saw people re-planting yam tops: that statement is worth reporting. But how could he know that people did “absolutely nothing” else? Passing by, he could not know anything of an annual yam cycle. And other evidence I quote shows that people did do more than replant tops — they tilled the soil, and in Western Australia transplanted yams. That’s where I think Gregory is “wrong.”

So I approach both Dark Emu and Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers cautiously. Pascoe and I are both dissatisfied by the Great Divide but disagree on some fundamentals. He thinks people were farmers in 1788. I don’t — I think some farmed but none depended on it. He thinks people have been here 120,000 years or more; the earliest possible date I know of is 65,000 years.

Pascoe’s date is apparently from Gurdip Singh’s work on Lake George sediments. In them Singh saw a sudden increase in charcoal between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, and suggested Aboriginal fire as a possible cause. If so, not 1788-style fire. It burnt cool, leaving little ash, much like a stubble fire today. A lot of charcoal suggests a fuel build-up in the absence of Aboriginal fire, not the reverse. Some researchers still make this mistake. More probably Singh meant clearing fires by new arrivals: that’s conceivable, but less likely than lightning strikes in a drought, and not enough to claim proof of human activity.

On the other hand, Sutton accuses Pascoe of ranking hunter-gatherers below farmers on a ladder of humanity, of calling them “mere” hunter-gatherers. The first sourced example I came across stated:

Pascoe said… “Dark Emu… exploded the myth that Aboriginal people were mere hunters and gatherers”… Pascoe’s message is built on a simple distinction between what he calls “mere” hunter-gatherers… and farmers; or between “mere” hunting and gathering… and agriculture.

Sutton thinks Pascoe is endorsing “mere” rather than exploding it. He elaborates on this misunderstanding several times, for example: “It is almost as if the more European the Old People can be made to seem, the better… This is Dark Emu’s most fundamental flaw.” Extraordinary. Here and elsewhere, the more charitable interpretation is that Pascoe is being ironic. And he ought to be able to say that he thinks people were farmers without being called a racist. The madhouse echoes.

Sutton says Pascoe omits words to give a more agricultural feel to quotes from explorers’ journals. This is convincing on Sturt but not on Mitchell. Pascoe quotes Mitchell on finding acres of seed grass piled into hayricks, but Sutton points out that Pascoe omits Mitchell’s words, “for some purpose connected with the allurement of birds or animals.” History 101: how could Mitchell know that? He is speculating, as Sutton says, but Sutton goes on to say Pascoe deliberately omits the words to convey an impression of Aboriginal agriculture.

In turn Sutton omits words suggestive of farming from this quote. Mitchell continues, “All of the grass was of one kind, a new species of Panicum [millet]… not a spike of it was left in the soil, over the whole of the ground.” A farmer might have suspected that one grass over so great an area meant a crop, and so did Mitchell, eventually. On the Macquarie in February 1846 a squatter told him that panicum “was called by the natives ‘coolly,’ and… the gins gather it in great quantities, and pound the seeds between stones with water, forming a kind of paste or bread.” A month later he noted that panicum:

seemed to predominate, a grass whereof the seed (“Cooly”) is made by the natives into a kind of paste or bread. Dry heaps of this grass, that had been pulled expressly for the purpose of gathering the seed, lay along our path for many miles. I counted nine miles along the river, in which we rode through this grass only, reaching to our saddle-girths, and the same grass seemed to grow back from the river, at least as far as the eye could reach through a very open forest.

“Through this grass only… as far as the eye could reach”: this was a clean crop on overflow land where each flush drops debris, so surely it was weeded.

So both Pascoe and Sutton leave out words that don’t suit. Me too, probably. On the words Pascoe leaves in, I think he goes too far; on the words Sutton leaves in, I think he protests too much, too angrily. Pascoe enlarges minds; Sutton corrects errors and exaggerated inferences. Pascoe has reached 250,000 readers, or buyers, illuminating for many the wonders of 1788; Sutton and Walshe refuse to let falsehood pass uncorrected. Few know of Pascoe’s earlier fiction writing, though it helps explain Dark Emu, and few know of Sutton’s invaluable work on language and native title — to preserve or restore their language is the greatest gift a researcher can give a disrupted people. Both contribute, both are at odds. Ships pass in broad daylight.

What of our children? What will they be told? For them this is not just whitefella bisnis. This is their heritage, this will shape what they think about their country and people. The present brawl won’t do. We must move on. Perhaps Pascoe and Sutton should write a school text together, Pascoe to restrain his claims, Sutton to curb his possibles and alternatives, both to learn from Aboriginal elders how to break down the madhouse. What an Australia that would be. •

The post The Great Divide appeared first on Inside Story.

A Voice embedded in the Constitution would allow Canberra to devolve power to local communities, says Bragg, and enable federal parliament to hear Indigenous advice on legislation, on the use of the Aboriginal flag, and on the integration of Indigenous culture into parliamentary processes and official ceremonies. The Voice could also work with the Productivity Commission to collect and analyse data, and could be “folded into” the parliamentary committee system.

But Bragg warns promoters of the Voice not to prescribe the “tabling provisions” of the Voice. Specifying that parliament will be obliged to hear and respond formally to the Voice’s advice might scare off potential Yes voters in the referendum, he advises. Let the parliament legislate its obligations to the Voice before submitting it to a referendum. The legislation could be passed within the parliamentary term, followed by a referendum during the next parliamentary term (which Bragg assumes will commence in 2022).

The other two demands of the Uluru Statement — “agreement-making” and “truth-telling” — worry Bragg more. He wouldn’t support agreement-making if that meant a national treaty covering land use, because land laws are a state responsibility. And, because Indigenous Australians are within the Australian polity, Australia can’t “treat” with them as if they were an external authority. On “truth-telling,” he believes we shouldn’t lose sight of the good in Australian history. A Makarrata Commission could help Australians learn more about the bad as well as the good in Australian history — through local history forums, and by giving more attention to Indigenous perspectives in school history classes and public cultural institutions.

Bragg’s book is aimed at those who vote Liberal and those who, as Liberal and National MPs, help determine the policies of the current federal government. He wants conservatives to be more idealistic and courageous. Constitutional recognition would not be “divisive,” he says: the Uluru Statement expresses the Indigenous desire to be included in the nation. Nor should we worry that recognition would further entrench the idea that Indigenous Australians are a different “race.” As he points out, the Constitution’s “race” power is what enables native title and other beneficial laws: “Whether we like it or not, race is part of our system.” Constitutional recognition of the Voice, he argues, will also ensure that the Indigenous affairs budget is more wisely spent.

Some conservatives believe that the Voice would be a third chamber of parliament, damaging our system of government. Bragg assures them that the Voice would put parliament under no obligations. In fact, he believes that nothing in the Uluru Statement should frighten conservatives, and much should inspire them. The Liberal Party’s history shows that it “can carry the big, substantial changes” in Indigenous affairs. Indeed, “we are the only hope. The only chance to deliver” on the Uluru Statement.

To gee-up his colleagues, Bragg devotes much of Buraadja to reminding Liberals of what they can be proud of. In 1962, the Menzies government gave all adult Indigenous Australians the right to vote in federal elections. In 1967, by endorsing two changes to the Constitution that were widely understood to reverse the exclusion of Indigenous Australians, the Holt government boosted the massive Yes vote in the referendum. In 1971, the Liberals chose Neville Bonner, the first federal Indigenous MP, to replace Dame Annabelle Rankin when she retired from the Senate. In 1976, the Fraser government legislated most of the Whitlam government’s bill to recognise Northern Territory Aboriginal people’s customary land rights. In 1998, the Howard government amended the Keating government’s Native Title Act, effectively securing it from any further conservative assault. In 1999 and 2007, Howard promoted recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution.

In this series of actions, Liberals have enacted the liberal principle that the rights of Indigenous Australians — to vote, to be respectfully included, to maintain possession of their property — must be guaranteed by the rule of law. The Native Title Act is emblematic of the liberalism that Bragg admires — a liberalism that recognises how Indigenous Australians, damaged by our colonial history, are entitled to some distinct rights. He is thus opposed to a liberalism that insists on a uniformity of rights among Australians.

Although supporters of the Uluru Statement should feel heartened by the existence of liberals like Bragg, it’s important to remember that the Liberal Party is not the sole or even the best guardian of liberalism. If we are to keep open our appreciation of the possibilities it creates, we need to question Bragg’s tendentious history. A more adequate account would argue that Australian liberalism, at its best, is the product of two dynamics: the interplay between the judiciary and the legislature, and the adversarial contest between the Labor and non-Labor parties.

Bragg’s celebration of the Howard government’s 1998 commitment to the Native Title Act demonstrates the problems of his partisan approach. Though he acknowledges that the Keating government legislated the Native Title Act, he doesn’t mention how in 1992–93 the Hewson-led opposition refused to countenance any national native title legislation. It was content to let state governments and the courts determine where native title remained and what rights it contained. So little does Bragg think of Keating’s negotiation of the Native Title Act that he claims “Keating did not make significant achievements in the [Indigenous] policy space.”

Yes he did. To understand why conservatives eventually had to embrace a federal framework for native title, we need to recall another piece of Labor legislation for which Bragg — I assume — would have great respect: the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. This was the act that made the High Court’s Mabo judgement impossible for legislators to ignore in 1992–93, for unless native title holders had been compensated for having their title extinguished by grants of title since October 1975 (when the act came into effect), such titles were racially discriminatory and arguably invalid once the High Court had recognised that native title continued in many parts of Australia.

The Keating government’s legislation saved the country from years of expensive, bitter litigation by those asserting their native title. Hewson was willing to countenance such litigation or leave it to the states to handle the “problem” of native title — or both. When Howard talked the Coalition parties into their qualified embrace of Keating’s law, in 1998, he was merely conceding Keating’s realistic appreciation, in 1993, that stability of property rights required a national framework for determining native title.

Bragg’s omission of the Racial Discrimination Act from his history of Australian liberalism might be excused by saying that it was Whitlam’s law. But this only underlines the fallacy of elevating the Liberal Party as the pre-eminent bearer of liberalism. To include that legislation in the story of native title sharpens the question: which side of politics and which branch of the Australian state has more effectively carried Australian liberalism’s respect for the right — fundamentally important in a settler colonial society — not to be discriminated against on racial grounds?

In a liberal polity the judiciary and the legislature both have parts to play in securing citizens against racial discrimination. The judiciary applies international or national codes of rights to litigated cases of discrimination; the legislature passes laws that make it an offence to discriminate on racial grounds (except when the different treatment is designed to have a positive effect).

Since 2012, the debate about how to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution has made clear that Australians don’t agree about the relative importance of the judiciary and the legislature as vehicles of liberalism. “Constitutional conservatives” (a label proudly worn by Bragg and others) are wary of further empowering the judiciary to hold legislators to account: after all, the legislature is elected, and so it embodies popular sovereignty. “Rights advocates” (for want of a better label) are wary of Australian legislators’ demonstrated readiness to make laws that unfairly discriminate against minorities: the courts’ adherence to codes of fairness (in common law, in international protocols or in the Constitution) is a necessary check on legislatures’ majoritarian arrogance.

So a history of Australian liberalism shouldn’t champion one side of politics but highlight the two sides’ competitive dynamic, and it should consider the interactions among all three branches of the state: executive, judiciary and legislature. It should recognise that one of the issues that continues to animate Australian liberalism is how best to distribute, among the three branches of the state, responsibility for the definition and enforcement of rights.

The most important feature of Bragg’s liberalism is that he seeks to honour the distinct rights of Indigenous Australians in a way consistent with his constitutionally conservative wish not to empower the High Court to encumber legislators. Between 2012 and 2017, the constitutional conservatives gained political ascendancy over those who wished to write new rights into the Constitution, so Bragg is — in this sense — on the winning side. But he seems unable or unwilling to recognise the significance of that victory. Historians will one day see this debate as one of the more significant in Australian political history: the triumph of the constitutional conservatives will shape the way that Indigenous rights are mediated in our political system for the foreseeable future.

At several points in Buraadja it is clear that Bragg doesn’t wish to tell the story of constitutional conservatives’ ascendancy. He passes very quickly over episodes when the rights approach to Indigenous affairs was strongly asserted. Although Bragg admires the Liberal parliamentarian W.C. Wentworth, for example, he devotes only a sentence to his attempt, in 1966, to insert a ban on racial discrimination into the Constitution. Liberal prime minister Harold Holt and opposition leader Gough Whitlam combined to present the “constitutional conservative” argument against Wentworth’s idea, and the referendum that the major parties endorsed in 1967 placed no judicial restraint on legislative or executive actions towards Indigenous Australians.

The constitutional conservatives mobilised again in response to the 2012 report of the expert panel on Indigenous recognition. The panel recommended that the Constitution be changed in two ways that would have widened the path of High Court litigation by aggrieved Indigenous Australians. One change was to convert the “races” power — section 51(xxvi) — into a requirement that federal legislation about Indigenous Australians be beneficial; the other was to add a new section that would disallow racial discrimination (not only against Indigenous Australians).

The conservatives’ eloquent and sustained campaign — mainly in the pages of the Australian — argued that such amendments would encourage Indigenous Australians to litigate in the High Court, with the possibility that the court would overrule the legislature and/or inhibit the executive. The expert panel’s proposal would make the Constitution a bill of rights, they warned, empowering the court and diminishing parliament.

That debate took place mainly in the press, but in one singularly luminous moment, on 22 September 2014, it was joined in the House of Representatives, when Stephen Jones — the Labor member for (ironically) Whitlam — gave liberal reasons for supporting the panel’s proposals. Jones invoked a rights-based liberalism as a guide to government. To fail to use the Constitution to protect against racial discrimination would be “a denial of fundamental liberal values… which those on the conservative side of politics have long held dear.” He then listed the rights of individuals, noting that “the protection against discrimination on the basis of race” was among those not yet constitutionally protected, despite being “one of these rights that liberals have always championed.”

Jones’s second appeal to liberalism was that “no government and no parliament should have unlimited power to legislate in ways that interfere with the liberties of its citizens.” Such power must be subject to constitutional checks.

Jones’s third point concerned “the rights of the minority against the majority,” pointing out that “liberals and conservatives have always sought to guard against the tyranny of majoritarian rule.” Taking aim at the constitutional conservatives, Jones asserted that to protect those rights “by the popular vote and through the democratic process of representative government” was not sufficient. It was necessary to “constrain the federal parliament,” as the expert panel’s proposals aimed to do.

It isn’t surprising that Bragg doesn’t mention Jones’s speech, since his aim is to highlight Liberals’ liberalism. But it is surprising that he doesn’t admit that what was at stake in the constitutional recognition debate was an issue endemic to liberal government: how to reconcile popular sovereignty with minority rights. He is wrong to say that “the focus for the decade between 2007 and 2017 was on formulating symbolic constitutional recognition.” No it wasn’t — the relationship between judiciary and legislature is a substantive issue. He also refers to  2007–17 as a “fruitless decade.” No — the “fruit” was what constitutional conservatives wished: putting certain “rights” in the Constitution ceased to be a political option.

In his page and a half on the debate about the expert panel’s advocacy of constitutional rights, Bragg refers to the panel’s (and subsequent joint select committees’) proposed replacement of the races power as “some tweaks to the races power in Section 51.” Tweaks? His word choice trivialises a deeply considered proposal and several years of debate about it. Not amending section 51(xxvi) means that parliament retains the power to legislate for and against Indigenous interests.

Bragg can afford to be cavalier about the constitutional conservatives’ victory over the expert panel because of the form that victory has taken: Indigenous endorsement. The constitutional conservatives began to prevail in 2014 when Noel Pearson reached out to them. With their counsel, he proposed that Australia abandon the expert panel’s “rights” proposals and seek a referendum mandate for a new Indigenous “right” to address parliament. Three years after Pearson first offered the constitutional conservatives this olive branch, a national assembly of Indigenous Australians endorsed it in May 2017: the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

As the Uluru Statement was — in this sense — a victory for the constitutional conservative side of the debate, Bragg’s warm endorsement is no surprise. Perhaps what has been more surprising — to Bragg and many others, including myself — is the Coalition’s ongoing reluctance to commit to holding the necessary referendum. Malcolm Turnbull’s dismissal of the Uluru Statement and Scott Morrison’s caution about constitutional recognition remind us that liberal conservatism can be a combination of indolence, complacency and a fearful lack of imagination.

The return of Barnaby Joyce to the deputy prime ministership is a reminder of a fact to which Bragg pays little attention as he champions the Liberal Party’s record: in almost every episode the Liberals were acting in coalition with the Country Party (more recently the National Party). Bragg’s regretful account of the Turnbull government’s rejection of the Uluru Statement in May and October 2017 can’t avoid making reference to Joyce. The Nationals leader, two days after the release of the Uluru Statement, described the Voice as “another chamber in politics” that the Australian people would not vote for. Bragg quotes Joyce as apologising later for his “fiction.” That many liberals and conservatives found Joyce’s “shallow response” persuasive is presumably a spur to Bragg’s writing, reminding liberals and conservatives to think more deeply about what they owe Australians. •

Buraadja: The Liberal Case for National Reconciliation
By Andrew Bragg | The Kapunda Press | $34.95 | 320 pages

The post A Liberal’s case for the Voice to Parliament appeared first on Inside Story.

The project resonates with Moree’s history. Mention Moree to many, and one phrase crops up: the Freedom Ride. In 1965, inspired partly by civil rights campaigns in America, a busload of students from the University of Sydney spent a fortnight driving through northern New South Wales. The Student Action for Aborigines group included Charles Perkins, later a leading Aboriginal bureaucrat, and Jim Spigelman, later a chief justice of New South Wales.

The group set out to “publicise the appalling conditions under which our Aborigines live,” wrote journalist Fred Wells in the Canberra Times. The paper described those conditions as “shanty towns, where most blacks lived without sanitation, electricity and often water.”

Just seventeen years earlier, Australia had helped to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But the racial segregation the freedom riders found in far-flung towns was shocking. In Walgett, about 200 kilometres west of Moree, the RSL club banned Aboriginal patrons except on Anzac Day, including those who had fought two decades earlier in the second world war. Cinemas in Walgett, Bowraville and elsewhere treated Aboriginal people the way America’s Deep South treated black Americans, forcing them to enter by separate doors and to sit in separate seats from whites. When a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal girl tried to challenge the ban in Bowraville, the theatre’s owner reportedly declared that it had always been policy to segregate, “and he would continue to enforce it.”

In 1955, a decade before the Freedom Ride hit Moree, the local council had passed an ordinance banning Aboriginal children from the town’s swimming pool. Amid a stand-off with police and hundreds of angry white townsfolk, Charles Perkins took in a small group of Aboriginal kids, and joined them in the pool. The freedom riders faced anger on the road, too. After they left Walgett for Moree late one night, a truck overtook their bus and tried to force it off the road. Bill Packenham, their driver, later quit the tour because it had “become too dangerous.” Another driver flew in to replace him.

Nothing like the Freedom Ride had been attempted in Australia before. It became something of a turning point in exposing the scope of inequalities and racism in Australia. In an editorial, the Canberra Times called for change: “The people of Moree and Walgett are especially angry because they know in their hearts that what the students say is true. There is colour prejudice in these towns, and in practice a round and ready kind of apartheid is the rule.”

Some Kamilaroi people credit the Freedom Ride with helping to trigger the constitutional referendum two years later, in 1967, in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to transfer power over Aboriginal affairs from the states to the Commonwealth.

To many, though, old attitudes and hurdles remain. The growing support among Aboriginal people and many legal experts for an approach like justice reinvestment could help solve problems that governments have largely ignored since the days of the Freedom Ride.

My own drive from Walgett to Moree last month was more peaceful than back then. Three years earlier, in 2018, I had visited Bourke, about 440 kilometres west of Moree along the same outback highway. Bourke had embarked on what has become Australia’s most successful bid by its Aboriginal people to use a justice reinvestment approach.

The town once had the highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers in New South Wales. The state government’s response was to build more prisons.

Alistair Ferguson, a prominent Aboriginal figure in the town, was inspired by a different idea from the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank: devote the money instead towards resolving underlying causes of crime, and try to keep people out of prisons. His community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body advocating this “justice reinvestment” approach as public policy.

Its logic has defied governments, but it has helped Bourke’s “Maranguka” exercise become something of a showcase. In late 2018, five years after it started, the accounting firm KPMG reported substantial falls in juvenile offences and domestic violence, and a sharp rise in year 12 student retention rates. The project, it estimated, had saved Bourke’s criminal justice system about $3 million a year.

About twenty other Aboriginal communities, keen to do similar work, had already approached Just Reinvest NSW. A small grant from the state’s justice department helped produce a Justice Reinvestment Toolkit to give communities a better idea of what it was about. But limited funds have confined work so far to just two communities, Mount Druitt, a sprawling suburb in western Sydney, and Moree.

Mount Druitt and its surrounds (rather than Redfern, as many think) is home to Sydney’s largest Aboriginal population, about 9000 people, making it a strong candidate to test how justice reinvestment could work in a big urban area. Julie Williams, an Aboriginal woman who grew up in Mount Druitt, joined Just Reinvest NSW last year. Poor relations with police and high fine rates for young black people are the biggest problems, she says. Working with Baabayn Aboriginal Corporation, a group of western Sydney Elders, she and grassroots colleagues in the Western Sydney Watch Committee have started meeting with police in a bid to “reset the relationship.”

Work in Moree is further advanced. Located on the Mehi River, the town is a big business centre for the Gwydir River valley. Drawn by the region’s rich black soil plains, white settlers started arriving in the 1830s and, for the most part, have never looked back. It’s been a different story for the Kamilaroi people, said to be the second-biggest Aboriginal nation in eastern Australia after the Wiradjuri.

Fifty-six years after the Freedom Ride, inequalities remain deplorable. According to the 2016 census, fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi people aged between fifteen and nineteen were in schools, compared with over two-thirds of non-Kamilaroi teenagers; less than a fifth of Moree’s Kamilaroi adults had completed year 12, compared with over twice that proportion for non-Kamilaroi people; just a quarter of Kamilaroi households were buying or owned a home, compared with almost two-thirds of other residents; and fewer than half of Moree’s Kamilaroi households had internet connection, compared with almost three-quarters of non-Kamilaroi people.

After the 1965 Freedom Ride, Charles Perkins told the press its “most important” aspect had been the “surprising degree of active support from the local Aboriginal people themselves.” Communities had anticipated their arrival with “strong interest”: Aboriginal people near Nambucca Heads, on the NSW north coast, had stood lookout on a hill for two days, watching for the students to come.

These attitudes were harbingers of what justice reinvestment is trying to achieve now: Aboriginal people determining their own approaches to solving problems, free from the directives of governments in faraway capital cities.

For Just Reinvest NSW, Moree seemed a logical place to help the local community start pursuing such an approach in 2019. After the Freedom Ride, Kamilaroi people had helped to form bodies like the Aboriginal Legal Service. Yet problems like high crime rates and school suspensions among young people seemed intractable. In late 2019 the NSW ombudsman reported that over a third of Aboriginal students at one Moree primary school and over half of Aboriginal students at a secondary school received short suspensions in 2017, the second-highest rates in each case among fifteen state “Connected Communities Schools.”

Experts talk of a “school to prison pipeline,” suggesting that children having trouble at school are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology calls it a “potential association between school experiences, including suspension, and later antisocial and violent behaviour resulting in incarceration.”

Similar problems plagued Bourke before justice reinvestment began to work. Moree faces the challenge of assembling a leadership group to pull together “a lot of moving parts,” as Alistair Ferguson also found in Bourke. And Moree’s overall population is about five times bigger than Bourke’s, making for a more complex task. So the Kamilaroi people are working out what they call a “Moree way” for justice reinvestment.

I arrived in time to hear how this is evolving. Among the several community leaders who had gathered for a meeting at the Dhiiyaan Aboriginal Centre in Moree’s main street were two local Kamilaroi women who now work for Just Reinvest NSW in Moree, Judy Duncan and Mekayla Cochrane. Duncan, “Moree born and bred,”  has worked in the area for almost forty years, “through education and government,” as she puts it, and has “done time in the criminal justice system.” Cochrane, her younger colleague, joined Just Reinvest NSW late last year. “As a way to provide a platform for Aboriginal people, it’s a no-brainer,” says Cochrane. Joining them at this meeting were Jenny Lovric and Nicole Mekler of Just Reinvest NSW in Sydney.

“We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is,” says Just Reinvest NSW’s Judy Duncan. Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

The local participants have set up working groups to enable Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal figures, police, school officials and others to talk to each other more productively and come up with locally designed approaches to problems. Like their counterparts in Bourke, they’ve also started building data to help track the problems.

“School suspensions and other education issues are big underlying problems in Moree,” Judy Duncan tells me. “We’re trying to work out what the ‘Moree way’ is. It’ll be Moree looking out for Moree, not government looking out for Moree. A community leadership group is starting to emerge on this. I love my community. It’s time we got things right. If the Aboriginal community can get it right, the rest of the community will, too.”

Just Reinvest NSW and the Aboriginal Legal Service have initiated a project with the Moree police aimed at cutting the number of young people who wind up in prison simply for breaching bail; a similar project is planned in Mount Druitt. Too often, young people are arrested for breaching bail conditions that are too onerous or that they can’t meet. The police have agreed to take a fresh approach by notifying the Aboriginal Legal Service of bail conditions earlier than before, allowing it to request amendments in certain cases.

“So far, it’s working,” says Helen McWilliam, officer-in-charge of Moree police, who presides over a staff of about fifty. “The last thing we want to see is more kids in the juvenile justice system.” Roger Best, crime manager of the New England police district, which embraces Moree, says twelve-year-olds were among the most prolific juvenile offenders, and that reoffending had been common. “But you can’t arrest your way out of these problems,” he adds. “Instead, justice reinvestment is about spending the money to address causes, so you can avoid spending money elsewhere later.”

Opening dialogues with the town’s big players is showing positive signs here. But some people at the Dhiiyaan centre tell me of other things that seem stuck in the past. More than sixty state and federal government services are located in Moree, but Kamilaroi people complain of trouble accessing them. Many feel that racist attitudes persist in everyday town life.

The Moree pool, the town’s flashpoint during the Freedom Ride, remains contentious. Owned by the shire council and run by a separate board, it was added to the list of National Heritage Places in 2013. The citation notes that the baths were a “stark example of official segregation” in 1965.

Many Kamilaroi people believe the exclusion goes on, in the form of a $9 entry price per person, making it unaffordable to poorer families, especially women looking after grandchildren over hot summer months. A Guardian Australia survey of public swimming pool fees in 129 local government areas last year found the Moree pool to be one of the two most expensive in the state.

“In the sixties you were excluded if you were black,” Judy Duncan says. “Now you’re excluded unless you’re rich.” Some reckon the two forms of exclusion are connected. Lyall Munro tells me, “The attitude lingers from the local government by-law in the 1950s that allowed segregation in this town. Nothing has changed for equality and liberty in Moree. It’s as though the Freedom Ride never happened.”

There’s growing support among legal experts for justice reinvestment as a way of keeping people out of prison and saving the criminal justice system money. The Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Reform Commission and the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee have all called on governments to promote the idea and to back it with funds. For the most part, governments have declined to do so.

Almost a decade after it started, Bourke’s Maranguka exercise recently received a federal grant awarded to community projects in far-flung places, although Bourke’s appears to have been the only grant for justice reinvestment. The funds were modest: $35 million shared among ten communities over five years.

The work in Moree and Mount Druitt relies almost entirely on the goodwill of private philanthropists. The backers comprise a diverse mix of family foundations, legal firms and finance firms. The Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation and the Bill and Patricia Ritchie Foundation are supporting work in both places. The Paul Ramsay Foundation is supporting Just Reinvest NSW and site-based work. The Charitable Foundation, a private fund chaired by Steve Killelea, is involved with Moree. Herbert Smith Freehills, a law firm, is funding the Bail Project in Moree and Mount Druitt. Other law firms help with pro bono work. IAG, an insurance company, is funding some work in Mount Druitt. The Dusseldorp Forum, another family foundation, and one of the first funders at Bourke, is still involved there.

Most philanthropists prefer to keep the amounts they’re giving confidential. At least two others have given in-kind support: Dell Computers, with help from the law firm King & Wood Mallesons, gave one hundred laptops to Moree so students could keep schoolwork going remotely when schools closed amid the pandemic.

After learning of the Bourke project three years ago, VivCourt Trading, a Sydney finance firm, met Sarah Hopkins, co-chair of Just Reinvest NSW, to learn more. “We were inspired,” says Rob Keldoulis, VivCourt’s founder. The firm now supports a community-led OzTag team for Aboriginal men in Mt Druitt and youth advocacy in relation to policing and the criminal justice system. It has also helped Just Reinvest NSW save on rent by extending the lease on premises in Potts Point, Sydney, that VivCourt was vacating. “They can create roots and it gives them certainty,” Keldoulis says. “If we can help scale justice reinvestment up this way, hopefully governments can get behind it.”

The Justice Reform Initiative, an advocacy group launched last year, is calling for similar reforms to the criminal justice system, but on a broader scale. Chaired by Robert Tickner, a former federal Aboriginal affairs minister, it argues that governments have long used imprisonment as a “default response to disadvantage.” In early May, the group launched their campaign in Tasmania where the state governor, Kate Warner, hosted a reception.

Tickner is impressed by work in Bourke, Moree and Mount Druitt: “The Aboriginal people have been forced to do the heavy lifting for criminal justice reform.” But, he says, the next crucial step is missing: government support.

To gauge local government support I visited the mayor of Moree Plains Shire Council, Katrina Humphries, at Fishabout, her seafood shop in East Moree. Humphries has a strong political pedigree: thirteen years as mayor, she is the daughter of the late Wal Murray, a former NSW National Party leader and deputy premier.

Fishabout seems to be Humphries’s unofficial office, making for more relaxed chats with visitors than a slightly intimidating council chamber. As I arrive, she’s finishing a meeting at a dining table with Craig Jenkins, director of the NSW government’s regional office for New England and the state’s northwest. Jenkins happens to be a Kamilaroi man who grew up in Moree, and is back in town to discuss two big projects.

“We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives”: the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council’s Lloyd Munro.

Moree will be the hub for one of six Special Activation Precincts the NSW government is planning across the state to encourage investment in regions. Some of these precincts, including Moree’s, also lie along the route of the proposed Inland Rail from Melbourne to Brisbane, one of Australia’s biggest infrastructure projects. Humphries expects the first freight train on this line to roll into Moree in 2024–25. The master plan for Moree’s precinct, launched in May, claims it will create jobs by supporting local industries in what it says is already the most productive grain region in Australia.

What are the prospects of its creating jobs for Kamilaroi people? “Enormous,” Humphries replies. Her council includes no Aboriginal members, but she says it aims for 20 per cent of its employees to be Aboriginal. I ask about disquiet that Moree pool’s high entry fee still makes many Kamilaroi people feel excluded. She explains that the shire’s three pools, including Moree’s, have combined “community service obligation” costs of about $700,000 a year. The $9 fee, she adds, is “not as expensive as a packet of cigarettes.”

Humphries doesn’t shy away from identifying Moree’s broader problems: petty crime; drugs, which she notes are not confined to the Aboriginal community; too few case workers for vulnerable young people; and too high rates of Aboriginal incarceration. Her response is straightforward. “I’m a capitalist,” she says. “I believe people need to work, earn their own money and be proud of that.”

It doesn’t sound like the sort of collegial approach that drives justice reinvestment, but Humphries supports that exercise nonetheless. She’s “very interested” by what’s happening in Bourke and says, “The way forward is that our Aboriginal community has to be run by Aboriginal people. We can’t keep doing things in a cycle that’s doomed.”

Craig Jenkins was unavailable for an interview, but people involved in Moree’s justice reinvestment project who met him in town say he seems “passionate” about the Aboriginal community’s benefiting from the Special Activation Precinct.

So far the signs look promising, according to Lloyd Munro, Lyall’s brother, who is vice-chairman of the Moree Local Aboriginal Land Council. The Munro family have played distinguished roles for at least two generations, fighting for Aboriginal rights in Moree and around Australia. Lloyd’s father, Lyall Munro Senior, received a state funeral in Moree last year to honour his work. As children, two of Lloyd’s brothers responded to the Freedom Ride. Lyall Munro Junior recalls joining a bus to town from the mission where they lived, “and the townspeople pelted us with stuff.”

Encouraged by Charles Perkins, Dan Munro was among the first Aboriginal children to get into the Moree pool. Noeline Briggs-Smith, a local Aboriginal researcher, has recorded Dan Munro’s account: “We were just nine-year-old kids and we were crying, we were upset, we didn’t know where we were going. But even when we got into the pool we were uncomfortable because we knew, as people, we weren’t supposed to be there. We were shamed, but the students took the shame away from us and let us know we were part of this world.”

Lloyd Munro wants justice reinvestment to be a further step in making Kamilaroi people “part of this world.” Through the Aboriginal lands council, he’s having regular talks with Inland Rail and Special Activation Precinct officials to make sure the Kamilaroi people are part of the story. About seven Kamilaroi people already work at a new village for Inland Rail workers built on Carmine Munro Avenue, a street named after his mother; it’s a small proportion of the 300-odd workers the village is designed to accommodate.

He agrees education is still a “key problem” for Kamilaroi teenagers. For this reason, he’s excited about a youth forum that Moree’s justice reinvestment participants are planning in November, followed by an education summit soon afterwards. “I don’t think Moree has ever had events like this. It will be a very significant chance to address underlying issues.”

Committees, boards and NGOs have long run young Aboriginal people’s lives, he says. Now “it’s time to get youth involved. They can come to these big gatherings. We want Australia to know how important it is for Aboriginal people to have a say about their own lives.” •

The publication of this article was supported by grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The post Finding the Moree way appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the 1901 Australian Constitution, s51(26) “the Parliament of Australia may make laws for the people of any race, other than the aboriginal people of any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws,” s127 “In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State, or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” On the 27th May 1967, 90.7% of Australian voters said yes to two questions in a referendum to change the Constitution: 1. Should the Commonwealth Government be allowed jurisdiction over aboriginal people, a right hitherto given to States? And 2. Should people of Aboriginal descent be counted in the national census? The petition to conduct the Referendum was officially launched in 1957 in the Sydney Town Hall by Pearl Gibbs and Jessie Street. The campaign took ten years and was itself the result of a long struggle by many people, black and white, to have basic human rights recognised for Indigenous people.

The inscription is inaccurate in three ways. First, it misquotes the Australian Constitution, which refers to “the aboriginal race of any State.” Second, it implies that Aboriginal people had not been under Commonwealth jurisdiction before the 1967 referendum, despite the fact that the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act determined whether an Aboriginal person was allowed to vote in federal elections. Third, it implies that section 127 of the Constitution had excluded Aboriginal people from the national census. In fact, Aboriginal people had been enumerated (incompletely) or estimated in every census since the Commonwealth began in 1901; what the repeal of section 127 enabled the Commonwealth to do was to take “Aboriginal” population data into account when apportioning federal electoral districts.

That an official memorial could mislead in these ways is symptomatic of the referendum’s mythical resonance. That’s not to say that “myth” is equivalent to “error”: we mythologise history because myths are good to think with. In arguing that the story of the 1967 referendum has become a potent national “myth,” I want to go beyond pointing out errors and examine how some of the myths of 1967 influence our discussion of constitutional recognition. I am more interested in myth-as-meaning than in myth-as-error.

Constitutions are necessarily esoteric, technical documents, but they are also — at times — objects of intense popular concern. Since the publication in January 2012 of the report of the expert panel on recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution, Australia’s debate about constitutional recognition has been animated by an assumption that a constitution should capture a nation’s collective self-understanding, its “narrative” and its values. As June Oscar, chief executive of the Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre, told a parliamentary inquiry in 2014, “For our assertions in the present to have lasting social impacts we have to be recognised and our past and present voices have to be woven into the overarching Australian narrative enshrined within the Constitution.” Two years earlier, prime minister Julia Gillard had referred to the Constitution as “our nation’s founding contract” (adding that “our people rightly guard it with care”), a “contract” among the peoples who comprise the nation.

In this way, the Constitution has significance beyond what it says, and such misunderstandings can be as meaningful to the voting public as understandings that are technically correct. Independently of constitutional reality, public references endow the 1967 referendum with implications for the conduct of government and citizens. As Labor MP Shayne Neumann remarked in 2014, the referendum “had an impact way beyond the wording that was changed.” The constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey has said something similar: “The constitutional amendments made in 1967 of themselves were not terribly significant. What was significant was the vote of the Australian people in terms of their recognition of Aboriginal people through that vote. Psychologically and historically the power of that vote was really significant.” For legal academic Rosalind Dixon, “the changes that were introduced in 1967 were practically largely insignificant” but “the symbolism of that referendum was overwhelmingly positive.”

The 1967 referendum changes had to mean something to those who voted. The campaign for a Yes vote had assiduously promoted such meanings as would make it attractive to delete certain words. For example, the official Yes pamphlet explained the deletion of words from section 51(26) as doing two things:

First it will remove words from our constitution that many people think are discriminatory against her Aboriginal people. Second, it will make it possible for the Commonwealth Parliament to make special laws for the people of the Aboriginal race wherever they may live, if the Parliament considers it necessary. [My emphasis]

According to the same pamphlet, removing section 127 was possible because of the increased administrative capacity of the Commonwealth to enumerate Aboriginal people, and desirable because “Our personal sense of justice, our commonsense, and our international reputation in a world in which racial issues are being highlighted every day, require that we get rid of this outmoded provision.”

As ways of making the two constitutional amendments meaningful and appealing, such arguments obviously worked. There was no official No pamphlet in 1967 because parliament had unanimously endorsed the bill to hold a referendum. Had there been a No case I would be able to quote alternative meanings: words designed to make the amendments unattractive to the voting public.

The Yes pamphlet illustrates an important point. In the course of popular engagement through referendums, constitutions must become meaningful — that is, they must gather implications and possibilities. They may become allegories of changes desired or feared. We will not understand the Australian Constitution if we confine our knowledge to what constitutional experts say about it; we must also attend to what Neumann referred to as “hearts and minds.” Such overbearing of fact by imagination is only what we should expect.

To be successful, a referendum to change the Constitution must be supported by a majority of all voters as well as a majority of voters in a majority of states. As long as the “four states” test is met, then a successful referendum requires an overall vote falling within the range of 50 per cent plus one to 100 per cent. Fifty per cent plus one of all voters is just as “successful” as 99 per cent, as long as supporters of the change are in the majority in four of the six states. But when they recall the 1967 referendum the protagonists of the constitutional recognition debate treat the size of the national majority vote as a measure of success.

With 90.7 per cent of the total vote, the Yes vote in 1967 was “the most successful referendum in Australian constitutional history,” according to George Brandis, speaking as attorney-general in 2013. What made it the “most successful,” according to Ken Wyatt in 2014, was that “Australia was strongly unified in making the change.” In many references to this “most successful” referendum, speakers have implied that a referendum would be a failure to the extent that its support fell short of 90 per cent. In February 2013, Greens senator Christine Milne supported deferring a referendum until after the next federal election because “we do not want to see it fail. We must build a consensus so that people get behind the next referendum as they got behind the 1967 referendum. We must make sure that the next referendum succeeds, and that is a challenge to everyone.” Speaking in the same parliamentary debate, Brandis hoped for a referendum “as successful as the 1967 referendum.”

Among those evoking the 1967 referendum as “the most successful” were Les Malezer (Aboriginal leader), Ken Wyatt (Liberal MP), Matt Thistlethwaite (Labor MP), Patrick Dodson (Labor senator) and Mohammad Al-Khafaji (then director of strategy and engagement, Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia). In 2015, Labor senator Nova Peris implied that the next referendum would be judged against the 1967 majority, as “a high-water mark in recognition of the first owners of the land.” “Our aim must be… to crown that success of half a century ago,” she added. In 2017, Labor’s Linda Burney saw “genius” in the campaign that produced the 1967 referendum’s high majority:

Whilst the questions that were put into the referendum did not, in many ways, seem ground-breaking, the campaigners were able to turn it into a decision for the Australian people about rights for first peoples and the unacceptable position that first peoples were in. That was the genius of the 1967 referendum.

Behind the assumption that a very high national vote was necessary for “success” was an appeal to “national unity.” Liberal MP Alan Tudge, like Christine Milne, used the word “consensus”:

We should seek a unanimous consensus but at least our aim should be something in the vicinity of what was achieved in 1967, when 90 per cent of the Australian public voted for change to the Constitution — a change that had such great moral significance.

Shortly after the expert panel released its report in 2012, opposition leader Tony Abbott urged: “What we have to try to do is recreate the fervour and the sense of unity that were captured in the 1967 constitutional change.” Gillard said that the referendum of 1967 “was a time of healing, uniting our nation in empathy and accord as never before.” She continued: “I want this constitutional amendment to be equally unifying, so I am determined that the referendum will be held only when the nation is ready. As the nation’s leaders and representatives, it is our job to do all we can to bring that unifying moment closer.”

For Liberal MP Kevin Andrews “the primary objective of a constitutional referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is to achieve a unifying moment for our nation, a moment similar to that of the 1967 referendum.” His party colleague Marise Payne hoped “to experience again the unity of 1967.” Bronwyn Bishop speculated that “a referendum recognising Aboriginal people as the first Australians could be a unifying and liberating moment for the nation, even surpassing the 1967 change or the national apology.” According to Labor’s Brian Mitchell, “the real import of the referendum in 1967 was… a universal acknowledgement that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were no longer ‘them,’ to be counted separately, but ‘us.’ We are one people.” A positive result, asserted Labor senator Claire Moore, “has to be across the whole nation. It cannot just be the majority of states.”

In other words, the phrase “most successful referendum” created meaning from a fact (that the Yes vote in 1967 was uniquely high): to be “successful,” the chosen form of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians must enable “national unity.”

Endorsing the May 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, Labor’s Anthony Albanese said, “We recognised the rights of Indigenous Australians to be citizens in the famous referendum in 1967, but we need to take the next step — it’s absolutely critical.” So, as well as being a “high-water mark,” a “landmark,” a “milestone” of national unity and a “turning point,” the 1967 referendum was also imagined as a “step” on what Tony Abbott in February 2013 called the nation’s “journey.”

George Brandis judged the 1967 referendum to be “the greatest single step ever taken towards the goal of achieving equal rights and status for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.” It is a popular expectation, according to Marise Payne, that a nation concerned with its Indigenous minority will take “steps” forward in its dealings with them. She reported that young Australians were looking back to the 1967 referendum and asking: “How is it possible that we are at this point and this next step has not been taken?” The independent MP Rob Oakeshott said in 2013 that “as hard and as challenging as constitutional recognition will be, it is from my perspective really just another important step. As 1967 was and as the ‘sorry’ speech was, this has the potential to be another step forward.”

In using the term “step,” it has been open to each speaker to name previous milestones. Some saw two. Abbott invited the acknowledgement “that there have already been two big milestones on our national journey to healing: the 1967 referendum and the national apology…” In February 2013, Nigel Scullion, later Indigenous affairs minister, saw agreement on what to ask at the next referendum as “the third step in our becoming a united nation. That is extremely important. It will follow from the 1967 referendum, which was so significant, and the apology, which had complete bipartisan support.”

On a later occasion, Abbott identified more moments when the nation had enacted its best self. The Yirrkala Bark petition (1963), he said:

was the beginning of this parliament’s consciousness that there were and are in this country Indigenous cultures and Indigenous peoples whose traditions should be respected. Since then we have seen the 1967 referendum, land rights legislation, native title legislation and the national apology. And who knows? If we are our best selves we may soon see Indigenous recognition in the Constitution.

Wyatt delineated even more steps on the nation’s “journey.” Recalling that prime minister John Howard had proposed in 1999 that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people be recognised in the Constitution, Wyatt continued:

It followed the journey of the 1967 referendum, which counted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the census. The next major event was the Paul Keating Redfern speech, in which he acknowledged the things of the past. Then we had Mabo and Wik. The next step in the journey was the apology from Kevin Rudd.

Would the next step also be the final step? Speaking in November 2013, Abbott thought that the next step, “within twelve months,” would be definitive. “Such an acknowledgement of Aboriginal people as the first Australians would complete our Constitution rather than change it.” When Abbott presented the next step as completion, he was echoing Gillard: “In 1967, the people of Australia sought restitution and repair, but their work was incomplete. Today a new generation dreams of finishing the job with the same idealism and the same means…”

Two Labor MPs presented the most elaborate version of this “step” account of the nation’s progress. Neumann called his steps “turning points,” starting with legislation “in the early sixties” that gave Aboriginal people the right to vote:

Then we had the 1967 referendum. The Commonwealth had the power to pass laws in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Then we had prime minister Keating’s Redfern speech, in which he acknowledged that we did the murders and brought the diseases. Remember that famous speech? Then we had the Mabo decision, native title, and the apology by Kevin Rudd. I think constitutional recognition can build on that; it is the next step.

Senator Malarndirri McCarthy listed the moments that, in her view, had led to the work she was doing as a member of a Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition:

The 1967 referendum, the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, Vincent Lingiari, the Racial Discrimination Act, the Barunga Statement, the Redfern Statement, Mabo, the Native Title Act, the Bringing Them Home report, the stolen generations and the Sorry Day marches, Closing the Gap and now constitutional recognition and the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

But it was also possible that a nation’s “steps” weren’t forward. Some feared that a referendum on recognition, if not well judged, would be a “setback,” reversing past advances. “We have certainly had advances over the past century, haven’t we,” said Peter Arndt, executive officer of the Brisbane Archdiocese Catholic Justice and Peace Commission, “with the 1967 referendum, the movement for reconciliation, the Mabo decision and the subsequent legislation in the parliament around native title.” So a defeated referendum “would be not only an enormous hurdle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people but a great setback for them in their hopes for achieving a place in the Australian community.” In similar vein, Wyatt reported in 2014 that “elders” had told Gillard’s expert panel in 2011:

that if the question is going to fail, do not put it, because we do not want failure in a referendum. They have a view that if we fail in this referendum then it will undo the importance of the 1967 referendum, it will undo the importance of all those other things that happened — the Keating Redfern speech, Mabo, Wik, the apology and reconciliation. They were saying that they would rather keep those as gains, and the way in which they walk with Australians now, as opposed to being set back. That is one of the messages that was very clear to us.

If memories of the 1967 referendum had expanded the meaning of “failure” to include a less than overwhelming “Yes” vote, then the referendum now being contemplated was imaginable as a risk, a misstep on the road to national unity.

What had happened in 1967 that made it a “step” in the right direction? One of the most frequent evocations of the 1967 referendum made use of the verb “count.” The Uluru Statement includes the words: “In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.” This is true if “counted” refers to one consequence of deleting section 127 from the Constitution: it removed a restriction on how Aboriginal population data could be used in making population-based administrative decisions, such as in the apportioning of federal electorates. But the phrase “in 1967 we were counted” is not true if it is taken to refer to the census itself, for the deletion of section 127 did not initiate the counting of Indigenous Australians in the census; their enumeration simply continued (though in the next census, in 1971, the “race” question no longer referred to fractions of descent, for reasons that had nothing to do with the repeal of section 127).

Thus the following statements about the 1967 referendum are factually incorrect:

[T]he section that stipulated that Indigenous Australians should not be counted in any census was removed… (Alan Tudge, Liberal)

[The referendum] gave the Commonwealth power to make laws for Aboriginal people resident in the states and to include all Aboriginal people in the national census. (Michael McCormack, National)

That referendum updated the Constitution to include Aboriginal people in the census. (Trish Crossin, Labor)

[The referendum] enabled Aboriginal people to be counted in the population, in the census of Australia. (Ken Wyatt)

To identify such statements as mere errors is to miss their mythical significance, which rests on the word “count.” To “count” is not only to “enumerate”; it is also to be treated as significant by an enumerator. In the Uluru Statement the word “count” is poetic: it nourishes the myth of 1967 that Indigenous Australians began to matter, to be worth counting. And once people matter, there are many ways they can then “count.” As Labor MP Sharon Claydon explained in 2017, the 1967 referendum was when:

our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia were finally granted the right not simply to be counted in our census but also to be counted in our history books and in the narrative of our nation and to get a say in contesting the space of colonial history that Australia was, for a long time, steeped in.

In the myth of 1967, “the census” is more; it is a metonym for the settler colonial nation-state and its mentalities. The 1967 referendum is thus remembered as the moment when the unrecognised were recognised. To “count” Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people meant that Australia was enlarging its vision, including those previously not recognised. For Linda Burney, the 1967 referendum “felt like citizenship. If you were denied the right to be counted in the census, then it felt like you did not really count anyhow, and that is very much the way in which it was seen.” The remembered pleasure of being recognised is a strong theme in Indigenous memories of that event.

Some witnesses appearing before recent parliamentary committees have used an allegory of humanisation to convey the transition from non-recognition to recognition. “I go back to 1967 when we were still classed as flora and fauna,” Bobby Nicholls, co-convenor of the Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group, told one committee. “I was seven years old in 1967,” said John Baxter, a council member of Reconciliation Victoria. “With the change to the referendum, I was no longer part of the fauna and flora; I was considered to be a human being.” June Oscar told the committee that in 1967 “discriminatory clauses were removed from the Australian Constitution which defined Indigenous people as flora and fauna.”

In a speech to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum, Malcolm Turnbull honoured this Aboriginal memory of 1967 by these words: “As Indigenous rights campaigner, the late Chicka Dixon, told his daughter Rhonda, who is here today: ‘The government counted everything. They counted the cattle, the cars, the TVs, but they didn’t count us. It’s like we were invisible.’” Turnbull’s shout-out to the Dixon family is probably better seen as a respectful gesture than as his lapsing into a factual “mistake” about section 127: he chose to deploy the allegorical equation of census enumeration with “recognition” of Aboriginal humanity. Turnbull honoured Dixon as one of those whom Harold Ludwick, on another occasion, described as “the movers and shakers that changed the past in 1967” — elders who “were not counted as part of the community before the 1967 referendum, but now they have a voice and they want to be heard.”

Since Julia Gillard appointed the expert panel in December 2010, Australians have been debating whether and how to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian Constitution. The public has been invited by figures from across the political spectrum to imagine the Constitution as a statement of national ethos. In such imagining, the 1967 referendum has been an emblematic event, recalled by some as the moment when the dehumanised were recognised as human, for at last they (were) counted. The high Yes vote in the 1967 referendum has been made to signify that this act of recognition was performed by the entire nation, an affirmation of national unity. The next referendum is evoked as a “step” on a progressive journey — perhaps the final step in reconciliation — but only if it is again an act of national unity. Referendum “success” has thus been exorbitantly redefined as “consensus.”

The aspiration to replicate the “consensus” of 1967 has become a caution against accepting the Uluru Statement’s demand for a referendum to oblige the Commonwealth to create a Voice to Parliament. “There is still no clear consensus proposal at this stage which would suggest mainstream support in the Indigenous community or elsewhere,” was prime minister Scott Morrison’s justification on 18 March this year for his refusal to commit to a referendum on the Voice. That was “a fair enough call,” Noel Pearson commented a few days later. “An appropriate question needs to be settled by consensus and put to the quiet Australians to decide at a referendum.”

Words like those make the push for a Voice hostage to the myth of the 1967 referendum. In that way, the memory of 1967 as a moment of national unity that must be replicated burdens the debate about the Voice to Parliament, to the benefit of those arguing for something less. •

The post The 1967 referendum: inspiration or burden? appeared first on Inside Story.

“In 2017, University of Queensland professor Tamara Walsh obtained data showing about one in four of all adults and more than 40 per cent of children charged with public nuisance were Indigenous.”

— Michael McGowan and Christopher Knaus, “‘Essentially a Cover-up’: Why It’s So Hard to Measure the Over-Policing of Indigenous Australians,” Guardian, 13 June 2020

1.

When a marginalised person writes, it is not art.

When a marginalised person writes, it is ethnography.

When a marginalised person writes, it is “truth-telling.” It is “bearing witness.”

When a marginalised person writes, their writing is asked to bear a load it cannot see or witness: its invalidation as art.

2.

Veronica Gorrie writes as a firsthand observer.

In the police force, the firsthand observer, the witness, is known as the informant (as in an informant’s statement). This is their individual narrative — their experience of an event.

The more firsthand this account, the more credible it will be as evidence.

3.

During her time in the police force, Gorrie writes, police officers would monitor each other. “It is common knowledge within the job that police do unauthorised checks on people: their neighbours, their mates, their family, and even each other. One time when I was in the watchhouse, and there was nobody in the cells or pods, one of my mates was placing bets on who had the cleanest traffic record. There were about five of us, and he ran all our names through the system.”

4.

Surveillance extends outward from the self, toward one’s family and friends — and then back, eventually, to the individual cop.

5.

Meyne Wyatt, actor, on ABC TV’s Q&A.

Taking on the role of informant creates a bind. If the Aboriginal author is always the lone witness — Adam Goodes, “I heard what I heard”; Shareena Clanton, “my experience on Neighbours”; Meyne Wyatt, Veronica Gorrie, the this I believe to be true — what then?

Then they are always able to be disbelieved.

Maybe it never happened.

Maybe it was one bad experience.

6.

We like a yarn in Australia. Especially a yarn that speaks to us.

Where does that put those yarns that are always bearing witness and truth-telling? That are ethnographic, or anthropological, or political?

The margins are full of exotic voices that can be ignored: that’s why we call them “margins.” They are “voices,” things “we should hear.” They are “necessary” or “urgent.” They are urgent because nothing ever changes. There is no completion. Their universality, if granted, is given only in terms of generalised anonymity: world music, world literature.

They are not art. They are not writers. They are not neutral, much less universal.

They are ignorable.

7.

Even if the witness joins others, makes a show of solidarity, they can always be atomised and set apart from each other: another lone voice. Another representative.

Poor bugger them.

8.

Prison abolition. The idea that prisons should not exist. Because we have material desires: for safety, for life, for time and space. And the carceral system is dead time, dead space. It is not regenerative. The reasons for why harm occurs are never understood or investigated.

I do not believe that every victim needs or wants “healing” or “understanding.” Some may.

But the carceral system is a circle of harmful effects — it feeds on harm, it causes harm and, in the end, it does little to reduce harm.

9.

As I write, I listen to KRS-One. The officer of KRS-One’s lyrics — officerofficerofficer, the one who holds office, the person in charge, who is charged with oversight — transforms into the overseer: the person who deserves, demands, special pleading.

Life giver, life taker.

Overseeroverseeroverseer.

10.

In The Fire Next Time (1963), James Baldwin writes: “I might have pitied [the police] if I had not found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held power and what they were like when you held the power.”

11.

Late in Black and Blue, Veronica Gorrie describes, two years into her time as an officer, a new policy of random breath tests for police. “Have a guess,” she says, “who was the first cop that had their breath tested for alcohol? Yep, me — not so random after all. Not only do police racially profile their arrests, it became evident that they also racially profile minority police officers — black cops.”

12.

The question of abolition, of an end to policing, is intersectional. The police are often first responders. Having responded, they find themselves criminalising people. Lifting the vulnerable up, up the justice chain.

13.

Contemporary Australian policing has its origins (and note the progenitive noun) in the paternalism underpinning colonisation. It picked up where the “Irish Model” left off. A sequel to a film set in that colony during the nineteenth century. No need for Officer Friendly or Constable Care when your raison d’être is suppressing dissent.

And so the police were placed in military-style barracks, set against the community, under a highly centralised and hierarchical chain of command.

14.

Chris Owen’s historical study of policing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, Every Mother’s Son Is Guilty, shows how police attitudes towards First Nations were premised on two simple, ongoing, axioms: that they were inferior to whites, and that they were, a priori, criminal.

15.

Are Aboriginal cells simply DNA or are they passed down over generations — like prisons, like cells?

16.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalised populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

— Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, 12 June 2020

17.

Dear Mr Morrison, we have tried importing our issues from overseas, but we cannot improve on the homegrown product. We would only be importing variants of local brands. Since invasion, First Nations who disobeyed the laws of the mission and colonial overseer have been criminalised. The missions showed little appreciation of First Nations’ lore and protocol; and so the prisons quickly filled with mob, and the bad relationship between cops and Blacks, its intergenerational institutionalisation — well, we live with that today.

18.

Much of what Gorrie describes in her day-to-day life as a police officer is not only routine but comically tedious. The banality is cruel, and banally so — officers running each other’s number plates, traffic patrols looking for any excuse to issue infringement notices. Once a month there is revenue raising. Quotas for roadside breath tests. The wizened Bruce Willis image of film and TV, cops doing the good work of catching the killer, stopping the heist, accounts for little of police business. Gorrie recounts being broke — too broke to pay bills, to buy her children Christmas presents, to pay rent — and then being tasked with serving notices of eviction. She might, in another life, have been served or pulled over by someone much like herself, were she not now sitting  in the cop car. Tenants’ possessions are placed in storage (few having left their properties within the fourteen-day notice period) and tenants foot the bill. Unpaid bills result in goods being sold and the profit passed on to the landlord — and how many who cannot afford rent suddenly discover that they can afford transport and storage costs? “Basically, I was kicking people out,” Gorrie notes.

19.

“My house, my rules”: sounds like your parents, doesn’t it? Policing as paternal frontline — with First Nations cast as children. Surrogate mum and dad, perennial overseers, police were psychologically primed for frontier expeditions, pastoral land grabs, and the breaking up of Aboriginal families.

A land grab is not directly comparable to taking someone’s house — but nor is the through-line impossible to recognise.

20.

Police today still play a role in removing First Nations children from families. The Family Is Culture report in 2019 noted significant concerns about the use of police during removals, saying: “When police are used for removal, especially riot police, this has historical continuity.”

21.

I received a job to attend an address to conduct a welfare check on three young children who were in the care of their mother. The job had been placed by the Department of Families (now the Child Safety Department), which had received complaints of neglect, and wanted welfare to check on the kids. Apparently, department social workers had been attending the address for weeks, but each time, the mother and children were not home. According to legislation, if the department is unable to conduct their assessment, then police are able to, and can remove children if deemed necessary…

The stolen generation. How ironic that during that bleak period, white people were removing black children, and here I was: a black police officer removing white children.

— Veronica Gorrie, Black and Blue

22.

I remember talking to a member of the force as a criminal defence lawyer; he told me that often those in community care were first to call the cops out. There is a reliance on police to do everything — including many things they are neither prepared nor qualified to do.

23.

There is much police are not equipped to do, Gorrie suggests. Like responding to the cops that break and enter into their head, patrolling their thoughts after-hours. Gorrie describes a “downhill spiral,” the fear of becoming like “the ones that flash their badges when they are off duty, on their own little power trips.” She tells of a female cop who, out walking at a park, sees a man approach her with two unleashed dogs. The cop lectures him about the rules of the park, threatening to act if he does not leash the dogs.

“The man identified himself as an inspector — technically, her superior. Not long after this, she was transferred out of the district.”

24.

The author outside the Tote Hotel, Collingwood, June 2020.

I got a cop in my head and he stay on the beat
On duty 24 hours every day of the week
And when he blow his little whistle, I restrict myself
And when I’m walking in New York, I stop and frisk myself
And when it’s time to make arrests, I don’t resist myself
Cos if I saw me in a line-up, I might pick myself

— Open Mike Eagle, “Police Myself”

25.

During a rotation in the traffic branch, Gorrie intercepts a vehicle for failing to stop at a stop sign. The driver is rushing to hospital. His brother is dying.

“Instead of being empathetic towards the driver and letting him off with a warning, I issued him an infringement notice.”

26.

Another memory (and isn’t this what memories are for — to haunt us, to remind us, until we can’t remember a time before them?): a sex worker — the only one Gorrie knew in her district — late twenties, addicted to heroin.

“I was working a shift with another female officer when I saw her standing on the corner. She was so affected by drugs that as we pulled up to the roundabout, she got in the back seat of the police vehicle and asked if we wanted her services.” Rather than assist, Gorrie issues her with a Notice to Appear in court.

“Shortly after, she hung herself in the garage of a friend’s place she was staying at. I’ve had to live with my actions ever since.”

27.

Since early colonisation police have been empowered to isolate and confine Aboriginal people on public health grounds. Historically, a diagnosis of syphilis or leprosy could be used (cop as qualified doctor); today, mental unwellness or inebriation are common justifications (cop as psychologist, as AA coach).

28.

After being diagnosed by policemen as having suspected venereal diseases people were rounded up, many placed in chains, and taken to the islands.

This was facilitated by the Aboriginal Act of 1905.

The islands’ facilities were inadequate, people had no contact with their families back home, and they were made to undergo experimental medical treatments.

Academics have said about 40 per cent of those confined never returned home.

— Karen Michelmore, “The ugly past of Australia’s ‘lock hospitals’ on Bernier and Dorre Islands slowly revealed,” ABC, 19 December 2018

Then, many taken to lock-up hospitals for “venereal disease” never made it home.

Now, many taken to lock-ups for suspected inebriation will never make it home.

29.

Finally, the few material traces of that past are slowly erased, and the future remnants will no longer carry the stamp of the colonized group. The few statues which decorate the city represent (with incredible scorn for the colonized who pass by them every day) the great deeds of colonization. The buildings are patterned after the colonizer’s own favorite designs; the same is true of the street names, which recall the faraway provinces from which he came.

— Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

30.

The WA government has said it is the first in Australia to acknowledge the history of lock-up hospitals. It is funding a statue to be built near One Mile Jetty in Carnarvon, where people were loaded onto boats bound for the islands.

31.

Q&A with Veronica Gorrie, based on page 224 of Black and Blue.

Fry: Tell us about your experience of policing?

Gorrie: Policing fucked me up big time.

Fry: How?

Gorrie: I spent half my time in the job educating other cops about my culture, and the other half explaining the reasons I became a sworn police officer and not a police liaison officer. Not to mention the shit I put up with from other officers. You either conform to become one of them and allow yourself to be a part of the racist system and their racist ideologies about your own people, or you are in a constant battle, defending yourself.

Fry: What are things like now?

Gorrie: I knew a lot of cops didn’t like me because I’m Black, and truth be told, I didn’t like them either. The friends I did make during my time — well, I don’t have any contact with them anymore.

32.

All effectiveness and social dynamics, on the other hand, seem monopolized by the colonizer’s institutions. If the colonized needs help, it is to them that he applies. If he does something wrong, it is by them that he is punished.

— Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized

33.

When I hear that we can build other ways of responding to harms in our society, that trained “community care workers” could do mental health checks if someone needs help, I wonder who would train them not to call the police, who will kill the cop in their head.

The same can be said for restorative justice as an alternative to prison — it’s useful, there could be more of it, but what about instances where restorative justice is inadequate? Where the victims don’t want restoration? Where even the abolitionists have lost their taste for it?

34.

Part of the answer, I think, lies in distinguishing the short- from the long-term. There are times when any one of us might turn to cops as part of an immediate need, say, to protect people from violence, or help those who are vulnerable. It is possible to do this work while remaining focused on a long-term goal of abolition; of working towards that point where people are able to feel safer not relying on the police to step in and tackle every conceivable form of conflict or distress. To reach a point where communities are equipped to resolve things.

35.

And yet, and yet… the criminalisation of misidentified victims of family violence, the growing ranks of gender nonconforming people in prisons, the criminalisation of Black, Indigenous, migrant, trans, homeless communities…

36.

Throughout her book Veronica Gorrie describes the second job she works alongside being a cop: caring for her children. They, in turn, care for her; she describes having her arm rubbed while talking to her oldest child about her day.

She worries if she is traumatising them.

37.

I wonder how much of the work of building alternatives to policing and incarceration — which is often care work, gendered work — is left to others to envision. Black and Blue is filled with the public-facing life-and-death action of policing. Yet there is something equally disturbing about the scene Gorrie describes of her child massaging her arm: the need to care for each other, to belong to each other. This ordinary emotional support Gorrie gives her children, and which they give to her, embodies something of the abolitionist ideal. It is this care that Gorrie comes to believe in after policing — while policing, even. It is the work that makes all other work possible: the interdependence, resilience and vulnerability she finds in her relationship with her family, her parents, her partner, her children.

38.

Both of Gorrie’s jobs are twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: that of being a mother, and that of being a cop.

39.

Perhaps it is not just a matter of temporality, but practical considerations, and the question of alternatives: if someone is facing deportation or violence from their partner, what do they need? As a criminal lawyer, I was focused on the immediate, on what a person needed to reduce harm or to access safety. I have no doubt that Gorrie, as a cop, felt similarly bound. The contextual nature of the struggles and decisions involved in them raises the question of allyship with your own values: allyship as verb, as being about what we do and how we do it, not some static thing you leave hanging in the dresser, to be taken down and worn every once in a while.

Forget the static analysis and fixed categories that fossilise into rigid oppressed/ally categories. Not who is more oppressed, but how oppression — a relational and contextual thing — is always moving, manifesting throughout our lives in different ways. It is not a quantity or a stock, a zero-sum game (something to be lost or won, gained or shed). It is amorphous. Fluid. It involves questions of agency, and self-determination: what does that person need? Are there effective alternatives? We owe ethical, consensual relationships to everyone we know. In the moment, does the person in front of us need to engage with state apparatus in order to immediately reduce their risk of harm or to access safety? Perhaps some might feel that any reliance on the systems we inherit gives them power. That it helps to validate them. But there are choices to be made in the moment; and it is always possible that one choice, whatever its limitations, increases the possibility of freedom, an expansion in the horizon of alternatives. We should always ask: is this choice widening that horizon? Or is it incarceration and control in another guise?

40.

This is the freedom I have faith in. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Killing the cop in your head appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite that inauspicious beginning, truth commissions became more frequent and better known during the 1980s, when the concept was picked up by Latin American states moving away from military dictatorship. In these cases, a truth-telling process was combined with amnesties or non-prosecution agreements designed to safeguard the transition to civil rule.

From that point on, the model was adapted and applied around the world by governments dealing with recent large-scale atrocities or conflict as part of their transition to democracy. They increasingly came to be seen as a critical mechanism for tackling (and redressing) human rights violations while restoring social and institutional trust. By 2016, at least forty national truth commissions had been set up, and by one count more than seventy.

To that number can now be added Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission (named for the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba word for “truth”), Australia’s first comprehensive process of truth-telling. The commission was foreshadowed last year, and last week the state government and the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria filled in the detail. We now know that the process will be led by five commissioners and be given the powers of a royal commission, including the power to compel evidence under oath.

Pragmatically, truth commissions focus on enlarging the historical record rather than assigning criminal guilt. In circumstances where criminal trials may not be possible, gathering the truth can be a means of dealing with the past in order to change the future. Morally and politically, they are a procedurally flexible venue for victims to “tell their stories and have them officially acknowledged.”

The best-known example is the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was given the job of investigating human rights abuses under the apartheid regime. Reflecting the delicate political balance at the time, the commission was given the power to grant amnesties to perpetrators who confessed their crimes. Its hearings were broadcast live to an engrossed nation.

The Yoo-rrook Justice Commission has been compared to the South African commission, but it will be very different. Because truth commissions have emerged in states shaking off authoritarian rule, they have usually ignored Indigenous peoples and their perspectives. Only in recent years — in Canada, Sweden, Finland and Norway — have abuses against Indigenous peoples been a focus.

The Victorian commission will face three key challenges. First, because truth commissions are designed to reconcile a divided or conflicted society, they are often under pressure to affirm goals of national unity. There is nothing inherently wrong with this — all societies require common bonds of solidarity — but it shouldn’t be a reason for the commission to exclude points of view outside the political mainstream, including from Aboriginal Victorians who question the legitimacy of the state and federal governments.

Second, truth commissions are often set up by new governments to investigate human rights abuses under a previous regime. They aim to draw a line under human rights violations committed in the “past.” But this is not always possible. As the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody found in 1991, “So much of the Aboriginal people’s current circumstances, and the patterns of interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal society, are a direct consequence of their experience of colonialism and, indeed, of the recent past.”

In Australia, a truth-telling process should do more than provide a richer understanding of Australia’s past — though that is of course one important outcome. Rather, it should “draw history into the present.” The original injustice may be historical, but it continues to operate today in the “very structure” of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, grounding a contemporary and prospective claim for justice.

Third, truth commissions’ traditional focus on individual human rights violations may not be appropriate in Victoria, where most perpetrators of violence are likely to have died. More importantly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples see little distinction between massacres, other individual acts of violence, and the broader structural forces that shape law, policy and attitudes that gave rise to and encouraged that violence. A truth-telling process can help to identify those connections for non-Indigenous Australians.

It’s also important to remember, as Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis have highlighted, that truth-telling “has not been absent in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.” The deaths in custody royal commission and the Bringing Them Home report on the stolen generations are two significant and well-publicised inquiries into particular kinds of abuse.

In preparing Bringing Them Home, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conducted hearings in every capital city across the continent and in many regional centres. It heard public and private testimony from Indigenous organisations, governments, church groups, foster parents and individuals, including 535 Indigenous people who had been forcibly taken from their families and communities. Its hearings undoubtedly penetrated public consciousness and, as lawyer Anne Orford writes, its report was “widely read, with sixty thousand copies purchased in the first year of its release alone.”

But neither that inquiry nor the commission on deaths in custody led to significant legal reform. The Howard government dismissed the Bringing Them Home report’s call for an official apology and compensation, and even after prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised in 2008 no national compensation scheme was established.

Even today, the majority of the deaths in custody royal commission’s recommendations have yet to be implemented. Victoria only decriminalised public drunkenness — a key recommendation — this year, following the death in custody of Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day. Last week alone, three Indigenous people died in custody, bringing the total number of such deaths to more than 440 since the commission handed in its report. What value is another report if it leads nowhere?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people rightly believe that truth must lead to structural reform. Whether the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission will be able to achieve this goal isn’t yet clear, but there are promising signs. The commission was developed in partnership with the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, and forms part of the Victorian government’s commitment to negotiating treaties with Aboriginal Nations across the state. The First Peoples’ Assembly could also help guide the state government’s response to the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission’s recommendations. If this works, truth may lead to structural reform.

Victoria’s commission can also learn from truth-telling processes in other settler countries. Between 2008 and 2015, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented the history and legacy of the Canadian Indian Residential Schools system. As happened in Australia, First Nations children had been forcibly removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools run by the government and churches. The Canadian commission gathered testimony from almost 7000 survivors and witnesses across the country. It held seven four-day national events to raise public awareness, and invited school students to attend and learn more about their country’s history. Recognising that cultural change is needed for lasting institutional reform, the commission also issued ninety-four “calls to action” aimed at redressing the “legacy of residential schools and advanc[ing] the process of Canadian reconciliation.”

Nationally, the Victorian announcement increases pressure on the federal government to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The statement called for three steps to empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: a First Nations Voice embedded in the Australian Constitution; the creation of a Makarrata Commission; and a process of agreement-making and truth-telling supervised by the Makarrata Commission. The sequence is important. Without a Voice, government may decide that the legal reforms that emerge from the truth-telling process are too difficult or not sufficiently pressing.

Although the federal government’s opposition to a First Nations Voice has softened, it remains reluctant to entrench it in the Constitution. Without that constitutional backing, it will struggle to be effective, and truth-telling processes may not lead to the reform and reparation necessary to redress past wrongs. •

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Among the self-inventors were poet Mary Gilmore and ethnographer Daisy Bates. Hungry for recognition, these women adjusted the facts so as to become living legends.

Mary Gilmore’s biographer, W.H. Wilde, author of Courage a Grace (1988), came close to giving up on his subject because she so often strayed from the truth. Her habit of placing herself at the centre of national events she hadn’t witnessed was disturbing, as was her proprietorial attitude towards Henry Lawson. Claiming to have rejected Lawson’s love, she represented herself as his literary mentor. The strain of Wilde’s adjustment to his wayward subject can be seen in the pages he devotes to “Dame Mary’s fabrications.”

Ben Hall, the bushranger Gilmore claimed had rocked her cradle, was shot three months before she was born. Her father wasn’t the heir to a baronetcy. In her self-promoting essay “Henry Lawson and I,” she listed basic skills in which she had instructed a seemingly unlettered Lawson, claims easily demolished by the record of all that he had accomplished before he met her.

Having done his biographer’s duty in patient sleuthing, Wilde was left to question Mary Gilmore’s motives. Talking about his problems to poet and academic Dorothy Green, he found ways to understand his subject’s self-inventions. Green saw Gilmore as “a neglected woman” whose letters show that, for all the acclaim she had won, she lacked recognition of her femininity or her intellect. “To turn a woman into an Earth Mother figure,” wrote Green, “to transform her into bronze in her own lifetime… can obscure the reality of the woman as effectively as overt neglect.”

Mary Gilmore’s fabrications are brought to mind by a splendid new biography of Gilmore’s contemporary, Daisy Bates. The fantasies of Gilmore’s “Henry Lawson and I” were harmless enough. Those of Daisy Bates, in My Natives and I, were dangerous and destructive.

Eleanor Hogan, the author of Into the Loneliness, interprets Daisy Bates through one of Bates’s disciples, the writer, journalist and intrepid traveller Ernestine Hill. Their relationship began in adulation, moved into doubt, conflict and betrayal, and ended in a renewal of the protectiveness that the Bates legend inspired.

Hogan asks her readers to travel with Bates and Hill into “the Great Australian Loneliness,” where she is herself the shadowy third in the journeyings she describes. As a shrewd investigator, she questions Ernestine Hill’s assessment of Bates’s work with the Aborigines and her contribution to the myth of “Kabbarli,” their benign grandmother figure. In what might seem a digression, she also discusses her own experience as a sole traveller across the Nullarbor. She speaks of the invisibility of a forty-something single woman. Feeling little in common with the grey nomad couples she encounters, Hogan found that the upside of invisibility is “a sense of weightlessness, the freedom to roam about and observe other people, other places.” Bates, Hill and Hogan all welcomed the embrace of solitude.

When Ernestine Hill first met Daisy Bates in 1932, Hill was in search of a good story to sell to the Adelaide Advertiser and other newspapers. For Bates, this “quick and clever journalist” seemed to have dropped from the skies to organise her rambling memoirs into a readable series of newspaper articles.

Hill was drawn to the eccentric, charismatic Bates, who showed the fragility of her seventy years. Carrying a black umbrella, dressed in a tight-waisted dark serge suit, and wearing a panama hat, veil, tie and gloves, Bates never compromised the formality of the period in which she had been brought up. Living in her own tent, pitched beside Aboriginal camps, she made voluminous notes on tribal languages and customs. Although she was never given the official recognition she coveted, she won the title of Kabbarli or “Grandmother” to the Aboriginal people. Sensing a useful ally, she made Ernestine Hill her prophet.

Hill’s first article on Bates was heedless and deeply offensive. The Sunday Sun published “Cannibalism on East-West” with a subheading “Black Baby Saved from Being Eaten.” To Hill’s shame, the family “feast” she described was a fantasy. The suspect mother reappeared at the camp carrying her “bouncing baby boy.” Hill had to backtrack and to become more wary of Bates’s stories. With such an appalling start, how was it that the alliance between Bates and Hill persisted? More important, how could the Indigenous people tolerate Bates’s presence in their lives?

Part of the answer to the first question lies in the similarities between the two women’s life stories. Both had created a past to suit a solitary life. Bates claimed to belong to a privileged landowning Protestant Ascendancy family in Ireland. Her family home was in fact her father’s bootmaker’s shop in a main street tenement, and she blotted out her Catholic schooling as a “charity” pupil. When her short-lived marriage to the celebrated “Breaker” Morant ended, she met another spectacular horseman, Jack Bates, and had a son. When Bates departed, Daisy signed the contract for a third marriage, which was soon over.

Three failed marriages, two of them bigamous, must have been humiliating. But her subsequent life in the desert freed her from Victorian respectability and gave her status. Her son was collateral damage.

Ernestine Hemmings had an affinity with desert places. Daughter of restless parents who moved between Mackay and Thursday Island in her early childhood, she was convent-educated in Brisbane. After this intelligent, enterprising young woman began working for Smith’s Weekly in Sydney, she met Robert Clyde Packer, founder of the Packer media industry, with whom she had a son, Robert, in 1924. For the sake of respectability, she invented a husband and took the name of Hill. Packer died without making provision for her or their child. The experience — a lonely ordeal for Ernestine — appears to have been crucial in her later life as a freelance journalist. It led her to the desert and to Daisy Bates.

From their first meeting, Bates exploited Hill. Most of the work for the book that turned Bates into a living legend was done by Hill but never acknowledged. The Passing of the Aborigines was a huge success when it appeared in book form in 1938. As a self-taught ethnologist, Bates had a good deal to offer. Her years of observation, turned into messy notes, had obvious value, but without the order and clarity that Hill brought to the enterprise it is unlikely that any publisher would have been interested. As its title indicates, Bates and Hill thought of the Indigenous people as a dying race. Bates’s chosen mission was to smooth their passing and to keep a record of how they had lived. This appealed to many white people: whatever sense of guilt they might have felt for invasion and exploitation could be transformed into a self-sedating pity.

The pattern that emerges as Hogan examines the relationship between Bates and the Aboriginal people is deeply damaging to the idea of a protective Kabbarli figure. Bates had a horror of miscegenation. Did she collaborate with police to remove mixed-race children from their families? Hogan finds the evidence “patchy and inconclusive” but concludes that Bates’s writings about racial purity and her “notions about Aboriginal women killing their children” helped create a public ethos that sanctioned child removal.

Consistently self-promoting, Bates doesn’t deserve the reputation she won from her long years in the desert. Hill must bear responsibility for colluding with her, and so must the newspapers that carried Bates’s stories of cannibalism. Eventually, Hill recognised the wrong done by the white invaders but she could never cut herself free from Bates.

Hogan was astonished to find that the people of Oldea nevertheless loved and protected Bates. Puzzling over Hill’s capacity to forgive Bates for stealing her literary work, Hogan found an analogy in the Aborigines’ attitude to their duplicitous Kabbarli. Like other white women, Daisy Bates claimed the central role of spokesperson and protector. Look closer, Hogan suggests, and you find a reversal of roles. Daisy was the needy child, not the kindly grandmother.

Ernestine Hill, late in life, had a vision of mutuality between the two peoples. And Hogan, self-described as “more misfit than missionary” in her journeyings, experienced warmth and openness in her relations with Aborigines. Could we be friends, she asked, in spite of our history? At the least, Hogan believes, Daisy Bates should be remembered for what her story reveals about how European women related to Aboriginal people. Expunge her from the record as a self-seeking racist and we will be evading much that should be faced and understood.

Shrewd and forthright in her judgements, Eleanor Hogan isn’t punitive. Like Bates and Hill, she responds to the strange beauty of the desert landscape. Her book offers a superb portrait of the undeserving Daisy Bates and the deeply compromised Ernestine Hill. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Henry Reynolds’s Truth-telling argues that neither in its legal doctrines nor in its official public memory has Australia come to terms with the historical scholarship that narrates Australian history as violent invasion and land theft on a massive scale. Colonial sovereignty is Reynolds’s main topic in the first half of the book. Reviewing the words and actions of James Cook in 1770 and instructions given to Arthur Phillip in 1786, he depicts “an astonishing assertion of sovereignty that had almost no credibility in international law.” From 1788, “the gap between law and reality, law and colonial experience, grew progressively wider” as the colonists encountered what many admitted was an ordered Indigenous society. Reynolds piles up quote after quote demonstrating that Aboriginal society “captured the attention of curious settlers” — not least when Aboriginal people objected violently to the newcomers’ treating the land as their own.

Reynolds points to nineteenth-century moments in which the British government admitted that Indigenous Australians were proprietors — an accommodation to reality made by imperial policy in other parts of the British Empire. In Australia, however, the British failed to turn that recognition into policies that preserved any Indigenous property rights, and this failure recurred as the colonists assumed “responsible government” in the 1850s and then federated as an independent nation in 1901. “Land rights” didn’t gain political traction until the last third of the twentieth century, and in 1992 the common law (articulated by the High Court) recognised that all of Australia had once been Indigenous property and that some portions remained under “native title.”

As Reynolds has pointed out before, to acknowledge “property” is one thing, to admit Indigenous “sovereignty” is another. Australian law has never worked out what to say about Indigenous sovereignty: for the High Court, sovereignty is a question beyond “municipal” jurisdiction. Australian law has merely affirmed and reaffirmed that Indigenous Australians are subjects of the imposed sovereign. Their “protected” status should at least have shielded Indigenous Australians from harm, but as Reynolds abundantly illustrates, the colonial sovereign was often negligent, often mistaken in its practices of protection, and often fearfully homicidal.

Because Reynolds doesn’t review what colonial policies have been effectively ameliorative, he risks not connecting with readers who believe that — notwithstanding Australia’s terrible past — good policy and law have become possible, without any change in “sovereignty.” He wants Australia to consider “some form of surviving, subsidiary, Indigenous sovereignty.”

Had he explored what could be practised as “sovereignty” in the early twenty-first century he might have evaluated the Indigenous Land Use Agreements signed under the Native Title Act, for some believe them to be regional “treaties.” Would Reynolds agree? His book focuses on harms and failures, and that is salutary; but he does not tell us what “protections” have been beneficial to Indigenous Australians. Few historians acknowledge that the twentieth-century recovery of the Indigenous population is a benefit of protective colonial authority, constituting the very peoples that now assert sovereignty. Perhaps “protection” (in the wider sense of ameliorative law and policy) has some achievements worth defending? Are Closing the Gap and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament causes worth fighting for?

Indigenous sovereignty is present in this book more as a defeated moral principle than as a feasible legal and political project. When Reynolds commends the Uluru Statement, it is for asserting Indigenous Australians’ “ancient sovereignty,” but how is that “ancient” thing now to “shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’? Answering that question would commit us to evaluating what we are now doing right in contemporary law and public policy, but Truth-telling is almost entirely concerned with the damage we’ve done.

“Truth-telling” is a civic mission to which any historian can sign up; it’s what we are paid to do. Because the truth of Australia’s past is infinite, selecting exemplary stories will be necessary, and so “truth-telling” enjoined by the Uluru Statement may start to form a “canon.” (“Canon” is Megan Davis’s word — no doubt carefully chosen — when she commends the story that Mark McKenna’s book tells.) What would Reynolds put in that canon? Which truths does he want Australians to learn to live with?

Reynolds makes two big points. He reminds us that colonial conquest affected Indigenous Australians region by region — that is to say “nation” by “nation.” At Federation, much of the territory deemed “Australia” still wasn’t under effective colonial occupation; much of the continent was under undiminished Aboriginal sovereignty and much was shared between pastoralists and Aboriginal people figuring out how to live with thinly scattered newcomers. He admits to being uncertain about the legal implications of this fact. The question “When was colonial sovereignty?” has no obvious answer. For those considering such governance problems as how to structure “the Voice,” Reynolds’s reminder that colonial occupation was a two-century sequence of steps has enormous implications, as it is one of the enduring sources of Indigenous Australia’s regional differentiation.

As well, Reynolds argues that the failure to recognise Indigenous sovereignties made violence inevitable as colonial occupation extended. Reminding us how violent that process was, he gives estimates from recent research by others — particularly about Queensland and its Native Mounted Police. What will be the effect on “the national story” of revealing that perhaps 40,000 Aboriginal people were slain by other Aboriginal people licensed and paid by the Crown? Reynolds wants to add the violent conquest of Australia to Australia’s military heritage as “our most important war.” I would add: “and the most morally complex war we have ever tried to commemorate.”

Indeed, the magnitude of Indigenous complicity makes new narrative demands for which the authors and supporters of the Uluru Statement may not yet be prepared. Neither Anzac orthodoxy nor revisionist history has so far imagined “patriotism” so tragically. “Truth-telling allows us to weave new stories and to make old ones richer while, at the same time, more complex,” Reynolds wisely advises.

Stories work by having characters, but how to characterise the Native Mounted Police? How would truth-tellers choose from the “over eight hundred troopers’ names” that historian Jonathan Richards has found in the records of the Native Mounted Police? And would we ever have enough biographical information to guess at the circumstances and motives of those chosen?

It is more likely that we will continue to point the weapon of truth at the august figures whom we credit with the triumph of the colonists. Reynolds gives Sir John Forrest, Sir John Downer and Sir Samuel Griffith as examples of men honoured for their nation-building whose memorials we must now reconsider. “What should Griffith University do?” he asks. The question is well targeted — not only because Griffith was attorney-general or premier in three administrations between 1874 and 1893, presiding over much frontier murder, but also because in 2019 a dispute about the teaching of Australian history (not mentioned by Reynolds) demonstrated to the leaders of that university how difficult it can be to reconcile academic autonomy with clamorous Indigenous opinion about what is “true.”

Mark McKenna’s approach to weaving new stories and making them complex focuses on individuals of exemplary colonial violence: a white man, Constable Bill McKinnon, and three Aboriginal trackers, Carbine, Barney and Paddy. In October 1934, southwest of Alice Springs, McKinnon shot and killed an Aboriginal man, Yokununna, who had escaped from custody with five accomplices, all suspected of murdering another Aboriginal man, Kai-Umen. At the inquest into Kai-Umen’s death, the trackers reported McKinnon’s brutal treatment of his prisoners, and at the trial of these prisoners, their counsel further questioned McKinnon. His answers worried the Commonwealth government and soon there was an inquiry.

The reasons McKinnon gave for killing Yokununna were self-defence and to prevent further escape. The inquiry concluded that the shooting of Yokununna “though legally justified, was not warranted.” McKinnon had told the inquiry that when he had fired his gun (into a cave where Yokununna was hiding) he had not taken aim and was not expecting to hit him. McKenna’s research has uncovered a note in McKinnon’s logbook in which he revealed his intention in firing.

Silhouette of a camel being ridden near Uluru by T.G.H. Strehlow and Charles Mountford during the inquiry into Bill McKinnon’s shooting of Yokununna. Charles Mountford/State Library of South Australia

A gifted storyteller, McKenna enriches this sequence of events with fascinating details of person and place, for what makes the story particularly interesting to him is that the cave in which McKinnon shot Yokununna is at Uluru. As a historian, McKenna has become interested in the symbolic significance of place — in this book, not only Uluru but even McKinnon’s daughter’s Brisbane garage, where he discovered McKinnon’s revealing logbook. The place to which he continues to return the reader is Uluru, as he explores the idea that what happens at Uluru continues to define Australians to themselves.

The Rock struck awe and a desire for mastery in the first Europeans to see it, and it has since become a destination for tourists who are similarly affected (albeit in greater comfort). The recent debate about whether it is respectful to climb Uluru has compelled us to ask whose perspective must decide that question. The country over which Uluru towers has been the object of a partly successful land claim in 1979 and, since 1985, the site of an experiment in “two-way” park co-management that now affords the visitor some of Uluru’s sacred stories. Uluru has been not only a lying policeman’s killing ground in 1934 but also a place of First Nations assembly in 2017, and we are now debating the “Uluru Statement.” Then there is the question of Yokununna’s remains: will they be returned from a museum to Uluru?

McKenna’s research and storytelling interweave these layers of meaning and lines of time in ways suggesting that this furrowed arkose monolith is our collective, troubled “heart” — the place where “immutable and inextinguishable” Indigenous “sovereignty” is made “visible… as it is at few other places on the continent.”

He adds to this epiphany the following warning (or is it an appeal?) to readers: “Australians have yet to grasp the fact that the core rationale for an Australian republic is not only the severance of our relationship with the Crown, but also the recognition of the Indigenous sovereignty that existed long before the Crown’s representatives arrived.” His misuse of “fact” (for surely this is only an opinion) is a reminder of what can happen when “truth-telling” becomes an eager act of political service. McKenna’s verbal stumble is a mere “blemish” (a handy John Howard word) on the face of his poetry of national sin and redemption, but we can see it as a caution to those taking up the Uluru Statement’s invitation to tell the truth. •

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Wyatt has issued an invitation to the public to comment on several issues of Voice design. His three “co-design committees” will digest these comments at the next (second) stage of the Voice’s “co-design” process, leading eventually to a blueprint for a new structure of Indigenous political representation: a National Voice underpinned by a number of Regional and Local Voices.

Marcia Langton and Tom Calma, co-chairs of Wyatt’s senior advisory group, are credited as principal authors of the interim report, and they deserve much praise for the thoughtful way they advance the design while identifying certain questions for further discussion. But the terms of reference of Wyatt’s three committees have explicitly excluded constitutional recognition from the discussion.

Whatever Voice design eventually results from Wyatt’s process, the government has made no commitment to holding a referendum to entrench the Voice in the Constitution. It hasn’t ruled out a referendum “should consensus on a question be found,” but consensus on the design of a Voice won’t necessarily determine the form of constitutional recognition that may eventually be put to the Australian people.

In short, one of the agenda-setting effects of the interim report — an effect immediately contested by supporters of the Uluru Statement from the Heart — is to sever the debate about the Voice from the debate about constitutional recognition. While we talk about the possible design of the Voice, talk about constitutional recognition is at risk of being suspended, or at least such talk will be rendered marginal to the attention of those who accept Wyatt’s invitation to discuss the Voice as legislated “Indigenous recognition.” How did this come about?

In 2010, the Gillard government took seriously the argument that Indigenous Australians were entitled to be recognised in the Constitution. Gillard appointed an expert panel, jointly chaired by Patrick Dodson (not yet a senator) and Mark Leibler, to propose changes to the Constitution — amounting to “recognition” — that could be put to a referendum. In January 2012, after extensive public consultation and having received Newspoll’s reports on public opinion, the panel recommended four changes to the Constitution that could be presented to the voters as a single package.

Two of the four items were about section 25 and section 51(xxvi). Both were to be deleted, as each affords Australian governments powers to legislate about Indigenous Australians as a race, and not necessarily to their benefit. Section 51(xxvi) would be replaced by words recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and empowering the Commonwealth to secure their “advancement.” A third item in the package would prohibit discriminating against any group defined by race, colour, or ethnic or national origin; discriminatory laws would be permitted only if they were in the interests of the specified “group” (overcoming their disadvantage, ameliorating effects of past discrimination, or protecting their heritage). The fourth item would recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages as “part of our national heritage.”

Deleting section 25 and recognising languages turned out to be uncontroversial. Throughout 2012–14, though, the other two proposals were criticised by “constitutional conservatives” — some of them Indigenous — on the ground that each would turn the Constitution into a charter of minority rights, and Indigenous rights in particular.

These critics invoked a democratic constitutional principle: popular sovereignty. They wished to avoid giving the (unelected) High Court of Australia further constitutional grounds for invalidating legislation by the (elected) Australian parliament. If the Constitution obliged the Commonwealth to legislate for the “advancement” of Indigenous Australians, a litigant could argue in the High Court that a law passed by parliament was invalid because it was detrimental to Indigenous interests. And a litigant could also mobilise the constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination, arguing that a law was discriminatory but not advantageous to the disadvantaged, or not ameliorative or not protective. Constitutional conservatives argued that since the parliament is the expression of popular sovereignty, constraints on its decisions should be minimised.

In this perspective, judges should be restrained from “activism.” To put into the Constitution such words as the expert panel proposed would increase the possibility that High Court judges would play, in effect, an improperly political role.

For such critics, recent history provided an example of how much the political and legal order could be upset by judges who invoked principles forgotten or ignored by the legislature: the judgements in the second Mabo case and the Wik case, which had forced parliament to pass a law recognising “native title.” In December 2011 Philip Ruddock, the minister when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, pointed out that it would have been much more difficult to repeal the ATSIC Act in 2004 and to legislate for the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007 had the Constitution included the words that the expert panel was about to recommend. But that, of course, was the very reason some wanted a constitutional right to Indigenous “advancement.”

Conservative MPs were not alone in dreading any increase in the judiciary’s capacity to shape or prompt legislation, and nor were they the first to express such fears. In debating how the Constitution should be amended in 1967, Gough Whitlam (then opposition leader) had teamed up with prime minister Harold Holt to reject a proposal, very similar to the expert panel’s, that Liberal MP William Charles Wentworth had presented in March 1966. In a private member’s bill, Wentworth had proposed a referendum to make two changes to the Constitution: to replace section 51(xxvi) with words allowing the Commonwealth to make laws for the “advancement of the aboriginal natives of the Commonwealth of Australia”; and to add a new section 117A outlawing racial discrimination but allowing “laws for the special benefit of the aboriginal natives.” Agreeing with Holt that this was not a good idea, Whitlam pointed to the US Supreme Court (the Warren court, now famed for its liberalism) as an example of a bench troubling the executive’s smooth performance. Apprehension about rights-based litigation has many precedents in Australian politics.

When constitutional conservatives pointed to what they called the expert panel’s “overreach” in the years 2012–14, there was nothing overtly “anti-Indigenous” in their arguments. They were asserting a hallowed principle: let parliament, as the organ of popular sovereignty, govern. Another kind of constitutional conservative argument against the expert panel’s proposal was that a liberal-democratic constitution should not confer distinct rights on any named sub-population: for these critics, strict formal equality of rights was the ideal. These and other (perhaps less creditable) views were sufficiently influential in the Abbott government to prevent it from endorsing the expert panel’s four-item package. It came to be widely believed that if the panel’s proposed model of recognition were put to a referendum it would lose, as the conservatives would be able to mount a persuasive No campaign.

To break this political impasse, one member of the expert panel, Noel Pearson, began to argue in the second half of 2014 that the four-item package not be put to a referendum. Instead, we should vote on two recognitions: a declaration of recognition that would stand outside the Constitution (and not be subject to High Court intervention); and a new constitutional power to create an “Indigenous Voice to Parliament” that would comment on, but not overrule, the decisions of parliament.

From the second half of 2014 to the first half of 2017, Pearson gathered allies for his proposal, moderate conservative MPs such as Julian Leeser and constitutional experts such as Anne Twomey and Megan Davis among them. The “Declaration plus Voice” package gained ground among other influential Indigenous Australians as well, though it is clear that some regretted the cost of Pearson’s conciliation of the constitutional conservatives. Many saw, and continue to see, that there is much to be gained for Indigenous Australians by empowering the judiciary to judge whether laws conform to the panel’s proposed new constitutional rights.

But the Pearson package had the virtue of “triangulating” (in the coinage of Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s strategist) — conceding to the conservatives that parliamentary sovereignty would not be impaired while offering something genuinely new and substantial to those who want more than “symbolic” constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians.

Pearson’s reformulated package won the endorsement, first, of the national Indigenous constitutional assembly at Uluru in May 2017, and then of the Referendum Council (appointed jointly by the government and the opposition in 2015). After almost seven years of public consultations by the expert panel and by a series of parliamentary committees, the Turnbull government was faced with one option in June 2017 — a referendum on the Voice, or no referendum on recognition. In October 2017, it chose the latter, explaining that it would not campaign for a constitutional change that (Turnbull said) would be rejected by the voters.

It soon became clear that in much of the Australian parliament, and in “civil society” (including some major corporations), there remained an unmet hunger for constitutional recognition of some kind. What Pearson calls the “radical centre” was not going away; it had adherents in every party room. So, over the summer of 2017–18, the government made an agreement with the opposition to conduct yet another joint parliamentary inquiry, co-chaired by Patrick Dodson (now a Labor senator for Western Australia) and Julian Leeser, an open ally of Pearson and his “Voice.”

The Dodson–Leeser committee, appointed in March 2018, issued its final report in November. While its task was to review all of the proposals for Indigenous constitutional recognition proposed since 2012, it found that a great many submissions were about “the Voice to Parliament” — mostly in strong support, but diverse in their conception of its design and role. The Dodson–Leeser committee did not issue a Voice blueprint, calling instead for a process of “co-design.”

Submissions to Dodson–Leeser smashed any presumption that Voice advocates want only one Voice. Australia is a federation: should there not be a Voice speaking to each state and territory legislature? And Indigenous Australia has many “nations,” so is not each entitled to speak for itself?

Confronted by the Voice’s myriad possibilities, Ken Wyatt, sworn as the Indigenous Australians minister in June 2019, addressed the National Press Club on 10 July 2019. He committed to convening a co-design process “with my ministerial and parliamentary colleagues, relevant departments and Indigenous communities, organisations and leaders.” He said he was seeking “enhanced local and regional decision-making through expanding Empowered Communities and other regional governance models.” Could this apparatus be recognised in the Constitution? Wyatt said he would “develop and bring forward a consensus option for constitutional recognition to put to a referendum during the current parliamentary term and that means working through until we reach a point in which there is consensus across all the relevant groups that have a stake in this.”

At that time, it was reasonable to suppose that Wyatt was referring to a consensus about the design of the Voice(s). Since then, though, it has become clear that he distinguishes between designing a credible Voice and coming up with a form of constitutional recognition that the Morrison government would back in a referendum.

The Turnbull government, and subsequently the Morrison government, had already hinted that this distinction was central to its thinking. One of those hints was Wyatt’s reference to expanding Empowered Communities, a Turnbull government program initiated in 2016. Empowered Communities had begun to feature in government statements about the possibilities of Indigenous Voice in 2018.

According to its website, Empowered Communities “recognises the diversity of cultures and circumstances of Indigenous Australians” and “aims to increase Indigenous ownership and give Indigenous people a greater say in decisions that affect them” by seeking to cultivate “true” government–community “partnerships” in eight regions: Cape York, the NSW Central Coast, East Kimberley, Murray Bridge, Goulburn-Murray, Inner Sydney, North-East Arnhem Land, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and West Kimberley.

In each region “robust governance structures” and “backbone organisations” have been “surfacing priorities” of “families, individuals and community,” thus enabling “our development and investment planning.” The relationship of these structures to the Commonwealth government and “corporates” is described as “partnership,” and other partnerships with state and territory governments are being sought. Empowered Communities analyse data, build “baselines” and “understand service delivery gaps” in order to produce “long-term Regional Development Agendas.”

When parliament established the Dodson–Leeser committee on 1 March 2018, Angus Taylor, one of Morrison’s ministers, said that he looked forward to seeing it report on how to bring about “stronger local voices and empowerment of local people.” He added: “Our work on Empowered Communities is a good example of our commitment to a place-based approach to empowerment.” People involved in Empowered Communities projects appeared before the Dodson–Leeser committee, extolling it as one way to give “voice.” In its submission to the committee, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet argued that the Empowered Communities meant that the government, without any change in the Constitution, was already well along the path of co-designing regional representative structures.

If this was so, it became plausible — from the government’s perspective — to question whether it was necessary to make any change to the Constitution in order to improve Indigenous Australians’ local and regional representation to government. The Dodson–Leeser committee’s interim report found in July 2018 that while submissions strongly supported local and regional structures, “it is hard to establish whether there is community and bipartisan support for a constitutional voice or voices.” The formation of some kind of Voice, from the ground up, was not contingent on writing a new authority into the Constitution, if executive action already had this matter in hand.

Liberal MP Tim Wilson went even further. Arguing against constitutional entrenchment of the Voice(s) the following month, and speaking from what he imagined to be the standpoint of Indigenous Australians, Wilson suggested that if the Voice(s) were authorised by constitutional amendment they would lack legitimacy. (He seemed to be appealing to the idea that, for many Indigenous Australians, the Constitution, as a problematic colonial artefact, lacks legitimacy.) A stronger form of legitimacy would derive from Voices being “truly representative” and carrying “the weight and voice and representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”

In other words, the federal government was already anticipating that the Voice, when embodied in local and regional structures, would resemble and build on the “partnership platforms” of the Empowered Communities program.

Marcia Langton and Tom Calma envisage between twenty-five and thirty-five Local and Regional Voices. One task for Stage 2 of the co-design process is to decide on their number and boundaries; each region will then develop its Local and Regional Voice. When describing what these could look like, Langton and Calma draw inspiration from Empowered Communities. Their interim report emphasises that “communities across each region [should] decide how best to organise themselves,” building on extant organisations and political structures. This means that Local and Regional Voices will emerge more quickly in some regions than in others. “Some communities or regions with local and regional decision making arrangements already in place, such as ‘partnership tables,’ will be well placed to commence shared, cross-government work in line with the framework relatively quickly.” They give an example: “New South Wales Local Decision Making and Empowered Communities regions are already working in a way similar to that envisaged for Local and Regional Voices.”

As well as the Regional and Local Voices there will be a National Voice, consisting of members (either sixteen or eighteen) elected from each of the eight jurisdictions (six states, two territories) and from the Torres Strait. If the National Voice and the federal government agree, it may also have two appointed members. While the co-chairs (different genders), elected by National Voice members, will be full-time employees, the other members will be part-time. Members will serve terms of either three or four years (a Stage 2 decision) with a maximum of two consecutive terms. The National Voice will also have the power to establish and be advised by committees of experts, and it will establish “youth” and “disability” advisory groups.

In Stage 2 of the co-design process the government is seeking suggestions about how members of the National Voice should be selected. One option is by direct election by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voters in each state/territory/Torres Strait. The other is to have members chosen by the Regional and Local Voices. The advantage of the second method is that it removes the possibility of the disputes that plagued ATSIC, at times, about who is an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and eligible to vote.

When the Voice to Parliament was advocated, from 2014, it was imagined that parliament would be obliged to take notice of it: to refer issues to it for advice and to respond to any advice that the Voice sent back or offered unilaterally. In the interim report and accompanying “fact sheets” issued by Ken Wyatt in January 2021, the obligations of parliament are not yet clearly spelled out.

To grasp the significance of this aspect of the Voice it is necessary to recall the words of Patricia Turner, chief executive of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, lead convenor of the “Coalition of Peaks” (representing the major Indigenous government and NGO-funded service-delivery organisations) and a member of Wyatt’s senior advisory group. When Turner addressed the National Press Club in September last year she warned Australians not to confuse “voice to government” with “voice to parliament.” It would not answer the call for a Voice to Parliament, she insisted, if Wyatt’s design process merely came up with a voice (or voices) speaking to governments.

Turner was not opposed to “voice to government” processes: the Coalition of Peaks’ recent negotiation of revised Closing the Gap targets was an example of “voice to government” — a productive and necessary relationship. But a Voice to Parliament would be something else, an additional mechanism of recognition and representation in which an assembly of Indigenous leaders would engage in public dialogue with parliament. In effect, Turner was saying: we already have a voice to government: look what it has just achieved. Let’s now design a Voice to Parliament.

Turner was worried that the specificity of the Voice to Parliament concept was being lost in Wyatt’s co-design process, discussions to which she was party. It is possible to trace, textually, a drift of attention from the “Voice to Parliament” to the “Voice to Parliament and Government” in some public statements about the Voice. In the Dodson–Leeser committee’s November 2018 final report, the phrase “Voice to Parliament” occurs frequently when the committee quotes submissions that had something to say about it. But the phrase is not to be found in the committee’s recommendation of a co-design process: “outline and discuss possible options for the local, regional, and national elements of The Voice, including the structure, membership, functions, and operation of The Voice, but with a principal focus on the local bodies and regional bodies and their design and implementation.”

Acting on this recommendation, Wyatt’s co-design committees certainly did focus on “the local bodies and regional bodies.” But the co-designers’ attention to the Voice’s relationship with “governments” (federal, state/territory and local) means that clarity about the relationship between a National Voice and the Parliament of Australia has been lost.

The interim report admits that “there has been significant discussion regarding whether the National Voice was a voice to the Parliament, Australian Government or to both.” The interim report explains that the co-designers were prompted to think about both parliament and governments as the interlocutors of the Voice by the Dodson–Leeser committee when it “proposed an Indigenous Voice not only to Parliament but also to the Australian Government, and not only to the Australian Government but also to state and territory governments.” The first half of this sentence, which I have italicised, is misleading: the Dodson–Leeser committee certainly discussed the possibility that the Voice should talk to both federal parliament and to all governments, but its recommendations about the Voice don’t use the interim report’s phrase “parliament and government.” To make this phrase explicit and to use it throughout the interim report was the senior advisory group’s decision.

Their interim report explains why a National Voice should be dealing with both parliament and the government:

The primary focus of the National Voice must be to provide advice to the Parliament. At the same time, it was recognised by the Senior Advisory Group that early engagement provides the best opportunity to reflect the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the development of legislation. This partnership would in turn also require the National Voice to engage with the Australian Government, preferably at the early stages of policy development. In fact, it would be inconceivable if it did not engage with the Australian Government.

Accordingly, the interim report envisages that the National Voice will send and receive two kinds of communication: it will “generally issue public advice, with discretion for informal discussion where appropriate.”

This makes sense. Why would anyone want the National Voice to be excluded from discussion with government officials drafting bills? But when we bracket parliament and the government as the interlocutors of the National Voice we are at risk of conflating them and so obscuring two important distinctions.

The first distinction is between parliament formally dealing with matters raised by the National Voice and the government engaging the National Voice in a conversation. Both exchanges are likely to be productive, but they differ in the ways that they will be valuable to the political process. When parliament speaks, it is a public action, and it would be expected that not only the government but also the opposition would have something to say. When parliament apologised to the stolen generations in February 2008 both the leader of the government and the leader of the opposition spoke — each apologising in his own terms. Such actions by parliament are public and formal, and they create the possibility of debate in each chamber if a motion is moved about the issue in question. There is also the possibility (one would hope) that members of the National Voice would be invited to address either or both chambers of parliament.

Interactions between the National Voice and the government, by contrast, are not subject to any framework of obligations and conventions; they may be as informal and as private as a telephone conversation or email exchange between two officials.

A summary fact sheet, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Voice,” issued with the interim report makes the important point that there will be “two-way interaction between the National Voice and the Parliament and Government” because “the National Voice may ask for advice and information.” But the summary is not as clear as it could be about the proposed guarantees of “transparency” in these communications.

“Transparency mechanisms are proposed to help demonstrate the National Voice has been appropriately consulted and engaged,” says the interim report. “Examples include tabling the National Voice’s formal advice in Parliament, having the National Voice’s advice considered by a parliamentary committee, and including a statement about the National Voice’s formal advice and consultation when a proposed law is introduced in the Parliament.” But what are we to make of these words in the summary fact sheet: “Advice must be tabled on issues that have been referred to the National Voice. Informal advice is not tabled”? “Tabled” by which side — parliament, the National Voice, or both? And who is to decide when advice is “informal,” and so not “tabled”?

The second important distinction effectively obscured by the recurrence of the phrase “parliament and government” is between the National Voice and all other Indigenous organisations. The interim report says that the Voices (National, Regional and Local) will not replace existing Indigenous organisations that are already channels of representation. In the words of the summary fact sheet, “The Parliament and Government is [sic] expected to continue engaging with stakeholders, and the National Voice will not be a gatekeeper.”

It is undeniable that the federal government should be free to talk to whichever Indigenous organisations it chooses; it will be up to the National Voice to persuade the government that what it has to say is worthy of focused attention. But what about parliament? Is it to be equally free (via its committees, for example) to engage with any Indigenous “stakeholder” whether or not it is the National Voice? What if the National Voice cannot persuade parliament that it has something that parliament must listen to? Will the National Voice not be diminished if parliament addresses Indigenous Australia over the heads (as it were) of the National Voice?

If the National Voice is to be a special body, it will be necessary to treat it as the legitimate gatekeeper — the pre-eminent representative of Indigenous Australia to parliament. The bracketing of “parliament and government” by Wyatt’s co-designers risks diminishing the National Voice by failing to specify contexts in which its status is rightly unique.

These two obfuscations — of the difference between parliament-talking and government-talking, and the difference between a National Voice and all other channels of Indigenous representation — have arisen partly because the case for an Indigenous Voice has increasingly become functional: arguments seek to justify a Voice on the grounds that it will lead to better policy rather than because it will constitute a form of recognition, give Indigenous Australians a distinct voice, or embody a “right.”

It is platitudinous to say that any government that wishes to be effective in governing Indigenous Australians (for example, closing the gaps more rapidly) must maximise the opportunity for Indigenous Australians themselves to shape the policy. I do not wish to contest this view. Indigenous participation in government is a means to an end: more effective government. I wish merely to point out that the more the case for a Voice emphasises the utility of the Voice to policy-making, the more that the couplet “parliament and government” is conflated to mean just “government.”

The value that the Indigenous Voice would add to Australia has increasingly been evoked in instrumental terms, as a means of communication with governments at all three levels. What is increasingly obscured is the value of understanding the National Voice, constitutionally entrenched, as a substantive and symbolic recognition of the distinctive position of Indigenous Australia as a respectful and respected interlocutor of the nation’s popularly sovereign body, the Parliament of Australia.

This noble idea has been further distanced by the minister’s insistence that the three co-design committees not make “recommendations as a Group through this co-design process on constitutional recognition, including determining the referendum question or when a referendum should be held.”

Since 2014, advocates of constitutional recognition have made incremental concessions to constitutional conservatives and to a series of unwilling conservative governments. The risk of such a conciliatory strategy is that we will end up with a legislated Indigenous Voice, adjunct to governments, that has little capacity to call parliament publicly to account. But this now seems to be the only way forward contemplated by the government. What it has in mind for constitutional recognition is anyone’s guess. •

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The divergence between the facts established by the intelligence services — sometimes by the decision makers themselves (as notably in the case of McNamara) and often available to the informed public — and the premises, theories, and hypotheses according to which decisions were finally made is total. And the extent of our failures and disasters throughout these years can be grasped only if one has the totality of this divergence firmly in mind.

— Hannah Arendt

I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours.
— Hunter S. Thompson

1. Introduction

From 1788 till the 1960s, Europeans established themselves on Indigenous land in a brutal regime, first of dispossession and then of disregard. Yet some among them had strikingly good intentions. A year before Wilberforce took on the cause, nearly eighty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, Arthur Phillip accepted his commission insisting that slavery had no part in the new colony. Phillip sought to treat the Indigenous people fairly, at least according to his own lights. But mutual incomprehension reigned and those with murkier intentions soon prevailed.

Today, good intentions abound, though racism often lives on in unacknowledged assumptions. Governments outlay vast sums, whether adequate or not, on specific Indigenous programs and in general expenditure on Indigenous health, education and social security. Widely supported grand gestures are announced every few years. You might think “Closing the Gap” was Kevin Rudd’s idea but it rebooted (or is that rebranded?) a Hawke government initiative of twelve years earlier. But the results are meagre.

Now comes a new cycle of activity, this one focused on whether formal evaluation processes might allow us to identify and scale up those Indigenous programs that actually “work.” Most recently, the Productivity Commission has been hard at work on a national Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, which was the immediate trigger for this essay and to which I’ll return. Will this cycle of activity produce better results than earlier efforts? I’ll explain below why I have my doubts.

To first clarify where I’m coming from, it is not from deep knowledge of Indigenous policy. My focus here is rather on a prior question: how our formal institutions of government — and most particularly our bureaucracies — might need to change to succeed where previously they have so consistently failed. To make that question concrete I draw on my experience in other intractable areas of social policy that bear family resemblances to Indigenous policy.

Programs to protect children from abuse and neglect, particularly in disadvantaged families and communities, follow the same endlessly repeated cycle of failure followed by grand plans for reform that then run into the sand before the cycle begins again. This essay focuses on how little the system really appreciates the distance it would need to travel to really be effective, in terms of either its own values and objectives, or those of the disadvantaged communities — including Indigenous communities — it claims to be serving.

2. The “what” and the “how,” the saying and the doing

So here’s my very simple description of the problem: despite endless pronouncements of what we must do, there’s minimal comprehension of how to do it.

This is an endemic problem. Dependable know-how itself — whether it’s improving outcomes in an Indigenous community or representing government in the High Court — is not directly legible to government systems. Anyone can claim to have that know-how but a bureaucracy needs something more dependable than that. As a consequence, it will interact with know-how as a certified, decontextualised “what.” That “what” could be a credential, the meeting of a key performance indicator, or a particular bureaucrat’s informal reputation for being a “good operator” or a “safe pair of hands.” In improving Indigenous lives, however, know-how won’t align with any such things, not least because so much of it resides among Indigenous people and communities themselves. We need to access their knowledge and their agency to improve their own lives in ways that matter to them.

The cliché used to convey this idea is “putting people at the centre” or “putting people first.” However well-intentioned such slogans are, more often than not they operate as a kind of doublethink — as if adopting the slogan were to put its intent into practice.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum offers a story that illustrates this difference between saying and doing. She describes how a development program encounters a woman in a traditional rural community who is uninterested in education for herself or her children. Nussbaum is showing how our (reductive) framing of the other’s perspective can cut us off from the wisdom of the other’s lifeworld. “Clearly,” she writes, “a one-shot logical argument” wouldn’t be enough to engage the woman:

[S]uch a procedure would only reinforce her conviction that education has nothing to do with her. Nor would the exchange get very far if the development workers sat down with her… asking… calm and intellectual questions about what she thinks and says. But suppose, instead, they spent a long time with her, sharing her way of life and entering into it. Suppose, during this time, they vividly set before her stories of ways in which the lives of women in other parts of the world have been transformed by education of various types — all the while eliciting, from careful listening over a long period of time, in an atmosphere of trust that they would need to work hard to develop, a rich sense of what she has experienced, whom she takes herself to be, what at a deeper level she believes about her own capacities and their actualization. If they did all this, and did it with the requisite sensitivity, imagination, responsiveness, and open-mindedness, they might over time discover that she does indeed experience some frustration and anger in connection with her limited role; and she might be able to recognise and to articulate wishes and aspirations for herself that she could not have articulated to Aristotle in the classroom. In short, through narrative, memory, and friendly conversation, a more complicated view of the good might begin to emerge.

Nussbaum’s scenario is based on actual fieldwork in Bangladesh, and couldn’t be cost-effective if it involved professionals engaging rural women en masse. But, as I discovered when I was chairing the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the spirit of this translational endeavour is already captured in existing and cost-effective programs in Australia.

The centre’s Family by Family program takes families who feel they’re close to crisis. A trained coach then takes each family through a structured program of mentoring by another local family that has come through similar stresses. The family seeking help chooses the family that mentors them and sets the objectives they want to work on.

The program was co-designed with families over many months, but the simplicity and obviousness of the end result gave those involved in it and many lookers-on numerous “aha” moments. Family by Family embodies the rare art of professionals vacating centrestage in a therapeutic intervention to create space for those who must do the real work. Professional knowledge, which grows with the program, is always there — but as midwife, not obstetrician.

Talking to some of these families, I was struck by their visceral engagement with the program and their mentors. To take just one example — of which there were many — one mother in the program had received twenty-seven statutory “notifications” documenting outsiders’ suspicions that she was neglecting her kids. The relevant department was heading to court to take her four kids into guardianship. When her mentor family took her family camping, she learnt many things from them — not least to hug her kids. The department stopped proceedings against her.

The thirty-week program cost around $13,000. If that sounds expensive, it’s a fraction of what social workers would have cost, and much more effective. Moving all four kids into care would have cost around $224,000 per year. So, if Family by Family steered just this family from the shoals of state intervention it probably paid for its development and first couple of years of operation.

Before I saw Family by Family in action, I’d have described my outlook as that of a tragic liberal — committed to fairly generous spending on social disadvantage, but with very modest expectations of how much it could turn things around. After seeing Family by Family, the penny dropped. Ingrained patterns and social reinforcement are immensely powerful, almost immovable forces. But people’s desire to work towards better lives for themselves, their families and their communities is similarly elemental if they can somehow unlock their own agency and that of those around them.

3. Lord Acton’s fault line

After acknowledging the vast gulf between identifying the “what” and mastering the “how,” between the saying and the doing, we should then do something I’m doing for the first time in this essay. For decades I’ve referred to it in asides, but it needs to be brought centre-stage so we can look it in the eye. It’s significant that it’s a joke, just as it’s significant that so many of the best insights into bureaucracy are provided by comedies like Yes Minister, The Office and Utopia.

More than a century ago Lord Acton quipped that rowing was the perfect preparation for public life. Why? Because you face in one direction while moving in the other. One crucial reason that we’ve made so little progress is that in a thousand ways, large and small, the actors in the system face in one direction — with their mission statements, corporate values, strategic plans, evaluation strategies and all the rest of it — while moving in the other.

Of course, they’d prefer to do a good job — most people would. But when push comes to shove, their animating imperative isn’t to keep progress going in the field. It’s to keep up appearances. Seen this way, all those grand announcements we keep making are part of the problem. They’re really directed at our own anxieties. They alleviate and distract us from facing our disappointment — our discomfort — that the world remains so resiliently impervious to our good intentions.

Lord Acton’s fault line appears between the two feet on which we stand — between what we say and what we do. That’s why the words we use matter so much, and why we should take George Orwell’s advice to choose the simplest and clearest words we can. As he put it:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations, this is true of all political parties [and here we can include officialese]… is designed to make lies sound truthful… and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Since those in the system are the ones with the power, all we have to appeal to is their own self-respect — their own desire to feel better about themselves. When they say they want to change, the real question is how much. The system has said that it wants greater Indigenous agency in its programs for ages. But as I’ll illustrate, our programs are so dominated by that same system’s routines and perspectives that Indigenous agency barely gets a look-in. Instead it gets reduced to things that are legible to the system — such as Indigenous ethics codes and certified cultural sensitivity. These things may have some benefits. They may also have costs, which I’ll discuss. But they are mostly the system saying rather than doing.

This takes us to the nub of the problem. It is only humility, or some institutionalisation of it, that can create that space within which Indigenous agency might be nurtured and grow. But “humility” itself is now turning up as a cliché in all those “how to” guides (it appears just before “nuance” and after “authenticity” — yes, authenticity really was a corporate value of PwC for a while there). So I’ve tried to revivify it with Iris Murdoch’s magnificent words above. For the non-Indigenous among us who fancy we care, we must find ways to untangle ourselves and our institutions from the “the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.”

4. Enter evaluation

Like a patient resisting therapy, the system constantly initiates new beginnings. But Lord Acton is never far away. At the political level leaders talk of evidence-based policy, but then shunt it aside when convenient. In fact, substantial performance evaluation was built into the structure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission but sidelined after ATSIC was dismantled by John Howard’s government. The failure of the Northern Territory Intervention to take an evidence-based approach is legendary, worked up as it was over a few days in Canberra in the run-up to an election and yet largely maintained by the incoming government.

More recently, while stressing his own commitment to following the evidence, newly elected prime minister Malcolm Turnbull expanded income-management schemes without mentioning that the independent evaluations were highly equivocal. However well the idea played in non-Indigenous Australia, the evaluations suggested that compulsory income management has clear, positive impacts in very few cases and gives rise to “considerable feelings of disempowerment and unfairness.” As one might expect, voluntary income management is more successful.

Now, it is one thing for senior officials not to speak publicly of their political masters’ hypocrisy. But their complicity goes deeper. In 2009, a finance department review of Indigenous expenditure stressed the need for “a more rigorous approach to program evaluation at a whole of government level.” In 2016, the nation’s most senior public servant, the secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, echoed those sentiments. In response to such concerns, $40 million over four years was allocated for evaluation. Parkinson’s department was responsible for Indigenous affairs, but the Audit Office reported three years later that its performance was desultory.

As ANU researcher Michael Dillon has suggested, even the Audit Office’s report was “extraordinarily hedged and timid, and failed to make a substantive assessment of the actual independence of the evaluations undertaken” by the department:

Of thirty-five evaluations on the department’s 2018–19 workplan, fifteen had not commenced. Of the remaining twenty, eight had been published and twelve withheld from publication… In at least four cases (involving very significant and sensitive program evaluations) the department was waiting to brief the minister or awaiting his noting of a brief. In plain language, the minister was preventing timely publication of the evaluations.

Further, Dillon observed, Parkinson’s response to the audit “fails to acknowledge or address in any way the negative content of the audit.” Is it likely that the system will engineer something better if it can’t acknowledge its own failure to do as it says?

Which brings us back to the Productivity Commission’s Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, a draft of which was released in June. The PC has always attempted to pitch its proposals to government within the “Overton window” — that range of options that will be taken seriously by powerful people. Given that constraint, as I’ll explain, I respect its compromises on policy. But the point of the PC’s independence is that, however much it compromises on the policy, it spares no one, least of all itself, the truth. What the great scientist Richard Feynman wrote about science is also true of social science. For me, it’s a holy grail of social policy and aligns nicely with Orwell’s advice: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”

5. Putting Indigenous people at the centre: the words

There’s a kind of ambiguity at the very heart of the PC’s draft strategy that’s increasingly common. It’s Orwellian in the bad sense. I guess the genre was introduced into polite society by the “vision statement.” Here one states an aspiration as a fact. You know the kind of thing: “PHP Residual Solutions is the world’s foremost residual solutions provider.” At least in its awkward baldness, it’s not misleading. We all know that global domination is an aspiration, not a fact.

But this fusion of fact and fancy appears as the fundamental building block of the PC’s draft strategy: “The Strategy puts Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at its centre, and recognises that governments need to draw on the perspectives, priorities and knowledges of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people if outcomes are to improve.”

One of the ways to ensure we remain fixed to the spot with Lord Acton’s fault line yawning beneath us is to encourage the idea that saying something is doing it. Does the PC know how to put Indigenous people at the centre of its strategy? Can it point us to better and worse examples of doing so? Can it highlight cautionary tales where grand claims have been made that are belied by the facts on the ground? These are some of the questions — pointed, uncomfortable questions — that we need to answer if we’re ever to step over Lord Acton’s fault line and enter the promised land of “how.”

At the level of programs, rather than evaluation, there are at least two perilous steps in the expedition to get from saying to doing — from signing the cheques to putting the resources of government properly at the disposal of Indigenous people and their communities:

1. We need to learn how to put Indigenous people and communities at the centre of these programs — or, to put it differently, how to realise their agency within them.
2. Then we need emerging successes to spread. That requires validated new knowledge of what’s working in the field — always fragile in large organisations to say nothing of systems of organisations — to trump the institutional imperatives that so often frustrate the spread of successful practice.

To me, these are the great priorities for the Indigenous-specific programs I have focused on in this essay, though analogous priorities would apply when considering the impact of general welfare programs on Indigenous people and communities. And any evaluative strategy would emerge from an appreciation of how evaluation might contribute to their wellbeing. As progress was made it would shed light on how further priorities might be set.

But the draft strategy makes clear that this is not the kind of priority-setting the PC has in mind. Its initial priorities reproduce those of COAG’s Closing the Gap report, and their foremost characteristic is their legibility to the system. They’re even arranged around the system’s existing organisational structure, which includes families, children and youth, health, education, economic development, housing, justice, land and waters. Makes you wonder what isn’t a priority! And all of them identify a “what” rather than a “how.”

6. Putting Indigenous people at the centre: the actions

How will we get Indigenous people and perspectives into the centre of evaluation? In their submission to the PC, researchers from Inala Wangarra and the University of Queensland argue that:

“Accountability” has become a lopsided concept, whereby the focus is overwhelmingly on service providers being accountable to government, and where there is no concomitant focus on the accountability of government to the most important stakeholders: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

So might placing Indigenous people at the centre of an evaluation strategy involve making service providers and government policies accountable to Indigenous people? This possibility doesn’t seem to have made it into the PC’s strategy, even as a “what.” And even if it had, I’d argue that what the PC has endorsed is likely to be implemented in a way that actively obstructs getting to the “how.” The PC talks about the importance of “whole-of-government” approaches to evaluation. That sounds innocuous enough — commonsensical even. But why does it have me thinking of “whole-of-church” approaches to the solar system at the time of Galileo?

The only way I can imagine a whole-of-government agenda not doing more harm than good is if it were to imagine itself as being at the service of solving the concrete and urgent problems in the field — by identifying good practice in the field, for example, and coordinating the system to expand its influence.

Despite senior officials’ and politicians’ protestations that they aspire to encourage innovation in the field and spread and scale “what works,” progress has been conspicuously lacking. Peter Shergold saw this as a major problem as he rose through the ranks of the public service, but after over a decade at its commanding heights conceded there’d been little change. As he put it in 2005:

If there were a single cultural predilection in the Australian Public Service that I could change, it would be the unspoken belief of many that contributing to the development of government policy is a higher-order function — more prestigious, more influential, more exciting — than delivering results. Perhaps it is because I have spent so much of my career in line agencies, learning to deliver Indigenous, employment, small business, and education programs that I react so strongly against this tendency.

Eight years later he confessed that little more progress had been made:

Too much innovation remains at the margin of public administration. Opportunities are only half‐seized; new modes of service delivery begin and end their working lives as “demonstration projects” or “pilots,” and creative solutions become progressively undermined by risk aversion and a plethora of bureaucratic guidelines.

In its preoccupation with grander narratives than identifying what works and spreading it, the PC sets its evaluation process up to be driven by the system rather than its intended beneficiaries, however much it protests that they’re “at the centre.” In a familiar move, the PC suggests that its strategy is driven by four principles, each identified by a pleasing adjective with them all arranged in a pleasing diagram. According to this diagram, evaluation should be “Credible, Ethical, Transparent and Useful.” But these words are so general, so capaciously flaccid, that they constrain no one, like a scientific hypothesis that couldn’t possibly be falsified. And so, rather than constraining (and so guiding) practice, those words will come to mean whatever people want them to mean, often in retrospect to justify whatever practice is chosen.

Note two further aspects of the high-level pronouncements echoed by the Productivity Commission. First, the PC speaks of evaluation as if its function is to bolster the accountability of those in the field to their senior managers, with evaluation’s function being to objectively certify the extent to which the program meets the system’s stated objectives. Second, it shows little awareness of how broad and permissive this relatively new discipline of evaluation is. In reaching for some actionable means of validating that it is embracing a thing called “evidence-based policy,” evaluation is taken to be something far more settled and definitive than it is — as if getting something evaluated were like getting an auditor to check financial accounts or an engineer to check the structural integrity of a bridge.

As Michael Dillon has observed, the assumption that there are or should be simple linear relationships between objectives and performance is “problematic in cross-cultural contexts and certainly not necessarily the case in the… Indigenous domain.” In that regard the system — and the PC — seems oblivious even to the existence of “goal-free evaluation.” There, the evaluator investigates the impacts of the program without referring to — or ideally even knowing — a program’s stated goals.

In an increasingly managerial world oriented to the needs of organisations and their senior managers, this unconstrained focus deploys the evaluator’s skills in an open-minded way that can more fully reflect the interests and aspirations of other actors in the system — most particularly, intended beneficiaries of the program and the families and communities of which they are a part. Goal-free evaluation puts the evaluator in the best possible position to notice and document all consequences, both good and bad. It can also improve program hygiene just as double blindness adds to the hygiene of a randomised controlled trial.

7. The anatomy of Lord Acton’s work

Then there’s the question of exactly how evaluation will identify what is and is not working, and how these findings will find improve policy and practice.

This raises several challenges at the heart of the PC’s draft strategy. First, evaluation should be independent so that it is candid. Second, it should be published, in order to help develop a “knowledge commons” around “what works” (and what doesn’t) and to strengthen incentives for policy, programs and practice to follow the evidence. Yet past behaviour shows that the system responds to such constraints by saying one thing and doing another. So why would it be any different here?

Indeed, the woods are full of regimes in which higher-order objectives are foisted on policymakers to do the Lord’s work (Lord Acton’s work that is). These systems allow those at the top to say one thing as they face towards an objective in general, while they do another thing that quietly prevents it happening in particular. And thus ensues a prosaic variant of something Oscar Wilde told us about life:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves…
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Freedom of information regimes sit atop Lord Acton’s fault line. And the discomfort this induces is all too often relieved with strategic cowardice. Having been lowered from on high, freedom of information faces boldly towards transparency. At least in general and at least when it comes to the saying. When it comes to the particular, to what is actually done, officials travel in the other direction. Transgressions go off the record — into corridors, personal phones and email accounts — or are reclassified “cabinet in confidence” or some such. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg as far as actions that are routinely taken to delay and obfuscate transparency under FOI.

If FOI solves its problems the coward’s way, regulation reviews use the sword. Today, new regulation can’t be introduced without a “regulatory impact analysis” duly demonstrating that its benefits exceed its costs. Australia introduced it in 1986, and it seemed like such a good idea that it was replicated around the world — but invariably with the same (desultory) result. Here’s the British Chambers of Commerce back in 2007:

Both Conservative and Labour administrations approach deregulation with apparent enthusiasm, learn little or nothing from previous efforts and have little if anything to show from each initiative.

Sound familiar? Regulation review is another take on the Lord Acton quickstep. Those at the top introduce a compliance regime, but those administering it are trying to get things done for their ministers. So they obey the letter but not the spirit of the regime, and it degrades into empty box-ticking.

8. Getting past Lord Acton’s fault line

To recap: as attractive as they sound, independence and transparency cannot be imposed without setting off powerful and perverse incentives. Any attempt to deal with these dilemmas must look them in the eye. I foregrounded them in 2016 with my own proposal for an evaluation architecture. I called it the evaluator-general to stress the importance of independence and transparency, and also to structurally separate the delivery of services from the means by which we validate their fitness for purpose.

The organisation of the public sector already honours this principle of structural separation — between doing and validating the effects of what we’re doing. Thus, the Audit Office and the Bureau of Statistics are independent information and integrity agencies whose work helps inform us of the success or otherwise of other “doing” agencies directed by ministers — such as the health department and Treasury. At the same time, we expect all these agencies to collaborate — sometimes quite closely.

My proposal for an evaluator-general provides the institutional scaffolding within which the same close collaboration amid structural separation between doing and knowing can be brought right down to operations in the field. That way independence and buy-in can grow quietly from the bottom up within organisations rather than being heroically imposed from the top in a grand gesture that experience suggests will fail and fail again.

My aim was to nurture the self-accountability of those out in the field — Feynman’s imperative that one mustn’t fool oneself — and to build system accountability on that foundation. That’s how Toyota revolutionised manufacturing productivity in a way that’s now imitated the world over. It found a way to build from “how.” It did so by placing the workers on the line, the suppliers and the customers at the centre.

Are my ideas viable or just naive? We’ll only know when we give something like them a good try. We’d need no more than a dozen or so teams to try them. In the PC’s near 400-page background paper there’s some reporting on these problems of independence and transparency, but not in the context of any critical vision or clear explanation of how they can be overcome.

9. Independence-for-hire and the he-who-pays-the-piper problem

The PC’s incuriosity extends to its ignoring the incentive issues arising from how evaluation is commissioned and conducted. As I’ve argued, allowing firms in our private sector to appoint their own auditor profoundly compromises auditors’ independence. By contrast, the auditing of government finances is overseen by an independent auditor-general. Still, while it’s far from optimal, we’ve made the independence-for-hire of private sector auditors work tolerably by specifying highly prescriptive auditing standards. With evaluation, things are very different, there being any number of ways to conduct evaluations to serve numerous tastes and purposes. So evaluators’ independence-for-hire provides wide scope for doing Lord Acton’s work.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, independence-for-hire sits at the heart of a “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t” catch 22 that prevents promising developments in the field even becoming visible to the system, let alone having their expansion supported by it.

It goes like this. Responding to all the stirring visions of government “scaling what works,” non-government organisations seek government funding to expand their most promising programs. At this point, departments of finance oppose such funding, as well they might, until the programs are independently evaluated. They don’t take responsibility by commissioning the evaluation themselves or even specifying what kind of evaluation they require. Thus, when the NGO returns, a few hundred thousand dollars poorer, with a Deloitte, PwC or Lateral Economics report in hand (we’re cheaper!), it’s ignored again because independence-for-hire isn’t independence. And so the process of “scaling what works” is stopped dead in its tracks.

Though it understands the value of independence in evaluation, the PC completely flubs the “independence-for-hire” problem, simply associating contracted-out evaluation with independence. And it won’t bite the bullet and recommend true independence because it knows this would be rejected out of hand. But to keep the idea of independence in play, it proposes Lord Acton’s independence — an independent Office of Indigenous Policy Evaluation that will “oversee” evaluation, though the actual evaluation will continue to be conducted within the very agencies whose performance is being evaluated.

No doubt the PC hopes that this might introduce some independence into the process. But progress, if any, will be agonisingly slow. Allowing agencies to do their own regulatory impact analysis has kept the tiger of regulation review pristinely toothless for thirty-five years now in every country where it’s been introduced. The old Office of Regulation Review operated within the PC itself, but the greater notional independence it had there made not the slightest bit of difference. The requisite boxes were ticked and regulations — both the good and the bad — went on piling up as normal.

10. Stated intentions and animating imperatives

It’s Lord Acton pretty much all the way down. The PC’s draft strategy stresses the need for evaluations to:

• be done ethically
• involve and engage Indigenous people
• be respectful of and in sympathy with Indigenous cultures and knowledges.

Now, each of these is a commendable objective as a “what.” As I keep saying, the hard part is working out the “how.” And tackling each of these matters productively requires great insight. Further (and astonishingly), the importance of each of these requirements is relatively new to the system even as a “what.” Should we really put that same system in charge of learning the “how”? What will happen is already a foregone conclusion — the PC more or less recommends it. Rather than proceed humbly, foregrounding its ignorance, the system will go through its well-worn routines. Codes of practice will be developed. I assume there’ll be lots of consultation.

But these codes won’t deliver what is written on the packet any more than the mission statement “putting families at the centre” would have delivered Family by Family. However well-intentioned, these codes’ animating intent — what will matter when push comes to shove and someone might end up on the telly or in a headline — will be the institutional safety of those developing and administering the codes.

This is what happens when the system’s commanding heights are put in charge of delivering something that is difficult and context-sensitive but not highly valued in our political culture. Those defending Indigenous interests would be well advised to look on the burgeoning performance regimes in numerous sectors — particularly education and university research — where more and more practitioner time is taken up complying with relentlessly expanding requirements from bureaucracies that have neither the slightest knowledge of nor regard for what’s going on out in the field. As the accountability theatre ramps up, administrative numbers and salaries swell at the centre and performance declines. As Britain’s Institute for Government documented in a different context, inquiries and restructurings abound and new ten-year plans are announced once every three or four years.

I recall when, in response to another paedophilia scandal, South Australia strengthened its child safety requirements. The very department whose lapses had produced the outrage refused to stagger the starting date of the new system for different community organisations. With the department’s processing capacity thus overwhelmed, it took over a month to clear the new paperwork. Family by Family was paralysed. If exceptions were allowed to the deadline, they were for more important folks than us. Overnight, practices that had worked brilliantly and safely for several years — that placed families at the centre of the program — became an offence. I don’t know about then, but today the department describes itself as “a customer-focused organisation that puts people first.”

In fact, an evaluation was done on Family by Family. The process was a train wreck. From memory numerous preliminary ethics processes took around nine months, though this was simply to ask families questions about their progress — as they’d been asked regularly within the program. The evaluation ignored the program’s effect on children. Why? Because getting that aspect through the ethics procedures would have been too expensive, uncertain and time-consuming. How ethical can you get?

When the evaluation finally began, the department funding the program wouldn’t give evaluators the data to identify our cohort of families. So the evaluation was forced to compare impacts on all families in the host suburb against two other areas (one of which was bizarrely incomparable). As I recall, the result was mildly positive but inconsequential — unsurprisingly, given the small number of families involved. To use J.K. Galbraith’s term, it was all “innocent fraud” — that is, all that effort and money produced an outcome that amounted to nothing. But its worthlessness was a system failure despite the best of intentions of everyone in it.

I expect that the National Health and Medical Research Council, which issued the ethics guidelines, the family services department and the university centre for family studies thought of themselves as putting people first. But far from nurturing the innovation breaking out on the edges of the system — driven by bright, idealistic, young professionals and increasingly enthusiastic families — the incumbent organisations imposed their own routines and imperatives, each one making the labyrinth denser, more bewildering, more dysfunctional, each one making it harder to put the families first.

Whether or not the evaluation report was released (I don’t believe it was), we all cooperated in covering up its worthlessness, which required nothing more than not to advertise it. This is just one close-up of a phenomenon the disillusioned development economist William Easterly has called “the cartel of good intentions.” It is built on Lord Acton’s fault line. But you won’t see any serious engagement with any of this in the PC’s material on Indigenous evaluation.

11. The perils and the promise of candour

You may think what I’ve written so far is scathing. Yet, as I indicated above, I think the PC makes the right basic calls in its draft strategy. Bereft as the report is of suggestions about how to bring it about, it nevertheless endorses more Indigenous involvement in evaluation. And it backs independence and transparency. In a system that’s nowhere near ready to seriously engage with such things, it also makes defensible compromises in shepherding those values into policy. The real shame is that the pathologies of the existing system are deeply entrenched and yet they hardly get a look-in in the commission’s analysis. So any strategy for shifting them requires something much more hard-headed — more problem-focused — than four pleasing adjectives and a well-intentioned tagline about putting Indigenous perspectives at its centre.

Here we get to Orwell’s point. The greatest service the PC could do Indigenous people — the way it could really put their interests at the centre of its concerns — would be to express itself simply and candidly. Its draft strategy asserts that program participants and the broader community should “have confidence that policies and programs are being assessed objectively and independently.” Poppycock. It should stop pretending and fess up on behalf of the system. Having recommended a highly compromised form of independence for now, it should explain that the system isn’t ready for much candour right now and explain why.

Now you can see the power of Orwell’s advice about speaking simply. Speaking simply makes it hard, excruciating even, for you to cover your tracks — to mask your motives — with the usual sophistry. Once the officialese is jettisoned (or should that be official-ease?) the discomfort that the system is defending itself against becomes its own discomfort in explaining the sorry situation it is dealing with. And the only way to relieve that discomfort would be to go further and sketch out a longer-term plan to reach the outcome described in the honeyed words.

12. Towards the final strategy

For the final strategy to deliver a minimum viable product, I think it needs changes to the draft.

First, it should base its policy compromise on a much harder-headed understanding of the obstacles that stand between us and the land of “how.” After explaining why the whole system can’t possibly embrace real independence and transparency at the moment, it should go on to sketch its own vision of how that might be grown from the bottom up. I’ve shown one possible model with my proposal for an evaluator-general, which involves structural separation between the system’s doing on the one hand and its knowing and evaluating on the other. It needn’t be grandiose and system-wide: it can be built on a small scale and grown from there. Some submissions to the PC seem to think it has merit. The PC itself gives the idea considerable elaboration, but only as reportage. If it has a better model it should set it out.

Second, if the strategy is its contribution to thought, its direct contribution to action should be to call for and begin the process of designing a new burst of energy and innovation that might grow at the margins of current activity and begin to spread through the system.

Here, the current weakness of the system lies not so much in the lack of promising experiments in the field as in the relationship between them and the system itself. The system must be able to identify, validate and acknowledge the best of those experiments. Currently, it can’t do that. Evaluation can play some role in fixing that, though we should guard against something that’s already clearly in evidence — the system grabbing hold of evaluation as a deus ex machina, it’s next fad diet that will save it from itself.

And there are two far graver obstacles to progress. First, as those in the field can attest, our politicians frequently play to their own political advantage irrespective of the evidence. Second, bureaucracies have terrible trouble responding to knowledge of what’s working from the field, for such bottom-up learning is countercultural in a hierarchy where power is at the top. Further, if learning were to rise from the bottom at any scale, it would involve the discomfort and uncertainty of change for large numbers of people.

The PC can do little about the first of these more serious problems. But it can hope to be influential regarding the second. I think it’s possible to be very concrete and specific about what is necessary here. The system can only sustainably expand what works by bolstering the status of the individuals and communities who have made it work and giving them much more authority and resources within that system.

Those at the centre of the system are just as important as the successes in the field, but there’s nothing unique about them — or there shouldn’t be if the system is working properly. Those in the system need to be made accountable not just for talking about expanding what works but for making sure it happens, despite the discomfort it will undoubtedly cause. To that end, a regular report could be recommended, by the auditor-general or some other independent guardian of integrity in the system, to document, say every two years, what progress was being made towards this goal of spreading “what works” and particularly the increasing empowerment of those who make it work.

For those of us who call ourselves Australians to properly begin the task that governor Arthur Phillip began with such high ideals and so little to show for it, we can only do it to the extent that non-Indigenous people and their institutions unloose themselves from those “anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.” To the extent we falter, the soft voice of conscience will keep whispering that destiny to us. •

This essay benefited from helpful comments on earlier drafts from Romlie Mokak, Keryn Hassall, Janina Gawler, Michael Griffith, Jon Altman, Mike Dillon, Christos Tsiolkas and Clive Kanes. As always, I am wholly responsible for the essay’s remaining inadequacies. The title “Orwell that ends well” is shamelessly stolen from my friend Konstantin Kisin.

The post Orwell that ends well? appeared first on Inside Story.

In developing the job guarantee proposal, Pearson has linked up with economist Bill Mitchell, a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. Mitchell argues that fiscal deficits are not inherently bad and that seeking to control inflation by maintaining a “buffer” of unemployed people (the current orthodoxy) is economically damaging. While the lively international debate about the feasibility of MMT is important, the job guarantee proposal doesn’t stand or fall according to how you view MMT.

Proponents argue that a universal job guarantee, set at the minimum wage, would have three important benefits. It would act as an “automatic stabiliser” (in Keynes’s terminology) by countering undue rises or falls in demand across the economy. It would forestall the significant economic and social costs of structural unemployment. And it would allow the central bank to focus squarely on managing inflation rather than having to attend to both inflation and employment targets.

In an opinion piece in the Weekend Australian, Pearson made plain what was driving his interest in this issue: “My people, consigned to welfare and structural exclusion from the real economy in the post-60s era of growing unemployment, have been victims of public policy choice for which there existed a better and more humane alternative.” He went on to outline his long campaign against passive welfare and its “bitter harvest”: “social problems, broken families, intergenerational poverty, lower life expectancy, egregious rates of out-of-home care for children, juvenile detention and adult incarceration.”

Although the necessary legislation would be national, the scheme would be administered through local government, Pearson wrote. He distinguished it from work for the dole — “It’s a full-time, minimum-wage job” — and stressed that the payment would replace unemployment benefits and end the churning of “hapless clients” through welfare-to-work programs.

Three weeks later, Pearson and Mitchell followed up with a two-pronged argument for their idea. First, focusing on the employment gap for Indigenous citizens, they cited a recent national cabinet pledge (not then public) to raise the Indigenous employment rate from 49 per cent to 60 per cent of working-age people by 2028. When it was finally announced on 29 July, the target was set at 62 per cent by 2031. With the mainstream rate currently 75 per cent, this new Close the Gap target concedes that four in ten Indigenous people will be without a job for the indefinite future.

Second, focusing on mainstream employment, they pointed to current estimates of 7.4 per cent unemployment and around 11.7 per cent underemployment. Figures recently published by Mitchell suggest that an annual $50 billion in government outlays could create 1.24 million jobs and bring employment down to 4 per cent. This fiscal stimulus would also have the flow-on effect of increasing private sector demand for labour, and its cost would come down as the private sector picked up.

Pearson and Mitchell point (persuasively, in my view) to the illogicality of the government’s recent decision to withdraw fiscal stimulus in the face of ongoing community shutdowns and rising unemployment.

Finally, they argue that separating Indigenous disadvantage from mainstream disadvantage is a poor policy choice:

[It] allows a pall of exceptionalism to be cast over the constantly depressing and outrageously out-of-step numbers that characterise Indigenous disadvantage. It’s as if the country — inured to the bad numbers — has come to accept that little can be done.

The country needs to address inequality and poverty as an Australian problem, not just an Indigenous problem.

So, how should we assess Pearson and Mitchell’s job guarantee plan?

The Australian’s editorial on 8 July 2020 provided an early critique. Headed “The Promise and Pitfalls of Modern Monetary Theory: Printing Money Doesn’t Reduce Deficits or Create Lasting Jobs,” the editorial takes aim at Pearson and Mitchell for overreach, the cost of administration, and the putative lack of fiscal self-control if “a populist National, a clueless Green, or a Labor class warrior” were they to control the Treasury benches.

“Pearson’s is a mammoth, brave proposal, one that would redefine the role of the state,” said the editorial, conceding that “In the midst of the greatest social and economic calamity in ninety years, there has to be more scope for imagination and ambition in our policy approach.”

Nevertheless, it saw a number of hurdles. The cost and administration of the scheme “would be vast,” work incentives would be skewed, some citizens wouldn’t want to work or train, and welfare would still be required for those who fall through the cracks. “While the policy edifice is failing Indigenous people, a neat solution is a chimera,” it summed up, concluding with the trite observation that:

we live in a complex, even messy world… How can you hope to manage the economy?… As an analytical tool the theory [MMT] has merit. But with printing money in the real world, there is a day of reckoning or just a long stagnation. Our income can never be guaranteed, so we need to earn and pay our way.

The value in this editorial is that it begins to set down the outlines of the case against the Pearson–Mitchell proposal — and it appears to be a collection of time-worn chestnuts synonymous with the slogan “private good, public bad.”

The Australian relies on the ideological trope that fiscal responsibility (austerity, in other words) must at all times be paramount in policy-making and administration — an idea already blown to smithereens by the pandemic. It also assumes that government’s role should be minimised and the concomitant red and green tape shredded — a view also blown out of the water by the exigencies of the pandemic. And its argument rests on a belief that complexity and messiness make for expensive policy and programs. Well, yes, but that reflects the world we live in. Markets and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” are amazing mechanisms for allocating resources, but they require strong and independent regulatory oversight if they are to work in the public interest.

What is missing from the Australian’s critique is an acknowledgement of the devastating costs (both financial and intangible) of an unemployment rate in excess of 10 per cent — and much higher among young people — over a sustained period. A recent Productivity Commission working paper on the consequences of the global financial crisis reports that “workers aged twenty to thirty-four experienced nearly zero growth in real wage rates from 2008 to 2018, and workers aged fifteen to twenty-four experienced a large decline in full-time work and an increase in part-time work.” Imagine what the commission will report in 2030 about the consequences of the current crisis.

A second omission from the Australian’s response is any acknowledgement of past policies directed at full employment, including New Deal–era programs in the United States and Australia’s own 1945 White Paper on Full Employment, which underpinned the postwar boom. The white paper’s full employment focus continues to this day as one of the legislated core functions of the Reserve Bank.

The third major omission is any conception of a dynamic and evolving role for government not just as a provider of public goods but also as a manager of risk. A job guarantee can be viewed as an institutional mechanism to retain, strengthen and develop the nation’s human and intellectual capital. To take just one example, the laws governing limited liability corporations are a form of risk insurance for shareholders. As the American economist David Moss points out in When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager, it wasn’t initially obvious that such innovations were required or would work. Today, they underpin the financial markets that raise most of the world’s capital for investment. I don’t hear any calls for this “red tape” to be removed.

Ultimately, though, the problem with the Australian’s editorial is that it focuses on the costs of delivering a job guarantee but entirely ignores the costs of failing to deliver one. Yes, a job guarantee would have implications for other policies. But it should be included on policymakers’ list of potential priorities and assessed against all others.

Leaving employment policy to the private sector is a choice of policymakers and governments, and it has serious consequences for citizens who can’t find work. Conveniently for governments, employment levels are made to seem as if they are someone else’s responsibility. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of the government (and indeed the opposition), the current orthodoxy allows governments to avoid hard decisions about social priorities. It means they can dodge the question: is full employment a priority or not?

In other words, I am a strong supporter of the Pearson–Mitchell proposal. If implemented, it would expand social inclusion, alleviate financial disadvantage and undoubtedly have other positive spin-offs for individuals, while providing a considerable impetus to social and economic infrastructure in local and regional communities. It would also make a huge contribution to eliminating Indigenous disadvantage, although it is not a silver bullet in that regard.

Like any complex public policy proposal, the guarantee will present challenges. As with planning for postwar reconstruction in the 1940s, designing the scheme will throw up many issues, the administrative systems required will be complex, and unintended consequences will emerge, particularly in the implementation phase. Tension is inevitable between the Commonwealth, as the funder of the program, and the delivery agencies (currently proposed to be local governments) over modes of operation, allocation of labour resources, and lines of accountability and reporting. These are not insurmountable challenges, but they do point to the importance of maintaining a degree of flexibility in the overall architecture of the scheme.

Despite the substantial merits of this proposal, though, the likelihood of any Australian government implementing it over the next five years is close to zero. This is not down to any fault in the proposal; it reflects the quality, risk aversion and blinkered ideologies of our governments and public institutions.

Would any modifications to the proposal make it more attractive to government? While a key virtue of the Pearson–Mitchell proposal is that it is universal, it may be that a second-best option, more limited in scope, will have a better chance of being implemented. This wouldn’t preclude the eventual adoption of a universal scheme and would provide an opportunity to test what will inevitably be a challenging and complex reform.

The economic and social crisis arising from the pandemic certainly demands more than business as usual, and its impact is likely to persist well beyond the current political cycle. This suggests that a proposal focused on the current crisis — rather than an open-ended scheme — might be more politically palatable. With a ten-year horizon, for instance, the effectiveness of the policy could be assessed based on its tangible record in cushioning the economic impacts of the crisis.

Another possibility would be to introduce the job guarantee across remote Australia, replacing the current Community Development Program, which is widely acknowledged outside government circles to be less than effective and highly punitive in its implementation. The levels of unemployment and underemployment are far worse in remote and very remote Australia, and it is already clear that current policies are doing very little to turn that around.

Even this scaled-back version would meet political resistance, but the Commonwealth’s very modest Indigenous employment ambitions in the new Closing the Gap program — and the absence of any strategy to meet even those meagre targets — suggests the need to try something new. A mainstream job guarantee in remote Australia would automatically target a substantial proportion of the most disadvantaged Indigenous citizens in the nation.

However a job guarantee program is rolled out, the unique circumstances of remote Australia will require particular attention. Indigenous organisations would expect to co-design the program, and community-controlled organisations would expect accreditation as job providers. The decentralised demographics and legitimate cultural aspirations of the remote Indigenous population will also create challenges. The lack of resources for managing the extensive and growing Indigenous land estate will need to be a focus, and the guarantee must build on successful innovations like the “working on country” programs that fund over one hundred ranger groups across the nation.

In what is clearly shaping to be a once-in-a-century financial, health and social crisis, the job guarantee is an idea whose time has come. It would align squarely with both major parties’ claim that job creation is the key priority for government. It would provide stimulus over the next decade. It would build rather than waste our most precious national resource, the skills and intellectual capital of our citizens. It would provide a strategy to reject the idea that the nation’s prosperity requires the impoverishment of a significant proportion of our citizens, particularly our youth. And it would open up employment opportunities to structurally excluded Indigenous communities and citizens — a choice the nation has lacked the political will to reverse.

In the shadow of a potentially existential climate crisis, we need all hands on deck. The national interest requires that we use all the human resources available in economically, socially and environmentally productive ways. •

The post All hands on deck appeared first on Inside Story.

Tess Ryan writes:

In the waiting room of a general practice a woman sits waiting to see the male clinician. She is uncomfortable and worries, because of past experiences, whether her concerns will be taken seriously or the doctor will see her problems as trivial.

An Aboriginal person also sits uneasily, knowing that the non-Indigenous people around her have no understanding of what her life entails, or what it means to be deemed a problematic statistic, or the assumptions that dictate how her health concerns are framed. If you have kidney or liver problems, it must be due to alcohol use. If you are a diabetic, it is due to the food you eat.

Also waiting is someone with a chronic condition. This person is running through her mind the list of concerns about her body, and the next complications she may face. When some new problem arises that can’t be explained neatly within diagnostic categories, she knows from past experience that she will be told, unsatisfyingly, “This is probably just a part of your condition.”

And an academic, who writes about race, cultural nuances and systemic failures across various institutions in the hope of disrupting them for the better, also waits for the doctor.

How many people sit in that waiting room? The answer is one. Me.

I walk into a medical practice with an understanding of health systems derived from my various identities: a Black Australian, a woman, someone with a deepening chronic illness, and an academic and writer with an understanding of the denial of Black voices and how health systems ignore the totality of people’s lives.

I come with many languages, some embedded in an emotional place that echoes through my body, and a history of being told I am less. I also bring an intellectual language for describing my understanding and experiences of racism and intergenerational trauma.

Observing myself in that waiting room, I am overcome with exhaustion. These discussions about race and racism that have come to the fore with the pandemic and with Black Lives Matter are necessary. But so utterly tiring. In case you haven’t noticed, we have been doing this work for a very long time.

____________

Melissa Sweet writes:

On a late spring’s evening in 2018 the Fred Hollows Foundation hosted a historic celebration in Adelaide. Guests whipped out their phones to record and tweet the beaming smile of the guest of honour, the president of the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association, Kris Rallah-Baker, with his arms wrapped around his parents. The celebration marked Dr Rallah-Baker’s graduation as Australia’s first Indigenous ophthalmologist.

Although he was just thirteen years old when the legendary eye surgeon Fred Hollows died in 1993, even then he had his sights set on becoming a doctor. But a careers counsellor at his school advised him against doing medicine, despite the fact that he was a top student, because “Aboriginal doctors were virtually unheard of.”

Low expectations are among the many ways that racism is expressed towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Rallah-Baker experienced many other manifestations during his medical training. Not long before that graduation ceremony, he decided to put his concerns on the public record. “My own dealings with blatant racism, degradation, training delays, bullying, harassment and racial vilification are unfortunately considered an unremarkable experience amongst my Indigenous medical brethren,” he wrote in Insight, the industry magazine for the eye-care sector.

Initially the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, or RANZCO, dismissed those concerns. But it quickly came under fire, with one headline referring to the college’s having engaged in “whitesplaining.” In an open letter, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics and health professionals, along with the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association and members of the Leaders in Indigenous Medical Education Network, condemned the college for “its callous disregard” of Rallah-Baker’s “experiences of racism and bullying and the attempt to publicly undermine his integrity and commitment to his profession and his people.”

Rallah-Baker had given RANZCO the chance to be part of the solution, they wrote. “We urge RANZCO to take up the call for the necessary institutional reform needed to ensure that Dr Rallah-Baker is not the first and last Indigenous ophthalmologist in this country. We urge you to listen and learn from his experiences and further, commit to action in the interests of Indigenous health justice.”

Within weeks the college issued a public apology — and Rallah-Baker is struck by how far the organisation has evolved since then. “I am absolutely impressed at how far they have come,” he tells me. “It’s been transformative for the organisation.”

He describes an increased focus on Indigenous eye health in training programs and an ambitious Reconciliation Action Plan. Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori flags are now displayed prominently at college events, Acknowledgement of Country and other Indigenous protocols are in use, and the college has introduced cultural safety training — a strategy for tackling racism that encourages health practitioners to reflect critically on their knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour.

At a personal level, Rallah-Baker appreciates how RANZCO colleagues have rallied around at critical times, such as when the mining company Rio Tinto destroyed sacred sites at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia during Reconciliation Week, and when the Black Lives Matter movement brought global attention to the pervasive and violent effects of racism in all its forms.

But the point is not so much that a conservative, largely white organisation like RANZCO could change for the better. More significantly, this is just one of countless examples of how hard Aboriginal and Torres Islander people work, individually and collectively, to deal with racism — and not only in its most obvious forms.

The work has involved generations of scholarship, teaching, training, activism and advocacy. It has involved campaigning for policy and organisational change to tackle the institutional racism whereby society’s institutions and systems are designed to operate in ways that privilege some groups over others. In Australia, institutional racism is most glaringly evident in the failure of mainstream health, education, justice, media and other sectors to address the aspirations and needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people also contribute immense emotional labour in pushing for justice and change after loved ones have been harmed or killed. In her report on the death of Wiradjuri woman Naomi Williams from septicaemia at Tumut Hospital in 2016 — the result of an infection that is usually treatable — NSW deputy coroner Harriet Grahame acknowledged “the enormous pain Naomi’s family and friends feel and I thank them for their courageous attendance and dedicated participation in these difficult proceedings.”

Grahame saw their motivation as twofold: “They have been dedicated to trying to find out exactly why Naomi died, but they have also been looking for ways to improve health outcomes for other Indigenous patients in their local community. In this way they are honouring Naomi’s life and acknowledging her status as an emerging leader of her community.” Her report stresses the importance of Aboriginal people’s representation at all levels of the health system, and explores the impact of implicit bias and racism on healthcare for Indigenous patients.

Grahame documents “clear and ongoing inadequacies” in Ms Williams’s care, also finding that the care provided to her family after her death was “not compassionate or appropriate.” In the several months before she died, she presented at least eighteen times to the hospital with recurring, persistent symptoms, including vomiting and nausea, but felt her concerns were not being taken seriously because she was being stereotyped as a drug user rather than being referred to appropriate services.

The pandemic has brought the harmful impacts of racism to greater prominence, with headlines around the world reporting that Black people are not only more likely to contract Covid-19 but also more likely to die from it.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, however, such concerns are no revelation. Next year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service, the country’s first Aboriginal community-controlled health service. It was established to provide a culturally safe alternative to mainstream services, and since then it and other similar organisations have argued that tackling racism is critical to improving the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Yet these calls have fallen largely on deaf ears. In fact, the r-word doesn’t appear in three landmark documents in the history of Australian health reform: Australia: The Healthiest Country by 2020, the “roadmap for action” of the National Preventative Health Strategy (316 pages); A Healthier Future for All Australians, the final report of the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (279 pages); and Building a 21st Century Primary Health Care System, which spelt out “Australia’s First National Primary Health Care Strategy” (forty-four pages).

Last year saw the release of health minister Greg Hunt’s ambitiously titled but modestly scoped report, Australia’s Long Term National Health Plan to Build the World’s Best Health System (twenty-four pages), and plans for a new national preventive health strategy. Again, though, silence on this central issue.

Writing in the Medical Journal of Australia in March, University of Queensland health researchers Chelsea Bond and David Singh highlighted other omissions and pointed out that the National Health and Medical Research Council has yet to invest in a research program to understand and tackle racism in the health system.

By contrast, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2013–2023, released by the government in 2013 and developed in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, made action against racism central, as did this year’s report from the Close the Gap campaign, which represents peak Indigenous and non-Indigenous health bodies, non-government organisations and human rights organisations. Yet the most recent of the federal government’s Closing the Gap reports mentions racism just once and contains no specific targets for tackling it, whether population-wide or in critical areas such as health, education or justice.

Among the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and leaders working overtime to break this silence is the Coalition of Peaks, which represents about fifty Indigenous organisations. In March, the coalition signed an historic agreement with the Council of Australian Governments setting out a power-sharing arrangement over the next decade, including a commitment to three-yearly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander–led reviews of Closing the Gap work.

The Coalition of Peaks is due to sign an agreement with federal, state and territory governments and the Australian Local Government Association on the next iteration of the Closing the Gap strategy. It is pushing not only for increased investment, according to its lead convenor, Pat Turner, but also for funding to go directly to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander–controlled organisations.

For Kris Rallah-Baker, the present moment — with the convergence of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement — brings a unique opportunity.

The Aboriginal health sector’s response to the pandemic, faster and more effective than those from mainstream organisations, has been widely acknowledged. The role of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on Covid-19, which has been advising the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, shows how tackling institutional racism through structural change can lead to better outcomes. The group, co-chaired by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, or NACCHO, works on principles of shared decision-making, power sharing, two-way communication, self-determination, leadership and empowerment, according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia.

Rallah-Baker, who is now president of the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association, or AIDA, says the Black Lives Matter movement has catapulted longstanding concerns into mainstream consciousness. “In Australia, we’ve had our own issues and debates around deaths in custody, and treaty, and reconciliation, right back to the Indigenous wars of independence,” he says. “By seeing those movements become mainstream in other Western countries, Australians start to question their own system.”

Weeks before our screens filled with the brutal images of a policeman’s knee on the late George Floyd’s neck, AIDA called out the racism Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were experiencing in health services during the pandemic (for example, a patient who identified as an Aboriginal person was denied testing because priority treatment would only be offered to “real Aborigines”). AIDA also called for the early release of imprisoned First Nations people to prevent Black Covid-19 deaths in custody.

In April, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency backed AIDA’s concerns and encouraged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to lodge complaints if they had experienced racism or culturally unsafe care. “We will not tolerate racism particularly given the impact it has on community members accessing critical healthcare at this time,” said chief executive Martin Fletcher.

Just a few months later, non-Indigenous public health officials were warning Australians against attending Black Lives Matter marches, while remaining silent on public health threats such as police brutality and institutional racism. Indigenous health leaders spoke up strongly in response. The Centre of Best Practice in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Prevention urged schools “to teach children about our history of racism, the social and historical determinants that underlie it, how this historical oppression continues, and what each of us can do to stand against racism.” NACCHO joined a broad coalition calling for the prime minister and opposition leader to support a bipartisan national anti-racism strategy.

Pat Anderson, chair of the Lowitja Institute, criticised the government’s lack of acknowledgement of the core concerns of Black Lives Matter. “We need to acknowledge that racism is deeply entrenched in Australia and is a public health emergency for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” she said. But instead of taking urgent action on the Black Lives Matter concerns, “our government criticises us for our protests.”

In Melbourne, the chief executive officer of the Lowitja Institute, Narrunga Kaurna woman Janine Mohamed, a longstanding advocate for cultural safety, marched with her family and other colleagues working in Aboriginal health. As they walked, she later wrote, she thought about the linkages between punitive health and justice systems, and the stories of Ms Dhu, Naomi Williams, Tanya Day and David Dungay Junior and their preventable deaths. “So many of our people have been hurt and harmed by traumatising systems. Yet it took the death of an African-American man in the US to bring so many non-Indigenous Australians out on to the streets.”

At Wagga Wagga, in the NSW Riverina, Donna Murray, chief executive officer of Indigenous Allied Health Australia, joined hundreds of others in the Black Lives Matter march, where many wore masks and carried signs declaring “I can’t breathe.” She was moved by thoughts of the late Naomi Williams and her family, she tells me, and how little the mainstream health system had done to address the coroner’s findings. A descendant of the Wiradjuri nation of the Murrumbidgee River and of the Wonnarua nation of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Murray has spent decades working in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs within government and community organisations.

What happens when all the non-Indigenous people go home? Indigenous Allied Health Australia’s Donna Murray. Honoring Nations/YouTube

On that day, she felt good to be on her Country and connecting with community after stressful months supporting members, many of whom were reporting increases in racism in their daily working and social lives as a result of the pandemic. “Fairly early on, it was quite obvious that it was going to be an issue to manage,” she says. Like other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workforce groups, her organisation ran webinars for members, stressing the importance of self-care and the cultural determinants of health as an antidote to racism.

Like Rallah-Baker, Murray believes that the increased global awareness arising from the pandemic and Black Lives Matter has created an opportunity to drive the anti-racism agenda. She would like a national process for tackling racism in health and education, including more support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to make complaints about health services and health professionals.

She also wants non-Indigenous people and organisations to deal with racism. This is not the responsibility of Indigenous people and organisations, she says. “Our responsibility is to support our own people in caring for families and communities, and stay strong so we can keep identifying our priorities and find solutions through nation-building and self-determination.”

Murray suggests that I ask Speech Pathology Australia about why it came out in support of Black Lives Matter, one of a small number of mainstream health organisations to do so. When I question SPA national president Tim Kittel about this, he links the statement to other changes made by the organisation, including setting up an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander committee, making a formal apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the profession’s history of causing harm, and encouraging members to undertake cultural safety training.

The SPA board is “firm” on the need to address the systemic discrimination and racism experienced by First Nations people, says Kittel. “There is so much more to do.”

At the end of the march in Wagga, Murray says she was left wondering: “When all those non-Indigenous people go home, what are they going to change and transform, so we don’t all have to keep coming back to march and speak out in another twelve months’ time, still in the same place, under the same dominant system? That’s always my question.”

Towards the end of a webinar hosted by the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association — coincidentally held the day after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis — the AHHA’s strategic programs director, Chris Bourke, showed a complex “mud map” outlining multiple, overlapping ways that racism in healthcare is being dealt with through regulations and law.

It included the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care’s implementation of new national healthcare standards released in 2017, race discrimination law, and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency’s work to embed cultural safety across healthcare.

Bourke, a Gamilaroi man, brings wide-ranging experience to this work, as Australia’s first Indigenous dentist and a member of the ACT Legislative Assembly from 2011 to 2016, where he held ministerial roles across portfolios including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs, children and young people, disability, corrections, and education and training.

He says his father, an Aboriginal schoolteacher and principal, had a profound impact on his education. “I was incredibly lucky to be in such an environment and it protected myself and my siblings from many of the impacts of racism and discrimination that so many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people experience both in going to school and growing up.”

He studied dentistry because he liked science and doing things with his hands, and wanted to help people. He recalls working on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the 1980s, when the dental clinic that served the non-Indigenous community was relatively well equipped but the one for local Aboriginal people “looked like something out of before the war.”

“There was no capability to do any fillings; you were there to take people’s teeth out. There wasn’t even an autoclave,” he recalls. “This was truly appalling ­— an example of a pattern of care, a model of care that’s been established as a result of institutional racism.”

Bourke says the concept of institutional racism recognises that organisations can serve some groups poorly because of the way they are run, managed, held accountable, resourced, located and staffed. It is about more than just staff behaviour, he says. Training and anti-racism courses will be ineffective if power structures don’t change.

Boards and management hold the key, but Bourke stresses the challenges involved. “It’s hard work. You have to play every note on the piano to get that change to happen.” But he is optimistic about “groundbreaking” developments in Queensland, where the state government, working with the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council and Indigenous academics, has drafted legislation to tackle institutional racism, including by requiring each hospital and health board to have at least one Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person as a member. With the pandemic constraining parliament’s operations, though, it’s not clear when the legislation will be debated, according to the office of Queensland health minister Steven Miles.

The South Australian health department is exploring a similar model, and is working with the AHHA on this. “That still leaves a number of other jurisdictions that could lean into this space and get some work done,” says Bourke.

In June last year, participants at the Lowitja Institute’s International Indigenous Health and Wellbeing Conference in Darwin outlined twelve priorities. “Colonialism and racism are determinants of ill health,” said one. “We call for comprehensive truth telling processes, and the acceptance of these truths, to dismantle colonial narratives and systemic racism in health research, policy and service delivery.”

While movements are growing for truth telling, as evidenced by the Uluru Statement from the Heart and, most recently, Victoria’s new truth and justice commission, the lived experience of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people shows a long road ahead.

__________

Tess Ryan writes:

Back in that waiting room I contemplate these developments, wearing all of my hats, including as president of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association.

My stomach churns reading again about Naomi Williams and her family. I think back to the time I spent with them, and the conversations we had about disconnections between cultural understandings of health and the health system. Recalling those days brings up all the anger and trauma, again. But this anger also fires us up to continue the fight.

We seem to be in a moment where change feels possible, and more commentary is recognising the many experiences of Black people and other people of colour. We are seeing very public denouncements of racism and an acknowledgement through numerous industries that those Black lives do matter. It is a powerful elixir to see allies also take on that work and young people in community wanting to carry the baton for changing these systems.

I want these developments to lead to systemic and structural change. It is the people within the system who need to see that change as necessary. At the micro or relationship level, I want to see behaviours shift in how we view various groups of people in connection with race. Rendering our bodies as statistical issues in health does nothing to change the paradigm of othering, and the focus on fixing the “condition” without having conversations about lived experience.

These developments are really only the beginning of the conversation we need to have. As an Aboriginal woman I will always want to work for that change, no matter how despondent I may feel. We look for the hope by looking backwards at all those who have advocated before us, and we look to the now and beyond in the strength of Black voices. We need to keep the momentum going, and for the policy changes to improve practice.

My hope is that I can walk into a medical clinic feeling like I am part of a team of people and professionals who will listen to my experiences, respect my different positions located in my identity, and work to build manageable solutions for better health and wellbeing. If I need a multidisciplinary team, then I expect them to work together with me and not sit in silos of their own discipline without connecting the dots to what can assist in better health.

I want to know that my mother is getting appropriate access to healthcare in her small town, that my brother doesn’t feel isolated from good health service delivery in a big city, and that a death like that of Naomi Williams won’t happen again. I want to see people like Kris Rallah-Baker supported and more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people become ophthalmologists, or psychiatrists, or epidemiologists. We should see this as the norm and not the exception.

And I want other Australians to acknowledge and understand the hard work we do — as academics, professionals, policymakers, community members, commentators, digital media practitioners and artists — to try to educate you and open your eyes and ears and hearts. Our work, in navigating racism, informing people about discriminatory practice and working within institutional structures to create change, is immense.

We work to educate you in understanding difference, in pushing back against racial violence, in railing at the structures that think they can do better for us when we have our own solutions. Community-controlled health organisations have been doing exactly this during the pandemic, and these successes are regularly ignored.

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities have given decades of service to improve this country’s healthcare. It is time for other Australians to step up, take the responsibility and do the work, through your conversations and relationships as well as through changing policy and institutions and making yourselves accountable. We have been carrying you all this time without your even noticing. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The long road to healthcare justice appeared first on Inside Story.

After the last massacres in Western Australia and the Northern Territory in the 1920s, the governing of Aborigines became a matter of intense concern to state and territory politicians and their advisers, agents and emissaries. In this new era — the protection era — paternalistic control masqueraded as care. No longer would white pastoralists, farmers and country residents be free to remove or enslave the local Aborigines.

Between the 1920s and the referendum in 1967, each state passed and frequently amended protective legislation, creating a great body of law that attempted both to separate and to assimilate Indigenous populations. The convoluted complexities that emerged reflected beliefs about race that remained unquestioned for decades and still lurk in disavowed corners of Australian consciousness.

The foundational fantasy was that two separate and unequal kinds of human beings, known as two races, the Whites and the Aborigines, lived in Australia. “Foreign” races also lived here, but they could, if necessary, be sent back to where they came from.

That fixed fantasy of separate and unequal races was the common sense belief of the times. It did not necessarily imply enmity, let alone brutality, and it was sometimes accompanied by sincere compassion and care, albeit founded on inequality.

But while separation and inequality were seen as natural, considerable force was needed to ensure they were maintained. Separation in particular, but also the inequality between Whites and Aborigines, was being undermined by an inexorable process that scientists had named “miscegenation.” This “problem” was often referred to as “the half-caste menace,” because the “mixed race” population menaced racial binarism.

It was when I was trying to make sense of the position of Rembarrnga people, with whom I lived intermittently in the 1970s and 80s, that I discovered the legal minefield that had been the Northern Territory’s racial frontier just a few years earlier.

This was at Gulin Gulin, better known as Bulman, just inside the southern border of the Arnhem Land reserve. The Rembarrnga families were refugees from Mainoru cattle station, where most of them had lived and worked since the 1920s.  Two disasters had occurred in 1969. With the death of Jack Mackay, the old and trusted owner of Mainoru, the station was sold. Because government subsidies had been withdrawn and equal wages introduced, the new managers stopped providing rations for the families in the camp. Individual contract jobs were offered to a few stockmen and the rest of the community was made unwelcome. After weeks of tension, the Rembarrnga families walked off the station, trekking north to a safer place.

A major focus of the earlier laws had been to control interactions between the races, especially the intimacy that had led to the emergence of “half-castes.” Their existence was routinely attributed to “combos,” a contemptuous slang term for white men who “consorted” with the Aboriginal women, who gave birth to “yella fellas.”

It now seems an obvious absurdity that such relationships were deemed a serious social problem. Yet it preoccupied respected and responsible politicians and public servants, and they devised an array of laws and regulations to discourage and administer “interracial” relationships. Because such matters were embarrassing, they were debated among the lawmakers rather than in public. In the southern cities and towns, Aboriginal people had been separated from their land and severed from their heritage for more than a century and were already largely “mixed race.” The legal restrictions Aborigines faced there were different, though in many ways more repressive — but that’s another story.

The laws devised for the Northern Territory defined where members of the two races could legally gather and reside, including the town areas from which Aborigines were prohibited, and camping areas and reserves for Aborigines only. The changing rules were mainly directed at town and fringe dwellers and were published in the government gazette each week. As John McCorquodale has written, a “bewildering array of legal definitions led to inconsistent legal treatment and arbi­trary, unpredictable, and capricious administrative treatment.”

State and territory governments modified their statutes as conditions changed, new challenges arose, other jurisdictions acted, and international ideas arrived. A critical task was defining an “aboriginal native” to whom these laws applied. The Northern Territory’s 1924 Aboriginals Ordinance extended the definition of “an aboriginal native” to include “half-caste males below the age of twenty-one.” It was extended again in 1927 to take in those males “whose age exceeds twenty-one years and who, in the opinion of the Chief Protector [of Aborigines], is incapable of managing his own affairs and is declared by the Chief Protector to be the subject of this Ordinance.” Applying these laws often entailed intrusive examination of individuals.

These laws were mostly ineffective against irresponsible or violent white men while punishing sustained, amicable relationships. A tin miner at Maranboy, for instance, had his “licence to employ Aborigines” cancelled after being accused of “abduction” and then of “associating” repeatedly “with female Aborigines.” It was then reported that “the girl may have been party to the offence,” before the police finally admitted that the same “girl” was involved each time. This man was being harassed for criminal and immoral acts on the basis of his loyalty and fidelity to his de facto Aboriginal wife.

In remoter areas, light-skinned children in “blacks camps” were routinely removed to institutions to be educated for a few years. This was justified partly because such children were allegedly treated badly by their “full-blood” relations. Rembarrnga people were baffled by and indignant about these laws, which I believe was based on a blatant lie. The mother and other relatives of a light-skinned baby who had been taken to the “half-caste home” in Darwin received news of how she was faring over the years from a sympathetic patrol officer, and the daughter, now an adult, eventually reconnected with her mother. “The government was silly then,” said the mother, voicing a general view. “They’re better now.”

Rembarrnga recognised differences between blackfellas, whitefellas and yellafellas — they used these vernacular English terms — but did not accord them different human value. They did not understand racism.

A principle of “not disturbing the tribal life of the natives” was agreed to by the territory administration and the Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees Association at a conference in 1947 in Alice Springs. Thus, remote Aboriginal communities suffered less disruption by state officials than those in or near the towns. In Darwin and Alice Springs, the laws of separation proved to be ever more complex and confusing. Demeaning designations and restrictions — such as permits allowing a specific white man to associate with a specific Aboriginal woman between the hours of 6pm and 9pm on Saturdays — were increasingly challenged as the years went by.

Underlying that kind of restriction was the fact that it was against the law for white men to “consort” with Aboriginal women. Any intimacy between white women and Aboriginal men was unthinkable because such relationships contradicted both the racial and sexual hierarchy. The law echoed the widespread contempt for the men concerned. Only brave white men openly established relationships with Aboriginal women and acknowledged the children they fathered.

Xavier Herbert brought this barbarity to light in his great novels Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975). Ted Egan’s song “The Drover’s Boy” reveals another way stockmen and women evaded the racial separation laws — the drover’s boy was actually a girl. The territory administration attempted to put a stop to this practice by forbidding female Aborigines from dressing in men’s clothing under penalty of a substantial fine.

I was surprised to find that the original Aboriginals Ordinance, introduced in 1918, had given the territory’s director of native affairs the power to issue a “mixed race” couple with a “permit to marry.” Although very few applications were made before the 1940s and only about eight between 1944 and 1948, many more were granted in the 1950s.

Three Rembarrnga women I knew had married white men under these conditions, but none had children. None of the three was literate, and all were clearly baffled by the legal constraints but proud of managing to overcome them. Rumour had it that such women were routinely subjected to medical procedures to render them infertile.

Judy Farrar, an old woman when I met her in 1976, had lived openly with Billy Farrar when he owned Mainoru station. She told me that the policeman had “chased them” but they gave him the slip. After that, Judy said, “they gave me a white dress for married, properly way.”

The Farrar family were pastoralists, but it appears that Billy’s participation in the social life in Katherine was severed after the marriage, which must have been about 1940. Judy remained with Billy Farrar until he died. He left her £46 in his will.

Alma Gibbs married stockman Jimmy Gibbs around a decade later, after two local government officials came to Beswick Station to interrogate them. This is how Alma described the scene to me:

That’s the time we got caught. Native Affairs came out because somebody reported us two. They came to Beswick at night time, all that lot.

Jimmy Gibbs said: “Hey, all the welfare are here. They’ve come after you and me.”

“Alright, they can come,” I said to everyone.

They carted up all the books. And they brought up two or three boys [Aboriginal men] too, to give me a black one.

“Well,” they said, “we can’t let you marry that man. You pick which boy you want.”

“I won’t pick anybody,” I told them like that. “I’ll stop with this old man.”

“No you not allowed. He’s not a young man. He’s a bit old for you.”

“No matter he’s an old man I’ll stay with him. I work for him. I can’t help myself. I’ve got to look after his clothes, everything for him. You can’t make me feel different.”

“No you’re not allowed. You’ve got to marry your own colour,” they said.

“I don’t care about my own colour. I’m married to this white man. You can’t make the law all the time,” I said to them. So they had to believe me.

“Alright, well, do you want to be married?”

“No, not married to him, I want to live with him, that’s all.”

After that they said, “That’s alright, you two can walk about free now.”

Alma and Jimmy were issued the permit and a white dress was supplied for the wedding party at Bamyilli. The liberal regime on Mainoru station protected such couples from public contempt. But couples who didn’t request permission to marry were sometimes hounded through the bush by police and patrol officers for years.

The third woman I met was Nelly Camfoo, who had married Tex Camfoo. Tex’s racial status reveals the absurdity of the laws. He was not classed as “an Aboriginal native” but nor did he fit the new category of “ward,” which had been created in the mid 1950s in a legislative move of breathtaking simplicity by territories minister Paul Hasluck. The Aboriginals Ordinance became the Welfare Ordinance; it no longer applied to a race but to those who were “unable to look after themselves.”

Because Tex’s father was Chinese, he had been removed from his Aboriginal family to Groote Eylandt as a “half-caste” child. Because the education he received there meant he wasn’t regarded as someone “unable to look after himself,” he was a European by default and needed a permit to marry Nelly.

As they tell it in Love Against the Law, these events were both hilarious and horrifying. Tex told me he said to the police officer, “Well, anyhow, I didn’t know I was a European,” to which the police officer replied, “Your father is a Chinaman. They haven’t got that law so your father’s a European. You follow your father. Your name’s Camfoo.”

This illustrates the widespread confusion caused by the desire to categorise people in terms of race. The newly invented category of “ward” silenced emerging complaints about racial injustice and ended legal challenges to the Aboriginals Ordinance. The number of wards would gradually contract as the assimilative process inexorably continued. An individual who ceased to be a ward would be severed from their relatives to become an individual European.

No distinct Aboriginal social realm with legitimate, autonomous cultural practices was recognised in the legislation. Or rather, the principle of “not disturbing the tribal life of the natives” was followed by ignoring “tribal life,” at least until valuable minerals were discovered beneath the surface of the natives’ lands — but that’s another story, too.

That “full-bloods” were in need of care by the state — meaning in their interactions with white institutions and practices — was thought so obvious that it was not detailed or defended. But the attempt to develop a register of wards failed. The intricacies of Aboriginal kinship and naming systems — the lack of a system of surnames, for example — baffled the patrol officers and police charged with listing wards by name.

Another common assumption was that Aborigines would welcome the chance to assimilate with the white world and readily divest themselves of their own “primitive” ways of being. While the assimilative forces puzzled people like Alma Gibbs and Nelly Camfoo, evidence that Aborigines wanted to retain their relationships and way of life puzzled many a policymaker working hard on “improvements.” “Improving” or “assimilative” ideas prevailed among the governing class for a century or two and still lurk in unconscious corners of Australian ideology.

William Faulkner was writing of the deep south of the United States when he said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” He traced the intricacies of racialised understandings of the world and the legacy of cruelty and hypocrisy across American society. Racial laws and practices in Australia were and are very different, yet the legacy of the laws I have described and the ideas that gave rise to them live on in what I think of as the naturalisation of inequality. In these matters we are all driven by perceptions and sentiments formed by a social history that is beyond our individual will.

The “bewildering array of legal definitions” of Aborigines and the attendant forms of control and interference dissolved when the Commonwealth government assumed control of Aboriginal affairs across the continent after the 1967 referendum. Rather than rejection, Aborigines then experienced far greater public and political attention, and a sometimes suffocating embrace. While the quantum of sympathy and concern increased exponentially, so did the accompanying hypocrisy, as the same fundamental conditions of separateness and inequality remained.

In rural communities, white resentment grew as Aborigines appeared to be favoured. The continuing marginalisation and poverty of the majority of Aboriginal communities, combined with their own desire for “difference,” has meant that police — who are seldom interested in either history or culture — are left to deal with the difficulties such conditions inevitably produce.

Australia’s political class now claims to respect traditional owners of the land, asserting pride in the “oldest culture in the world” and scorning explicit racial hostility. Yet the complexity and sophistication of traditional as well as contemporary Aboriginal social worlds are little understood. Perhaps this is just as well, because their underlying principles and values contradict those of the settlers. As anthropologist Ken Maddock, who worked with Rembarrnga men some years before I was there, wrote in 1974:

The polity of the Aborigines… with its freedom from any institution of enforcement, and its consequential stress on self-reliance and mutual aid within a framework of generally recognised norms, was a kind of anarchy… in which none were sovereign.

The Aboriginal voices heard in public today may chip away at the prejudices evident in white Australia, but even the most powerful of them can readily be dismissed — as was evident in the federal government’s response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Uluru Statement was composed by respected and responsible Aboriginal people after many months of consultation with communities across the country. That a decent-enough human being like Malcolm Turnbull could so easily and hurtfully dismiss it on bogus grounds seems to me a reflection of the lack of importance accorded to Aboriginal people among the political and economic priorities of contemporary Australia. But the fact that Turnbull was criticised for his response, and that widespread support emerged for the projected future proposed in the Uluru Statement provides us with a ray of hope that black lives may matter as much as other lives in Australia’s future. •

The post Black loves matter appeared first on Inside Story.

Not so long ago it was unclear whether Australia had the appetite — or wherewithal — to celebrate Cook again. The “statue wars” were a reminder that the weeping sore Cook symbolises is far from healed. As Stan Grant’s incisive essay argued, Cook will remain a lightning rod for as long as Australia’s assumptions about discovery, possession and sovereignty are allowed to stand shamelessly unexamined. He called for a clear-eyed national conversation, and what we got instead was a furious backlash from some quarters and tip-toeing around the issues from others, including our prime minister at the time.

That little taster of what happens when Cook is criticised suggested that perhaps we were still not quite ready as a nation to commemorate the Endeavour’s voyage along the east coast — or at least to grapple in a good or proper way with the unresolved issues that lie at our colonial core and have adhered to that expedition’s captain.

Nevertheless, as the sestercentenary of 1770 inched closer, and particularly after the revolving door of prime ministers stopped with the Member for Cook, Scott Morrison (a more apt title is hard to imagine), it became a sure thing that 2020 would be the Year of Cook. Morrison, like his predecessor Bruce Baird and many earlier Members for Cook, is an admirer of Lieutenant James Cook’s character and achievements, and a defender of his central place in the nation’s history.

Morrison has made no secret of his idolisation of the man, but it made him a soft target. Back in the distant past of late last year, when he was besieged for taking an overseas family holiday without telling the Australian public or the media, a joke did the rounds on social media: “What do Captain Cook and the Member for Cook have in common? They both regretted going to Hawai’i.” Boom boom.

Soon after assuming office, Morrison committed nearly $50 million to commemorate the quarter millennium of the Endeavour voyage. The announcement was seen by many, particularly younger Australians, as an outdated indulgence. Criticism only intensified when it was announced that a good portion of the money would support the circumnavigation of Australia by the replica Endeavour, which the National Maritime Museum in Sydney looks after. To remain seaworthy and keep its crew credentialed, the replica needs to sail regularly. Although this is an expensive drain on its cash-strapped host, the opportunity to put the little ship to sea was welcomed; and there were plans for educational activities, community engagement and exhibitions at each of its stopovers.

The voyage might also have prompted protests, or at least alternative accounts of its meanings, in the places where it pulled ashore. Certainly, its travels in real time would have generated a stream of images and stories for a hungry media and would have stretched the commemoration from a single moment (usually the first landing at Botany Bay) into a four month (or 126-day) epic punctuated by episodes, encounters and experiences.

Three Bama in a Canoe (2019), by Wanda Gibson, Hopevale. Endeavour Voyage exhibition/National Museum of Australia

But the problem of commemorative history, and the rock on which this enterprise faltered, is that it requires a certain faithfulness to the known “facts” even as its metier is to stretch history to fit our contemporary desires. And so, when the circumnavigation was billed as a re-enactment, that pact was broken: Cook didn’t circumnavigate, and cynicism filled the space that opened up.

Now the pandemic has kept the ship moored in Sydney, scotching a key component of the planned commemoration. And, like dominoes, local festivals, events, and exhibitions along the coast have fallen over too. The annual festival at Cooktown, which has been growing and garnering interest over the past decade, will not go ahead this year, a blow for those who have worked in a largely voluntary capacity for many years and for those who were planning to make their way to Cooktown to attend. Held in June, it is the biggest weekend on the town’s calendar and local businesses depend on it.

A lesser-known component of the federal funding package is the Cultural Connections Initiative, which is being coordinated by the National Museum of Australia. It supports “professional development and employment opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural practitioners and grassroots cultural work.” Over the last two or so years, the Museum has worked with nine organisations dotted along the east coast to co-design and create cultural, art and language programs and activities.

Pre-pandemic, the idea was that — as the replica Endeavour made its way north — some of this very powerful local community work and storytelling would have come to the fore, but the program itself was never conceived as providing content for public commemoration. Rather, the NMA is pursuing a bigger and more ambitious engagement with Indigenous Australians, one that both contributes to and reflects changes in museum practice worldwide. This involves seeking ways to contribute to the work that communities do, or want to do, in researching, telling, curating (broadly speaking) and sharing their own histories (again broadly speaking) in their own ways, and it necessarily includes some commitment to employment and training.

The NMA’s Encounter Fellowships program, which emerged from the landmark Encounters exhibition held over late 2015 and early 2016, is also a key component of this longer-term vision. Using a portion of the windfall that came with Cook’s anniversary, the NMA has provided resources to some east coast communities to realise their own local visions and ambitions around cultural heritage and knowledge, whether it references James Cook or not.

Importantly, the Cultural Connections Initiative has been rolled out at a remove from the engine room that drives the development of Museum’s own Cook show. Exhibitions have a momentum that can run counter to the usual rhythms of time. But in commemorative-style history, they still matter. The package of funding from the federal government came with the expectation that both the NMA and the National Library of Australia would do public shows. Opting to go early before the calendar of commemorations became too crowded, the NLA opened its Cook and the Pacific in late 2018 with a very droll speech by Sam Neill.

In the meantime, the National Museum of Australia was developing its exhibition, Endeavour Voyage: The Untold Stories of Cook and the First Australians, which would have been launched earlier this month if Covid-19 hadn’t intervened. The delay brings to mind Cook’s moral crisis when he suspected that his crew was responsible for introducing new and fatal diseases, and his own attempts at managing and mitigating the situation. “As there were some venereal complaints on board both the ships…” he wrote during his third voyage

I gave orders that no women on any account whatever were to be admitted on board the ships, I also forbid all manner of connection with them, and ordered that none who had the venereal upon them should go out of the ships. But whether these regulations had the desired effect or no time can only discover. It is no more than what I did when I first visited the Friendly Islands yet I afterwards found it did not succeed.

The Untold Stories exhibition is instead being presented online — an impressively agile response from the institution, and particularly from the small curatorial team behind the exhibition, who could have been forgiven for thinking that all the hard work and long hours were behind them and they could bathe in visitors’ responses and the media coverage of their intellectual and creative labours. Instead, they are scurrying to transform a feast of old and new art and objects, many produced for the show or borrowed from overseas institutions, and immersive audio-visual programs designed to fill a single physical space. As has become a standard response, there are positives and negatives to be found in this new reality.

Joseph Banks’s travelling stove, used on the Endeavour 1768–71, on loan from the Royal Geographical Society. Endeavour Voyage exhibition/National Museum of Australia

As the virtual exhibition follows Cook’s voyage up and the coast, visitors are being drip-fed video and other content, a decision that was presumably as much pragmatic as pedagogical. But it has the welcome upside of helping us to keep track of days, something we are all struggling to do. It’s 29 April, must be time to land!

(This inspired me to suggest to my family that we do daily readings from Cook’s and Joseph Banks’s journals as a way of marking the days, but I was met with uncomfortable silence and probable eye-rolls. Much more enthusiasm has been generated by a virtual road trip in the United States, a holiday my sister had planned but has been cancelled. We’re currently “in” San Francisco.)

The Untold Stories exhibition’s itinerary is composed of nine significant sightings or encounters on shore. We start at Point Hicks on the Victorian coast, where land was first sighted, and end at Possession Island on the far northern Queensland coast, where Cook made his controversial claim over the territory. At each site, the stories of the people, places and prominent landmarks that he saw, described and renamed are told by local Aboriginal people.

Along the way, we learn about important cultural sites (often mountains which Cook had described and renamed), about what the people on the shore thought the ship and its crew were (pelicans, possums, ghosts) and what has happened in its wake (violence, missionisation, assimilation, and survival). So far, only Point Hicks and Gulaga (Mt Dromedary) on the south coast of New South Wales have been revealed. Come Wednesday, we will be in Kamay Botany Bay sharing the “untold version” of the much-told story of the famous first landing.

With its emphasis on Aboriginal communities telling their own stories, the exhibition follows an approach the NMA has honed over the last decade or so in a trio of major exhibitions: Kaninjaku: Stories from the Canning Stock Route, Encounters, and Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters. And like those exhibitions, innovative and immersive audiovisual elements are central.

For the Untold Stories exhibition, the NMA commissioned Alison Page and her creative partner Nik Lackaiczak to create a film with four communities along the coast. The result is The Message, which imaginatively and impressionistically reconstructs a story about how knowledge about the Endeavour’s arrival was passed from group to group all the way along the coast. In this retelling, the British appear as only shadowy figures; it is Indigenous people’s faces, languages, places, objects, dress, knowledge, ceremony, communication and social worlds that occupy the frame.

Caranx melampygus (blue trevally) by Sydney Parkinson (1770), © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Endeavour Voyage exhibition, National Museum of Australia

The Message uses a form of visual storytelling that comes without explication. Language and song are pronounced, body gestures are used in place of speech, dances and displays of strength are shown. There are no subtitles and there is no voiceover explaining what is happening on the screen. Some viewers will recognise certain vignettes, but it is not narrative. In a “making the film” blogpost, the filmmaker explains that “the temptation for all of us was to approach this like a drama — a straight telling of the story to dispense with obscurity and make the history clear,” but they eschewed this in favour of producing a piece to:

encapsulate the emotional symbolism of the chapters of the story. Like Aboriginal painting, the meaning takes deep diving to fully understand all its layers. While some of the scenes will reflect historical perspective and records, our main aim was to engender a visceral and emotive response through a highly engaging and sometimes challenging visual narrative.

Interpretation is left open-ended, and the more cryptic elements would probably have been filled in by other parts of the physical exhibition. Not straight narration, the point of the film is as much the process of making it in collaboration with the communities who live under the shadow of Cook. It is not designed to replace one version of Cook with another. Watching it at home on a tiny laptop with a tinny speaker, I was conscious that its fully immersive quality — of creating another space in which to encounter Cook and his history — was dissipated. (I’ve heard of other visitor’s computers delivering a much better exerience.) It will be good to eventually see it in the space for which it was designed.

I’m looking forward to today’s instalment of the exhibition, which is at Kamay Botany Bay; but then I will have to patiently wait for the next instalment, which is scheduled for 12 May when the Endeavour passes the three mountains on the mid-north NSW coast and that Cook named The Three Brothers, but which are known in the local language as Dooragan, Mooragan and Booragan.

Between the more exciting moments, days pass. We sit it out at home, and the parallels with shipboard life start to suggest themselves. We follow daily routines, spend time doing chores, get lost gazing into the distance, and try to manage our emotions. Accounts of Cook that are only interested in heroics or cross-culture encounters can eclipse the sheer monotony and drudgery of voyaging. And they can also miss the heightened emotions that come with living with others in confined spaces.

The fifth place on the Untold Stories exhibition’s itinerary is Gooragam – Bustard Bay, Seventeen Seventy which we will visit on 23 May and where we are told:

The Endeavour dropped anchor here and a small crew prepared to make their second landing on Australia’s coast. By the time they landed, they found only footprints of Gooreng Gooreng people and their abandoned fires.

This might seem a little anticlimactic, but it gives another opportunity to learn something about that place and its people.

HMS Endeavour Ship (2019), by Kurt Kynuna. Driftwood, pearl shell, galvanised wire and screws. Endeavour Voyage exhibition, National Museum of Australia

What will probably not be covered, or not in any detail, is what had happened on board the Endeavour immediately prior to this. Overnight, as Cook recorded in his journal entry for 23 May, his clerk’s clothes and ears had been cut off while the man slept in a drunken stupor. As Cook wrote:

Last night sometime in the Middle Watch a very extraordinary affair happened to M^r Orton my Clerk, he having been drinking in the Evening, some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took the advantage of his being drunk and cut off all the cloaths from off his back, not being satisfied with this they sometime after went into his Cabbin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay asleep in his bed.

The episode clearly disturbed him, and he devoted an unusually large number of words in his journal to trying to make sense of what had happened, who was at fault, and what its implications were — including for his own authority. The entry ends with Cook deciding to keep quiet, for fear of escalating the situation, until the culprits were known:

I shall say nothing about it unless I shall hereafter discover the Offenders which I shall take every method in my power to do, for I look upon such proceedings as highly dangerous in such Voyages as this and the greatest insult that could be offer’d to my authority in this Ship, as I have always been ready to hear and redress every complaint that have been made against any Person in the Ship.

The episode is important, not just for what happened (as intriguing as that is) but because it reminds us that when we attempt to interpret the history of the Endeavour voyage — from the ship and the shore — we are faced with trying to comprehend many different and unfamiliar cultures, values, personalities, and contexts.

Untold Stories takes us a long way into seeing, experiencing and understanding the deep and complex cultural worlds into which Cook and his men occasionally stepped when they went ashore. In another iteration, such an exhibition might also attempt to try to better understand the puzzles that Georgian shipboard life represents, and the cruelty and pettiness of men living in close quarters that even Cook sometimes found difficult to fathom and manage. At this present time, it is those other untold stories that are also speaking loudly to me — and perhaps to Scott Morrison as well. •

The post Virtually Captain Cook appeared first on Inside Story.

The land is still sick when we stop tweeting about it, though, and comorbidities come with this pathology. Displaced animal species from dying ecosystems produce new pathogens that can pass to humans. Economies, social systems and supply chains are catastrophically affected as the interrelated elements of our existence, grounded in a largely ignored dependence on the land, begin to break down. Our mental and physical health becomes dysfunctional.

The solution to this destructive pandemic of disconnection can be found in the traditional knowledge systems of Indigenous cultures, which sadly remain inaccessible to most people. If only there were somebody who could map this knowledge and translate it into a plain-language text that could connect with the hearts and minds of people from all walks of life, I’ve often thought. Such a text just might save this continent, if not the world.

Enter Victor Steffensen, Tagalaka man, ranger, educator, musician and filmmaker, and his game-changing book Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia. Steffensen has been working on Country with traditional Elders and knowledge-keepers for decades, initially on Cape York and then all over Australia. On the surface his book is about Indigenous firestick practices of land management — the burning off of areas seasonally to care for Country — but when you start reading you will find it is so much more than that.

Fire Country is an autobiography, a self-help book, a manifesto, a biology textbook, a change-management guide and environmental commentary all rolled into one. Mostly it is a book about the hot topic of Indigenous land-based knowledge. A lot of people are looking to this traditional knowledge for solutions right now, and while Bruce Pascoe’s work has dealt with the why, and my own work has dealt with the how, Steffensen has dealt expertly with the area people are clamouring to know about — the what.

The what is important. While many Indigenous thinkers are still writing to convince the world of the importance of Indigenous knowledge, a critical mass of motivated people are actively seeking this knowledge and ways to apply it. Their efforts are frustrated because this knowledge is obscured by a maelstrom of history wars and identity politics. Steffensen’s book is a breath of fresh air, a lifeline for all the influencers and grassroots change-makers who are actively seeking to transform our ways of living on this planet to ensure the survival of the biosphere and the humans who depend upon it.

The word Steffensen uses for this activity is “praction,” a term coined by a Cape York Elder to describe the application of knowledge in fulfilling custodial roles on Country. He maps the elements of this knowledge system using a triangular diagram based on the process of firestick land management. This is then expanded as a metaphor for human social/ecological behaviour that follows the natural processes of the land. It extends outwards in an exponential patterning of the elements of land and culture, which are not separate concepts in an Aboriginal worldview. The elements are interchangeable and exist in a profoundly interrelated way of being and knowing.

This previously inaccessible lens for viewing the world is explained by Steffensen in a deceptively simple way. His writing may seem simultaneously naive and cynical at times, but our community is very familiar with this kind of voicing, which we would simply call straight talk. Steffensen has made no attempt to alter his language for a literary audience, maintaining linguistic patterns that most would deem irregular. His publishers should be commended for supporting this bold choice in a competitive marketplace that follows style guides and standards religiously.

While at times Steffensen has acquiesced to the ubiquitous self-narrative genre of Indigenous literature, most of the book is completely out of the box and like nothing you have read before. At the start of the book I thought, “Oh, here we go, another rambling life story.” But the writing very quickly changes to something quite remarkable — an intimate sharing of complex knowledge that makes readers feel like the author is sitting alongside them and yarning within a deeply respectful relationship.

Considering the amazing work Steffensen has done all over the continent with communities and organisations that were often initially hostile towards him, it is clear that his writing is an extension of his extraordinary gift for connecting with all kinds of people in all kinds of contexts. You get the sense that he is not even aware of this gift, that it is just an integral part of who he is, unaffected and free of ego. Steffensen is signalling nobody, and is not remotely interested in building a personal brand. He is just a man of the land, working to save it from destruction.

One big message the reader might take from this book is that we may have to break a few rules to create urgently needed change. More than a few stories in the book are about community actions and fire-management activities that Steffensen describes as “cheeky,” in which participants have disregarded bureaucratic directives or regulations in order to apply Indigenous knowledge solutions. Sometimes this is in the ballpark of the corporate catchcry “it’s better to seek forgiveness than permission,” while at other times it’s more like “light the match and run like hell.”

A more sobering message is that it will take a thousand years to rehabilitate our landscape. That is the lifespan of the trees that have gone, trees he refers to as “parent trees” that perform vital roles in the ecosystem. The knowledge in this book about the complex ecologies and cultures spiralling out from those parent trees is breathtaking in its scope. Different kinds of Country are formed when particular species of these trees become dominant, and they create different kinds of soils that demand different kinds of fire (or sometimes no fire at all), because light-coloured soils reflect heat while darker ones absorb it.

Different seeds require different kinds of burning and even smoke from specific grass species in order to germinate properly, and these different ecosystems require burning in different seasons. They fit together like a patchwork quilt, so that areas burned in previous seasons can prevent the spread of fire into neighbouring areas in the next season. Of course, there are also irregularities depending on proximity to ridges and rivers, and there are exceptions to every rule. “Never burn on a riverbank”? Well, in some cases you need to. Mixed-species Country requires mixed methods of management, and wetlands require different approaches depending on a thousand different vectors.

All of this knowledge sits within an algorithm that is very familiar to me, both from my connection to Cape York and my experience walking and reading Country all over the continent. In all these diverse landscapes the algorithm is transferrable as you walk through and observe, “Okay, from this soil I can see that instead of ironwood they have this species here, and so the ants will be over here, and I will find medicine plants over there,” and so forth. The translation of patterns across contexts of different Country is a particular gift that Steffensen has, but it is not limited to landscapes. He also transfers these patterns and principles to various disciplines, including health, education, psychology, media and governance.

He extrapolates pedagogies, social systems and methodologies from encounters with a sentient landscape. This is the most exciting element of his work — the potential for applying patterns of Indigenous logic to disciplines beyond biology and culture. It may seem strange to look to a book on fire management to find a blueprint for things like transformational leadership, but seriously, look no further.

It’s all here in straight talk, from a man who has no interest in culture wars or guilt or the myriad categories of identity that currently pepper our discourse. He has a very simple, deracialised rubric that identifies only two kinds of people — connected and disconnected. As he says, “There are even Aboriginal people who have become disconnected too. Today the disconnected people come in all colours, from black, white, brindle and brown.”

This is the most potentially game-changing book to emerge in this time of turbulence and transition. It is not a book only about fire. It contains Indigenous knowledge that will work for anyone, from any discipline and any walk of life. It is an easy read with a hard impact that will change the way you live. •

The post Carrying the flame appeared first on Inside Story.

About a third of the country’s intensive care beds are in the private system. The government is seeking to increase the national capacity from about 2200 to 7500 beds, which the minister said would be sufficient to meet the worst-case scenario.

His positive messaging may have been partly aimed at reassuring health workers, who have been following horrific accounts — particularly from the United States, Italy and Spain — of overwhelmed systems, shortages of personal protective equipment, and alarming rates of illness and death among health workers.

But at least one medical leader was not reassured. John Hall, president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia, doesn’t think Australia is on track to have enough intensive care beds, and wants the military to set up field hospitals in areas of need, as has happened in Britain and elsewhere.

“If the international evidence is anything to go by, intensive care units across the globe have been overwhelmed, even when they’ve put good preparations in place,” he tells me. “I don’t think there’s any reason to think Australia is going to be spared.”

Hall is concerned about more than the number of beds; he fears that people in rural, regional and remote areas won’t get their share of beds and equipment. Private hospitals are scarce outside the cities, and intensive care units even more so. Yet non-metropolitan residents — especially in remote Indigenous communities — are especially vulnerable to Covid-19 because they are more likely to suffer from chronic health conditions and live in poor-quality housing.

“We’re concerned for rural Australians about that whole issue of the metropolitan beds being full,” says Hall. “They might have enough intensive care beds in total for the city, but that’s not to say that rural Australians will have access to those beds at any point in time. You might need a separate field hospital set up specifically for taking rural patients, so you’ve got guaranteed access for rural patients.”

Because they’re constrained by shortages of equipment, drugs and appropriately trained staff, rural hospitals have only limited capacity to ventilate critically unwell patients. Hall is worried by reports of some rural hospitals not doing enough preparation ahead of the surge in patients he expects to begin in late April or early May. He has observed a “delusional belief” among some that the novel coronavirus might not penetrate far into rural and remote Australia.

Even in the best of times, it can be difficult to arrange patient transfers from these areas to metropolitan hospitals, Hall says. During a pandemic crunch, retrieval services could easily be overwhelmed by demand at the same time as losing their valuable workforce to infection and illness. While work is under way to increase the capacity of retrieval services, he would like to see much more done, including involving the military in retrieval planning.

Urgent efforts are also needed to boost access to quality palliative care in rural, regional and remote areas. A recent statement from the Australian Covid-19 Palliative Care Working Group said palliative care is an essential component of frontline responses, and called for these services to be boosted as part of operational surge planning.

“There will be a significant demand for palliative care for some of the people who are elderly, frail and have multiple medical conditions, who don’t want to be resuscitated,” says Hall. “They may choose not to be retrieved or sent to an intensive care unit. Those people are going to need access to quality palliative care. We will need extra doctors, nurses, drugs to provide that. Many of these towns have only enough drugs and equipment to manage one palliative care patient at a time.”

At the National Rural Health Alliance offices in Canberra, chief executive Gabrielle O’Kane is also concerned about access to retrieval services and metropolitan intensive care beds, and is hearing from rural and regional doctors anxious about these questions. “Can rural health professionals be assured that there will be fair allocation of intensive care beds for rural people in metropolitan hospitals, should they need them?” she asks. “This situation has made it clear that there are considerable gaps in rural healthcare.”

The National Rural Health Commissioner, emeritus professor Paul Worley, is worried too. As he tweeted on 31 March: “Are you, like me, angry that rural Australia is having to fight Covid with one hand tied behind its back? The constricting rope is health workforce shortage. 61 GP vacancies in SA alone. We can’t just do more of the same. Let’s use this time to make our rural health system stronger.”

The Royal Flying Doctor Service is already feeling the impact of the pandemic. It transported forty-six patients with Covid-19, aged fifty-eight on average, between 20 February and 29 March, according to executive director Frank Quinlan. Transporting these patients takes longer and costs more because of the extra cleaning required for infection control.

Quinlan welcomed the news of public and private hospitals working together to expand capacity, and said the RFDS was also working hard to build its own capacity, bringing on additional resources, including locums, pilots, engineers, contractors and clinical crews.

“We’re planning for the worst and hoping for the best,” says Quinlan. “Planning for the worst means we have to consider the possibility that both aircraft crews and clinical crews could become ill and that will place pressure on already challenged resources. All of our planning has revolved around enhancing and building up that capacity.”

Quinlan believes it is too early “to be either comforted or alarmed” by trends in Australian case rates, but is encouraged by Australians’ response to calls for social distancing. “It is an opportunity for the community to take control of this crisis,” he says. “That creates the sense that we’re all working together.”

Under the deal announced by Greg Hunt this week, the private sector must act as not-for-profit organisations for the duration of the crisis, and open their books for audits. In return, governments are guaranteeing their viability during the life of the agreement.

Private hospitals will contribute 30,000 beds and 105,000 full- and part-time hospital staff, including 57,000 nurses and midwives, to the pandemic response. The Commonwealth was budgeting $1.3 billion for the arrangement, but the figure was not capped and, the minister said, “if more is required, more will be provided.”

Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association chief executive Alison Verhoeven welcomed the deal as “a very necessary and sensible move.” “The whole arrangement is really good to see — state governments, the Commonwealth government and the private sector agreeing to work together in a really coordinated way for the benefit of the community.”

Stephen Parnis, an emergency physician at three Melbourne public hospitals and a former vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, says there can be no one-size-fits-all in bringing the sectors together, not least because of the diversity of private hospitals, which range from small day surgery facilities to fully equipped tertiary services.

To work most effectively, arrangements will need to be made locally, he says. “It may be that the private hospital takes on the standard hospital load to enable the public hospital to become sectioned off and treat Covid patients.”

A massive logistics exercise is under way, together with urgent efforts to boost health workforce numbers and extend critical-care training. Health workers, academics and communities are discussing the ethical dilemmas that lie ahead, spurred by reports from Italy and elsewhere of health workers left weeping and traumatised from having to make life-and-death decisions. When ten patients need lifesaving ventilation but only one machine is available, who is chosen?

At times like these, some groups — including disabled people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — are at increased risk from both Covid-19 and systems that have a long history of causing them harm.

The Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association, or AIDA, has received reports of Aboriginal people experiencing racism and exclusion from health services during the pandemic. It has called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients to be tested and treated ethically and equitably for Covid-19. “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ lives, health and wellbeing cannot be put at risk because of underlying racism and prejudice,” says the association.

According to Janine Mohamed, a Narrunga Kaurna woman and chief executive of the Lowitja Institute in Melbourne, it is in high-pressure situations that non-Indigenous health workers are most likely to make kneejerk reactions based on embedded negative views of Aboriginal people.

“We have seen this already play out in our reduced access to transplants,” she says. “We know that Aboriginal people don’t get the same pathways of care. At this time, more than ever, cultural safety has to be at the forefront of health professionals’ minds. In September, when this pandemic is finished, what I don’t want to read is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who needed intensive care were left to die. We have to do whatever we can to ensure that preventable deaths do not happen.”

Similar concerns are also worrying Bronwyn Fredericks, a Murri woman and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Engagement) at the University of Queensland, who stresses that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must be involved in developing pandemic ethical protocols for resuscitation and allocation of lifesaving interventions.

“I’m concerned for my parents, my partner, other family, friends, community members, and even myself,” she says. “I know that if medical interventions become rationalised and if we have coronavirus that there is the possibility we wouldn’t be offered lifesaving treatment if pitted against others, and that we would be offered isolation and palliative care instead.”

Fredericks is also worried that age could be a factor in determining access to care. “[This] fails to consider that that Elder in front of them may not just be a partner, or grandparent, uncle or aunt, but also be a precious and rare repository of language or law, music, art, medicine, knowledge, philosophy and more,” she says.

“They might be one of only a handful of people who hold this knowledge not just in the community, but in Australia and in the world… It needs to be asked, are we prepared for us, and the world, to lose this by rationalising lifesaving interventions based on availability of resources and age?”

While Fredericks welcomes the hospital deal in principle, she wonders about the implications for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. “The coronavirus itself doesn’t discriminate; it is society’s structures and people that do. The deal to open up private hospitals for all must also now ensure access for all too,” she says.

The perfect storm created by the pandemic is driving integration and cooperation across the health system in ways that were previously inconceivable. Suddenly, population-wide telehealth and other innovations that have been waiting in the wings for years are a reality. A government better known for health cuts than health innovation may go down in history as having introduced some of Medicare’s most significant reforms.

The Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association’s Alison Verhoeven is keen to ensure the momentum continues beyond the pandemic. While some not-for-profit hospitals have a long history of working for health equity, Verhoeven would like to see the wider sector stepping up.

“At the moment, private hospitals support a population group that can afford to pay for their services,” she says. “What we have seen with this week’s funding announcements is a recognition that they are part of the public system, partly subsidised by the public purse, so they have an obligation to contribute to the health of the wider system.

“We hope that, longer term, private hospitals might continue to support some of that social obligation. It’s important that they engage in the dialogue that we need to have at a national level about supporting the health of the most vulnerable people in our community.”

More broadly, Verhoeven hopes the pandemic will also lead to wider societal changes, tackling problems that have been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic, such as the casualised, insecure health workforce and the privatisation of essential services.

The Rural Doctors Association’s John Hall hopes the groundwork is being laid for lasting changes in the relationship between private and public health services. He would like the public sector to be more responsive and engaged in collaboration with private services, including general practice, radiology and pathology.

“My view is that public and private haven’t collaborated well enough in the past; we have seen that play out in the regions. For example, a private radiology firm might want to co-locate with a public hospital in a rural town but the negotiations have fallen over because the public sector is notoriously bad at working out collaboration with the private sector.”

Hall also describes public patients being transported long distances from regional centres for essential cardiac services that could have been provided by private services locally. This has often meant huge additional costs for patients and families because of the travel involved. “For a public hospital to use the private catheter lab is a really good example of where the private and public sectors could work together to provide an evidence-based service to the community,” he says.

Hall says this must be a transformational time in driving greater cooperation between health systems and services. “This is going to be a war for rural doctors and rural health services. We would like to see barriers broken down so everyone can put in their best efforts to win the war.”

In Tasmania, Geoff Couser, an emergency physician in public practice, questions whether it is appropriate to refer to a “private hospital system” at all. He prefers the term “federal public hospital system” given the large public subsidy the private sector receives through Medicare, subsidies for private health insurance, support from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, and tax exemptions for religious institutions.

The pandemic crisis is a perfect opportunity for making clear that any sector receiving a significant amount of public money has a responsibility to contribute to the wider public good, he adds. “It is about getting the best value for that public money every step of the way. We need to have that sense of stewardship and responsibility on a fiscal level to taxpayers, and responsibility to patients.”

Couser also highlights inequities built into the system. Patients with private health insurance can tap into the “federal public hospital system” and get a colonoscopy next week, he says, while those relying on state public hospitals face long waits.

Despite apprehensions about what lies ahead, Couser is enjoying some relatively quiet time before the storm hits. Presentations in the emergency department are down, perhaps because more people are staying home. This has left time for preparation, and also reflection, including about how he hopes the crisis will bring transformational change for health systems and society more widely. “I hope that we will not waste the crisis,” he says. •

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Presenting the report to parliament yesterday, prime minister Scott Morrison described it as a “stark and sobering” tale of “hope, frustration and disappointment.” He said something very similar last year, calling out the failure of the current approach and the hubris of those who had created it.

Yet the past year has not only seen problems go unresolved, it has also seen considerable progress in some areas — and enough of each to generate both scepticism and optimism.

The basis of the optimism is the December 2018 commitment by the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, to partner with Indigenous people in refreshing the Closing the Gap framework and creating a forum for ongoing engagement. The formal partnership agreement between COAG and the National Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations (Coalition of Peaks) came into effect in March last year.

Since then, a series of community consultations has considered how this new partnership might work. In January, the Coalition of Peaks released its Community Engagement Snapshots report, which found strong support for the three reform priorities it had proposed: developing formal partnerships between government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to close the gap, boosting community-controlled services, and improving mainstream service delivery. A fourth reform priority — local data projects led by local communities and organisations — will be sent to COAG.

The Indigenous leaders engaged in this process are feeling optimistic that a full partnership approach can show the way forward. But their view is offset by the prime minister’s refusal to commit to an Indigenous recognition referendum until “there is consensus,” a position at odds with his commitment to the beginning of a “new era.” It will be hard for Indigenous people to trust the government to deliver a new approach when it consistently sidelines the work of the Referendum Council and the central importance of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

How can Closing the Gap be improved? Fully recognising that their validity is limited by my non-Indigenous status and a lack of formal consultation, these are a few thoughts.

In policy terms, the focus must be on the key underlying causes of disadvantage.

First, racism. The lack of progress on this key determinant of the physical and mental health of Indigenous Australians may explain part of the unremitting gap in health and socioeconomic outcomes. Tackling and reducing racism, including ensuring that healthcare is culturally safe and respectful, should be an integral part of policies and interventions aimed at improving Indigenous health, especially that of children.

Second, very high rates of Indigenous incarceration are, in the words of a recent PwC report, “unfair, unsafe and unaffordable.” Inappropriate imprisonment and the failure to ensure needed post-release services lead to loss of culture, identity and connection to the land, aggravating the cycle of disadvantage and poverty. A new justice target is part of the refresh of the Closing the Gap framework, but if it is to be effective then the courts, police, corrections services and social services will all need to adopt its principles.

Third, safe and secure housing is key to the health, wellbeing, safety and dignity of Indigenous Australians. A new report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found that in 2016, 29 per cent of Indigenous Australians were living in a dwelling with major structural problems, with 15 per cent of households lacking at least one basic facility (a functioning kitchen, bathroom, laundry or toilet). The proportions are higher in remote areas.

In focusing on these three areas, the government must commit to a real and enduring partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and organisations. Despite the rhetoric, the Morrison government’s commitment to consultation has generally been deficient.

Not long after the last election, the prime minister announced a new National Indigenous Australians Agency within his own department. Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt described it as a “new era of co-design and partnership,” but the decision was made without consulting Indigenous groups. Meanwhile, the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples lost its funding and the government persisted with its expansion of the cashless welfare card in Indigenous communities.

The decision to double down on the cashless card came despite growing evidence that it is adversely affecting many lives, has failed to get users into jobs, and is opposed in many communities. Many people subject to the card feel they have been punished by a loss of control over their own finances. This blanket imposition of a political ideology backed by very little evidence is completely counter to a partnership approach.

Another consultation-free act was the axing of funding for the secretariat that oversees the thirteen-member National Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum. This annual $244,000, a tiny outlay for government, was justified by reference to an independent evaluation that, on the contrary, recommended increased resourcing.

And on the day Scott Morrison was promising a new approach to Closing the Gap, it was rumoured that the government had taken a unilateral decision to end funding of Indigenous housing — a dismayingly plausible possibility that highlights how little attention is paid to the social determinants of health.

These various government decisions also highlight the lack of coordination across departments and agencies. When prime minister Tony Abbott moved responsibility for the majority of Indigenous programs to the prime minister’s department in 2014, under the rubric of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, the shocking news that he also cut more than $500 million from the programs hid the fact that the move might facilitate a whole-of-government approach to tackling Indigenous problems.

That has never come to pass — and it still doesn’t happen even within portfolios. Hearing loss, trachoma and rheumatic heart disease, for instance, all involve a similar healthcare approach (cleanliness) for prevention, yet these conditions continue to be tackled under a series of separate programs. Their high incidence in Indigenous communities won’t be reduced without a coordinated effort to improve housing.

“Every minister in my government is a minister for Indigenous Australians,” the prime minister declared yesterday. Given the known occasions on which the real Indigenous affairs minister, Ken Wyatt, has been sidelined (the referendum, for instance), Indigenous communities will need some convincing on this point.

They will also be looking for evidence that programs are introduced — and evaluated — where they are needed. Here, the signs haven’t been good. A June 2019 report from the Australian National Audit Office identified delays in evaluating the five-year-old Indigenous Advancement Strategy. The prime minister’s department had not met guidelines, the report said, and nor had the department kept records of key decisions or set targets for all programs and projects.

In October 2019, the new National Indigenous Australians Agency released an equally, if not more, damning report on the past ten years of Closing the Gap. (Oddly, the date on the report is March 2018, more than a year before the agency was established.) Among its findings were three fundamental criticisms. Cultural determinants are not captured in the policy framework, which makes collaborating with Indigenous Australians difficult. The evidence base to support many programs is lacking or weak, and programs are rarely evaluated. And the effort to close the gap has been hampered by inconsistent political leadership, constantly changing policies, insufficient resources, and workforce and funding cuts.

Finally, the funding maze needs to be streamlined and made more transparent. Organisations and communities deal with a level of complexity and “red tape” that would never be tolerated by the general business community, with the evidence suggesting that some Aboriginal health services are juggling forty or more funding sources with separate application and reporting requirements. Too often communities are unaware of services for which they are eligible.

A 2016 study identified 1082 separate Indigenous-specific programs. Less than one in ten had been evaluated, and most have produced little evidence of effectiveness. Multiple service providers often compete in the same communities (assuming there are providers), and duplication and waste are rife.

The impact of funding conditions on the governance and performance of Indigenous organisations is under-researched. Evidence suggests that the public financing of Indigenous organisations is successful when the focus is on the organisation rather than the program. Funded organisations should always be required to be accountable to their constituents; performance indicators should be negotiated rather than imposed; achievements should be rewarded.

Encouragingly, the health department will introduce a new funding model for the Indigenous Australians’ Health Program’s primary healthcare program in July this year. Three-year funding agreements, annually indexed, will become the norm, and the administrative burden will be reduced.

Recent efforts by the Productivity Commission have gone some way to tackling the lack of transparency. Preparing an analysis for Oxfam in 2017, I found it very difficult to track spending on Indigenous programs on the basis of publicly available data. But I did find every indication that the government is increasingly looking to mainstream services and programs to meet Indigenous people’s needs, especially in non-remote areas. While 55 per cent of the programs funded under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy were run by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, 81 per cent of direct Indigenous expenditure went towards mainstream services.

Pat Turner, lead convenor of the Coalition of Peaks, has described the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as “a gaping wound on the soul of our nation.” This wound won’t be healed without the best efforts of all Australians. The prime minister is right to say that the Closing the Gap strategy has reinforced “the language of failing and falling short” and neglected to “celebrate the strengths, achievements and aspirations of Indigenous people.”

Refreshing the program must involve building on the expertise and wisdom of Indigenous individuals and communities and the abundant success stories that have largely been unrecognised and uncelebrated. The Oxfam report In Good Hands: The People and Communities Behind Aboriginal-led Solutions is just one of the many excellent places to start. •

The post Gap year appeared first on Inside Story.

To some, Dark Emu seemed to come out of nowhere, but Pascoe’s latest book, Salt: Selected Stories and Essays, helps us to see how it grew from the author’s life experience and earlier storytelling. I’ve been a follower of his work since the early 1980s, when I read his fiction and subscribed to the literary magazine he edited and published with Lyn Harwood, Australian Short Stories. When Dark Emu was published in 2014, Bruce became a household name and many readers encountered him for the first time. One of the pleasures of Salt is that it weaves his earlier fiction writing together with his now-celebrated nonfiction. We meet — or rediscover — the pre–Dark Emu Pascoe, and we’re reminded that this powerful voice itself has a history.

Pascoe is a writer but also a performer, an orator, a dedicated storyteller in the old style. I’ve sat with Bruce on a stage and found myself captivated by his careful, humble manner of speaking and gruff bush charm; he has a natural charisma and a mischievous wit. Earlier this year I was in a university lecture hall packed with hundreds of young people who had come out on a dark winter night to listen to the author of Dark Emu, and they were enthralled. You could have heard a pin drop. At the end of the speech the crowd erupted in an ovation for several minutes. Whatever Bruce Pascoe is saying, Australians clearly want to hear it now. And he has responded generously to the call, touring the continent tirelessly these past few years, accepting invitations to speak to audiences of all kinds in both city and bush. Apparently indefatigable in his early seventies, he reminds us of the enduring power of book and speech in the digital age.

In Salt he tells again and again of his realisation and dismay that Aboriginal history has been so systematically left out of Australian history. He discerns, as did John Mulvaney in the 1950s, W.E.H. Stanner in the 1960s and Judith Wright, Bernard Smith and Henry Reynolds in the 1970s, a wilful blindness, a Great Australian Silence, a complacent denialism about Aboriginal achievement. It is so persistent and embedded that it seems we have to keep rediscovering it, as if for the first time. Pascoe, a university graduate and schoolteacher, rails against the history he was taught and the texts he studied; his cry of betrayal is akin to Reynolds’s question (and book title), Why Weren’t We Told? (1999). There is an eloquent ire that informs Dark Emu and it suffuses Pascoe’s speaking and writing with the passion of a preacher.

Side by side with the public story of betrayal and revelation about Aboriginal history is Pascoe’s own journey into his Indigenous identity. Recently Andrew Bolt and Quadrant attacked Pascoe’s identification as a Bunurong, Tasmanian and Yuin man, wielding family trees like weapons. But Pascoe has long written with honesty and humility about what it means to be a pale-skinned Australian who has come to identify as Aboriginal: the forgotten branches of the family tree, the past conversations that suddenly make sense, the renewed connections with community.

“My insight into Aboriginal Australia is as abbreviated as my heritage has allowed,” he wrote in 2012. “It is as if I have been led at night to a hill overlooking country I have never seen.” In another essay in Salt he accepts scrutiny of his identity, reflecting that “clinical analysis of genes says I’m more Cornish than Koori.” But he explores his connection in a whole book about Aboriginal heritage, identity and belonging called Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country (2007). There he analyses the “suffusion of Aboriginal genes into the white population,” the identity of “people of broken and distant heritage like me” and how that “trace of blood doesn’t mean much unless you want it to.” Pascoe’s personal discoveries illuminate his investigations of the nation’s past.

The epigraph at the beginning of Convincing Ground reads: “This is not a history, it’s an incitement.” Dark Emu has gained traction from the self-professed marginality of its author and the impression that Pascoe’s revelations are also the nation’s. Kaz Cooke welcomed the book as “an elegant act of defiance,” and some of its power does come from being oppositional. Dark Emu has certainly reached new readers and awakened people, and the book has a strong analytical emphasis that I will soon address.

But what interests me here is the sense that Pascoe has had to fight against the grain of Australian historical scholarship to make his case. This is an angle that the media understandably loves. For example, Richard Guilliatt’s fine recent portrait of Pascoe in the Australian is titled “Turning History on Its Head” and promises to show how “academic conflict accidentally turned Bruce Pascoe into our most influential Indigenous historian.” It begins by describing Pascoe’s “long-running conflict with academia” and explains how one such confrontation over a cup of tea spurred him to write Dark Emu.

Disagreement is frequently a provocation of good books. But the implication here is that Pascoe’s crusade has been lonely and resisted. In Salt, he tells of “senior historians” who told him that “every primary document in the Australian history trove had been thoroughly examined; there was nothing new to be discovered.” I don’t believe any historian could believe or say such a thing; it would be a repudiation of their craft. My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now. It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university fifty years ago.

We could tell an alternative story of revelation, one that is more complex and collective. It would portray a collaborative political and intellectual endeavour across more than half a century, a concerted scholarly quest by black and white Australians to dismantle the Great Australian Silence. For the Silence itself has a tenacious history: it tightened its grip on the narratives of the emerging nation in the late nineteenth century, drawing a veil across frontier violence and underpinning the poetics and politics of White Australia. It was a great forgetting that was made up not only of silence but also of white noise. A cacophony of national history-making overwhelmed Indigenous testimony and the “whisperings” in settlers’ hearts, and it hardened into denialism — denial of the depth of Aboriginal history, denial of Indigenous sovereignty and land management, and denial of bloody warfare on Australian soil. The cult of sacrifice in overseas war — the Anzac legend — was essential to the denial of war at home.

Denialism persists today in culture and politics, as we see daily. But scholarship began to confront and overturn it from the 1960s as archaeologists, anthropologists and historians — increasingly working with Indigenous scholars and communities — worked their way into the traumatic oral testimony, the records of colonial conquest and bureaucracy, and the deep archive of the earth. It was — and continues to be — a protracted revolution in understanding, always challenged by reactionary denialism. Bruce Pascoe’s work is a further, marvellous elaboration of this great revolution in understanding the history of this country.

Pascoe does go some way towards acknowledging this modern scholarly context, for Dark Emu is thick with reportage and quotation, drawing on nineteenth-century sources and also citing the work of scholars such as Norman Tindale, Harry Allen, John Blay, Beth Gott, Jeannette Hope, Tim Allen, Rupert Gerritsen, Bill Gammage, Rhys Jones, Jim Bowler, Tim Flannery, Ian McNiven, Dick Kimber, Peter Latz, Deborah Rose, Harry Lourandos, Lynette Russell, Paul Memmott and Eric Rolls. He might have added the likes of Sylvia Hallam, Marcia Langton, Bill Jackson, Stephen Pyne, John Mulvaney and Isabel McBryde. But no account is given of how these historical insights have developed collectively over many decades to overturn earlier understandings. This inspiring story has been downplayed in Dark Emu.

What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. With these words Pascoe detonates a primary European rationale for the conquest of Australia. The myth of “nomadism” was blown away by an earlier generation of scholars, as was the idea of “terra nullius”; then terms such as “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist” came to be seen as simplifying. But Pascoe wants to revive those categories triumphantly: Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers.

This argument really matters in the history of Australia. It mattered from the moment the newcomers arrived and it still matters today — witness the recent conservative attacks on Pascoe and the critique of his work by those behind the website “Dark Emu Exposed,” who, significantly, self-identify as “a collective of Quiet Australians.” Agriculture is at the front line of the ideological war about the British colonisation of Australia. As literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has argued, “agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.” That’s why Pascoe has taken it on, digging out mentions of Aboriginal hayricks and stooks, crops and villages from the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists, no less, the very “sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based,” as he puts it. Pascoe thus draws his evidence from the words of the legendary “firsts” in white history-making and shows how they saw more than we knew and sometimes more than they knew themselves.

This revisionary work is, I think, vital. We don’t understand enough about how Aboriginal peoples used and honoured this land for millennia. In spite of half a century of eloquent activism and scholarship, most Australians still grossly underestimate the sophistication of Indigenous culture, technology and governance. The popular embrace of Pascoe’s work suggests that many are keen to learn.

And these early witness accounts of how Aboriginal peoples managed the land are precious and fascinating. They invite a subtle reading, a cultural history that is attentive to both sides of the frontier. When Thomas Mitchell or Charles Sturt identified “hayricks” and “stooks,” their imperial eyes were observing features that they did not expect to see in the land of the “savage” — and they were also using the language of their own English rural culture to evoke the landscape of home, which they missed and hoped one day to remake in this strange land. There is prejudice, surprise and nostalgia distilled in these words. They deserve our close attention and open-minded analysis.

I understand why Pascoe has deployed the template of agriculture. He is turning a political tool of oppression and disdain into a case for dignity and respect. Archaeologist Rhys Jones did the same thing in 1969 when he coined the term “fire-stick farming.” It was a brilliant provocation and remains a foundational insight. But I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.

Pascoe often over-reads the sources — and for what purpose? To prove that Aboriginal peoples were like Europeans? Dark Emu is too much in thrall to a discredited evolutionary view of economic stages, a danger that Pascoe himself acknowledges in the book: “We have to be careful that we are not deciding on markers of civilisation simply because that is the historical path followed by Western civilisations.” Not only does this risk simplifying the surprising ingenuity and flexibility of Aboriginal economies; it also plays into the hands of conservative critics who are always ready to mobilise centuries of stereotypes about “Stone Age nomads.”

Two scholars are especially acknowledged by Pascoe in making his argument about agriculture. One is Rupert Gerritsen, whose book Australia and the Origins of Agriculture was published in 2008, and the other is Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, a bestselling history of Aboriginal land management published in 2011. Gerritsen’s work, richly referenced, reminds us how long the debate about foragers or farmers has been going on in the scholarly literature, and he often draws on the same evidence as Pascoe (as Bruce acknowledges). Gammage’s book won wide acclaim and a popular readership but also drew criticism, especially from ecologists and archaeologists.

Pascoe and Gammage are often cited as making a similar argument, and they do both tend to homogenise the diversity of Aboriginal societies, ecologies and histories in their quest for a national saga. But their books are distinct in important and interesting ways. For example, Gammage argues that Aboriginal peoples “farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle.” He persists with careful distinctions: “Many people did live in villages, but most only when harvesting”; “they did not stay in their houses or by their crops”; “they lived comfortably where white Australians cannot.” Different Aboriginal societies used a range of practices throughout Australia, cultivating a wide variety of ecologies. And when Europeans brought their version of agriculture to Australian shores, it often didn’t work — and it’s in retreat in many regions today. The Indigenous alternative — in all its many forms — was grounded in a knowledge of Country. A strong dimension of Dark Emu’s popular appeal is the practical inspiration it offers for caring for the land and cultivating native perennial plants; Pascoe has himself invested in the bush foods industry.

A scholar’s reaction to Dark Emu can therefore be mixed. First there is surprise that large sections of the reading public are still unaware of scholarship that has been brewing since the 1950s, but there is also gratitude for a book and a voice that awakens people. There is concern that archaic evolutionary hierarchies should be revived just when we thought that such a northern-hemisphere mode of thinking had been transcended in Australia. There is criticism of hyperbole and of evidence being simplified or overblown. And there is admiration for the sheer bravura of a man on a mission, a gifted Australian writer whose work has struck a chord with the public and whose words — written and spoken — are inspiring and empowering Australians, black and white. The new book, Salt, reminds us of the storytelling muscle, poetic depth and moral seriousness of Bruce Pascoe, and of his role as a public intellectual who has wrestled for decades with the idea of Australia. •

The post Reading Bruce Pascoe appeared first on Inside Story.

How many storylines might be drawn from this incident? Behind it, there’s a dismal tale of domestic violence and wider privation and stress. Media reports concentrate on the heroic intervention of Alexandra Irving (Deborah Mailman), a regional health worker from an Aboriginal community in the remote town of Winton. Two and a half thousand kilometres away in Canberra, prime minister Rachel Anderson (Rachel Griffiths) watches the drama on the news.

Three months later a young staffer arrives in Winton to prepare the ground for an important mission. Jonathan Cosgrove (Harry Richardson) is greeted at the door by Alex’s mother Jan, who is unimpressed at the sight of this outsider in white shirt and tie. But nothing fazes Cosgrove. He invites himself in for a cup of tea while he waits for her daughter to return from work and, observing the collection of royal portraits on the wall, engages her in agreeable chat about the Queen. “Ninety-three years old,” says Jan, “and never missed a day’s work in her life.”

Having knocked back Cosgrove’s overtures, Alex receives a visit from the prime minister herself. Unlike her staffer, Anderson dresses for the occasion in faded jeans and an Akubra. From her point of view, all the cards are now in place: a pressing policy matter involving native title negotiations with the Winton community; a vacancy in the Senate; an Indigenous woman with conveniently conservative values and proven qualities of grit and courage. Anderson won’t take “no” for an answer.

It’s a promising start to the series, with four interestingly balanced players about to embark on an enterprise fraught with political and personal hazards. And, given recent reports that the Queensland government has “quietly” extinguished native title over the Adani mine site, it’s topical. The challenge is to explore the political tensions in a convincing way.

Here, Deborah Mailman in the lead role is a major asset. Mailman is always convincing. As a new senator unversed in the ways of Parliament House, she needs to be advised how to dress, and what to say and not say. There is some nice interplay between her and Cosgrove, appointed her minder, who insists on protocols she has little interest in observing. Gradually, as the newcomer starts to impose her own rules, the cocky twenty-seven-year-old must confront his limits.

Mailman and Griffiths make effective counterparts, one grounded in the physical realities of a life on the land, the other shaped by the artificial environment of Canberra, groomed and poised for whatever occasion presents. Griffiths faces the more difficult task. Television drama offers an endless parade of prime ministers, presidents, queens and emperors. It’s as if no actor is really at the top of the profession until he or she has played a head of state, and it’s not an easy task: there’s a risk of creating a persona without enough psychological substance behind it. As Anderson, Griffiths is not entirely successful, evoking a version of Julia Gillard that is cooler and less vibrant than the original.

Anderson is something of an ice queen. As she battles with a brash, ebullient right-wing challenger to her position, she is more adept than, say, Malcolm Turnbull in negotiating the political trap, but along the way she dispenses with some of her principles — or is it just the pretence of them? — in order to retain her position. Alex, and the Winton community whose interests she represents, “are the collateral.”

By the end of episode three, midway through, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about where this was all going. Why start a series co-produced by Blackfella Films and directed by Rachel Perkins, only to subordinate the Indigenous storyline to an all-too-familiar portrayal of blood sports in Parliament House? “It’s another country out there,” remarks Indigenous affairs minister Kevin Cartwright (played by David Roberts as a cadaverous-faced Machiavel). If this is about bargaining between two countries, wouldn’t it be more interesting to make Winton, rather than Canberra, the centre of gravity?

In episode 4, the dynamics shift in just that way. While the prime minister is fighting for her political life, Alex learns that her mother has collapsed and died. She returns home to face a community that sees her as an agent of betrayal, and a sense of devastation that almost breaks her. It becomes clear that her mother has been the source of her strength in ways that go deeper than the family bond. Jan Irving was brought up on a reserve, where they belted her and lied to her about her own mother, who they said was dead. “She was never angry,” Alex reflects in a conversation with her brother, “but I fuckin’ hate ’em all.”

From here on, rage — Alex’s, and that of her brother and the betrayed community of Winton — becomes the driving force of the series. In Parliament House, anger is stringently controlled, channelled into heavily coded exchanges and strategically managed forms of vindictiveness; in Winton, it breaks open as an elemental force of clean fury.

Jan Irving makes one final appearance in spirit, but leaves an impression that galvanises the next phase of the action. Trisha Morton-Thomas, an Anmatyerr woman from the Northern Territory, invests her character with a presence that imprints itself on the memory. Rob Collins as Alex’s brother Charlie and Aaron Pedersen as a local ringleader give psychological depth to the two figures now closest to Alex, showing how the anger twists itself through different life courses.

Anousha Zarkesh, who was casting director for Mystery Road, has again shown her exceptional gift for matching actors and roles. In a location-based drama like this, with the presence of a community evoked in the drama, so much depends on a sensitivity to how individuals channel the natural and social environment.

Not everything is right about this series. The scripting is uneven. Some scenes are deftly managed, but the dialogue is sometimes heavy-handed and lacks pace. It may be a case of too many cooks. Four people (including Rachel Griffiths) are credited as co-writer/creators, and most series work best when the steerage is in the hands of one or two showrunners. Given the costs of producing drama like this, it would be good to see the series taken up in international markets, but the competition is fierce and scripting can be the make-or-break factor. •

The post Centres of gravity appeared first on Inside Story.

Are we so transfixed by the murderous violence that begins the film that we entirely miss the poetry? I can’t find any review that notices it. Indeed, David Edelstein in the Vulture pronounces that “metaphor is absent from The Nightingale, unless you think Clare’s singing fits the bill.” Well, it does, actually. The song she sings — set to “The Bold Grenadier,” sometimes known as “The Nightingale” — has descended from one of the oldest myths of western Europe: the tale of Philomela.

As told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Philomela is raped and imprisoned by her brother-in-law, King Tereus, who cuts out her tongue so she may not speak of his crimes. She gets word to her sister, Procne, and together they take a terrible revenge. Then she — or they — turn into birds and fly away.

From that point on, the nightingale became a symbol of the revenge taken by an abused, forsaken and silenced woman. Musicians, artists and poets alike — from Wordsworth and Coleridge to T.S. Eliot and, yes, Margaret Atwood, the current high priestess of tales of gendered violence — have drawn on the story. In directing our attention to the fact that many Aboriginal creation stories are also about metamorphoses, Kent doesn’t seek to appropriate them. Indeed, though they are not explored here, there are many other tales of sisters who change form and fly away.

In putting the dynamics of rape and control up front, Kent does take risks. When Clare sings her song, in a borrowed dress, for a banquet in a rough mess hall in colonial Van Diemen’s Land, she is there at the behest of Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) to entertain his commanding officer. She does his bidding because she wants to be free. Her Irish convict husband, Aidan (Michael Sheasby), has served his time and is due his ticket of leave. When she dares ask Hawkins to sign the papers he takes it as insolence. His response is ugly, and what’s on screen neither glosses it nor eroticises it.

A second, much more brutal and punitive rape occurs after Aidan confronts Hawkins about his papers. There’s a murderous brawl, and a child is killed. Hawkins is eligible for promotion but cannot control his men, and the melee brings a reprimand from the visiting major. When a letter arrives notifying Hawkins that his promotion is refused, his fury is unleashed. He will ride across the island, through the war zone, to plead his case.

It’s a strong opening, to be felt more than feared. Aisling Franciosi, giving chase, alternately pursued by and pursuing Hawkins’s party, is magnificent in her grief and furious rage. The film becomes formidable, and problematic.

Kent is trying to do a lot here. She has made it clear, in interrogating the roots and dynamics of violence, that she is also trying to tell a tale of change. How does the anger, the desire for revenge, the thirst for violence give way to something different? It is the question of our times, because the violent abuse of women and children, usually by those known to them, is rising. That much is clear from current research, analysed in Jess Hill’s groundbreaking See What You Made Me Do.

Noticing parallels between the experience of a raped, colonised white woman and a black man whose people are being systematically murdered and dispossessed of their lands, Kent dares to imagine a kind of détente. Both hate the English. Both have lost their families, have been taken from their land, and must speak others’ languages. (Clare’s original language is Gaelic; Billy’s is Palawa Kani, a language once recorded in Tasmania and resurrected for this film.)

In imagining this relationship Kent runs a big risk. She skirts dangerously close to evoking the “faithful Jacky Jacky” myth, the old colonial fantasy of the Aboriginal tracker who guides a white hero across the frontier. But she is not showing us a friendship; rather, she is imagining an alliance, a temporary one, in an epic journey.

The nightmares Clare has along the way are among the film’s most striking images: she is a lactating woman, maddened and mourning. The claustrophobia of the closely timbered Tasmanian wilderness is beautifully evoked by the cinematography. But though her distrust of Billy gives way in the face of his reluctant compassion, I could not always believe in the relationship.

Despite the work the filmmakers have put into this — the research into language and costume, the advice from Aboriginal elders of Tasmania — the way Clare and Billy coexist in these scenes does not always ring true. Though I did enjoy the way Billy appears and disappears, quite suddenly.

In many traditional communities Aboriginal people don’t look directly at strangers; they wait, they are silent, they watch sideways and make their judgements. In the screen format, Academy ratio, that Kent and cinematographer Radek Ladczuk have chosen, there appears to be no space for this. The choreography seems oddly cramped, and it’s not helped by the dingy grey digital masking used in today’s multiplexes to screen films shot in this ratio.

But The Nightingale raises big questions. Reviewing the film in the Guardian, Larissa Behrendt argues that in comparing the colonial experiences of women and Aboriginal people, Kent has strayed into a minefield she is unable to navigate convincingly:

Every societal group that is co-opted in the colonial process suffers in a different way, but it is dangerous to link those marginalised within the colonial state to those being colonised. The sliding scale of suffering among those within the colony makes little difference to the Aboriginal group whose land they stole.

Aboriginal women, meanwhile, are left in the usual trope. We see only one. Lowanna (brought to life by the luminous Magnolia Maymuru) is raped and then murdered, with no characterisation. All we know is that she is even more disposable than both white women and black men.

All that is true. Our experiences are not the same, because our histories are not the same. But there are parallels, if you think of what Cromwell inflicted on the Irish, or the dreadful experiences of highland Scots during the “clearances.”

What Kent is suggesting, I believe, is that an empathetic imagination is needed to overcome racism. This is the leap Clare makes when she sees a black woman raped before her eyes. Kent is not suggesting that the experiences are equal. But if we are to undertake this work of reconciliation we will need to use our imaginations. If not now, when?

And finally: I wish this had been a television series. The space the story required, the additional characterisation needed, the at-times cramped choreography and curious flatness at the end — all this would have worked very differently given the space a streamed series allows. Was it ever considered, I wonder? •

The post Metamorphoses appeared first on Inside Story.

If amending the Constitution were as simple as passing any old piece of legislation, a government controlling both houses of parliament could do whatever it wanted. Abolish elections, for example.

But is our Constitution a little too resistant to amendment? It can only be altered by a vote of all electors at a referendum. Compulsory voting in this country drags the unwilling to the ballot box, potentially (especially at a midterm referendum) creating a class of crankypants inclined to say No on principle. And because the proposal needs to attract not only a majority of all votes but also a majority in a majority of states, and we have only six states, it effectively needs two-thirds of them.

Throw in the nature of Australian politics, politicians, parties and — if I may be so bold — voters (a wise person once noted that Australians are extremely wary of change but then adapt to it with relative ease) and any advocate of constitutional change faces a huge challenge.

The tally, eight successes from forty-four referendums since Federation, is so lop-sided that proposals rarely even get off the ground. It won’t pass, so why bother? Most politicians are willing to take short-term unpopular decisions for long-term political reward, but it’s less appetising to back an idea that will probably be given the thumbs down by the electorate and go nowhere.

If you’re wondering how other countries navigate this conundrum, the answer — at least among those established liberal democracies we compare ourselves with — is that most of them don’t need to. The big majority can alter their founding document with legislative supermajorities, typically of two-thirds, but sometimes three-fifths.

A comprehensive comparative study of nations’ amendment processes remains to be done, but Denmark’s seems to be the most onerous. A legislative vote begins the process, followed by a general election (!), another legislative vote and then a referendum. Like Australia, changing the constitutions of Ireland and Switzerland (and Japan, although its membership of the liberal democracy club is tenuous) requires a parliamentary vote and then a popular vote.

For most, though, a supermajority is at least an option — with, in France, Italy and many other cases, a referendum being another. Some federations (including Canada and the United States) also require a supermajority of state legislatures. (Thanks to Twitter folks for enlightening me on some of this.)

Back in the late 1890s, the authors of the Australian Constitution were aware that whatever text they came up with would need to be approved by a majority of voters in each of the six colonies. So it made sense to insert an amendment process that also involved a referendum.

But they did all this before the formation of Australian political parties as we know them. And they certainly did it before the firming up of the two-party system — and a ferociously combative and highly disciplined two-party system at that.

That solidification is usually dated to the end of the first decade of Federation, when the anti-socialist parties merged to present a united front against the disciplined Labor Party. That’s also when Australians got into the habit of voting No at referendums. The first decade of Federation had seen three of them, one in 1906 and two in 1910, all (sensibly) held with general elections. Two succeeded and one (narrowly) failed, a creditable success rate of 67 per cent.

Then in 1911 a Labor government — the first majority federal government of any hue — held the first-ever midterm referendums. While the earlier ones can be characterised as basic housekeeping, these were truly radical and ambitious: in the words of R.S. Parker (writing in 1949), “more than constitutional,” they were “social and economic and political in the most provocative way.”

They were also soundly rejected by the electorate, with 60.6 and 60.1 per cent respectively voting No. From then on, though, midterm referendums became the option of choice.

Why? Because our major-party politicians reckon that bipartisan support (a necessary though not sufficient criterion for success) isn’t possible at election time, when each side is painting the other as the devil incarnate. This is not a time to be holding hands in agreement.

But bipartisanship has also been pretty rare outside elections, and these have actually been the site of the biggest carnage: the sixteen lowest Yes votes were all at midterm referendums.

Let’s imagine that our Constitution included a method of effecting constitutional change that involved a two-thirds supermajority of federal parliament. Bipartisan support would still be a necessary condition for success, but it would also be sufficient.

(It would be necessary because only once has a party or coalition won two-thirds of the seats in both houses, and that was way back in 1931. The Liberal and National parties under Malcolm Fraser took more than two-thirds of House seats in both 1975 and 1977, but the post-1948 Senate electoral system makes it all but impossible for either side to get an upper-house supermajority.)

Without indulging in a full 118 years of “road not travelled” guessing games, it’s very likely that the section 44 dual citizenship fiasco would have been fixed long ago, local government would be recognised, and simultaneous House and Senate elections would be mandated. (That last one received the support of both major parties at a 1977 referendum, and 62.2 per cent thumbs up from Australians, but failed to clear the “double majority” hurdle.)

Those embarrassing references to “race” would already be excised (with the “race power” retained with some other formulation of words). And much more besides; our Constitution would look quite different.

What about the Voice to Parliament, a key recommendation of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart? In this alternative reality, without the self-fulfilling referendum dynamic dragging out the worst in our MPs, we might see in this term this historic piece of constitutional change, driven by earnest speeches and MPs’ better angels fluttering around Parliament House. A landmark like the 2008 Apology, only including nuts-and-bolts change.

Coalition sceptics could have been placated with the assurance that it can be undone by the same process.

But that’s the rub. The Voice is a very unusual proposal, because it doesn’t in itself require constitutional change at all. It could simply be created by legislation.

Its advocates respond that it needs to be in the Constitution so that a government that finds it troublesome can’t simply eradicate it via legislation — or, as in the case of earlier incarnations, a flick of the ministerial pen. (For more on this history, listen to this Radio National Rear Vision podcast.)

If a supermajority could suffice, the Voice could be inserted with relative ease, largely bypassing ugly and hurtful language that a referendum would inevitably generate. But it could be taken away just as easily; recall the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 2004–05, when the Labor opposition beat the government to the punch in announcing its abolition.

So Voice proponents might have mixed feelings about this supermajority hypothetical.

If a constitutional referendum to create an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is held this parliamentary term, and is successful, it will be extremely difficult to undo. But convincing Australians to vote Yes will be an immense challenge.

Which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted. As we’ve seen, Australian political history is littered with defeated referendums. Being doubtful of success is no reason not to try.

With the No campaign likely to include accusations of gratuitousness — this is all unnecessary; why not simply legislate? — the referendum might generate momentum for that second-best legislated option. And it might produce wider discussion of other approaches. It’s hard to see how a failed vote would worsen the status quo in terms of Indigenous empowerment and quality of life.

Predictions of the dire repercussions of rejection — that it would, in the words of Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt, be “a major setback for at least ten or twenty years” — are overly dramatic. Yes, it would shut down the possibility of enshrining a Voice for the foreseeable future, but so would postponing the referendum.

That’s because successful referendums require a Coalition government; in opposition, Liberal leaders simply lack the authority to support Labor proposals. Nixon goes to China, and all that.

Thanks to the events of 18 May, the current prime minister possesses a significant reservoir of internal party authority. These favourable circumstances won’t last forever; in fact, they’ll probably expire at the next election.

The iron might not be piping hot, but it’s radiating a decent temperature. Scott Morrison has a shot at the history books — for the right reasons.

A failed Voice referendum before or with the next election would be better than none at all. •

The post The referendum conundrum appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s the voice of the land you hear first: the drone of insects, the bird calls, the leaves rustling. Then the sound of humans walking barefoot blends in, the leaves rustling more sharply as sprays of foliage are pulled from the trees and added to a pile in the clearing. At the click of a lighter, smoke rises. We hear the voice of an elder recite the names of the land: “Arrkuluk. Arrkuluk. Injalak. Mandjawulbinjdji. I ask these places to take back the spirit.” His voice, too, is low and intimate, as if taking its pitch from the sounds around him.

This smoking of the spirits is a quiet business, and one not usually observed by outsiders. Much is at stake: establishing boundaries between the living and the dead is critical to securing the cycle that links new and coming generations with the ancestral presence.

On this occasion, though, outsiders will be witnessing the ceremony on film. “The reason why those men wanted to smoke the hard drive was to protect you while you watch,” Thomas explains. It is important that we watch, because “we,” who are the inheritors of broken traditions arising from a settler culture, are implicated.

Thomas’s film, co-directed by Béatrice Bijon, documents the repatriation and burial of stolen ancestral bones. It also tells the story of how the bones were taken from their resting place in a cave at Gunbalanya in Arnhem Land in the first place, weaving in extracts from a documentary made by a party of ethnological researchers in 1948.

First, though, we hear about those events from two local men, one of whom is the artist responsible for the paintings on the sacred rock face leading to the cave. As they climb the hill, music is introduced: rising cadences on stringed instruments, elegiac and melodic. The dialogue between the men is almost matter-of-fact. “The white people got those bones from this cave, they took them down the hill… They put the bones in a box and took them overseas.”

The bones are restored now to their original resting place and life in Gunbalanya goes on in a steady weave of sound and motion. A rhythmic soundtrack of didgeridoo and guitar accompanies images of children circling each other on bikes, bats hanging in sleep, dogs lazing in the sun, women chatting as they wander across the street, a crocodile floating downstream.

“We want to keep this place as strong and as normal as it was many, many thousands of years ago,” says Jacob Nayinggul, the elder who is in every sense the presiding spirit of the film. With its river, hill caves and flourishing native plants, this is a stunning place. In a final poetic flourish to this first part of this account, a flock of birds takes off against a flaming sky reflected in the still waters below.

Then, a jarring note. A fanfare cuts in, and an announcement comes in the strident tones of postwar BBC English: “Expedition to Arnhem Land.” Nothing could more effectively express the shock of an alien cultural intrusion. There is no need for commentary, and none is offered. A small plane lands, discharging a cargo of Europeans dressed in khaki shorts and shirts. Bulky provisions are unloaded from a boat, and the whitefellas set up camp with Australian and American flags hanging side by side above the tents.

This 1948 expedition was led by Charles Mountford, a photographer and ethnographer from South Australia, and Smithsonian curator Frank Setzler, who had interests in the racial characteristics of human anatomy. Both were in search of relics and artefacts they could take home with them. We see Setzler taking facial casts from the young men, who patiently cooperate. Then a couple of teenage boys lead him up to the caves where the bones are held, and take a nap while he explores. The trust is painful to witness. While they are asleep, Setzler nips into the cave, and like any common cat burglar, helps himself to what, back at the Smithsonian, will be received as a prize haul.

Here Thomas intervenes with a brief account of the Smithsonian enterprise and the late nineteenth-century fascination with evolutionary ethnography. The museum was founded with a bequest from English scientist James Smithson, who died in Genoa in 1829 and “lay there for seventy years” until, in one of the most striking symmetrical ironies of this whole situation, his own remains were repatriated.

They are now installed in a marble shrine in the original Smithsonian building known as “the Castle.” Opposite this fine Victorian edifice is a clinical modern construction designed for the high-density storage of a vast archive of specimens. Numbered skulls and bones are packed into trays in massive shelving units.

In 2010, following negotiations with the Smithsonian, representatives from the people of Gunbalanya, East Arnhem Land and Groote Island travelled to Washington to receive the bones Setzler had taken. Thomas and cinematographer Adis Hondo went with them, and filmed the simple ceremony they performed as the boxes were wheeled out on a trolley draped in Aboriginal flags.

At almost exactly the midpoint of the documentary, we return to Gunbalanya to follow the stages of reception and repatriation in the homeland. This is overseen by Nayinggul, who serves as a commentator on the significance of all that must be done. Each bone and skull is painted with ochre and wrapped in paperbark. He talks to them, offering reassurance that they have come home. “We’ll follow,” he says. “We’ll go after them, too.”

Over the five years between Thomas’s first visit to the community and the burial ceremony, Nayinggul has declined physically. A frail figure in his early sixties in 2006, he is a near skeleton when he directs the ceremonial proceedings from his wheelchair in 2011. It’s as if his presence in the physical world is fading. There is a lightness about everything he says and does. He switches effortlessly between English and traditional language, alternately addressing the spirits of the dead and making explanatory comments to the film crew.

Soon after his ancestors were laid to rest Nayinggul did indeed follow them. Etched in Bone took eight years in all to complete and, as Thomas explains in his 2013 essay, “Because It’s Your Country: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land,” a number of years had to pass before the taboo was lifted on speaking the name of the deceased or showing his image. It is a tribute to Thomas and Bijon that it is essentially Nayinggul’s film. He establishes its tone and controls its message.

This is an exceptional piece of filmmaking, governed by qualities of restraint and attunement that are essential to its subject. Thomas first visited Gunbalanya in search of recordings of Aboriginal song, and the musicality of the film as a whole — with compositions by Yolngu musician Joe Gumbula and original music by Eric and Joseph Bijon — is one of its most appealing characteristics. •

The post Coming home appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor was committed to a referendum on constitutional change in its first term. It would have included a yet-to-be-legislated Indigenous Voice to Parliament, embedded in the Constitution, with the detail left to a post-election design process. Key Indigenous proponents such as Noel Pearson and Megan Davis believed they could overcome the widely recognised impediments to a referendum lacking bipartisan support, but the risk of failure would have been high.

The Coalition went to the election having spelt out its deep opposition to the Indigenous Voice in a series of statements by prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and former Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion. All four men alleged that the Voice would amount to a third chamber of parliament, and thus threaten the integrity of our system of government.

In a shift in tactics, though, the Morrison government highlighted its support for the recommendations of the parliamentary committee on Indigenous constitutional recognition, jointly chaired by Liberal MP Julian Leeser and Labor senator Patrick Dodson. The committee wanted a further process of consultation leading to a final report before the end of the new parliament. In its pre-election budget, the government allocated $7.3 million for those consultations and pointed to having earlier allocated $160 million to its contingency fund to run a referendum at an unspecified point in the future.

These decisions appear, and were designed, to signify a commitment to the recognition process. But despite the welcome appointment of Ken Wyatt as minister, the government has given absolutely no commitment to dealing with any other substantive Indigenous reform proposals, including the Indigenous Voice. What is on offer is yet another of the seemingly interminable consultation processes on constitutional recognition commissioned by Labor and Coalition governments over the past decade, and the prime minister’s latest comments merely reinforce this point.

While Labor offered the best chance so far of successful constitutional reform, neither party has committed to a detailed and specific proposal, let alone a referendum question to be put to a vote. In a Policy Insights report published this week by ANU’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, we take a step back and focus on the structural issues that perpetuate Indigenous exclusion in Australia. We argue that continuing disadvantage and the inability of the nation to come to terms with Indigenous recognition are a function of that exclusion.

While we see considerable value in the Indigenous Voice proposal, we also argue that it alone cannot deal with deep-seated Indigenous exclusion. Even if an Indigenous Voice were established and effective, it would take decades to make the nation’s many social and political institutions more inclusive. Substantive Indigenous reforms have a history of being resisted by those with an interest in preserving the status quo. Even when reform is successful (as was largely the case with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, notwithstanding its patchy record), it is wound back when those who feel adversely affected by the reform gain influence and power.

We take a detailed look at the history and experience of ATSIC, a previous mechanism designed to give Indigenous interests a voice (though within government rather than to parliament). ATSIC’s leadership and internal governance had a mixed record, but its strengths and contribution — and particularly its regional representation structure — far outweighed its shortcomings. Its failings were arguably the fault of ministers reluctant to use their powers to support ATSIC’s and Indigenous peoples’ repeated calls for necessary reforms. Its successes were overshadowed when the Howard government decided it would take the blame for the Coalition’s Indigenous policy failures.

What then of the Indigenous Voice? We discuss both implementation tactics and the design options available to policymakers. Whether the proposal is put to a referendum first and then legislated (assuming it is successful) or legislated first and then entrenched in the Constitution via referendum, legislation will be needed. The options, as to both its makeup and its scope, are myriad. Legislation also means that parliament, with all the usual trade-offs, will have a say over structure, design and remit. Again, the experience of ATSIC is relevant.

We also assess and analyse the issues likely to arise when an Indigenous Voice is being designed. Two of the more salient are the fact that in our system parliament is effectively dominated by the executive, and the fact that mainstream policy issues and programs increasingly have greater impact on Indigenous citizens than Indigenous programs do. The major risk we identify is that the Indigenous Voice legislation will create an entity that is structurally incapable of influencing parliament effectively on matters relevant to Indigenous interests. The tasks of devising a path to successful implementation and designing an effective Voice are extraordinarily complex, and we propose a number of strategies to deal with this complexity. But it should be recognised that an Indigenous Voice is not a panacea for what most analysts agree has been an area of longstanding and comprehensive policy failure.

Other structural changes will be required, potentially including agreements, treaties and other mechanisms, and these will play into a greater role for Indigenous interests in the design and implementation of government programs and policies. In all cases, First Nations peoples face power differentials and inevitable pressure from other interest groups pursuing their own concerns. These are significant challenges, and they pose a serious threat to the likelihood of effective reform. Part of the solution, we argue, is for Indigenous interests to invest in better advocacy; another is for them to seek out allies among other interest groups. A third, perhaps quixotic observation is that it is in the long-term national interest to create a more inclusive and equitable society.

We also spend considerable time in our report explaining why it is that political parties, the media and the community at large tend to grasp for simplistic Indigenous policies. A consistent theme through our analysis is that reform must be substantive. The political process has failed over at least the twelve years since John Howard promised during the 2007 election campaign to deliver constitutional recognition within the first eighteen months of his next term. At virtually every decision point, across the breadth of the mainstream political spectrum, the path of least resistance has been chosen — a path based on rhetoric and aspiration rather than substance.

While the moral imperative for making the nation’s institutions less exclusionary is unarguable, the political imperative for reform is weak or non-existent. First Nations are left seeking to take advantage of ephemeral political and policy opportunities, the insecure generosity of dominant interest groups, and the possibility that extraordinary individual action, whether by a minister within a government or by the Indigenous community, can navigate the maze of structural obstacles. The progress to date of the proposal for an Indigenous Voice, driven by the sheer persistence and vision of First Nations leaders such as Davis and Pearson, is an example of the latter.

Central to our analysis is our view that the nation is making unacknowledged but enormously significant choices by failing to pursue substantive Indigenous policy reform. The costs of prevarication, short-sightedness and endemic self-interest fall not only on First Nations citizens but ultimately on the nation as a whole. While First Nations and their leaders will clearly need to take stock and reassess their options and strategy, it is beyond time that the Australian nation took stock as well. •

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Last month Queensland swung most to the Morrison government — a touch over 4 per cent on current estimates, and more than double any other state. The swing was particularly pronounced in areas that might be affected by the Adani coalmine (although it was exacerbated by high support for One Nation and the United Australia Party, with their Coalition-friendly how-to-vote cards).

Instead of opposing Adani outright, as Hawke opposed the dam, Labor sat awkwardly on the fence. But similar sentiments came into play: an outlier state angered at the prospect of Canberra interfering in its affairs and sacrificing jobs at the behest of trendies in Sydney and Melbourne. Only this time the state in question had thirty seats, not five.

More generally, we need to be wary of trying to find “reasons” for last month’s shock result by matching seat-by-seat (or booth-by-booth) swings with assessments of whether voters would have won or lost under Labor’s proposed policies. For one thing, many of the 2019 swings appear, at least partly, to be corrections for 2016 moves in the other direction, which were in turn at least partly a result of Labor’s “Mediscare.”

Most importantly, though, political scare campaigns, of which we have just witnessed a ferocious example, don’t target rational individuals researching party policies and deciding what’s in it for them. On the contrary, spreading misinformation relies on voters’ lack of knowledge and disinclination to dig into the detail. It’s about whipping up emotion. Throw in a fictional “death tax” and it becomes safer for stressed voters to stick with what they know. Those in precarious economic circumstances — people who would be more likely to benefit from the spending that would have been funded by Labor’s housing and dividend policies — can be the most susceptible to fear.

So you could see the results in, say, Sydney as simply a case of Labor seats swinging to the Liberals, and Liberal seats moving the other way. Or you could see them as a general change-of-government swing counteracted by a scare campaign that was particularly effective among people of modest means.

After every Labor election loss, opinion pages and airwaves burst with advice. Overwhelmingly, the party is urged to move to the centre, reconnect with battlers, and learn the values of aspirational voters. These naggings are as hollow as they are predictable; sometimes the same commentators, only months earlier, had been celebrating what was seen then as a move to the centre (2004 was a prime example).

They don’t stand up in 2019, either. Labor’s big-ticket policies — straight out of Treasury and the technocrats’ handbook — were hardly the stuff of revolution. (It’s true that promising to legislate to reverse the Fair Work Commission’s penalty rate decision was a bit out there, and perhaps played into the usual fears of union domination.)

But Labor presented the platform with fiery rhetoric, exaggerating its mildly redistributive effects. Beyond the true believers, it was never clear who all those swipes at the “top end of town” were supposed to impress. Like the decision to present a big target, this tactic probably flowed from the better-than-expected result three years ago and the hope of latching on to the international post–GFC anti-elitist zeitgeist.

But perhaps one lesson from 2016 — and from Trump, Brexit and Theresa May’s close shave against Jeremy Corbyn — is that low expectations are a necessary ingredient. And in 2019 it was the Coalition government that was the firm underdog.

There is little point in the opposition gnashing its teeth about being out of touch with voters. Its policies might have been good or bad, but it lost the election because it asked voters to give it a tick before it acted. No opposition since 1993 has been so foolish. And with the exception of the 1998 GST election, no government in living memory has either.

In 1983 the Hawke opposition declined to mention that it would impose an assets test on pensions, which was perhaps the hot potato it handled in its first term. A lot of the language and sentiments were similar to this year’s dividend franking debate. Few of the reforms still celebrated today were taken to elections first.

The fourth estate’s rare bout of introspection — how did we get it so wrong, do we not understand our own country? — will be fleeting, but on this occasion is not really warranted. When all the opinion polls point one way, what’s an election pundit supposed to think? It’s true that many observers enthusiastically internalised the long line of poll results, perceiving political events so clearly through a poll-created lens that they convinced themselves that we don’t need the polls to tell us that this government was going down, big time.

But if the pollsters had accurately anticipated the result, expectations would obviously have been different.

(My election-morning assessment was in line with earlier jottings: seeing Labor’s campaign as wrong-headed but ultimately accepting the evidence of the polls. See also reasons for the government to be hopeful, last December.)

The polls said it would be around 51 or 52 per cent to Labor. The Coalition instead won 52 per cent. Was there a late swing? Were the polls wrong for the whole campaign? Were they wrong for the last two years? Were voting intentions for the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull as high as 52 or 53 per cent (rather than 49) in the weeks before he was chopped down?

As noted last week, I’m also not as sceptical as most about the idea of a late swing.

It is clear that two things will survive a nuclear Armageddon: cockroaches and the bizarre insistence among the political chatterati that betting markets are useful “predictors” of election results. They are merely a reflection of general expectations, which are mostly driven by the opinion polls, and should never again be referenced as evidence on a particular seat or the overall result. But of course they will be.

One side effect of this result is that the chances of a successful referendum on the Uluru Statement from the Heart have shot up. Under a Labor government it would probably have gone nowhere, because Liberal opposition leaders simply lack the clout to bring their side to the constitutional amendment table. And Bill Shorten would not have been likely to hold a referendum without Coalition support.

Labor opposition leaders, by contrast, have no problem jumping aboard. Supporting constitutional referendums is in their DNA (communism in 1951 aside). As a rule (with the usual exceptions) referendums succeed when a Liberal prime minister with the necessary internal clout is convinced of the desirability of constitutional change.

Scott Morrison now possesses a level of authority not seen since Tony Abbott’s early months as prime minister. The spectacular nature of the polls’ failings insulate him against poor future numbers. And even before the election he had expressed an interest in making progress on this front. •

The post Notes on an election appeared first on Inside Story.

Many wore white t-shirts featuring a picture of the hero of the day and the words “William Ferguson. Fighter for Aboriginal Freedom.” The Travelling Wiradjuris, a country music band comprising the region’s Wiradjuri people, played from the rotunda in the town centre, where the statue stands. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speakers alike — including state Nationals MP Dugald Saunders, Dubbo’s mayor Ben Shields, and journalist Jeff McMullen, an Aboriginal rights advocate — praised Ferguson. Jenny Munro, a Wiradjuri elder, told the crowd the day would be the “start of a new era that will see statues of black men and women in towns and cities all over Australia.”

How different from 1937. In June that year in Dubbo, William Ferguson launched the Aborigines’ Progressive Association, a body the likes of which Australia had never before seen. It called on Aboriginal people to take charge of their own affairs in a country that had deprived them of basic human rights.

Six months later, on Australia Day 1938, Ferguson helped to organise a Day of Mourning and Protest in Sydney, while the city thronged with crowds celebrating 150 years of white settlement. About one hundred Aboriginal people convened defiantly at Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street, a few blocks from Sydney Town Hall, where processions of sesquicentennial floats marked the triumphs of British colonialism.

The Aborigines’ conference passed a resolution condemning the “callous treatment of our people by the whiteman during the past 150 years” and calling for “a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality in the community.” (After a battle by Jenny Munro and others to save it, Australian Hall was added to the National Heritage List in 2008.)

That event was also a first. Besides Ferguson, those gathered there included William Cooper from Victoria, Jack Patten from La Perouse in Sydney, and Pearl Gibbs, who later settled in Dubbo, where a large mural of her overlooks that city’s park. The Dubbo statue could help bring the leadership of this remarkable group of people back into Australia’s historical narrative.

Born in the Riverina district of New South Wales, William Ferguson started working in shearing sheds in 1896, aged fourteen, after just two years of formal education at a mission school. He became a unionist and joined the Labor Party. Outraged at the power of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, a body that controlled Aboriginal people’s lives on reserves, he demanded its abolition.

At the Day of Mourning conference, Ferguson described conditions he had witnessed in his travels: “The dreaded disease of TB has made its appearance among our people, and is wiping them out, right here in New South Wales.” Two months earlier, at a public meeting Cooper had called in Melbourne, Ferguson said of life on reserves, “It would be better if they turned a machine gun on us.”

William Ferguson (left) and other participants in the Day of Mourning in Sydney on Australia Day 1938, as shown in Man magazine.

Ferguson and Cooper found two unlikely allies in the white world. William Miles, a businessman, owned the Publicist, a magazine edited by Percy Stephenson, a former Rhodes Scholar and one-time communist. Known as “Inky,” Stephenson by then had become anti-British, pro-fascist and a strong Australian nationalist. Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton and writer Jack Horner have argued that Stephenson was “probably in sympathy with the Aborigines on nationalist grounds.”

Stephenson helped arrange publication in 1938 of the Abo Call, a monthly magazine billed as “The Voice of the Aborigines,” and gave Jack Patten, its editor, a desk at the Publicist. The Abo Call was one of only two known publications to report fully the proceedings of the Day of Mourning conference. In yet another unlikely twist, the second was Man, a popular risqué magazine that also published reputable fiction and current affairs articles and pictures. Under the heading “Aborigines Meet, Mourn While White-Man Nation Celebrates” the magazine ran two pages of pictures recording the event in Australian Hall, and quoting Ferguson: “We have been ‘protected’ for 150 years, and look what has become of us.”

The Sydney Morning Herald, by contrast, ran just a six-paragraph story of the Aborigines’ conference amid pages of stories and pictures extolling “Australia’s Day of Rejoicing” and “Milestones in Australia’s March to Nationhood.” An editorial in the Age observed a bit more sharply that the Aborigine had been cast as the skeleton at the feast on Australia Day 1938.

After the Sydney conference, Ferguson and his colleagues ramped up their campaign. In late January 1938 a deputation met prime minister Joseph Lyons, his wife Enid, and interior minister John McEwen. They presented a policy known as Ten Points, which demanded that Aborigines have the same education as white people and be allowed to own land. “Why give preference to immigrants when our people have no land and no right to own land?” Ferguson asked. It called for the Commonwealth to take control of all Aboriginal affairs. That reform had to wait another twenty-nine years until Australians approved a bigger role for the Commonwealth, by a record majority, in the 1967 referendum.

The setbacks seemed interminable. In 1949, when Ferguson was vice-president of the Australian Aborigines’ League, Ben Chifley’s Labor government dismissed calls for changes Ferguson had drafted to its Aboriginal policy. Ferguson quit the Labor Party in dismay and stood for federal parliament in the 1949 election as an independent in the seat that included Dubbo. His platform centred on the newly promulgated United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, which said that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” He was not elected. Ferguson collapsed after giving his final campaign speech in Dubbo, a few metres from where his statue now stands; he died not long after, aged sixty-seven.

Among William Ferguson’s family members who gathered in Dubbo for the unveiling, Alistair Ferguson had driven from Bourke, about 370 kilometres northwest. For the past six years, Alistair has successfully pioneered a project, known as “justice reinvestment,” to cut crime and imprisonment rates among Bourke’s young Aboriginal people.

Alistair cites his great-grandfather’s battles as his inspiration. “Human rights is a work in progress right across the globe,” he says. “Martin Luther King had a dream in America in the 1960s. My great-grandfather had a dream long before that. The Bourke project is showing how William Ferguson’s work is continuing. It’s not about me. I’m just the vehicle. It’s unfinished business.”

William Ferguson’s grandson, Willie Ferguson of Lightning Ridge in northwest New South Wales, cut a striking figure in Dubbo: tall, slender, with a grey beard and swept-back grey hair, dressed in a red country shirt and black trousers. He was born just five years before William died, but recalls his grandfather as a “strong man with a strong voice.”

Willie and Rod Towney, a Wiradjuri man, lobbied the Dubbo Regional Council to support their bid for a statue of William. The state government eventually provided about $120,000; Aboriginal figures and their supporters raised extra funds.

The sculptor is Brett Garling, who owns a gallery in Wongarbon, a hamlet on the Mitchell Highway near Dubbo. “I had no idea who William Ferguson was,” says Garling. “It’s not the sort of thing we were taught in schools. Yet when I learned his story, I thought that if he was American a movie would be made about him.” Garling worked from photos of William, and used his grandson Willie to capture “basic bone structure.” The result shows William Ferguson leaning slightly forward with a rolled-up newspaper in one hand: a typical stance when he spoke to crowds in the Domain in Sydney in the late 1930s.

Madeline McGrady, a pioneering Aboriginal filmmaker, and Cliff Foley, an Aboriginal land rights campaigner, were among many who travelled to Dubbo for the event. When William Ferguson took a stand for Aboriginal rights there in 1937, Dubbo was a small town on the edge of the western plains, where wool was king. It is now one of Australia’s biggest regional cities, with almost 40,000 people, about 15 per cent of them Aboriginal. With the federal election campaign in full swing, several reflected on how far Australia had come in the eighty-two years since Ferguson’s stand.

Land rights and native title have largely been won. But some people point to quite recent events to suggest that William Ferguson’s struggle is far from over. Just twelve years ago, John Howard as prime minister harked back to the era of white supremacy when he launched the Northern Territory Intervention, sending troops to take control of seventy-three remote Aboriginal communities and suspending the Racial Discrimination Act there. The exercise had all the hallmarks of the old Aborigines Protection Board that Ferguson had fought to abolish.

There is something of a stark choice on Aboriginal policy at this election, too. Labor promises to implement the call by Aboriginal people two years ago at Uluru for a First Nations Voice to parliament, calling it the party’s “first priority” for constitutional change. The Coalition government, under Malcolm Turnbull, dismissed the proposal. “If Bill Shorten says he’ll do it,” says Rod Towney, “he needs to listen and be true to his word.”

Mark Coulton, the National Party MP for Parkes, the federal electorate that includes Dubbo, had left town earlier that morning, before the statue’s unveiling. Fighting his fifth campaign to hold the biggest federal seat in New South Wales, Coulton drove to Warialda, his hometown, ahead of visits to the towns of Menindee and Wilcannia. A crippling drought and problems with the Murray–Darling river system seemed his priorities. Nonetheless, he praised the Ferguson legacy through the achievements of Alistair Ferguson’s project at Bourke: “It’s worked so well because of the strong local ownership and leadership.”

William Ferguson’s statue is bound to leave an even more enduring legacy, perhaps helping to head off another heavy-handed government policy like the Intervention. “A sculpture opens people’s minds and imaginations, and lets them learn why he’s there,” says Brett Garling, the sculptor. “He was a game changer.” •

The post The game changer appeared first on Inside Story.

In March 2016, this coastal town became the first trial site for the cashless debit card, a new, stringent way of quarantining welfare payments. Just 20 per cent of a cardholder’s welfare payment is credited to his or her bank account, with the remaining 80 per cent sequestered on a debit card that can’t be used at any alcohol or gambling outlet.

I have worked on the far-west coast of South Australia for over a decade now, and have written a book about my research into the entangled questions of mining, conservation and native title there. In the middle of 2017, I embarked on research about “lived experiences” of the debit card trial in Ceduna. I sought to hang around with and listen to people affected by the card, spending approximately three months in Ceduna over the last year and a half, and visiting Yalata on four occasions. This is the anthropological method: it involves endeavouring to become a part of the everyday lives of the people one is hoping to better understand.

I have volunteered for the Red Cross’s Driver Mentor program, accompanying learner drivers around town. “I’ve got my bush licence,” joked one confident young person who learned to drive at an early age out at the former Koonibba mission. I’ve also driven with people who have settled in Ceduna as adults. I’ve singed the fur from kangaroo tails over a smoky fire in the mallee scrub, and watched evening tennis matches as galahs careen low across nearby paddocks. I washed a lot of tea cups at a local drop-in centre; I joined the gym.

I was not there to generate more statistics, to abstract or to generalise. I asked people about their prison tattoos. I learned how tricky it is to germinate Sturt’s desert pea seeds. I watched knitting projects take shape. I asked people about their working lives and I also asked people about forms of labour that don’t get recognised as work: the care of siblings, of close kin, of other relatives’ children, or of the sick and grieving.

Sometimes I borrowed a bike, sometimes I gave or accepted lifts around town. I called in at the craft shop to check for fresh eggs and jelly cakes. I found at the Aboriginal arts and culture centre an eye of focused creativity and peace in the midst of a chaotic storm of circumstances and events that were often desperately cruel. I remain dazzled by the large canvases by consummate artist Verna Lawrie, the energy of Glenda Richards’s Seven Sisters works and the meticulous detail in Ashley Pompey’s paintings.

By September 2016, the Ceduna trial covered 752 people, including the residents of the remote community of Yalata, northwest of Ceduna, and a number of other nearby Aboriginal localities. Although census data shows that only around 22 per cent of the 3500 people who live in the Ceduna local government area (which excludes Yalata) are Indigenous, around three-quarters of the people on the trial are Indigenous.

A second trial of the card, in Western Australia’s East Kimberley region, began in April 2016 and a third started in the Goldfields region of Western Australia in March 2018; in both regions, the card is issued to all welfare recipients of working age except if they’re on a veterans’ payment. At the site of the fourth trial, a predominantly non-Indigenous area including Hervey Bay and Bundaberg in Queensland, the card is issued only to those aged thirty-five and under.

The card originated in a report published in 2014 by a mining magnate that was subsequently taken up, modified and implemented by the federal government. In The Forrest Review: Creating Parity, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest called for what he called a cashless Healthy Welfare Card. When I asked about the origins of the scheme, one of the card’s proponents in Ceduna immediately nominated an opinion piece by Forrest in the Australian around the time of the report’s release. Another interviewee emphasised that this was “co-designed” social policy — that conversations with Aboriginal community members were crucial in the lead-up to the agreement between the federal government, the Ceduna district council and five Indigenous organisations in August 2015.

But many of my research participants describe a profoundly disempowering process. They first heard of the card, they said, in news reports of the agreement’s signing. On the subject of consultation, I noted down comments such as this: “None of those government officials ever spoken to the community. It’s like they was all cherrypicked. The mayor, he picked the people that favoured the card, so the government officials spoke to the people that favoured the card.” And this: “They pulled the blanket over everyone, and just secretly said that everyone is on the card, without informing the community about it.” And this: “No one was told about it. It was all very underhanded and sneaky.”

Journalist George Megalogenis has recently described those Australian regional and rural areas that have largely been bypassed by two decades of skilled migration as being “older and whiter than the nation at large,” warning that Australia risks a split “between those who are globally connected and those who are yelling stop.” Of course, Megalogenis has in mind the populist movements fuelling Trump’s election and Brexit, and, in Australia, Pauline Hanson’s political resurrection. But other grassroots political possibilities are evident in Ceduna, where a tenuous alliance of affected citizens has seeded new friendships. “It did bring the Aborigines and the whites closer because we were working together with a single aim,” says one opponent of the card.

A small group of locals arranged for a public meeting to take place the month following the agreement’s signing, at the Foreshore Hotel. About thirty people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, old and young, went along — “the biggest variety of people,” according to one of my interviewees. “We tried to get the mayor to come,” I was told. “We give them all invitations to come. ‘This is your community people here: we want answers. We want a consultation, that we were never given.’ But no, we were on our own.” Another person told me, “Basically the feeling was: how could this go on without us… knowing. Without talking to people about it?” Two more meetings organised by concerned locals followed.

It was only after the federal legislation implementing the card had passed on 15 October 2015 that a more widely publicised public meeting was held at a local football club. This one was attended by the federal human services minister at the time, Alan Tudge. Two weeks later came a protest organised by card opponents. “We marched on the main street!” I was told proudly.

The perceived contempt shown to a senior figure from Yalata at that November 2015 meeting at the club made a deep impression on a number of my interviewees: “Mr Tudge was so rude. He was so rude to that lady and she’s an Aboriginal elder, she’s really high up in their hierarchy. I had never seen anybody… He just totally ignored her. It was just awful.” Sure, meeting attendees rambled, were nervous, or furious, says another interviewee, but they were there to express themselves, remembers another. A number felt that some of the government visitors, standing at the back of the hall with their arms crossed, were “snickering” at the contributions of some of the attendees.

Why was the debit card first tested in Ceduna? There’s a long and complex answer to that question — and it partly depends on whom you ask, of course — but drinking is central. Who is drinking, and how to help them stop are the key questions, and they have no easy answers.

A Senate inquiry into the debit card legislation drew numerous submissions highlighting the Yalata community’s resolve to stem the flow of community members into Ceduna chasing gubby, or grog, and detailing the heavy costs involved. An elderly Pitjantjatjara woman explained to me that she was constantly counselling kin she encountered in Ceduna. “I say, ‘Wiya, wanti [no, leave it]… get on with your life, hey? You’ve got kids. You’ve got family at Yalata. Why, what are you doin’ here?’” The broader Indigenous community on the far-west coast has been grappling with the effect of alcohol on the community’s health and happiness for decades.

So, while many of my Aboriginal informants expressed cynicism about their “leaders,” ”representatives” or cousins who sit in an office and sign away their community’s rights, and speculated about how they were induced, threatened and/or rewarded, my belief is that they are community-minded people in search of a circuit-breaker.

But focusing on the intentions of those in positions of institutional power is not the point. What I’m here to find out is what it’s like to be on the debit card.

It’s like being “taken back,” an elderly man told me, “to the days when old people were given a pinch of tea, some sugar and salted beef.” Or, for some Indigenous and non-Indigenous women, it’s like being taken back to periods of their life when they were controlled by — “under the thumb” of — a “bossy man.” How grimly ironic, given that the state casts itself as protecting women by restricting the amount of cash available to be pooled and drunk away. This same logic, of course, was also deployed in the Howard government’s 2007 Northern Territory intervention.

I interviewed an Aboriginal grandmother whom I’ll call June (I’ve used pseudonyms throughout this article). “I was [a] very respectable woman!” she emphasised. “I feel strongly that I don’t want to be on it, because it’s taken responsibility away from me… It’s treating me like a little kid again.” A more ambivalent response came from Shaun, who fretted about children growing up in drinking households and hoped the card was helping: “It’s got its cons, and it’s got its non-cons, and to me, I just like my money in the bank and spend it how I wanna spend it. Not being dictated to, how it’s gotta be spent and the percentage-wise, and it’s taken the independence away from me.”

Dustin went further: “But to be on this card it feels like, I tell you, if you’ve ever been to prison…” I haven’t; he has. “Stripped of rights” again, he feels that being on the card results in unending stress.

The shame-inducing aspects of this punitive and race-based policy are consistently highlighted by opponents of the card. Drawing on a survey of participants, the evaluation of the pilot says that “only 4 per cent… explicitly raised ‘stigma’ or ‘shame’ associated with the card as an issue at Wave 2.” In the Wave 1 data, collected nine months earlier, around six months into the Ceduna trial, the figure was 6 per cent. But shame can be hard to measure. It creeps across cheeks, or makes one fumble or look down, feeling squashed. Shame might recur as experiences accumulate. Robert, for example, remembers moving schools and suddenly finding himself “one little blackfella” in a large high school. “I just felt so alone… I was sort of copping it left, right and centre: black this here, black that there.” A short survey is a woefully inadequate instrument for capturing that kind of experience.

Besides, anthropologists have long noted that the meaning of shame in Aboriginal Australian communities is quite different from how the notion is used in the broader community. In Aboriginal English, “shame” (kunta in Pitjantjatjara) might refer to an experience of being distinguished as an individual, for good or bad reasons. For example, I ran into a young person who had just collected a NAIDOC Week award on behalf of a relative. The experience of accepting the award on stage was described as “shame,” even if this was a joyful moment. This can be partly explained by the cultural value placed on egalitarianism in Indigenous communities. Because the debit card was issued to so many fellow relatives and community members, most people shook their heads when I asked about the issue of shame in Yalata. There was no shame involved because everyone was on the card. “Just usual, I suppose,” said one person. “Like the Medicare card and everybody uses that. Like that to me, you know, you’re not shame.”

The response was quite different in Ceduna. Many people shared their perspective of finding the card an “insult,” of feeling “targeted” and “punished,” of being involved in the trial as a “degrading” experience. “When I pull [the debit card] out,” June began, then she stopped and sighed. “It makes me shamed I come to the shop. There are a lot of people standing back looking: they got money in their pockets, you know. Then I thought, ‘I wonder what they’re thinking?’”

This shame was experienced most acutely after the card was first introduced. As one person said, “I felt like I was, what do you call…? A stigma was attached. You were being segregated. You know, you were looked down upon.” Here’s Robert again: “I just feel like I’m another person to blokes that’s got regular job, and me, pulling the grey card out in front of them, that’s embarrassing. ‘Oh, he’s on the Indue card,’ you know.” (Indue is the company contracted by the federal human services department to issue the card and administer the trial.) “Yeah, you get your little smirks and stuff like that around the place.” Another response was to shrug off shame defiantly — why should I feel ashamed? some people said. I am not lesser because I need government assistance.

The card doesn’t work at the municipal tip, I was told. And an Aboriginal couple explained that they preferred to order car parts online, and fix their vehicles themselves: “eBay doesn’t accept the cashless welfare card,” one of them said, “and my car’s still off the road. Now, that’s a big problem.” In fact, the informal cash economy is important to many people I spent time with. As Tracey explained, “I buy everything in my house, like my kids’ beds, my bed, the fridge, the microwave, even clothing, everything just about that I own was purchased off of this Buy Exchange [a local website where people swap, sell and buy second-hand goods, using cash]. You find that with a lot of community members here. When you haven’t got money to go splurge and buy, you know, [an] $800 telly, when you can buy the same telly for maybe 50 per cent.”

The debit card uses EFTPOS technology, so it is widely accepted, even at second-hand or opportunity shops. But, yeah, the op shop. Tracey squirms, “I really feel it there… They’re elder people and they’re very well respected in the community. It makes me feel like I’m a drug user or something like that because I’m on the card, where it’s not the case at all. So that’s why I think that it’s sort of stereotyped there that if you’re on the card you’re… When you could just be a simple Centrelink recipient.”

Helen has found the card unpredictable. “I can be at the chemist and pay for my meds, I can go up to the post office, and it won’t work. I can come back to the supermarket and it will work, or vice versa and anywhere in between.” Pre-existing anxieties have been exacerbated in this case. “It’s just the trepidation.”

These experiences notwithstanding, many people I spoke with took care to note that “some people” like the card. It was nearly always women who told me they liked it; they like the app they can use to check their card’s balance, and are pleased to find more money saved at the end of the fortnight.

Partly, too, people didn’t want me to believe that their perspective on the card was shared by everyone. Not only is it considered culturally improper to impinge on others’ capacity to speak for themselves, but I came to realise that they were also saying, “I was spoken for. I have been spoken about. I have not been listened to. But I won’t speak for others, or over the top of them.”

But it’s not correct to assume that people with drink, drug or gambling problems are opposed to the card, and clean-living recipients accept it. I came to see that the most articulate and passionate critics of the card were often those attuned to broader colonial, racial and social injustices and injuries, and sought to understand the card in a historical perspective. They had a lot to say, and our conversations ranged from terra nullius to the implementation of the Community Development Program, a disastrous federal employment scheme that many of my research participants are also enrolled in. Those who liked the card, on the other hand, tended to leave these larger issues in the background, with more immediate familial concerns claiming their attention.

Responses to card proponents’ frequent assertions that things are “quieter” in town were mixed. Is it true? If so, is it the card? Or is it the work of the mobile assistance patrol bus, which transports people home or to places where they can rest and rehabilitate? (The bus is part of a concerted “service reform” project under way in Ceduna since 2013.) Or is it the stringent electronic “ID tech” system restricting the purchase of alcohol, introduced in 2012? It could equally be the community paramedics, who have worked humbly and with great success since September 2016, building up relationships with the Aboriginal community and connecting people with the medical system before things get dire.

And anyway, what does it mean to say things are “quieter”? “A lot of our people are transient,” Rexy from one of the local social services told me. “So things might look quiet one minute, and then they’re full-on the next, you know? It’s not like, ‘Oh, it’s working because it’s quiet.’ We’d usually say, ‘It’s quiet. Must be people gone somewhere, you know? Where’ve they all gone?’ And then all of a sudden they’re all back.” Funerals, cultural business, fluctuations in weather all play a part. “It’s not even about whether you see people or don’t see people. Even when you don’t see people, some of our people are concerned, because then we think, well, if they’re not there… where are they?”

In the East Kimberley, the cashless debit card is referred to as the “white card,” because of its perceived imposition of white designs. In Ceduna, it is the “grey card,” after its silver-grey appearance, or the “Indue card.” Researchers Elise Klein and Sarouche Razi have established that Indue was granted more than $10.8 million (of the $18.9 million spent up to April 2017) for building and operating the card technology in both Ceduna and the East Kimberley during the trial.

Consultancy firm ORIMA was contracted to evaluate the pilot. The shortcomings of its evaluation have been highlighted by numerous authors, who point out that self-reported “behaviour change” may well be influenced by the interviewee’s reluctance to admit to drinking or, especially, illicit drug use (a limitation acknowledged by ORIMA). Most damningly, the Australian National Audit Office released a report in July 2018 analysing the implementation and performance of the cashless debit card trial. According to the auditor, it is difficult to ascertain “whether there had been a reduction in social harm” as a result of the card’s introduction.

I didn’t seek to evaluate the card in this way. My starting point was “Tell me about your life,” not “Your life is a problem, has it been fixed?” But I did ask: does the card stop people from drinking? One person, living in a household of heavy drinkers, shook his head ruefully in response: “Drunks gonna drink!” Other Aboriginal interlocutors told me, “They’re clever, Aboriginal ones are.” Seeing family members with “lots of grog,” even tawny port, banned from sale at local outlets, a speaker asked, “Eh, where you mob get that, you’re not allowed to…?”

Another person reflected, “Since this card has come out it’s only made people smart. They know how to do the loopholes and it’s not stopping the people that enjoy the alcohol every week. It’s never stopped them.” Another responded more specifically: “What they’ll do is they’ll go buy a laptop on the card and then flog the laptop.” “For cheap?” I asked. “Yep. Cheaper, yeah. Well, they buy radio or they buy a telephone. What do ya call the…? An iPhone and then they’ll flog the iPhone for less, to get money to go to grog.”

Here is not the place to discuss the abysmally low Newstart payment rates, and the fines regime of the Community Development Program. But it is important to note that when people flog a big-ticket item for less than they paid for it, or use their debit card to fill someone else’s fuel tank but accept a lower amount of cash as payment — both examples my research participants related to me — people with little to spare are further impoverished.

I have spent time with people who told of their serious problems with alcohol over the course of their lives. As I got to know them, they spoke more candidly about the long process of overcoming their addiction as well as the traumatic life events that precipitated their descent. In each case, these people had endured horrific deaths of those closest to them. The conjunction of support from other individuals, personal determination, access to rehabilitation services, and the other assistance that enabled them to break their drinking habits casts doubt on whether a blunt instrument like the card can stimulate any meaningful transformations.

What next? Legislation is currently before parliament to extend the Ceduna, East Kimberley and Goldfields trials to mid 2020, and the card is still being rolled out at the Queensland site. @IndigenousX founder Luke Pearson’s observation is apposite:

White Australia has long believed that the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians could never be perpetrated against them, but we are already seeing this happen with cashless welfare cards being rolled out to non-Indigenous people, work for the dole, and other punitive measures that were first trialled on Indigenous people. The denial of rights that Indigenous people never even got the chance to enjoy is now plaguing the rest of the country as well.

Meanwhile, a Yalata person told me, despairingly, “We’ve lost our vision. A card cannot give vision to the community.” I was reminded of novelist Alexis Wright’s observation: “It is almost a miracle wherever you find a really solid Aboriginal-defined vision forging its way through a maze that only seems to work to destroy possibility.”

While my research participants are convinced that “no one listens to us,” the poor are keen observers of those who make policy and pronouncements about their lives, just as Aboriginal people across Australia offer astute insights into the ways of whitefellas. They notice those advisers who seemed to snicker down the back of the footy club when hearing the testimonies and questions of people whose very presence at a public meeting attests to their sheer bloody tenacity. I talked to others about Malcolm Turnbull’s visit, when he described the cashless debit card as an exercise in “practical love.” A small crowd of gathered dissenters wasn’t feeling it. “He turned his back on us,” a highly respected local Indigenous woman told me bitterly. Another person summarised: “They think we’re rubbish.” •

I am the grateful recipient of a Macquarie University Research Seeding Grant, which supported the fieldwork undertaken for this research.

The post “We’ve lost our vision. A card cannot give vision to the community” appeared first on Inside Story.

Born on 7 May 1834 in the Gloucester area of New South Wales to a convict named James Bugg and an Indigenous Worimi woman named Charlotte, Mary Ann’s early life had little to do with bushranging. Indeed, despite her Aboriginal ancestry (which was frowned on at the time), Mary Ann was brought up a lot more respectably than many rural, white, working-class children in this era. For one thing, she could read and write because her father had paid for her to attend school in Sydney. And unlike with many liaisons between Aboriginal women and white men that were brief, casual or coerced, Mary Ann’s father petitioned the church for seven years to allow him to marry her Indigenous mother, and the pair were eventually wed in September 1848. That same year, at the age of fourteen, Mary Ann was also married, to an ex-convict named Edmund Baker, and the pair welcomed their first child in 1849.

So far it seems to be a conventional tale of marriage, motherhood and family, but this would not last for long. In 1861 Mary Ann became pregnant to a man named Frederick Wordsworth Ward. It appears that Mary Ann left Baker in 1849, and after a further two partners and six children began a relationship with Frederick Ward that would last for at least six years. And yet it was not the number of Mary Ann’s partners, nor the number of her children (who were born both in and out of wedlock), that made her noteworthy. In the nineteenth century, before the introduction of state welfare, it was not uncommon for a woman to change partners, especially if her and her children’s livelihoods were at stake. Rather, the issue came when Ward became one of the most troublesome and long-lasting bushrangers in New South Wales, Captain Thunderbolt.

Although Mary Ann accompanied Ward in his bushranging escapades from about 1863, it was not until 1865 that she leapt, almost literally, into the popular imagination. That year, Mary Ann and two of her children were found by the police, alone, in Thunderbolt’s camp. Instead of going quietly with the authorities, a heavily pregnant Mary Ann taunted the police for their failure to capture Ward. According to the Maitland Mercury, she then “sprung like a tigress upon one of the police, ribboning his uniform, and taunting him with cowardice for seeking her apprehension instead of Thunderbolt’s.”

Her response was so severe, “with her passion she brought on, or feigned to bring on labour.” Against their better judgement, the police were obliged to leave Mary Ann at a nearby property while they continued to hunt for the male bushrangers. Miraculously, upon the police’s departure her contractions appear to have ceased, and when Thunderbolt came by the station Mary Ann and the children escaped.

As well as berating and assaulting the police, Mary Ann accompanied Ward around the colony, acting as his scout, informer, lover and confidante. She helped to provide food and shelter, disseminated false information, nursed Ward back to health after he was shot, bore him three children and, many colonists alleged, took part in the robberies herself. In 1866 she was arrested for vagrancy; in court, Senior Sergeant Kerrigan declared that he had “no doubt” that Mary Ann had accompanied Thunderbolt and “assisted him to plunder.” He also disclosed that when living in the bush, Mary Ann dressed in men’s pants.

Now, for us, swapping your petticoats for pants when you are on the run may appear to be an understandably practical choice. But it conflicted with the respectable public persona of a refined lady that Mary Ann tried to cultivate. Many bushrangers relied on local supporters to help them survive and to strengthen their popular appeal, and Mary Ann and Thunderbolt drew on well-known tropes of gallant and chivalrous highway robbers. The idea was that while Ward may have been a working-class criminal and did not have noble blood, he did have nobility of spirit. And just as Robin Hood had Maid Marian to illustrate his tender, gentlemanly side, Thunderbolt had Mary Ann. Mary Ann declared herself to be “the Captain’s Lady” and Ward’s lawful wife.

Although her actions seem to belie this interpretation (and there is no evidence that she and Ward ever married), this itself is important. The tension suggests that Mary Ann decided when her public persona had to be kept up, when it could slide, and when to define herself by her actions or her words. And her awareness of popular opinion continued for the rest of her life.

The Thunderbolt legend holds that Mary Ann died a tragic death from exposure in 1867, mourned by her heroic lover. But the truth is much more interesting. It appears that she chose to leave Ward that year, and that another Aboriginal woman, Louisa Mason, was the one to die in the wilds of New South Wales. In 1867, after Mary Ann became pregnant with her last child to Ward, the couple parted ways for good. Thunderbolt famously died at Uralla in 1870, but Mary Ann far outlived her famous partner. After giving birth to at least five more children, becoming a nurse, purchasing land and marrying her longest-term partner, John Burrows, she died at the age of seventy in Mudgee on 22 April 1905.

Mary Ann’s death certificate states that she was from the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, and while she was alive, she had begun to circulate the myth that she was Māori. Here we can see Mary Ann shaping her public persona yet again. At a time when Aboriginal people were increasingly being controlled by the government and children beginning to be taken from their families (in what we now call the stolen generations), concealing her Aboriginal heritage saved her family from being so dramatically affected.

While Mary Ann Bugg lived as a bushranger for four tumultuous years, perhaps her greatest achievement was to live a prosperous, quiet life afterwards, and to cultivate a narrative that protected the ones that she loved most. Mary Ann Bugg was an Aboriginal bushranger but she was also an extraordinary woman. She was clearly far more than “the Captain’s Lady.” •

Further reading

Captain Thunderbolt and His Lady: The True Story of Bushrangers Frederick Ward and Mary Ann Bugg, by Carol Baxter, Allen & Unwin, 2011

“‘Mrs Thunderbolt’: Setting the Record Straight on the Life and Times of Mary Ann Bugg,” by David Roberts and Carol Baxter, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 2013

The post How “the Captain’s Lady” created her own legend appeared first on Inside Story.

A member of the Port Sorell group of Tasmanian Aborigines, she was born around 1835. Tasmania’s Black War had ended, and her father, Towterer, and mother, Wanganeep, had been among the many Aborigines moved to Flinders Island by the Europeans in the early 1830s. There, the Aboriginal death rate would prove to be catastrophic. When Towterer died in 1837, apparently of consumption, the commandant, George Augustus Robinson, noted that he left a wife and an infant child whom the authorities called Mary. Wanganeep married Palle, of the same Aboriginal group, but she herself died in 1841, when Mathinna was six.

Jane Franklin, wife of the governor of Van Diemen’s Land, had developed an interest in the Tasmanian Aborigines. Like almost all the British, she believed in the “great chain of being,” a ranking of races that predated evolutionary theory, with Europeans at the top and everyone else in descending order according to their degree of observable “civilisation.” Indigenous people were seen as scientific curios and Franklin wanted to learn as much as she could about them. It was this thinking that led Europeans to take children in “for their own good,” creating the first generation of stolen children. Franklin was one of the earliest Europeans to try her hand at “Europeanising” Indigenous children.

The Franklins visited Flinders Island in 1838, and later that year Jane asked Robinson to send her a black boy. Robinson sent Timemernidic, a boy of about nine. Franklin left it to her stepdaughter Eleanor to teach him, and in October Eleanor wrote that “he is anxious to be able to read and write well.” Timemernidic “waits at table and does other little things,” she went on. “But unfortunately he is very idle and obstinate, so that it is difficult to keep him to his duty, unless he is constantly watched.”

Franklin was discouraged. “You have heard of my unsuccessful experiment to civilise a native boy,” she wrote to her sister Mary. Timemernidic was given a job as a seaman, and Franklin decided to try again with a younger and, she hoped, more malleable child, this time a girl. By 1841 Robinson had sent Mary to her.

“I could not learn her native name when she was sent to me,” Franklin wrote, “so I called her Mathinna after the name of a necklace made of shells which the natives string together & put on their neck.”

Mathinna lived in the schoolroom with seventeen-year-old Eleanor, who in May 1841 wrote to a cousin: “my little pupil Methinna (a native girl) is waiting for her lesson, and every few minutes interrupting me to shew me her work.” Mathinna dictated to Eleanor a letter to her stepfather Palle, back on Flinders Island.

“I am good little girl,” she wrote, “I have pen & ink cause I am good little girl. I do love my father. I have got a doll & shift & petticoat. I read My Father. I thank thee for sleep. I have got red frock. Like my father come here to see my father. I have got sore feet & shoes & stockings & am very glad.”

“Said one day I do love my God,” added Eleanor. “I think she is affectate [affectionate] & intelligent.” From this description, Mathinna seems to have been lively and eager to please, and she had a kind and warm-hearted carer in Eleanor, who arranged a European playmate for the little girl. Before breakfast, Eleanor and her father would stroll in the garden while Mathinna, according to a bystander, “would be darting about, or climbing the trees with hand and toe, native fashion, peering down with wild bright eyes out of the lofty foliage.”

Franklin had Mathinna’s portrait painted by the artist Thomas Bock, noting that “she is dressed in a scarlet frock with a black leather girdle which sets off her naked black arms & legs to great advantage.” But Franklin became as disillusioned about Mathinna as she had been about Timemernidic, describing her as “very troublesome and disobedient” (she was eight). She “retains much of the unconquerable nature of the savage,” wrote Franklin, including “extreme uncertainty of will and temper, great want of perseverance and attention, little if any, self controle, and great acuteness of the senses and facility of imitation.” Why Franklin’s view of Mathinna was so different from Eleanor’s is not clear, but Eleanor certainly exhibited greater sympathy and understanding.

By July 1843 Franklin had had enough of Mathinna and sent her to the Orphan School in Hobart. Later that year the Franklins returned to England, and there is nothing in the records to suggest that the girl had any chance of accompanying them.

Mathinna was returned to the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island the following year. By now Palle had died, and she had no family to care for her. In a letter written when Mathinna was twelve, the superintendent’s wife said that she was treated vindictively by the white staff, and was wretched, dirty and miserable. Shortly afterwards, the remaining Aborigines on the island were moved to a former convict station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, and the four girls in the group, including Mathinna, were sent to the Orphan School.

This seems to have been a happy experience for Mathinna. On one occasion, the governor’s wife, Lady Denison, visited the school, and the girls showed her a native dance and sang an Aboriginal song and an English hymn. The matron professed to be treating them with indulgence, allowing them to follow their own devices more than other children because they could only be brought into civilised habits by gradual degrees.

Mathinna might well have led a contented existence if she had been able to stay at the school. But in 1851, when she was fifteen, the authorities decided she was too old to remain there and should be removed to the Oyster Cove settlement or, “should anyone be willing to receive her,” taken into domestic service. No one was, apparently, so she went to Oyster Cove.
This is the last definite mention of Mathinna in surviving documents. As far as we know, Franklin did not enquire after Mathinna, and the fact that her name doesn’t appear in any later record of Tasmanian Aborigines may indicate that the authorities were embarrassed by the fate of her protégée.

We do know that Mathinna died young, and it is likely that either of two recorded deaths at Oyster Cove refers to her. In their despair many Aborigines took to drink, and in 1852, Aminia (or Amenia, or Armenia), “a Native Aboriginal woman,” became drunk at the North West Bay inn and while walking home fell on the road with her face in a puddle. She was found dead the next morning. Was this young woman Mathinna, who would have been sixteen or seventeen at the time? Aminia is not mentioned anywhere else, either at the Orphan School or on Flinders Island.

But it was believed at the time that Mathinna committed suicide by drowning herself in the river, as the Mercury reported in August 1879: “Mathinna, the unfortunate favourite of Lady Franklin, who, after her patroness left the colony, passed through so many sad trials, which terminated in her committing suicide, by throwing herself into the River Derwent, where she was drowned.”

It would not be surprising: after being taken from her own people at seven, she was expected to fit into an alien, if reasonably kindly, environment at Government House. From the age of nine she had no family and no protector, and could fit into no community. She was made miserable back in the Aboriginal settlement, spent three or so years in the relatively mild though still alien Orphan School, then at only fifteen was returned to the badly run Aboriginal settlement, where there was no happy outcome for anyone. •

Further reading

The Ambitions of Jane Franklin, by Alison Alexander, Allen & Unwin, 2014

The post A brief life seen through “wild bright eyes” appeared first on Inside Story.

Mack was born Katipelvild at Marrunggung (Brinkley Homestead), where the Murray flows into Lake Alexandrina in Yaraldi-speaking country, in 1858. A member of the Piltindjeri clan, she acknowledged Yakapeni (a variation of Karpeny) as her father, and she and three younger sisters lived in his camp after the onset of puberty. Through Yakapeni she learnt a range of songs and ceremonies. Marrunggung was downstream from Wellington, where her biological father, a Scottish-born policeman, George Mason, was the first sub-protector of Aborigines. Louisa Karpeny and George Mason had two children, George and Margaret, known as “Pinkie” for her fair skin.

Pinkie briefly attended school at Point McLeay Mission, whose founder, George Taplin, challenged many Ngarrindjeri cultural practices, as did his son when he succeeded him. (The mission’s questionable practices during this period were eventually the subject of a government inquiry.) She was known as Pinkie Karpeny until her marriage to her first husband, Telwara (Djelwara) John Mack (c. 1840–1918), a Yakamuldah man whose country was upriver, east of Mildura, near Kalkine (Culcairn Station).

The couple lived near Mildura and Wentworth and had at least four sons — Albert (born 1886); David (1887–1911), who died from consumption as a young man; Miller (1891–1919), who saw service on the Western Front in 1916–17 but died of tuberculosis on his return; and Arthur (1895–96), who died from meningitis as a baby — and at least two daughters — Rose and Edith, born possibly between 1888 and 1890.

Pinkie kept the name Mack for the remainder of her life as a signifier of the upriver knowledge of songs, ceremonies and designs she had acquired. A second marriage, to Nginmelindjeri Philip Sumner (1864–1921), resulted in at least two sons — Benjamin Philip (1903–06), who died of whooping cough, and Hurtle (born 1908) — and at least four daughters — Ellen (born 1905), Laura Isabella (born 1906), Wilhelmina (born 1911) and Nita Louisa (born 1913). She later lived with a younger man, Alfred Cameron junior (born 1890).

By the early 1920s, then in her early sixties, Pinkie was a practising midwife, and would eventually attend the births of seventy-two babies. Records show that most women in her care quickly recuperated, with Mack and attendants wrapping the newborn in fur and assisting in the mother’s recovery.

Like her mother, Mack was a key informant for the South Australian Museum. In 1933–34, camped at Wellington, she was among those who began mapping Yaraldi clan and place names with Norman Tindale, an ethnologist with the museum. Mack delineated Yaraldi country as the eastern side of the Lower Murray — from Murray Bridge, upstream of Tagalang (Tailem Bend), downriver through Wellington to Marrunggung and onto Lake Alexandrina, crossing into Lake Albert — as well as all the clan areas along the Coorong, on the Fleurieu Peninsula and at Encounter Bay. In 1935 and 1938, Mack and a cousin, Albert Karloan, a member of the Manangki clan, related Yaraldi fishing stories and clan associations and place names.

According to Tindale, Pinkie Mack knew “more songs than any other Jaralde [Yaraldi].” Despite elaborations and melodic improvisations by other singers since then, her essential song texts, tempos and rhythms have endured, suggesting links to the deep as well as the historical past. “Pata Winema,” a song about gathering cockles at Goolwa, was sung by women at men’s initiation ceremonies — including the ceremony for Karloan, who recorded the song.

In 1943, Mack described five categories of song to the anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, noting the name of each composer. Pekeri songs, for instance, were identified by their clan tunes and comprised an even beat by women on folded skin drums or beating sticks. Her pekeri songs included the pelican (rorika) song to help cure sickness, as well as “Nganawi Ruwi,” a lament to take the Ngarrindjeri back to their country. Mack also recorded many tunggari songs, which convey different ideas, sometimes about specific historical events and phenomena.

Among the patangi songs, which were for dancing, was one composed by Pinkie’s husband John Mack that referred to upriver people coming down the Murray to meet the Ngarrindjeri. Another patangi song, composed by Minduk Jack of the Yakamuldak (near Wentworth), was about watching Europeans arrive by steamer with a buggy in order to establish Mildura. Both songs were performed when people from different areas gathered for a large ceremony.

Mortuary rites and showing respect for the dead were fundamental aspects of Ngarrindjeri culture. In the early 1940s Mack and Karloan condemned the archaeological excavation of burial mounds and camp sites on Kangaroo Island. It was believed that Ku-Ka-Kungarr, as it was known, was a step on the way to the land of the dead. Many burial sites were remembered there, including those of mass interment during the smallpox epidemic.

Mack also had experience in preparing mortuary rituals with red ochre, smoking platforms and specially prepared large oval mats. She was a talented weaver, and a large mortuary mat she wove for the Berndts in 1943 is now held at the South Australian Museum. Right up until the 1940s, she would row across the water to Tagalang (Tailem Bend) to sell her weaving to passengers on the steamers. Her weaving continued a family tradition of passing on to younger generations the loops and patterns evident in her mother’s work. Louisa Karpeny’s iconic bags, baskets and large circular mats, seen in a 1915 photograph, were reminiscent of the circular mats described by Charles Sturt in 1833 and by artist George Angus in 1844. Mack passed on these weaving skills to her daughter Ellen Brown (nee Sumner, 1905–79), to Ellen’s daughter, Daisy Rankine (born 1936), and then to Daisy’s daughter Ellen Trevorrow (born 1955), continuing a distinguished line of weavers.

Mack’s cultural knowledge was also embedded in her hunting and skinning skills, as well as dancing for pleasure and in women’s initiation ceremonies. Like other Ngarrindjeri men and women, she knew how to prepare a pelican skin by salting, nailing and stretching it to dry. But she did not claim to represent all Ngarrindjeri women’s cultural knowledge, nor women’s rituals specific to other clans. The Berndts described Mack as a “gregarious… most likeable, affectionate and energetic person” and “a memorable collaborator.”

For Pinkie Mack, her family recalls, the 1951 performance must have been a moment of mixed emotions, of sorrow and sadness, mourning the loss of land and ceremony as well as affirming her cultural heritage. Sturt’s arrival in 1831 had led to much dispossession. As Pinkie Mack sang in Yaraldi, chanted, beat the rhythm and danced, she was giving public expression to her authority as a song woman and cultural custodian. It was her last corroboree: a profound statement about the continuation of her clan’s knowledge and the ever-present state of deep and recent history; and a provocative statement that cultural knowledge, song and dance practice still ran through the land, directly in the face of Sturt’s landing at Goolwa. •

Further reading

A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, by Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with John E. Stanton, Melbourne University Press, 1993

Ngarrindjeri Nation: Genealogies of Ngarrindjeri Families, by Doreen Kartinyeri, Wakefield Press, 2006

Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be, by Diane Bell, Spinifex, 2014

The post A Piltindjeri woman who lived her culture appeared first on Inside Story.

With the further integration of previously separate functions into the new Department of Home Affairs in late 2017, it is not surprising that concern with “national security” has come to dominate how Australians think of their “border.” The way we deal with refugees and asylum seekers is now seen as predominantly an issue of “border protection,” though it is increasingly unclear exactly what threat they pose.

Reading the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani’s extraordinary book, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, in the context of this expanded border highlights a series of ironies. Boochani’s book, published by Picador in 2018, was written on a succession of mobile phones during his detention, now in its sixth year, on Manus Island. In relation to the Australian border, this author is definitively “offshore.” After trying to access Australian waters by boat from Indonesia, and despite having been granted refugee status, his life has been tightly constrained by Australia’s “border security.” Yet “onshore” — within Australia — his writing and other creative endeavours are having profound repercussions. Among other awards, he has recently won the prestigious Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Prize for Non-Fiction, in the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

If the border is a “continuum” then new opportunities arise for the excluded to cross it, as well as for the excluders to “manage” it. Boochani has become an impressive — though virtual — presence at literary events, academic seminars and political gatherings around the world. He figures as a creative subject and collaborator in art, theatre and photography. He has made a widely distributed film in collaboration with a Dutch-Iranian director. He also continues to feature — not just as a “source” but also as a journalist in his own right — in accounts of the continuing saga of offshore detention published in Australia.

No Friend but the Mountains is a many-faceted work synthesising a range of genres. A sustained thread of memoir — creatively fictionalised, where appropriate, through archetypes representing fellow detainees — it also incorporates poetry and elements of Kurdish mythology. What has received less consideration than its literary achievements, so far, is the book’s contribution to philosophical reflection about Australia’s policies and practices at and around the border. Some of those issues are explored by Anne McNevin in her Inside Story essay “What We Owe to the Refugees on Manus,” published in November last year. My own reflections on the philosophical aspects of Boochani’s writing have been stimulated by some significant insights in that essay.

The concept of “Manus Prison,” as developed by Boochani, extends beyond a place of incarceration outside the physical border. It points to a network of practices of oppression and containment — and a supporting framework of ideas — whose effects can be located both offshore and onshore. Thinking through that analysis yields a disturbing challenge to how Australians have come to collectively imagine recent mass movements of people. McNevin’s essay sketched a reversal of perspective — from treating refugees as objects of our condescending pity to recognising ourselves as diminished by our own policies. That reversal was foreshadowed in an imaginative fable by Boochani’s translator, Omid Tofighian, narrated in a supplementary — but integral — set of reflections incorporated in No Friend but the Mountains. In this story about “two islands,” familiar “offshore” and “onshore” perspectives change places:

The two islands are polar opposites. One island kills vision, creativity and knowledge — it imprisons thought. The other island fosters vision, creativity and knowledge — it is a land where the mind is free.

The first island is the settler-colonial state called Australia, and the prisoners are the settlers.

The second island contains Manus Prison, and knowledge resides there with the incarcerated refugees.

The impact of Boochani’s book goes beyond a shocked recognition of the manifest cruelty of Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies. As well as being a masterly and harrowing piece of “prison literature,” this is also an exposure of how Australia’s “offshore” cruelty reflects a debilitating curtailing of imagination and empathy — a maiming of collective consciousness — “onshore.” The message to be learned is this: “Manus Prison” is us.

We certainly need to recognise the mystification that has facilitated refugee policies while being itself intensified by them. But the concept of “Manus Prison” demands that we also recognise other disturbing transitions. Should we have expected the cruelty in the treatment of refugees offshore to remain comfortably beyond the old physical borders?

Thinking of “border security” as a continuum has facilitated an acceptance of new policies that impose hardship — to the point of destitution — on the strangely labelled “legacy caseload” of asylum seekers living within Australia. These are the people who arrived by boat prior to the reopening of detention centres on Manus and Nauru. “Strong borders” rhetoric and practices have accentuated a division between them and those refugees who managed to arrive through formal channels. Many refugee families are divided along the lines of that division, though their differential treatment has no justification in international law.

The emphasis on “border security” is now entrenched in Australian politics and policy, and in the popular imagination. “Strong borders” seem to have merged with the “war on terror.” The creation of a group of people — “those who would do us harm” — no longer points beyond the border; it also operates here, among us, behind the border. Having spread to the treatment of refugees onshore, the “othering” rhetoric is now playing out in the stripping of citizenship from Australians, many of whom have spent their entire lives here, and in unexplained delays in processing the citizenship applications of others.

The rhetoric of “strong borders” and “border protection” is not confined to Australia, of course, although our current policies have played their part in a global shift in attitudes to movements of people. Yet there are some peculiarly Australian features of the fears that sustain — and are in turn sustained by — the rhetoric. Tolstoy’s dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way has application also to troubled polities: to each, its own amorphous unease about borders.

In Australia, mantras of deterrence and border security have become so familiar that the harsh realities of indefinite offshore incarceration are relegated to the margins. We should be shocked by those realities. Instead, at best, they are seen as a regrettable but necessary evil — justified as means to an elusive national good. (Was the border ever really under threat from those who came without prior authorisation to seek protection?) At worst, they are subsumed into strange parodies of justice or even compassion. We are encouraged to think that it is for their own good, as well as our own, that those who seek to arrive “unauthorised” must be kept at bay. (To save others from drowning at sea, did we really have to mistreat those who survived the perilous journeys?)

When we get to hear them, the voices of refugees themselves can cut through the static, challenging us to think again. Boochani’s voice has also challenged us to think about other policies that reflect a similar pattern of thought. His philosophical reflections around the theme of “Manus Prison” include some trenchant comments on the continuities between Australia’s refugee policies and its treatment of its own Indigenous peoples. He argues that the conditions that gave rise to offshore detention should be understood, and more deeply studied, in relation to the history of post-settlement Australia. In further exploring that idea, McNevin’s essay highlights the tendency to circumscribe the dispossession and oppression of Australia’s Indigenous people as a “closed chapter” rather than to acknowledge how it reaches into the present. The horrors of dispossession are seen as aberrations in an ongoing positive narrative of progress.

In that context, there are significant parallels between the impact of No Friend but the Mountains and that of the beautifully crafted “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” in which representatives of Australia’s Indigenous peoples responded to a request to consider how the Australian Constitution might be amended to allow more meaningful “recognition” and “inclusion.” In repudiating what seemed inadequate tinkering with the wording of the Constitution, the framers of the Uluru statement offered an alternative approach that had emerged from extensive consultation with Indigenous groups across the nation. Rather than seeking greater inclusion within a Constitution shaped by the dominant majority, the historically dispossessed Indigenous minority made an alternative offer to the national imagination: to include non-Indigenous Australians in a narrative of continuous human presence on the Australian continent.

The offer came with a proviso: non-Indigenous Australia must first acknowledge the truth of past oppressive exclusions, and the ongoing effects of those exclusions. If there is to be non-tokenistic recognition, there must first be an exhaustive process of truth-telling and acknowledgement. It was a proposal of extraordinary generosity and powerful political potential; had it not been thoughtlessly dismissed by members of the government, it might have brought the nation together in meaningful reconciliation, grounded in genuine recognition. It might yet do so.

There was a powerful rhetoric at play in the reversal of perspective — of “us” and “them” — at the core of the Uluru statement. Its potential to resonate in the collective Australian consciousness can be compared with the impact of the reversal of border-thinking articulated in No Friend but the Mountains. But perhaps there is a deeper connection here than parallel rhetorical strategies. What if the ongoing tragedies of Australia’s treatment of refugees and of its Indigenous peoples are seen as, conceptually, two sides of the one coin — facets of a flawed imagining of national identity, both grounded in a failure to engage in truth-telling?

While attitudes towards refugees in Australia were hardening, historians were increasingly revealing the previously denied realities of the resistance to dispossession offered by Indigenous peoples — and of the accompanying massacres perpetrated by settlers. At the same time, evidence of the deep time of Indigenous presence on the continent — and the cultural depth of that presence — has become undeniable. What European settlement tried to displace was not an uncivilised form of humanity, doomed to extinction and incapable either of managing the land or of resisting its occupation. It was a highly developed system of knowledge and practices that had responded to environmental change over a period of 60,000 or more years. This is a great deal for the consciousness of non-Indigenous Australia to absorb.

Perhaps it is time for Australians to reflect on the relationship between those two sets of issues. On the one hand is a “whispering in the hearts” of non-Indigenous Australians, unsettled by a deep past into which Europeans claimed “uninvited” entry. On the other hand is the increasingly troubled sense of something deeply amiss in the treatment of the more recently “uninvited,” whose arrival has been so readily construed as threatening “our” borders. Exploring the interconnections of those two sources of collective unease may be a long and contentious process. That No Friend but the Mountains has offered a way into beginning that process is something that should be welcomed — as Anne McNevin expressed it so well — as “something akin to a civic gift.” •

The post Rethinking Australia’s borders appeared first on Inside Story.

But the best way of bringing about that reform is still being debated.

Unfortunately the parliamentary committee that spent much of last year considering the options didn’t advance the debate greatly when it reported in November. Like others before it, the committee made the mistake of treating the Uluru Statement’s elegantly simple proposal as somehow underdeveloped. Yet the regional dialogues and the Uluru convention, which preceded the statement, had demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the nature of constitutions and constitutional amendment, the political realities of referendums, and how best to design the Voice.

The parliamentary committee did provide some important clarity, however. It confirmed that the Voice is the only widely supported — and therefore viable — constitutional reform option. It also noted the lack of support for the idea that the Voice was a “third chamber of parliament,” which should have put to rest last year’s verballing of the concept by Barnaby Joyce, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison.

But the committee equivocated about how to make the Voice happen. Indeed, it was silent on whether parliament should legislate for the Voice or seek to have it constitutionally enshrined. Given that the latter option was endorsed by almost all of the submissions made to the committee, this failure of nerve is disappointing.

Constitutional change was perhaps the most fundamental dimension of the Uluru Statement’s call for a Voice. Only by enshrining the Voice can Australia respect the remarkable consensus of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples expressed at Uluru. Only through the process of a referendum will the Voice achieve the popular legitimacy and authority necessary for its ultimate success as a political institution.

The committee’s failure to recommend a constitutional amendment at least partly reflects its view that a referendum is unlikely to succeed without a fully detailed plan for the Voice and without the support of the major parties. Both of these reservations misunderstand the nature of constitutional reform.

Since the committee reported, leading constitutional experts have challenged the idea that bipartisanship is necessary for a successful referendum. Trust in politicians and loyalty to major parties, especially at the federal level, is in serious decline. As the marriage equality campaign showed, civil society and state governments can lead successful law reform campaigns even when federal parliament can’t agree. Importantly, too, the Voice proposal draws its authority not from federal parliament but from the deliberative process from which it emerged.

The idea that the Voice must be fully designed before a vote also fundamentally misunderstands what constitutional reform is designed to do. A constitution is not just another piece of legislation; it shapes a society by establishing the institutions of state, placing obligations on them and limiting their power in ways that reflect the fundamental social values of the community. As the distinguished Israeli Supreme Court jurist and academic Aharon Barak has explained, this makes a constitutional text quite different from an ordinary statute: it is expressed at a high level of abstraction and often in open-ended terms.

Barak gives three reasons why this is so, and why it is an important character of constitutions. First, constitutional words must be capable of garnering national agreement, of bringing together people from across an often broad political, ideological and social spectrum. Second, constitutional language must capture fundamental values, covenants and social viewpoints that are rarely clear or unequivocal. Finally, constitutional language is intended to regulate a society across generations. It must be framed with the long view in mind, assuming that circumstances and social views will change, sometimes in unexpected ways.

In this light, the option rejected by the committee — an immediate referendum to enshrine the Voice, drawing on the authority of the Uluru Statement and the process that led up to it — emerges as the most compelling. A transparent and rigorous design process would follow this referendum.

This option was set out in detail in a submission to the committee by the three Indigenous leaders of the Referendum Council — Pat Anderson (co-chair), Megan Davis and Noel Pearson — and the technical legal advisers who attended each of the regional dialogues and the convention — Sean Brennan, Dylan Lino, Gemma McKinnon and myself. Unlike the authors of other submissions, our aim was not to offer our own opinions on the reform proposals and process; instead, we drew on the records of the regional dialogues, the documents endorsed by the Uluru convention and the full Uluru Statement. (The full statement is on pages 16–32 of the Referendum Council’s final report, which sits behind the single-page statement, as endorsed at the constitutional convention.) Drawing its authority directly from Uluru, the proposed process had four key dimensions.

1. THE ULURU STATEMENT PROVIDES AUTHORITY AND DETAIL FOR A REFERENDUM

The submission argued that the process leading up to the Uluru Statement provides sufficient authority for a referendum on constitutional reform to create a First Nations Voice. The dialogues, convention and statement provide not just authority to act but also a clear approach to framing the amendment.

Drawing on these sources, the submission proposed the following wording for the amendment:

Section 129: The First Nations Voice

(1) There shall be a First Nations Voice.

(2) The First Nations Voice shall present its views to Parliament and the Executive on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

(3) The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures of the First Nations Voice.

This provision sets out the primary function of the Voice using language from the Uluru Statement. Consistent with the understanding drawn from the dialogues, it leaves the Voice’s composition, functions, powers and procedures to the normal legislative process. This will ensure, as participants in the dialogues understood, that the Voice evolves over time to become as effective a vehicle as possible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to speak to parliament and for other functions that might be determined to be appropriate.

2. THE DETAILED DESIGN SHOULD BE DONE AFTER A REFERENDUM

The plan for the Voice to be designed after the referendum reflects what constitutional scholar Rosalind Dixon refers to as “constitutional deferral.” According to this established practice, the broad parameters of the reform will be set out in constitutional text, and the detail provided through statutory enactment. A ready example is the High Court, which was created in the Constitution but designed in detail through legislation two years later.

Similar practice has been followed when other countries have changed their constitution to recognise Indigenous peoples. When Canada enacted constitutional protection for Aboriginal and treaty rights in section 35 of its Constitution Act 1982, it also mandated that a further process — a constitutional conference between first ministers and Aboriginal peoples — would take place within a year to help define the nature and extent of those rights. That conference resulted in greater definition of what constitutional recognition entailed and led to additional constitutional conferences on Aboriginal and treaty rights.

We have seen something similar in the negotiations over a treaty (or treaties) by the Andrews government in Victoria. While the parties are yet to settle on the precise form that it (or they) will take, all parties — government and Aboriginal — have committed to the broad goal and the statutory enshrinement of a detailed process for negotiating its detail.

It’s important to stress that the constitutional referendum pertains only to the constitutional words (such as those in proposed section 129) and not to the detailed design of the Voice. The public debate in the lead-up to a referendum should focus on what is being constitutionally entrenched: the broad parameters of the body and the empowering of parliament to determine its composition, functions, powers and procedures. The people of Australia are not being asked to vote for a particular design of the Voice — Model A, say. They are being asked to vote on an enabling provision that will allow parliament to select a model, whether it’s Model A, B or C, in the future.

Indeed, it would be misleading to ask Australians to vote Yes for a particular model when that model might not be enacted by parliament for any number of reasons — and even if it is enacted, it might be amended or entirely repealed and replaced. The regional dialogues understood that only the existence, core nature and primary function of the Voice should be constitutionally enshrined, and that it must, in practice, be capable of evolving. If a particular model is presented for constitutional reform, politicians may feel reluctant to amend that model, backed as it is by a national public vote.

3. A TRANSPARENT, INDIGENOUS-LED VOICE DESIGN PROCESS SHOULD BE ESTABLISHED

Having said that, the submission was aware of the public’s need for more information about what they are being asked to vote for. Rather than designing first, the submission proposed that parliament would endorse a bill spelling out the process by which the Voice would be developed and release it to the public alongside the referendum question. This should provide sufficient certainty and confidence ahead of a referendum to First Nations, parliament, the government, the states and the Australian people.

The submission sets out the process through which the bill would be developed. Getting this process right will prove just as important for the legitimacy of the Voice as the form the Voice ultimately takes. The process cannot be rushed or imposed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Above all, it must be underpinned by respect for their right of self-determination.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recognises that this right is engaged at moments when new political institutions are being created. It stresses the need to make sure that their design reflects the collective will of the peoples concerned. To respect this right, the First Nations Voice must be designed by an Indigenous-led process that involves extensive participation and deliberation by representatives of First Nations from around the country. It must go beyond consultation and move into genuine participation and deliberation.

This would be similar to the process that produced the Uluru Statement and the demand for a First Nations Voice — “the most proportionately significant consultation process that has ever been undertaken with First Peoples,” according to the Referendum Council. Drawing on that model would also provide a level of certainty to those who have witnessed the success of the Uluru process.

The submission also recognised that non-Indigenous Australians should have input into the process because its creation will change the governing arrangements of Australia as a whole. Revealing how this process would work would provide a platform for a public education campaign before the referendum.

4. DESIGN MUST BE CONSISTENT WITH ULURU’S DESIGN PRINCIPLES

As well as setting out the process, the submission suggested that the draft bill should include a set of design principles distilled from the regional dialogues and the Uluru convention. Including these principles would provide further transparency to the referendum campaign, while not pre-designing the Voice.

Under the design principles, the Voice must:

• give effect to the right of self-determination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• have cultural legitimacy
• be independent of government
• have a structure that appropriately reflects local diversity
• be accountable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• be proactive
• be capable of effectively achieving its functions
• be subject to periodic review to ensure it remains responsive to the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Australia stands at the precipice of historical constitutional reform. Important progress towards that goal was achieved in 2018, particularly with the Labor Party’s firm commitment to act and, to some extent, through the work of the parliamentary committee.

But the path ahead remains cluttered with misunderstandings about the nature of constitutional reform, outdated beliefs about how that might best be achieved, and a failure to understand the sophistication of the authority that was provided at Uluru. The proposed plan provides a path through those obstacles drawing on the success of the process that got us to this point. •

The post Looking forward to constitutional reform by looking back at Uluru appeared first on Inside Story.

What, if anything, might break this stalemate? One possibility is that the critics might change their minds, or give up. Another is that the AWM might change its mind. A third is that an outside party will intervene, which in practice means a national government, which in turn means a Labor government — not because Labor is sure to do something but because the Coalition certainly won’t.

Are the critics wrong? Can the AWM be made to change its mind? If not, will Labor do the needful? Yes and no; no; and perhaps.

Should the critics change their minds?

The critics have surely been correct to insist that the only word in the English language to evoke the frontier reality is “war.” It is true, as the AWM has often insisted, that armed conflict between black and white didn’t observe the usual European conventions of declaring war, putting combatants in uniform, respecting rules of engagement, and so on. It is true that combat was mixed up with other kinds of relationship, including some that would be regarded as fraternisation, or worse, in European-style warfare. And it is true that most frontier conflict occurred before “Australia” existed as a political entity.

But the bigger truth is that deadly fighting between a people trying to keep what they had and a people who wanted to take it from them was a prominent and crucial strand in relationships “between two races in a single field of life” for well over a century, and that this warfare was profoundly formative, particularly for Aboriginal people but also for the rest of us, for relations between black and white, and for “Australia” in any sense of the term.

Those realities are so plain and so well documented that the implications for the AWM are often taken to be plain and incontrovertible too. It was a war; it’s a war memorial; so, it should be in. “Our” fallen are remembered; “theirs” should be too.

But that raises at least two questions. Why does it matter so much? And why can’t the frontier wars and their dead be commemorated elsewhere, as AWM spokesmen have often suggested?

The case for including the frontier wars in the AWM does need to be revised and beefed up, in several respects:

• The real problem is not in the AWM’s grasp of history, as is implied by much of the criticism. It’s in the history to which the institution belongs. The fact, scale and impact of violence by Europeans on Aboriginal people was routinely covered up, euphemised and winked at throughout the nineteenth century and then denied for much of the twentieth. It was covered up and forgotten so thoroughly that startling facts about the enormous cost of the conflict could still be unearthed as recently as 2014. This is the history to which the AWM and its refusal belong. Given that the matter to be avoided, concealed or denied was, precisely, war, the AWM can be regarded as concealment’s epicentre. Don’t mention the war — particularly in the war memorial.

• The AWM’s director likes to say that it represents “the soul of the nation.” But the AWM tells only the story of the shining us; it should also tell the story of the other us — not to extinguish or demean the former, but to get closer to representing the real us. The AWM says that its mission is to “assist Australians to remember, interpret and understand the Australian experience of war and its enduring impact on Australian society,” but it has been getting away with a confidence trick, asserting that of course that means real wars. Much of the criticism of the AWM (including my own) has fallen in with that logic, setting out to prove that the frontier wars do indeed meet the AWM’s requirements. The boot should be on the other foot: the frontier wars are the only genuinely Australian wars, fought in a distinctively Australian way. They were more formative of “Australia” than any of the major overseas wars or battles in which Australians have fought, Gallipoli not excepted. It is the frontier wars, not the European-style conflicts that followed, that should have prompted and defined an Australian War Memorial, and we can be sure that had there been more in the conduct of those wars to be proud of, a memorial would have been built long ago. That the wars were suppressed rather than commemorated belongs to that part of our history often referred to as the great Australian silence, and so does the AWM.

• Since the job wasn’t done when it should have been, we are in the position of having to put things right. That cannot be done by commemorating the frontier wars somewhere else, as the AWM likes to recommend. Shunted off to the Museum of Australia or to a dedicated memorial, the frontier wars would be seen as the not-in-the-War-Memorial wars, and therefore not real wars at all. They would also be seen as something to do with the Aborigines rather than “us.” What was done would be diminished and deflected, yet again. We would have whitewash history in one place, black armband in the other.

• An important and difficult question remains. Since the AWM is a museum as well as a shrine, and since some of those who died were ours (I write as a fourth generation Anglo-Saxon Australian), we are entitled to bring the frontier wars into the AWM, and must. But the vastly greater numbers of Aboriginal dead? Where and how they are commemorated is a matter for their descendants to decide. We should make the offer, but the response is theirs.

Might a statement of the case beefed up in these and perhaps other ways, and addressing the AWM’s arguments more directly, shift opinion within the AWM?

Can the AWM be persuaded to change its mind?

The AWM is an organisation of many parts: memorial, museum, research institute, publisher, impresario and tourism provider. The one thing it does very well is the one that provided its raison d’être: the commemoration of Australia’s “fallen.” Most Australians, and certainly those of my generation, would find it difficult to visit the AWM without being moved, perhaps particularly by the “wall of remembrance” and its 100,000-plus names, most of them of young men whose lives had scarcely begun.

The AWM’s other activities, accreted in the eighty-odd years since it was commissioned, are more controversial. Its displays have given some visitors (including me) the impression that in war it takes only one to tango — a very present Us versus an almost invisible Them. We are the Winners, and In the Right. The horrors of war, and the horrors visited on civilians (women particularly), survivors and survivors’ families, are subordinated to Boy’s Own Annual displays (the second world war Lancaster bomber chief among them). Most of a reportedly large collection of materials on anti-war and peace movements, by contrast, is in storage.

The AWM’s full-throated promotion of the Anzac myth jars with the actual Anzacs’ pride in a laconic, understated patriotism; it makes a great deal more fuss about their sacrifice than they did. The AWM has come increasingly close to being a theme park, offering a really popular “visitor experience” (seventeenth most-popular tourist landmark in the world, it claims, one ahead of the Pyramids). Its chase after numbers through the gate and dollars in the till ended up with this “sacred place,” this “soul of the nation” taking donations from arms manufacturers (and perhaps fudging the fact in a report to parliament). The AWM is yet another Australian institution that has lost its way in the rank undergrowth of the long boom.

The AWM’s long-serving director, Brendan Nelson, is apt to claim credit for much of this. As one recent critic put it, Nelson has a “genius for turning every story about the memorial and the World War I celebrations into a story about himself.” He has appointed himself the nation’s commemorator-in-chief, professing emotions that are either maudlin or synthetic and certainly self-serving. He gratuitously and improperly inserted himself and the AWM into the current controversy over allegations against Ben Roberts-Smith, declaring from his perch on the high moral ground that they constitute “one of the lowest blows I have ever seen” and represent yet another attempt to “tear down our heroes.”

Nelson has played shamelessly on legitimate feelings to support his empire-building, quoting an (unnamed) veteran to the effect that “we’ve already paid in blood, and whatever the government spends on the Australian War Memorial… will never be enough.” He has implied that the psychological wellbeing of veterans is a justification for spending half a billion dollars in grossly disproportionate recognition of post-1950 conflicts. Faced with Indigenous and other critics of gargoyles in the AWM’s courtyard that depict an Aboriginal man and woman among twenty-six varieties of native fauna, the AWM included them in its gargoyle replication and replacement project. “We are not going to take twenty-six down,” the director has said, “and put twenty-four back.”

Nelson has followed his immediate predecessor in deploying a string of rationalisations for shutting the door on the frontier conflicts and the many tens of thousands of people killed in them. He has claimed “much” unspecified “consultation” with historians as providing support for the AWM’s position when almost certainly the weight of opinion within the profession, including among military historians, has for some time been to the contrary. He asserts that the founding idea for the AWM and its Act both make recognition impossible, while boasting of the memorial’s self-initiated evolution. He has said that the frontier wars just can’t be accommodated because there isn’t room, while bidding for (and getting) half a billion dollars’ worth of new space. He has insisted that frontier conflict can’t be admitted because it didn’t amount to warfare, and in any event took place before “Australia” existed, but finds no difficulty in including other war-like and peace-keeping operations. Indeed, he has recently gone one further by suggesting the inclusion of border protection personnel as well. “It’s just extraordinary what these men and women do,” he is reported as saying. “We’ve had sailors who jumped into the sea to save drowning people.”

In all of this Dr Nelson has claimed the backing, even the direction, of his council, and there is no reason to doubt him. Nine of the council’s thirteen members are affiliated with the Australian Defence Forces, three as serving officers, five retired, and one Reservist. They include one air marshal, one rear admiral, one vice admiral, one lieutenant general, one major general, and one former commander of the SAS. Of the four non-military members, two are from “the private sector,” one is a director of a “family company” and one is a journalist (and author of bestselling books on the Great War and Gallipoli). The chairman is media mogul and Anzac buff Kerry Stokes. The council’s members hold between them three ACs, five AOs and one AM, as well as other medals and awards beyond counting. The average age is sixty-one years and would be sixty-three were it not for a single youth (in his thirties), a former corporal and VC winner. He and three of the female members are by some margin the most junior members of the council.

So far as can be told from their official biographies, none of the council’s members is drawn from or has any relationship with unions or other employees’ organisations, and none is from the “community sector” (although many are office-holders in philanthropic organisations) or from peace, nuclear disarmament or similar movements. There are no young people; none is black, brown, yellow or brindle or, with one exception, from a non-Anglo-Celtic background. None is Indigenous. Again, so far as can be seen in the official biographies, none is associated with or representative of former allies, much less former foes. The council is top-heavy, military-dominated, male-dominated, Anglo-dominated and deeply integrated into the Establishment. It is representative of and sees itself as defending the interests of those who are commemorated. It is entirely unrepresentative of the nominal commemorators, the Australian community. It offers a case study in the workings and consequences of what some economists would call “provider capture.”

The real charge against Nelson, his predecessor and the various members of council who have tagged along behind them is not that they are wrong about frontier conflict or that their arguments are contentless. As I suggested earlier, they are not contentless. What is objectionable or worse is that the AWM’s arguments are made in bad faith, and that the leadership of a major national institution has hidden behind rationalisations and half-truths while showing no willingness to engage in a serious conversation about a serious question, to learn, and to hold open the possibility of coming to a different view.

A third-party intervention?

If a beefed-up, refocused case wouldn’t persuade the AWM to change itself, would it persuade a Labor government to tackle the problem? In and of itself, no. It’s not that Labor lacks the necessary sympathies. As is suggested by its recently promulgated Reconciliation Action Plan — with its full-page pics of Whitlam and Lingiari, Rudd and a member of the Stolen Generations, and Keating at Redfern — Labor’s heart is in the right place, or at the very least it likes to think so. But on the question of the AWM in general and the frontier wars in particular, Labor is starting a long way back, and is spooked by the Anzac industry.

Labor’s national platform, adopted late last year, acknowledges the Uluru call for a “truthful telling of Australia’s history” and promises a Makarrata (or truth-telling) commission as a means to that end. But neither the platform nor the reconciliation plan mentions the AWM or, indeed, the frontier wars. It is difficult to see how the truth can be told without bringing the epicentre of truth avoidance into the picture. More concerning still, shadow minister Amanda Rishworth recently joined Nelson, Stokes and the prime minister on the platform for the “Australian War Memorial Development Launch,” where she was proud to announce that a Shorten government would honour the Coalition’s pledge of half a billion dollars to that cause. We are reminded that it was a Labor government that appointed Nelson in the first place.

Nelson’s term ends in a few months, and Stokes’s appointment comes up next year. As things stand, the best that could be hoped from a Shorten government would be improvements on Nelson (unless the present government makes a pre-emptive strike in the meantime) and Stokes. But if the AWM’s culture and high command are as I’ve suggested, even the best appointees would struggle. The task is to persuade Labor that the AWM should be the focus of a comprehensive review and rethink, and to address Labor’s concerns about the political hazards of doing so.

Managed badly it could go very wrong, of course. But it could also go very well. The past decade or so has seen a steep increase in the number of news stories and comment pieces about the issue in an ever-widening range of media. That might not blow the AWM’s house down, but it signifies something. It is possible that another of our subterranean cultural shifts is under way, the kind of thing that burst into the open in 1967 when, to near-universal surprise and delight, 90 per cent of Australians voted for what they understood to be equality for Aboriginal people. The council of the AWM, and its stance are anachronisms. For some, seeing the frontier wars alongside the heroics of Gallipoli and Flanders and Milne Bay would be a source of uncomprehending offence. For most of the rest, not to mention Aboriginal Australians? We’d ask as we did after the marriage-equality plebiscite: why did it take so long? •

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The problems with Howard’s position have long been recognised. His confusion of personal with government and national responsibility; his inability to recognise the intimate links between past policy and present circumstances; his inconsistency in embracing pride in the past — such as the achievements of the glorious Anzacs — while denying any shame. Howard is diminished as a public figure by his stubborn refusal to grapple with the nuances of this issue.

Yet, as I listened to him, I realised I was not just hearing the words of a man attending to his legacy. This was the denialism of a generation of Australian conservatives who saw Mabo, Wik and Bringing Them Home as nuisances and impositions rather than landmarks in the history of this country. They were the words of a generation that repeatedly bends over backwards to extend empathy towards the whites who devised and executed policies and practices that caused pain, but stubbornly refuses to extend a parallel empathy to Indigenous people.

The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families would never have come into existence under Howard’s stewardship. Appointed by the Keating Labor government and chaired by Sir Ronald Wilson, the inquiry’s report, Bringing Them Home, would become another of the modern landmarks in the history of race relations in this country.

Child removal had long been part of the Australian Indigenous experience. The term itself — the Stolen Generations — had been coined by historians Peter Read and Jay Arthur in the context of a study carried out in 1981 for the NSW government. The slow and meandering journey of these stories of suffering and trauma to the centre of settler consciousness was a long one, which Bringing Them Home would complete in 1997. In July 1996, however, the newly minted Howard cabinet — assisted by a submission from attorney-general Daryl Williams — faced the dilemma of how to respond to an inquiry already in progress.

Williams’s submission has been heavily redacted. Apart from the several substantial instances in the main body of the submission (all of points six and seven and much of point eight), the entirety of Attachment C — two full pages — is blacked out. The two grounds for exemption are stated in accordance with the requirements of the Archives Act. Under section 33(1)(c), “a record is exempt from public access if it contains information or matter the disclosure of which under this Act would have a substantial adverse effect on the financial or property interests of the Commonwealth or of a Commonwealth institution and would not, on balance, be in the public interest.” Under section 33(2), a record is exempt if it would be subject to legal privilege and, again, “disclosure of the record would be contrary to the public interest.”

All of this can be summed up fairly simply: the federal government still fears releasing material that a member of the Stolen Generations could use in a court to gain compensation. It is not in the “public interest” to provide them with any assistance to do so. The managers and custodians of Commonwealth records in the National Archives, which is part of the attorney-general’s portfolio, play a significant role in protecting past, present and future governments and officials from scrutiny, and litigation, by the Australian public.

The Howard government also took the view that no compensation should be offered, and was concerned that the inquiry might give rise to financial claims. The government’s priorities lay in dealing with “current disadvantage in health, housing, employment and education” and it believed that “special compensation in respect of the issues being addressed in the Inquiry is inappropriate and unacceptable.”

“Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are classic weasel words, especially when unaccompanied by elaboration. They are indispensable to governments. “Costly” — in both political and financial terms — would be more accurate.

Daryl Williams was opposed to the whole-of-government submission that Wilson had requested, and his submission fails to engage with the complexities of the issues raised by the inquiry. To be fair, though, the government had little reason to anticipate that it would be made to wear Bringing Them Home like a crown of thorns from the moment it arrived on the desks of government ministers until the day Kevin Rudd delivered the National Apology in 2008.

“I understand that Indigenous peoples’ expectations of the Government’s response to the Inquiry are diverse,” Williams told cabinet. “They range from deep scepticism to a more optimistic view that the Inquiry will result in reparation and/or compensation, an apology, Government assistance to individuals in accessing records, guidance on welfare policies for indigenous children and provision of sensitive and appropriate mental health services for affected individuals and families.”

Williams considered that the government could probably avoid raising expectations of a positive response to the inquiry report by saying nothing at all for the time being. “In my view,” he continued, “it is unlikely that any such expectation will arise from the Government’s ‘silence’ in relation to the Inquiry.” After all, the previous government had set up the inquiry, “presumably with a particular policy outcome in mind,” and “the public would not expect a new Government uncritically to accept its recommendations.”

If Williams had been discussing, say, an inquiry into the sale of defence department land in western Sydney, this would have been an astute and reasonable prediction. In the circumstances, it was folly.

The government’s eventual response to the report, summed up in a cabinet document from late 1997, is much better known than the deliberations beforehand. There would be no formal apology, cabinet decided. Rather than compensation, $54 million would be spent over four years on indexing and copying archival records, providing “Link-Up” services to help Indigenous people trace family members and effect reunions, expanding mental health services, and running an oral history project to record the stories of separation.

It was a minimalist response to a report that had clearly left the government unmoved. Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron said the report was “very emotive” and “one-sided,” and “focuses only on one view of the separation process.” The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was scathing about the government’s response, which “will severely disappoint Indigenous people.” The government’s refusal to address most of the report’s recommendations compounded the distress already caused by its announced refusal to countenance either compensation or an apology.

There was no prospect of the government joining with ATSIC in a more considered and comprehensive response. Pauline Hanson was in full flight with her complaints about “reverse racism” in favour of Aboriginal people. In 2000 Herron would make a government submission to a Senate inquiry into the Stolen Generations whose argument was essentially that no such generations existed because only a minority of children were separated from their families — and for a variety of reasons, many of them valid. Government policy on separations had an “essentially benign intent,” it said. There was that empathy again.

But by this stage the government’s friends in the right-wing intelligentsia had decided to make the Stolen Generations their Alamo. And there were now a million One Nation voters — many convinced that Indigenous people had been long coddled by bleeding heart governments — up for political grabs.

In the end, it was these people that the government was mainly concerned with bringing home. •

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As Inside Story reported in September, Bourke’s Aboriginal community formed a partnership with Just Reinvest NSW, a Sydney-based body, to start the project. It had a pressing cause. About a third of Bourke’s 3000 people identify as Aboriginal, and for more than twenty years this community has had the state’s highest rates of juvenile crime and domestic violence. Old government law-and-order methods, costing billions of dollars, were simply not working.

The Bourke people called their alternative the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project (Maranguka means “caring for others” in Ngemba, a local language). Its underlying strategy, drawn from the Soros think tank, is that governments should stop building yet more prisons and divert the funds to community projects designed to help people stay out of them.

Five years after the Bourke project started, its dividends are proving impressive. After following its progress, the accounting firm KPMG produced a report in late November estimating a “gross impact” of $3.1 million in 2017. About two-thirds came from lower costs in the justice system, and the rest from broader savings in the Bourke region.

Even more striking were improvements in the main areas where justice reinvestment has focused in Bourke: domestic violence, juvenile crime and early childhood development. KPMG reported a 23 per cent drop in police-recorded domestic violence in 2017; a 31 per cent rise in Year 12 student retention rates; a 38 per cent fall in five main juvenile offence categories; a 14 per cent cut in bail breaches; and a 42 per cent reduction in days spent in custody.

KPMG estimates that the project’s $3.1 million economic impact was five times the $600,000 cost of running it in 2017, much of which came from state and federal government contributions. (Substantial extra philanthropic backing comes from the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation.) If Bourke can sustain even half the economic results achieved in 2017, says KPMG, “an additional gross impact of $7 million over the next five years could be delivered.”

The changes stem from at least one key departure from the time when Bourke’s Aboriginal community was beholden to policies set by governments in faraway Sydney and Canberra. This has been the involvement of Bourke’s Indigenous community itself in guiding the justice reinvestment approach. Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, helped to create two bodies to get it going. One is the Bourke Tribal Council, which represents Bourke’s twenty-two language groups and makes decisions about strategy. The other is Maranguka, a community hub where local Indigenous officers meet daily with police to monitor any trouble cropping up with young people. The cooperation of Bourke’s police force, headed by Greg Moore (no relation to youth worker James Moore, pictured above), has been another part of the project’s success.

The KPMG report was launched at the state Parliament House in Sydney before a room of parliamentarians and other notables. They included Tom Calma, a former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, who was among the first to call for justice reinvestment trials in Australia. Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer who heads Just Reinvest NSW, told the room, “When we say justice reinvestment is Aboriginal-owned and led, we think of Tom Calma.”

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, who has followed the Bourke project, said the number of Aboriginal people in prisons statewide “remains appalling.” Maranguka had shown “the solution has to be the empowerment of the people themselves.”

But the KPMG report also places the onus on governments to look at changing their approaches to locking people up. It will put pressure on them to take seriously the idea that prison money can be better spent on community-led early intervention to steer vulnerable young people away from crime. The Coalition government, for instance — to which Hazzard belongs — announced almost $4 billion in 2016–17 for what it boasted to be the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.”

The report offers four possible models for a “core unanswered question” about justice reinvestment: how to reinvest prison funds in Bourke and elsewhere. These include diverting savings from building fewer prisons towards preventing crime; rewarding communities for achievements that cut costs for governments; doing more to encourage communities to work on their own solutions; and encouraging seed funding from private donors to secure government grants related to crime prevention.

Alistair Ferguson missed the Sydney launch. He was busy in Bourke with Mick Gooda, another Indigenous leader and early justice reinvestment advocate. When I caught up with him in Sydney last Friday, he had just spoken to a seminar in Canberra, where the ACT government has embarked on justice reinvestment trials, and was preparing for “cross-leadership” meetings involving the Bourke project later in December in Sydney, Dubbo and Bourke.

Despite the KPMG report’s positive assessment, the Bourke project that Ferguson initiated has no plans to wind back. “It shows quite an achievement,” he says of the report. “It’s got to the point where stakeholders now have to consider where and how to reinvest.

“Who’ll take those decisions? It doesn’t mean I’ll be sitting in a dark room making nocturnal decisions about spending that money saved from the criminal system. We’ll be making those decisions as a community. It will be a case of sitting down with police, family and community services and the Bourke Shire Council, co-designing it with the Aboriginal community.”

Ferguson nominates education, jobs and vocational training among areas where prison money could be invested better. Then he spells out why governments can’t ignore the changes at Bourke: “First Nations people have provided a compelling case that this can’t be done without our involvement. What gets overlooked is how willing Aboriginal communities are to roll up our sleeves and address legacy issues.” •

The post Breakthrough at Bourke appeared first on Inside Story.

When we have this kind of vote, cost is almost always a key part of the No campaign. Why are we wasting money and time on this; wouldn’t it be better spent on schools and hospitals? So this development isn’t a great omen for the republic’s chances.

The “two step” strategy — a non-binding referendum on the general idea followed by a constitutional vote on the model — has long been part of Labor’s republic push. Kim Beazley’s plan before the 2001 election was for a plebiscite concurrent with the subsequent election.

As a rule, holding referendums with general elections is preferable, not only because it costs a lot less and is less disruptive to people’s lives. It’s also likely to be drowned out by the political campaign. People are more likely to tick Yes if they don’t overthink it.

But let’s assume the plebiscite is held and the Yes vote prevails, which is no certainty. What then?

One of the narrative strands that emerged from the unsuccessful 1999 referendum on the republic depicts that diabolical genius, John Howard, rigging the outcome by forcing Australians to decide on a particular model. But that was the Constitution’s doing, not the then prime minister’s. Any move to a republic must eventually clear that hurdle.

The logic behind the plebiscite is that voters will feel they have ownership of the process and would be more likely to approve the final constitutional referendum. That seems to envisage sixteen million electors as one big convention, and is quite a leap of faith. Which is not to say it shouldn’t be attempted.

Most surveys indicate that a majority of Australians want us to have our own head of state. A large majority of that majority would prefer the president to be directly elected. But for a republic referendum to pass it must have the support of more than that portion of the voting population. Basic arithmetic tells us that the 45 per cent who voted for the minimalist model in 1999 included some direct electionists opting for a bird in the hand.

The argument that most republicans want an elected president and therefore that option would be more likely to win a referendum is simplistic. It’s rather like concluding that because voters invariably name health as their number one priority, the political party with the most popular health policy will always win the election. (If this were so, we’d almost always have Labor governments.)

There are problems with any direct-election model. The Constitution gives the governor-general enormous powers, which convention, along with the possibility of prime ministerial and royal intervention, restrains occupants from exercising. The advantage of a minimalist model like 1999’s was that such restraining powers could be left in place; if a president went bonkers and announced we would invade New Zealand (the governor-general is commander of the armed forces) a two-thirds vote of parliament could remove him or her.

But an elected president with those powers, and one who felt he or she enjoyed a special mandate as the only politician elected by all Australians, could be quite another thing.

It is almost impossible to imagine any government or parliament allowing such a dangerous plan to go to a referendum, let alone it passing.

The powers would need to be codified first. That’s hardly insurmountable, but such a vast rewriting would provide plenty of ammunition for republic opponents.

Hybrid models involving parliamentary oversight without changing the current powers, as suggested here and here for example, would still allow a president who suspected he or she was going to be removed to dissolve parliament first. (In theory, this is also possible with the minimalist model, but the incumbent would at least not have “people power” onside.)

And writing into the Constitution parliamentarians’ ability to veto candidates and remove elected presidents? That No campaign writes itself.

In June, academic lawyer Megan Davis argued persuasively in the Monthly that the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament should be linked with the republic. Others have made similar arguments.

The obvious rejoinder is that lumping them together aggregates the difficulties — that it risks alienating monarchists who are sympathetic to the Voice, and republicans who aren’t. But voting behaviour doesn’t always adhere to these linear formulations.

Under the right political conditions — in 1988, say, with the Hawke government in its third-term doldrums, voters inclined to give it a bloody nose, annoyance at being dragged to the ballot box, and Coalition opposition — you can get a 62.4 per cent No vote on a proposition to “provide for fair and democratic parliamentary elections throughout Australia.” Yet, also under the right conditions — including bipartisan support — large majorities have voted for rather arcane changes.

Davis has a point when she says that the old assumptions about “bipartisanship” don’t necessarily still apply, given the low esteem in which the political class is held (and as measured by the low primary votes of the major parties).

I don’t share Davis’s and others’ optimism about the likelihood of Australians supporting the Voice. Then again, I don’t like the republic’s chances much either, under any model. In fact, given the current condition of our politics, it’s difficult to envisage any constitutional referendum on anything being passed again — ever.

And Australians enjoy saying No to “elites.” It makes them feel good.

But what have we got to lose? Since Federation we’ve had thirty-six defeated referendums, and after none of them has the sky fallen. Governments of the day are left red-faced, but there is no evidence it impedes their longevity.

Why should we be scared to make it thirty-seven, or thirty-eight or forty? There’s an argument that a failed Voice referendum would be a setback for the cause, but why?

Without the Voice, there seems no particular reason for Indigenous Australians to feel excited about the prospect of this final separation from Britain. On the contrary: in the 1800s, London sometimes had a moderating influence on colonial infliction of atrocities on Aboriginal people. From around that time the racist and influential Bulletin magazine — slogan “Australia for the White Man” — was campaigning for a republic. So the two causes of the Voice and the republic might not seem a natural fit. But in the twenty-first century they could prove complementary and compelling.

The Voice could rescue the republic from its current status as dreary 1990s kitsch. The republic could help provide an alluring context for the Voice. It would be a distinctly Australian aspiration.

Perhaps the sum can be greater than the parts. •

The post Rescuing the republic appeared first on Inside Story.

Waterford’s free character reference for Nelson — including his “genius for turning every story about the memorial and the World War I celebrations into a story about himself” — is best enjoyed in full. His case against the AWM and its half-billion spend can be summarised as follows:

• The AWM’s expansion plans lack proportionality. Australian involvement and casualties in wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and elsewhere, now to be memorialised by the AWM, are dwarfed by the two world wars. Of those whose names are inscribed at the memorial, Waterford points out, 99 per cent were killed before 1950. There were many single days during the first world war when more Australian soldiers died than have been killed since 1950.

• A proportional comparison is even more striking. Were we to experience today losses proportionate to those of the Great War, 400,000 would die and 800,000 would become invalids.

• Service and sacrifice must be recognised, but so must the facts. Australia made significant contributions to the outcomes of the world wars. These were provided overwhelmingly by volunteers, not professionals, and they paid a high price. The entire population was mobilised in a widely supported cause. None of these things can be said of the post-1950 conflicts.

Waterford concludes his assault on the AWM and its proposal with some thoughts about how the $500 million could be better spent, but he (with other commentators) misses the obvious option: the money should be spent on recognising the frontier wars.

To justify that suggestion, I will borrow Waterford’s methodology:

• The number of deaths from violence on Australia’s frontiers exceeded the number of Australian deaths in the first world war and was probably close to double the number of second world war casualties.

• Were we — I speak as a non-Indigenous Australian — to experience a similar casualty rate now, somewhere between two and three million would die.

• Numbers of deaths by violence on the frontiers were greatly exceeded by deaths from disease, malnutrition and addictive substances, variously preceding, accompanying and following frontier violence. An Aboriginal population estimated at three quarters of a million or more when the first fleet arrived had been reduced to less than one-tenth of that number by the 1920s.

• An entire civilisation came close to complete destruction, as did much of the ecology that sustained it, exacting a further toll of physical and psychological misery that still has a long way to run.

These figures for violent deaths no doubt raise some eyebrows, and need to be explained.

Historians have struggled with the calculation for decades. Generally speaking, the more recent the estimate, the greater the figure arrived at. By the turn of the century Henry Reynolds’s early estimate of 20,000 was regarded as very conservative. For example, in his Claiming a Continent (1996), David Day speculated that the true number might approach Australian losses in the first world war.

All this went out the window when Raymond Evans, a noted historian of the frontiers, joined with the Danish scholar Robert Ørsted-Jensen and built on pioneering research by Jonathan Richards to detail the activities and consequences of the notorious Queensland Native Police, or QNP, long hidden from view by the destruction and dispersal of the relevant records.

Richards and then Evans and Ørsted-Jensen tracked down and employed such evidence as had survived to work out numbers of QNP patrols per year and numbers of deaths per patrol. Evans and Ørsted-Jensen report a total of 3420 “official dispersals” by the QNP, resulting in more than 40,000 Aboriginal deaths. They further examined evidence about confrontations between settlers and Aborigines and concluded that 275 conflicts contributed a further 20,000-plus deaths. Adding “invader” deaths and estimates of casualties before their period of study (1859–98), Evans and Ørsted-Jensen arrived at an estimated total for Queensland in excess of 66,000 and a ratio of Aboriginal to white deaths of 44–1. These estimates, they insist, are “cautious [and] minimal.”

Violent deaths on other Australian frontiers are usually estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, with a ratio of Aboriginal to white deaths of perhaps 10–1. The much lower figures reflect the dense Aboriginal population of Queensland, the lesser impact of disease there, and the fact that most of the Queensland frontiers came after the invention of repeating rifles and the refinement of methods and tactics, including the use of mounted Aboriginal troopers recruited from previously defeated peoples.

Of course there are various sophistries available to the AWM and others to argue that these events did not constitute “war,” and it is true that there was no declaration of war, that the combatants were not in the armed forces and/or Australian, and so on and so forth. But there is now a consensus among military historians, echoing what was widely assumed to be the case in the nineteenth century: frontier conflict was indeed warfare, pursued in distinctively Australian ways.

The hard question is this: what explains the AWM’s refusal to see these wars as wars? And harder still, what explains the fact that even a distinguished journalist such as Jack Waterford didn’t think to include them either or, perhaps, did think of it and decided against? And, for that matter, what explains the fact that Evans and Ørsted-Jensen’s work and findings, which should have created a national stir when published in 2014, are still known only to the cognoscenti?

There is a certain perverse rationality to the AWM’s obscurantism, doggedly maintained for more than forty years — ever since 1979, in fact, when none other than Geoffrey Blainey was the first of many historians to suggest that the frontier wars might be included. To give them parity with other wars involving Australians would not sit well with the AWM’s even longer campaign to manufacture, promote and profit from an Anzac mystique.

But Waterford belongs to an entirely different mental world from that inhabited by Brendan Nelson and his predecessor and the many AWM council members who have tagged along behind them. So what does his silence signify?

Anyone who has puzzled over these things is in debt, conscious or otherwise, to the great anthropologist and public intellectual W.E.H. Stanner. In the second of his celebrated 1968 Boyer lectures, Stanner pointed to something previously unnoticed, the “great Australian silence,” a silence that reigned over “relations between two racial groups within a single field of life.”

“It is a structural matter,” Stanner argued, “a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.”

There has since been a torrent both of storytelling, and of conflict over whether and how the stories should be told. Dozens of historians and others, led by the heroic Henry Reynolds, have worked to break that silence at its centre so that we accept two things: that we are the beneficiaries of a past that includes both honourable sacrifice in honourable causes (including particularly those for which the AWM was conceived and created) and brutal, sustained and deeply dishonourable violence against peoples almost powerless to resist. The first is central to our way of thinking about who we are; the second is peripheral at best. The case to be made against the AWM is that it is wilfully, culpably wrong about both. •

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For the Larrakia, the traditional owners of the Darwin region, the banyan is known as galamarrma. It offers shade as well as edible fruits and those long fibrous roots — the sort that sprout from branches and search for the ground — that can be turned into string used as fishing lines or intricately woven to create dilly bags, baskets, armbands and art. A famous banyan (below) still stands near Darwin’s council chambers, where it has served as a postal address, a place for meetings and union rallies, and a trading spot for Chinese hawkers. Astonishingly, it has survived every cyclone that Darwin can remember.

“The Tree of Knowledge” (c. 1937): This banyan tree in Darwin’s Cavenagh Street has long been a meeting and trading spot. Northern Territory Library, Yvonne Beames Collection

A Territory Story took three years to conceive and curate. Like so many recent exhibitions, it uses audio, video and interactive features to immerse visitors in the Territory’s sounds and sights. You can hop aboard a mock tourist bus — one of the many used by visitors to explore the Red Centre as transport changed from camels to automobiles — in which an early black-and-white film of one of these ventures is screening. You can choose which trailer of which film set in the Northern Territory you would like to view, or which historic voice — male, female, Indigenous or Chinese — you would like to hear.

The world of the Larrakia people is foregrounded at the opening, and the beautiful and iconic weaving by Pintupi artists features in stunning variety. The settlers’ “opening up” of the north and centre is here, as are early stockmen and police, the legacies of the removal of Aboriginal children, the often bizarre and iconic front pages of the Northern Territory News (a paper that really celebrates Top End difference), and the impact of the alternating wet and dry seasons. The last third of the exhibition explores films, music and books set in the Territory, from We of the Never Never (1908) and Jedda (1955) to Yothu Yindi’s “Treaty” (1991) and Samson and Delilah (2009). It finishes with a timeline that includes the Dutch navigation of the north coast of Australia, Macassan traders fishing for the knobbly sea cucumbers known as trepang, the spread of mission stations, the opening of railway lines and the first schools, the Coniston Massacre of 1928 (the last documented Australian massacre), and key moments in the land rights movement. The last year displayed, 1977, sees the arrival of Vietnamese refugees.

Put that way, it might sound like another worthy and rather provincial exhibition. But in the weighting of its content, A Territory Story is actually tremendously exciting. Its vision in many ways renders the “history wars” passé.

Early on in the exhibition, for instance, you can touch a screen and see maps showing the major post-contact infrastructure works in the Territory, starting with railway lines and the Overland Telegraph Line from Port Augusta to Darwin in the 1870s. Next to this, on another screen, you can explore the longer history of the Northern Territory, beginning with the arrival of Aboriginal people in the Top End and taking in their trading routes, language and songlines. Here you can learn about sites of conflict, missions, and the places where land rights claims have been successful.

“Dugout canoe, Daly River” (c. 1935): Coastal Aboriginal people readily adopted the dugout canoe design brought to northern Australia by Macassan trepang fishers. Northern Territory Library, Charles Barrett Collection

In another section, the magnificent and varied photographic collection of the library is brilliantly put to work. A fascinating array of exhibits is accompanied by detailed explanations of how Territorians built houses sufficiently suited to the climate, and how architecture changed after Cyclone Tracy in 1974. You can also discover how Aboriginal people made shelters just right their purposes — whether travelling, hunting or at ceremony — that also suited different seasons, weather and locations: windbreaks for cold desert winds; paperbark and stringybark roofs to keep out the rain.

One of the more extraordinary stories comes early in the exhibition. Speaking of the violence and lawlessness that so often followed pastoralists in this part of the country from the 1870s onwards, this section details how uneasy relationships nonetheless began to build. When thefts at a fencer’s hut were reported in 1911, mounted constable Bill Johns went to investigate and arrested four Aboriginal men. As was standard in the Northern Territory at the time — but soon became an anachronism — neck chains were used on the prisoners. When the constable was swept away by the current of a swollen, fast-moving river (his horse had lost its footing), one of these men, whose name was Ayaiga, or Neighbour, dived in and saved him. Later, Ayaiga was not only acquitted of theft for lack of evidence at the trial but also awarded the highest honour for civilian gallantry by King George V. (Replicas of this medal are held by the NT Library and by Ayaiga’s descendants, with the original at the National Library of Australia.)

This is what reconciliation looks like, and there is not a whiff of tokenism. This is an exhibition about people, like the proud descendants of Ayaiga, and like those removed and their descendants. This focus is particularly striking when the exhibition looks at the stolen generations, detailing the policies and perceptions of the time while allowing visitors to listen to interviews with those who were themselves removed, or their descendants. If nations, states and territories are unified not only as administrative units but also as imagined places, the Northern Territory constructed in this exhibition is a full and richly textured one that encompasses its many experiences.

It is not simply a feel-good, postcolonial political point but what the Northern Territory has become. If you wander through Parliament House, the building in which the library is housed, it is clear how many Indigenous people are members of its Legislative Assembly — a huge difference from the makeup of federal parliament. And as a placard makes clear, they are prominent businesspeople, sportspeople, and so on.

“Kuo Min Tang Party, Darwin Branch” (1932): Darwin’s branch of Kuomintang poses in front of a portrait of their leader, General Chiang Kai-shek. Northern Territory Library, Chan Collection

This is not insignificant given the polarisation that has afflicted national discussions of Australian history for decades. It was in 1996, under prime minister John Howard, that talk of the “balance sheet” of history began: in November of that year he said that “our history is one of heroic achievement and… we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed.” This increasingly intense debate culminated in the history wars of the early 2000s and continues today in debates about statues of Captain Cook and more.

Political change was in the air when Kevin Rudd delivered an apology on behalf of the Australian government to the stolen generations in 2007. And yet, as many have recognised, this apology, while significant and overdue, was also limited. As historian Catherine Kevin noted, it was an apology that was willing to recognise child removal and the sexual exploitation of women but shied away from other gritty realities of Australian colonialism, like dispossession and pressing matters of sovereignty.

What makes this exhibition different, then, is that the violence of colonialism is recognised — though it does not form the focus — while the exhibition remains generally positive. That the key library of the Northern Territory, a government-funded library, could produce such a balanced and enthralling exhibition is extraordinary and cheering.

Greg Johns’s sculpture, Monument to Mulga Bill and Neighbour (2010). Northern Territory Library

Of course, the Northern Territory, and perhaps Darwin in particular, takes pride in being different. As one of the exhibition placards reads, it is the home of “the stayers, the tourists, the new chums, the blow-ins, the eccentrics, the hermits, the escapees.” By this it means more than the white settlers and Afghan cameleers who appeared in the 1870s. It’s talking about the Chinese who came in the 1880s, the Japanese, Malays and Filipinos who came to dive for pearl shell, the Greek and Italian refugees who came after the second world war, and the Vietnamese who began arriving in the 1970s. This is the Northern Territory as an exciting cultural melting pot with Darwin as its metropolitan, gentrifying and self-confident hub. Yet many Indigenous groups are insistently present too, their ongoing culture engaged with in a rich, interwoven way as a large part of the social fabric of the Northern Territory.

Darwin’s many and pressing complexities are highly visible, of course. Located in the CBD, A Territory Story seems to recognise, even if only implicitly, just how much unfinished business there is. At the entrance is Greg Johns’s sculpture, Monument to Mulga Bill and Neighbour, which depicts Ayaiga’s rescue of the constable. The final links of Ayaiga’s chain are free of rust and he reaches out an ochre-blown hand, suggestive of friendship and assistance. Here is a hint of where hope lies — in the recognition of an entangled past and in respectful relationships in the present. •

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Bourke is pioneering Australia’s most innovative way of tackling a problem haunting many parts of the country: the shockingly high rate of incarceration among young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Of Bourke’s 3000-strong population, about a third identify as Indigenous. Before the scheme started having an impact, the town had the state’s highest conviction rate for Aboriginal children and teenagers under seventeen, and about 90 per cent of young people released from custody were in trouble with the law again a year later.

“We’d been left to die slowly,” is how Alistair Ferguson, a local Indigenous man, describes his community’s fate under past government policies. “But Bourke and outback river towns are worth fighting for.” Fed up with billions of dollars of government money being poured into the “old law-and-order approach,” with little to show for it, Ferguson turned to an idea developed by the Open Society Institute, a New York think tank run by the American billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Known as “justice reinvestment,” the strategy is based on the argument that the money governments spend building yet more prisons should instead go to projects designed to help people stay out of them.

It is Ferguson’s initiative that eventually brings this group of expert backers to Bourke for a crucial “leadership group” meeting. Five years after introducing justice reinvestment to his town, he opens their gathering at Diggers on the Darling by declaring, “We are on the road to recovery.”

My own 800 kilometre journey from Sydney to Bourke — still one of Australia’s most isolated places — revealed much about the town’s vivid frontier history and its disastrous legacies for Indigenous people. From the 1880s, Bourke was a booming port handling wool bound for world markets via the Darling River. The press called it the “Chicago of the West.” In 1885, jealous at seeing its wool exported to Britain via Victoria and South Australia, the state government extended the rail line to Bourke so it could be shipped from Sydney instead.

The last 186 kilometres of this great piece of late-nineteenth-century infrastructure was closed down in 1990, and now lies crumbling beside the dead-straight road from Nyngan to Bourke. The remnants of Bourke’s wharf, where Darling River steamers once loaded multitudinous bales of wool (40,000 a year at its peak), have fared a bit better, and it’s there that Alistair Ferguson spoke to me between a stream of meetings with summit participants.

Ferguson, an energetic man with close-cropped greying hair, was born in Brewarrina, a nearby town on the Darling. He traces his own heritage to four states, and has family links with Barkindji, one of four tribal groups that were living in this region when white settlers began arriving in the mid 1860s. As the historian Bobbie Hardy writes in her book Lament for the Barkindji: The Vanished Tribes of the Darling River Region, some tribes “disappeared early under the impact of white settlement, and their conquerors were less than explicit as to the fate that overtook them.”

The Back O’ Bourke Exhibition Centre at North Bourke is a bit more explicit. In its small section on “The Traditional People,” it quotes an early settler: “The blacks on the Darling had been most barbarously murdered by our early predecessors, hunted like kangaroos or wild dogs wherever they were known to exist.”

Governments removed many Aboriginal people from traditional lands, and later brought others from outside the region to mission stations at Bourke. The thoughtless mixing of rival groups changed the makeup of the area, expanding the region’s four tribal groups to twenty-two in Bourke today. Ferguson and others see that dispossession and loss of identity as the main underlying cause of high crime rates.

Ferguson, who had planned to be a chef after he left high school in Bourke, became a public servant in the Bourke office of the state attorney-general’s department. From there he watched in despair the “constant revolving door of young people in handcuffs” at the local courthouse. Using Bourke’s twenty-first century lifeline to the world, the internet, he learned about trials of justice reinvestment in around twenty-four states in the United States, and in Britain. Tom Calma and Mick Gooda, both former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioners, had already called for similar trials in Australia.

“I became intrigued,” says Ferguson. “I wanted to know more.” In 2012 he approached Sarah Hopkins, a Sydney-based lawyer and chair of Just Reinvest NSW, a body advocating justice reinvestment as public policy. The following year, Just Reinvest and Ferguson formed a partnership to start a project in Bourke. “We didn’t go to Bourke,” Hopkins says. “They came to us.” She is keen to stress the Aboriginal community’s determination to find a new approach to solving its problems that didn’t leave it beholden to governments. “Self-determination is fundamental to justice reinvestment,” she says.

A “lot of moving parts” soon came together, says Ferguson. The Australian Human Rights Commission and the state Aboriginal affairs office offered early support; Gilbert and Tobin, a law firm, pitched in later. The first funding, in 2014, came not from governments but from two family philanthropic outfits: the Dusseldorp Forum and the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Along with money from smaller family foundations, this allowed the project to kickstart with a backbone of staff in Bourke.

A September 2016 report prepared free of charge by accounting firm KPMG found that philanthropic funding for the project had amounted to $554,800 each year over the three years to 2018–19. It argued that the early progress and the goodwill the project had attracted made a strong enough case for governments to get behind it.

Teya Dusseldorp, the Dusseldorp Forum’s executive director, is a granddaughter of its founder, the late Dick Dusseldorp, who also founded the Lend Lease construction company. She visited Bourke at Ferguson’s invitation when he was trying to get something started. “We could see the real desire of the Bourke community to be drivers of change for their town,” she says. “I found that far more promising than people just advocating to governments. They wanted to confront the problems they identified of too many young people being incarcerated. There were enough people there who wanted to be part of designing the solutions themselves, rather than waiting for government to fix things.”

Goodwill was palpable when the fifty-odd people gathered at Diggers on the Darling on 30 July. There was something symbolic about the fact that the meeting was taking place across the road from the Darling River, where Henry Lawson set several short stories drawing on his time in Bourke in 1892. Lawson sharply observed the region’s swagmen, riverboat captains and other pioneer characters, but Indigenous people featured in his stories only fleetingly as part of the exotic frontier backdrop.

“Finding a balance from the first nations’ perspective isn’t an easy thing to do,” Ferguson told the meeting. But now, the descendants of Lawson’s largely invisible people were telling a story of trying to reverse a downward spiral that had started back then. By any standards, it has a promising ring of success.

A report to the meeting showed a sharp drop in juvenile crime last year. Break-and-enter offences fell by about half. At Bourke Primary School, 4 per cent of Aboriginal students were suspended, a dramatic reduction from about 20 per cent four years earlier, though the fall in suspensions at Bourke High School was not so impressive. The proportion of children going to school, and staying there, has risen.

One of the most encouraging shifts involved domestic violence committed by Aboriginal men. Unemployment, alcohol and dislocation have long made this a problem in Bourke: reoffending rates per capita are among the highest in Australia. And its reverberations spread to the streets, where children forced to flee violent homes embark on crimes of their own. The meeting heard that the proportion of adult men charged with domestic violence had almost halved since 2014.

This news preceded the opening of a new “Men’s Space,” further along the Darling, later that afternoon. The substantial block of land and modest brick house on the edge of Bourke was donated by the Sisters of Charity, a Catholic group. Ironically, it was once a prison site; but now, says Jonathon Knight, an Aboriginal man who works with a group called Men of Bourke, it will become a place where “men can come to seek help and feel comfortable.” His hope is that “we can be role models for our community.”

A group of Aboriginal children and young men had gathered for the event, and five nuns had travelled from Orange in New South Wales to join a Catholic priest in blessing the Men’s Space. (One of them recalled how the Indian missionary, Mother Teresa, had visited Bourke fifty years ago to bless the sisters’ land.) Led by several Aboriginal women, the men, black and white, walked in a semicircle through a smoking ceremony under a magnificent river red gum tree.

Brad Hazzard, the NSW health minister, was among them. “I still shake my head in wonder as to why so much state and federal resources are coming into regional towns and not achieving the outcomes we want,” Hazzard told the Bourke meeting. He offered as one explanation the politics in some Aboriginal communities: “They make Labor and Liberal look like a bunch of amateurs.” After recent leadership turmoil in Canberra, he may be right.

Yet that seemed to miss a key point. The Bourke community’s creation of the Men’s Space is one example of its bid to take pressure off a key cause of crime in its midst. “Do they have the right to make decisions for us?” asks Phil Sullivan, a Bourke elder, referring to governments. “We’re still not in the Constitution you know! I think the justice reinvestment approach, a tool to do what we want to do, is a perfect start.”

Like most governments in Australia, the Coalition to which Hazzard belongs beats a law-and-order drum relentlessly. In its 2016–17 budget, the NSW government announced almost $4 billion for what it called the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history.” Yet Hazzard seems impressed with what he has seen in Bourke. “The men here say they asked for the Men’s Space,” he tells me after the smoking ceremony. “No central office dreamed it up. The ground-up mode means the community owns the process and the outcomes. My instinct tells me that is the most likely recipe for success.”

When he embarked on justice reinvestment in Bourke, Alistair Ferguson built crucial new links into the project. He involved local Aboriginal people by helping to create two bodies: a community hub called Maranguka (“caring for others” in Ngemba, a local tribal language), and the Bourke Tribal Council, representing the town’s twenty-two language groups, whose role is to make decisions about strategy.

“This concept, allowing the community to be the decision-makers, isn’t new,” Ferguson says. “It’s been here for thousands of years. It got lost after white settlement pushed traditional structures away.”

He also insisted on involving Bourke’s police force as key players. Too often around Australia, high imprisonment rates have followed combative relationships between police and Indigenous communities. Greg Moore, Bourke’s police chief, presides over a staff of about forty-five police; he is also commander of a larger force that serves other outback districts in the state’s northwest. He has keenly embraced justice reinvestment, which he sees as a way to “shift the focus from building prisons to addressing the causes that feed crime in the first place.”

“In the old days, you had the cops, health, education and the local council,” Moore says. “That was about it.” Of the new Aboriginal bodies, he says, “We set these structures up so the community could have greater involvement in decision-making and resolving community conflicts. The community has always said, ‘We want policy designed with us, not on us.’”

Greg Moore identifies domestic violence, mental health, alcohol, drugs, idleness and truancy among the main underlying causes of Bourke’s high Aboriginal youth conviction rate. They are the same as those revealed twenty-seven years ago in a royal commission the Hawke government set up to examine Australia’s then alarmingly high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody and juvenile detention. That inquiry said the main way to stop rates climbing even higher was for governments to tackle these causes first. But since then incarceration rates have only doubled, according to Amnesty International.

While governments have ignored the royal commission’s recommendation, Ferguson says he has taken it as his template. The work starts every morning at the Maranguka hub office in Bourke. James Moore (no relation to Greg), the Birrang SOS (“Save Our Sons, Save Our Sisters”) youth coordinator, meets there with police to review any trouble in town overnight.

Moore is a local Aboriginal man who left school without finishing Year 10. He fell foul of the law himself and spent time in jail. He understands the problems of the people aged between eight and eighteen whom he now tries to help: “Like them, I felt disconnected and had little sense of belonging.” This understanding, and working with kids to encourage more positive outlooks, is probably the key to Bourke’s justice reinvestment project. It was missing from long-time government approaches in Sydney and Canberra: setting policy from a distance, and sending welfare to the town.

“Because of a lack of jobs, a lot of families depend on welfare,” James Moore explains. “Kids just dropped out of school. Many fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were on police radar every day. Maranguka asked, what can we do to help them? My role is to change their mindset, to work towards getting jobs.” SOS was set up last year to encourage kids to go back to school.

Maranguka has also set up a youth council to discuss proposals from Moore and his colleagues, and contribute their own ideas. “It’s all about giving them a voice,” says Moore. “In the past, young people never had a say in anything.” The council consists of local young Aboriginal role models and “other more vulnerable ones.”

Moore also works with an Alternative Education Program, to equip young people with job skills. Bourke’s schools identified twelve kids who they thought could benefit. Moore says the twelve had about 300 “interactions” with police between them in the three months before the program; in the three months after it started, police interactions had fallen to fourteen. Meanwhile, school attendance rates among the twelve have risen.

Another initiative exposes young people to environments outside Bourke. James has taken some to Nowra, on the NSW south coast, for boot camps on leadership and life skills. “It’s all based on discipline, respect and responsibility,” he says. Closer to home, he takes young people out “on country” to connect them with traditional cultural practices. “Culture today is the answer for our vulnerable kids,” he says. “It should be part of day-to-day routine for Aboriginal people.”

Vivianne Prince, whose parents are Ngemba and Wangukmarra people, coordinates services at Maranguka. Each Thursday, school principals and other town officials join the meetings. “It means everyone is working together, breaking a silence,” says Prince. “If a pupil has been suspended from school, everyone knows. Evidence shows the children are benefiting from this approach. They’re getting the support they need.”

Leonie Brown, corporate services manager of Bourke Shire Council, tells me the council has supported justice reinvestment “since Alistair put it together.” With jobs scarce on the region’s great sheep stations nowadays, especially during the drought, the council is one of Bourke’s biggest employers. An abattoir, due to open in Bourke this year, could offer up to 200 jobs.

“A lot of government and non-government money comes into Bourke,” says Brown. “Incarcerating youth is a big cost. If we can stop that, and reinvest it, this is one way of working through those problems.” She praises Greg Moore as police chief for his “supportive” approach, helping to bring crime down: “You can see the difference.”

I sensed a difference myself since my last visit to Bourke, in 2010. On that occasion, I was reporting on another intractable issue: water. Crime then seemed out of control. Among the handsome old stone and wrought-iron buildings from Bourke’s grander days, shops were shuttered with steel grids. The town had a sense of siege.

Eight years later the shutters are still there, but the siege sense has waned. Perhaps wary, Bourke’s business figures largely had held back from engaging with justice reinvestment. Now, though, some are happy to commend it.

“It’s doing what it should be doing: getting kids off the street. It’s a marvellous thing,” says David Randall, manager of the Betta Home Living electrical goods shop in Oxley Street. “Eight years ago, you wouldn’t have contemplated that I might take my shutters down. Now I’m contemplating it. It’s very rare that we have problems with hardened kids any more. A lot has to do with attitudes of the police, who are getting involved before crime happens.”

Across the street Peter Crothers, the pharmacist at the Towers Drug Co (“An outback icon since 1878”), says Bourke had long suffered from a “feeling of powerlessness.” He adds, “All decisions were made on how money was spent without reference to the community. What’s happened since justice reinvestment started is that Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal, local government, community associations, business and professional people have all said, ‘Just give us the money and let us work out what needs to be done.’ We’ve started in this town trying to address a different way. Unlike any community I have worked in, we have started to say, ‘We’re special.’”

Support is growing for projects like the one in Bourke. Although none is as advanced as Bourke’s, other justice reinvestment trials are planned or getting started at Katherine, in the Northern Territory, Cherbourg, in Queensland, and in the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia.

The Australian Human Rights Commission calls it a “powerful crime prevention strategy.” The Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee five years ago recommended that the Commonwealth “adopt a leadership role” to support justice reinvestment and that it fund a trial with “at least one remote Indigenous community.” In a report last March, the Australian Law Reform Commission called on federal, state and territory governments to establish an independent justice reinvestment body to “promote the reinvestment of resources from the criminal justice system to community-led, place-based initiatives that address the drivers of crime and incarceration.”

So far, governments show little inclination to take this on. Beating the law-and-order drum seems calculated to win them more plaudits from tabloids and shock jocks than cutting spending on prisons. Yet the 2016 KPMG report on Bourke offered a cogent economic case for a different approach. It contrasted the justice reinvestment project’s estimated running cost of $554,800 a year with the estimated $4 million annual cost to the Bourke area’s criminal justice system of Aboriginal children and young people’s involvement in crime. KPMG is preparing another report on the Bourke project’s economic impact.

Its achievements so far have prompted the federal and NSW governments to commit $2.5 million up to 2022 towards cutting family violence, helping young people to find jobs and enabling the Maranguka team to collect more data. The project’s influential private backers are impressed. “We have a long-term commitment to this work, because that is what it will take,” says Teya Dusseldorp. “We’re talking about generational change. Maranguka is one of the most promising initiatives I’ve seen. They’ve been very effective in building a bridge between community and government to last.”

Alistair Ferguson reckons the “reinvestment” side of justice reinvestment is now in sight. Bourke’s crime reduction, he argues, could warrant redirecting a quarter of its $4 million spend on criminal justice into more work helping the town’s young people. “That will be the real turning point.” When? “It can’t come soon enough.” ●

Robert Milliken returned to Bourke later in 2018; his short followup report is here.

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Recent events in Parliamentalia, which Chan could hardly have anticipated at the time of writing, provided a grotesque illustration of her theme. Amid the voices that dominate the airwaves, striving to shout each other down and cut each other off, how are we to hear the voices of the people they are supposed to represent? For Hugh Martin, head of distribution for the ABC’s regional and local division, this is a question of central importance.

Martin was an early convert to the digital revolution in news media. From the mid nineties, he was convinced of its “phenomenal” potential as a means of promoting audience engagement and gathering stories from regional and remote locations. Before joining the ABC, he had worked as an online editor for the Age and then spent six years setting up the digital arm of APN News and Media in regional New South Wales and Queensland.

With his metropolitan background, he found himself on a steep learning curve, he says, especially in Queensland, where the concentration of population and resources outside the major cities and strong local cultures created different ground rules for communication. “You can’t do business on the phone,” he says. “You have to go and sit with people, talk to them and understand what their concerns are.” In his current role, presiding over the Connecting Communities project, which involves an expansion of ABC regional operations through forty-eight bureaus across the country, he sees the work of communication as very much a two-way process.

“One of the things we need to do is articulate the value of public broadcasting for Australians in the twenty-first century,” he says. “A lot was done to address what it was for the later twentieth century, but the environment has changed.”

When ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie spoke about the lift in regional coverage at a Friends of the ABC dinner last year, she affirmed her commitment to maintaining the role of the national broadcaster as “Australia’s most important cultural institution” and a vital link between past, present and future.

One of the project’s most interesting and genuinely transformative aspects is its rethinking of the temporal frameworks of broadcasting. Places distant from the capital cities also allow for some distance from the tyranny of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for “breaking news.” Past, present and future are deeply interwoven.

The expansion itself has been implemented with some speed. Since the middle of last year, Martin has been involved in appointing staff to eighty new positions. Sixteen of the larger bureaus now have their own dedicated chief of staff, formerly a role combined with program-making responsibilities. They act as the editorial head of the local office, fielding the range of news coming in, listing stories for the state news desk and serving as representatives of the ABC in their communities.

Where regional stations were once seen as training grounds and stepping stones for journalists and producers, the new staff have been chosen with the expectation that they will make their careers locally. Being there for the long haul makes possible a different approach to news-gathering, drawing on deeper familiarities with a place and its people, tapping into “what lives under the surface of communities.”

This “slow news” experiment is in its early stages, Martin stresses, and the groundwork takes some time to establish. With funds to send journalists to remoter communities whose stories can’t be told on a fly-in-fly-out basis, he found that higher levels of trust were called for. In one case, the mayor of an Aboriginal town was uneasy about the proposal to send a reporter in for a ten-day residence — not surprising from a historical and political point of view, as Martin says.

It’s a question of how the ABC can go about winning trust, convincing community leaders that the aim is not to make invasive raids for news and information but to give voice to people who might not otherwise be heard. That means working through land councils and other peak bodies who might help build trusting relationships. “It struck me as a conversation that had never happened before. We don’t spend time revisiting stories, trying to do more considered and thoughtful coverage.”

But might this lead to some serious ethical dilemmas? Isolated communities can have ugly problems, and journalists are not necessarily the best people to help in a crisis. What may be a chronic and deeply distressing situation for residents may have nothing more than “breaking news” value for national audiences. I pushed Martin on this question. Did he envisage having to make some tricky judgements about what might be in the best interests of the local people and what might be regarded as “in the public interest”?

It’s important to distinguish between what is in the public interest and what is interesting to the public, he responded, citing the model of Back Roads, where reporters are free of the “public interest” imperative dominating news reportage and can adapt their focus to accord with local perspectives and concerns. In some cases, the interests of the community and those of a news organisation converge quite easily, providing that attention can be trained on a situation in a way that may assist in its resolution.

Martin gives the example of a residents’ campaign to keep the police station open in Alpurrurulam, west of Mount Isa. The police presence had reduced problems of violence associated with alcohol abuse in the township, a dry community in which the elders have struggled to make long-term gains in social wellbeing. In video journalist Lucy Murray’s report, the voices of the elders come through, and it is their concerns that frame the narrative. But wider issues are also covered. Alpurrurulam was one of eighteen remote locations where temporary police posts were established as part of the Northern Territory intervention. Plans to shift to a “remote patrol model” make sense in terms of police logistics and resourcing, but the human impact needs to be recognised.

Larger regional towns generate other kinds of controversy that also call for nuanced ethical judgement. Here, Martin is interested in the relationship between councils and residents. “I think local government is potentially a great power for good,” he says. “It is hugely important in people’s lives, but councils don’t always attract the best representatives. Perhaps the ABC can be a conduit for community ideas and questions that may not be getting through to councils.” He is participating in a Melbourne University research project developing the Australian National Development Index, which documents the aspirations Australians have for themselves, their communities and their country. “With all our radio stations across the country, we can be talking about the issues this project wants to cover. It tends to be the loudest voices that get heard, but there are lots of quieter voices that have really important things to say.”

Some of the regional bureaus are experimenting with a “community commissioning” approach to storytelling. “Simply put,” Martin says, “it’s a way of asking the audience what stories they want to see covered, voting for the most popular idea, and then putting a reporter to work alongside the person who proposed it.” A recent suite of stories from the Kimberley illustrates the diversity of ways in which people interest themselves in the places and landscapes they call home. There are tales of a cache of diamonds lost in the outback during the second world war, of the curious migration of boab trees from Madagascar to the Kimberley, and of how planetary movements create the massive tidal influxes in Talbot Bay.

Martin envisages future changes in the ABC’s role not in technological terms but “as a positive influence in Australian social and democratic life.”

“It’s worth a shot,” he reflects, “because so many other things don’t seem to be working. I’ve always tried to take calculated risks with a view to getting something achieved — new types of audience content, new forms, new ways of telling stories. That’s our opportunity.”

Martin’s opportunity may only push at the edges of the massive communications divide that is the subject of Gabrielle Chan’s book, but cultural change happens through a confluence of energy from many directions. “Localism” is an agenda too easily derailed under the steerage of those who occupy Parliamentalia and whose idea of acknowledging the great wide land they govern is to wear it as an emblem on their lapel pins. If the future of the nation can be wrested from their control, who knows what transformative changes might occur? •

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Instead, she took her baby to the home of the Department of Native Welfare’s local patrol officer, a K. Johnson. Officer Johnson wasn’t home, but his wife was. Mrs Johnson tried to get hold of the Native Hospital matron, who by now had heard about the incident from another party, and called the white doctor herself. He allegedly refused a second time to see the child and said he’d visit the following morning, so the matron took mother and child to the Native Hospital at the “Three Mile.”

At around 10.30 that night, aware of concern over his failure to see the baby, the doctor went looking for it. Thankfully, the child later recovered, according to a report of the incident written by Officer Johnson and held by the State Records Office of Western Australia. Still, the mother was upset. She had a citizenship certificate (under a 1944 change in WA law, Aboriginal Australians could gain citizenship rights as long as they dissolved “native” associations beyond immediate family, didn’t have active leprosy or venereal disease and could speak English). And, as Officer Johnson pointed out, “a citizenship rights holder is justly entitled to attend the White Hospital for treatment.”

A few days before this incident, another baby had been brought from the Native Hospital to the White after failing to respond to treatment. On this occasion, too, the doctor appears to have refused to see it. Later that same evening, Officer Johnson’s wife brought the child back: its condition was deteriorating. The night sister wouldn’t fetch the doctor, saying he had refused to see the child earlier on. The baby died in Mrs Johnson’s arms just outside the White Hospital.

The baby in the first case was, albeit belatedly, protected by the state and afforded the treatment a citizen was entitled to. The second baby was not an Australian citizen. It was, as the doctor involved wrote in eerily familiar language, “a native non-citizen.” It was outside the state’s protection. Exposed to death.

There are not many people in Wyndham any more: 780, according to the last census. There are, however, a lot of graveyards. There’s the Pioneer Cemetery, a few dozen graves perched on the side of rocky hills overlooking the milky-tea water of the Cambridge Gulf; the Gully Cemetery, resting home of many former workers at the Wyndham Meatworks, and other Wyndham residents (mostly white); a more recently built cemetery around seven miles out of town, where you can find relatives of the current Wyndham folk; and the Afghan cemetery, home to the former Afghan cameleers, who are buried along with their former lead camel, or so it is assumed from the large size of the graves.

Then there is a stretch of fire-charred land, out of town, surrounded by chicken-wire fencing hung with a blackened sign. The site was unmarked until work crews excavating sand or building a golf course — the story is unclear — uncovered human remains: they belonged to former patients of the Native Hospital. A sign was erected to mark the spot, but the site has since been burned and the only word I could make out when I was there in 2017 was “burial.” It’s better than nothing. Locals tell me there are other unmarked graves around town, including just outside the boundaries of the former Native Hospital. When a local Aboriginal corporation, Joorok Ngarni, took over the old hospital buildings in the 1990s, the workers used to rush to get out of there by sundown; too many ghosts.

Chance discovery: the site where the remains of former patients of the Native Hospital were found. Annabel Stafford

The Wyndham Native Hospital opened in 1937, which happened to be the year my grandfather passed through Wyndham on his way to London. The resident Wyndham doctor took Pop, a fellow medico, to see the hospital, which was three miles out of town. “The colour question here is very strong,” Pop wrote to my grandmother, “and the whites refuse to have natives in [town] unless absolutely necessary.” (He was not wrong. In a letter written when the hospital was still a proposal, Western Australia’s chief protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, suggested it be built out of town so “the susceptibilities of the local whites would not be offended by the presence of diseased natives in town.”) I might never have known about the hospital except that I was writing a novel about a ship’s doctor and, for verisimilitude’s sake, my ship was following the same route as my grandfather’s had, and my doctor visiting some of the same places.

Researching the Wyndham Native Hospital, I came across a list of patients posted online by the Centre for Indigenous Family History Studies. The patients were categorised: “F/B,” “H/C” and “?.” I had to look up the acronyms; they stood for “full-blood” and “half-caste.” I learnt other terms too, like “quadroon” and “octoroon,” and “gin” and “lubra.” It seems incredible, but up until then it had somehow escaped me that there were segregated hospitals — an apartheid health system — in Australia in 1937. I went searching for the hospital in Western Australia’s State Records Office.

Wyndham was “far flung,” my grandfather wrote in 1937, “but not flung far enough.” (“Eighty miles up the arsehole of the world,” one local told me last year in an updated version of the slur.) In any case, Wyndham wasn’t flung far enough for the WA government either.

By 1937, the town had become an important port. Land in the East Kimberley had largely been “cleared” of its original owners, many of whom had been forced into unpaid labour or itinerancy on their own land, and pastoral stations established across the Kimberley, a process that Mary Anne Jebb and Chris Owen have meticulously documented. In 1919, the state government had opened the Wyndham Meatworks, and every year from May to September cattle were driven into Wyndham from all over the Top End.

Hundreds of single male workers also sailed into town for the season and, as Neville wrote to his undersecretary in 1928, “motor transport” brought young men into the East Kimberley, where they consorted with “natives.” There was “in consequence a greater danger of disease being spread amongst whites than in the past when the majority of teamsters and station hands were elderly men.”

The irony, of course, was that it was the very exploitation of Aboriginal women that had caused the “danger of disease” in the first place. White men who worked in the East Kimberley, even “responsible” white station officials, as one doctor wrote in 1931, “make no secret of the frequency and facility with which they gratify their appetite” with Aboriginal women. Some of the relationships were genuine; many were not. One former patient I spoke to, taken to the hospital as a five-year-old, remembers young women with dresses wet in the back from “the pox.” She tells me they caught it from sleeping with white men. Did they want to, I ask? They had to, she says.

There were people who seemed to genuinely want to alleviate suffering. But overall, the archives make it clear the hospital was mainly built to “protect” the white population by getting sick Aboriginal people out of town, out of reach of white men, and preserving an unpaid labour force. Even Neville later admitted that the “belated attempt to stamp out disease in the North” did not emerge from a sense of care but because, as he wrote in Australia’s Coloured Minority (1947), the white residents were “afraid of disease spreading to ourselves — afraid the disease would lose us many useful cheap workers in the pastoral industry.”

People were brought to the hospital from all over the Kimberley and Northern Territory, few of them voluntarily. In one letter in the archive, written a few years before the hospital was built, Neville complains that he can’t send Aboriginal people to hospital except if they agreed to go. Still, amendments to the law were planned “to cover this.” Just before the hospital opened, new legislation was passed allowing the commissioner (formerly the chief protector) to appoint “some suitable person” to medically examine Aboriginal people; these individuals could use “such means as may be necessary” to force people to submit to examination.

The 1936 Aborigines Act Amendment Act also meant that the minister, who had only been able to imprison Aboriginal people on reserves, could now also imprison them in hospitals, schools and other institutions. And there were tough new punishments — including jail — for those who tried to escape. Gidja woman Biddy Trust, who was taken to the hospital as an eleven-year-old with an eye infection she got from washing wool, told me that “they used to send people from all over the place.” Most of them “didn’t even know what they were there for.”

And so, on this small stretch of red-dirt earth at the Three Mile, the normal political–juridical order of Australia was suspended. Habeas corpus was denied. The place was ruled by a semi-sovereign in the shape of a manager who was authorised by government regulation to summarily put inmates in confinement for two weeks for, among other things, neglect of duty or insubordination.

This land at the Three Mile was — to borrow a phrase from Suvendrini Perera, who borrowed it from Bernard Cohen — “not-Australia.” And the people kept in not-Australia were not Australians. They had been stripped of their rights. They were, in the words of the doctor I quoted earlier, native non-citizens. The Wyndham Native Hospital was what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls a “camp.” And because it was a camp, it tells us something about how this nation was built: on exclusion.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal Western Australians, like other Indigenous people, had been considered, at least theoretically, British subjects. But as Australia moved towards Federation, they were progressively disenfranchised by a series of Acts that, as historian Peter Biskup has pointed out, made voting dependent on land ownership, as understood in the European sense, and on race.

In 1893, “Aboriginal natives” were excluded from voting unless they owned a certain amount of property. In 1899, the wording of the law was tightened to make it clear that insufficiently propertied persons of “the half-blood” were locked out too. And in the 1907 Western Australian Electoral Act, all Aboriginal people and persons of “the half-blood” were excluded regardless of property. Further legislation meant Aboriginal people in Western Australia could also be subject to forced medical examinations, have their children abducted, have their money and property taken by the state, and be imprisoned in an institution like the Wyndham Native Hospital.

It is striking that this disenfranchisement, the reduction of Western Australian Aboriginal people to less than citizens, occurred alongside the birth of the modern Australian nation as though it were the precondition for the new Federation. It was as though, as W.E.H. Stanner wrote in 1963, “The primary axiom of settlement, or at least of development [was] that Aboriginal and European society could not or must not be allowed to coexist.” Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr argue, in their 2007 book Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, that all nation-building is inherently utopian because it tries to create a unity that has never existed. Australian nation-building was doubly utopian in that, as many eugenics scholars have pointed out, the new Commonwealth tried to design a future population by locking out races and individuals seen as, in the language of the day, dysgenic or defective. The tools of design, identified by Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (2004), were those immigration restrictions known as the White Australia policy and “the widespread use of segregation of those deemed outside the civic body.”

Theories of social Darwinism, biological racial difference and eugenics, which had begun to take hold in the decades before Federation, would have a devastating effect on who was to be included as a citizen in the young Australia. According to Sandra Peart and David Levy, who wrote about the impact of eugenics on post-classical economics for a 2003 issue of The Journal of the History of Economic Thought, the social Darwinist paradigm saw the belief that humanity was essentially made of the same stuff and shared equal potential give way to the idea that some “races” were incapable of advancement. Meanwhile, new discoveries in bacteriology were contributing to an epidemiological view of different populations as more likely to succumb to and pass on disease. And so, as medical historian Warwick Anderson wrote in a 2000 issue of Medical History Supplement, “a White Australia finally could be represented as a medical necessity, not just a national goal.”

In 1931, S.D. Porteus, a professor of racial psychology at the University of Hawaii, concluded, as Anderson writes elsewhere, that Aboriginal people probably lacked the ethnic capacity for civilisation. It was not an isolated view. In September 1925, the Legislative Assembly of the WA parliament had debated a proposed amendment to the Electoral Act that would have overturned a clause preventing “half-bloods” from voting. The British government was pressing for British Indians now resident in Australia to be given the franchise. If Indians could vote (the argument for “half-blood” voting rights went), surely “half-castes” could too? Sir James Mitchell — who served as premier in separate stints before and after this debate — fought the proposed change, saying that “half-castes” were “not capable of exercising any responsibility.” They were a threat to progress, living standards, public education and moral outlook. Others backed his view. The Bill was defeated in the Legislative Council on a technicality.

Meanwhile, as social Darwinism grew in influence and certain races were deemed incapable of citizenship or civilisation, the number of Western Australians captured under the definition of “native” grew. Soon, almost anyone with a hint of Aboriginal heritage was locked out of the nation. In 1905, only those “half-castes” who lived with an Aboriginal partner or community, or who were under sixteen, were included as “aborigines.” By 1936, all “half-castes” were classed as “natives,” as well as some “quadroons.” The more Aboriginal “blood” you had, the fewer rights you enjoyed and the more control you were subject to.

“Second-class citizen” is a term often used to describe the position of Aboriginal people in Australia, but it’s way too generous. In a widely quoted observation in his 1942 book Black Australians, Paul Hasluck described the legal status to which Aboriginal Western Australians were confined after the state’s 1936 Aborigines Act Amendment Act as being closer to the status of a “born idiot than of any other class of British subject.” Giorgio Agamben might have described it as “bare life.”

The first appearance of bare life, Agamben writes in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), was a figure in ancient Roman law known as the homo sacer, or sacred man. The ancient Greeks had separated life into “zoe,” or simple biological life, and “bios,” the life of social participation, but the homo sacer was another category of life again. This individual could not be sacrificed, but was exposed to death because the sovereign would not punish anyone that murdered him. The homo sacer was set outside human jurisdiction and yet did not come under divine jurisdiction either. His was a life stripped of rights and exposed to death.

The official records of the Wyndham Native Hospital are written in emotionless prose that might well have been described using the words of W.E.H. Stanner, who in 1968 reflected on his own earlier reports of living conditions for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. There was “a very interesting absence of declamation,” he wrote. “Apparently what lay before my eyes seemed to me a natural and inevitable part of the Australian scene, one that could possibly be palliated, but not ever changed in any fundamental way.”

There is a similar absence of declamation in the records related to the hospital. There is no mention, for example, of how the baby’s parents reacted after Mrs Johnson asked “the sister would she please examine the baby as she thought it had just died in her arms.” The banality of language alone suggests the inmates of the hospital were viewed as “bare life” rather than citizens; and perhaps they were more than just viewed as such. Agamben argues that because it has lost all the protections of citizenship and abandoned to death, bare life is exposed to things that a citizen would never be.

Reading through the archives, I found instances of what looked to be treatment withheld, and not just from individual patients like the two babies whose stories I told at the beginning of this essay. In 1939 the then Wyndham doctor, Keith Sweetman, took blood from all the natives employed in Wyndham and “found that all had positive Kline tests or in other words had syphilis or yaws.” Dr Sweetman wrote to Commissioner Neville to find out what to do. The patients would have to be treated in the White Hospital in town because the Native Hospital was already full and, moreover, who would pay? The government? Finally, he wrote, “Am I to bother about treating them at all?”

The query was passed on to the commissioner of public health, Everitt Atkinson, who responded: “I do not think that we should consider the wholesale treatment of every native” who returns a positive test. Instead, he recommended treating only those who had lesions or who had given birth to children with syphilis; the others may only have had yaws or congenital syphilis and were unlikely to be infectious. Playing devil’s advocate, it’s possible Atkinson didn’t want to subject otherwise healthy people to a treatment with uncertain results, but it is difficult to imagine a similar response had the patients been white. (Indeed Atkinson had presided over schemes in which whites could get free treatment for syphilis, but which did not extend to Aboriginal people.)

There are hints, too, of experimentation. In the same 1939 letter, Atkinson suggested Sweetman “try treatment upon a few” of those who had tested positive for syphilis “with a view to discovering whether anti-syphilitic treatment renders the blood test negative.” A few days later Sweetman replied, confirming that “a certain number of patients” who showed no sign of syphilis other than the positive blood test were being treated “to gain information as to future action.” The “future policy” of the Native Hospital would be to test all patients, but only treat those with obvious signs of syphilis.

Perhaps Sweetman was going to keep track of whoever tested positive in case wholesale treatment was later decided upon. Still, testing for a disease you don’t intend to treat could be read as experimentation. It recalls the Tuskegee study of “Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” which had begun seven years earlier and left men untreated to see how the disease would progress.

There were other cases of treatment that no citizen would have been subject to: patients sleeping on the floor or sharing beds, and unpaid Aboriginal workers locked up with patients at night. Biddy Trust remembers that people with suspected leprosy were kept chained up and locked in small huts, their food passed to them through the gap at the bottom of the hut door and their only toilet a bucket. Some of them were kept in the hut for several months, she says. When patients died they were buried in unmarked graves and it often took months or years for family members to be notified.

Reg Birch may have collected some of those patients. As a boy, he used to help his father collect bodies from the hospital and load them onto a truck used to collect nightsoil. There were so many that Reg started getting nightmares, so his mum sewed him a cloth bag to put over his head when there was a corpse to load onto the flatback.

“Put on your bag, Reg,” his dad would say.

And then there is this: in 1942, after the white women and children had been evacuated from Wyndham over fears the Japanese would bomb the town, Biddy Trust and the other inmates of the Native Hospital were dropped out in the bush, and told to make their way south to the Aboriginal cattle station at Moola Bulla and hide from any low-flying planes along the way. Some of the remaining townspeople took pity on them, commandeered vehicles and drove out to leave them food and water or drive them part of the way south. Other than that, they were left exposed to the enemy.

It’s hard to reconcile the abandonment of the Native Hospital patients and the micromanagement and control to which they were subject. But at a protest rally against offshore detention earlier this year, I came closer to putting the two things together. One of the rally organisers read out a letter from the men on Manus Island. The men didn’t want to come to Australia, they wrote. They wanted only to be set free. Their situation seemed to me akin to that of the inmates in the Wyndham Native Hospital: Australia, though it had abandoned them, would not release them. They were tethered to the state in what Agamben calls a relation of abandonment, at once completely turned over to the law and abandoned outside its protection.

Why bother trying to see the Wyndham Native Hospital as a camp and its inmates as bare life? Because, according to Agamben, bare life is the original political element, the basis of state power. In the state of nature that existed before, when everyone was bare life to one another, the sovereign first established its rule through an originating act of violence over all the other bare lives. To maintain its power, the sovereign carries with it into the state the ability to dissolve its new kingdom and reduce its subjects to bare life. The sovereign alone would not revert to bare life but hold on to its power, which would now be absolute. Agamben calls this situation a “state of exception.”

For a long time, Agamben writes, all this was largely theoretical, since you were generally subject to whoever ruled the region into which you were born. But with the French Revolution and the birth of the modern state, with declarations of rights and citizenship, it was no longer so easy to determine who was in and who was out. It was this new difficulty, Agamben says, that accounts for the flurry of provisions issued in the wake of the French Revolution specifying who was a citizen and who was not. Maybe it also explains why in the wake of Australian Federation there was such a welter of laws specifying which person was a citizen and which a mere “native.”

The birth of the nation-state occurred at what Michel Foucault has identified as the “threshold of modernity,” when the state’s raison d’être changed from maintaining its own power to managing the biological lives of its citizens, a phenomenon he calls “biopolitics.” Agamben finds the first juridical appearance of the “biopolitical structure of modernity” in a “well-intentioned pamphlet” on euthanasia issued in 1920 and entitled Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived. The idea of life unworthy of being lived suggested its flip side: the life that is worthy of living. And this, Agamben writes, “implies a new decision concerning the threshold beyond which life ceases to be politically relevant, becomes only ‘sacred life’ and can as such be eliminated without punishment.”

The horrific apotheosis of the camp, of course, was the Nazi concentration camp. But Agamben argues that it is not what occurs in a camp that marks it out as such; rather, it is its structure — its suspension of the normal political and legal order, and the reduction of its inmates to bare life. The holding space in which asylum seekers are held at French airports can be described as a camp, as can Guantanamo Bay. Agamben writes, “Whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law, but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign [in the camp].” In a 2002 edition of Borderlands e-journal, Suvendrini Perera builds on Agamben, arguing that it is in the camp, where bare life confronts unbridled sovereign power, that the claims of the human (as opposed to the citizen) are tested, and found to be almost non-existent. Agamben points out that one of the rules to which the Nazis fastidiously adhered during the Final Solution was that Jewish people could be sent to an extermination camp only when they had been fully denationalised. No German citizen could be sent to the camps. In a similar manner, no Australian citizen could be sent to the Wyndham Native Hospital, only a “native.”

Seeing the Wyndham Native Hospital as a camp makes it possible to explain, though not understand, the possible experimentation on inmates, the withheld treatment and the tiny huts for lepers. It also makes it possible to explain how patients, apparently brought to the hospital for healing, were dumped in the bush in 1942.

Not long before Biddy Trust and her fellow hospital inmates were dumped, a missionary from the nearby Forrest River Mission, John Best, met with an army major from the North Australia Observation Unit, which was tasked with patrolling the north of the country to watch for signs of foreign invasion. Best had been told by a senior army officer that Aboriginal people in the Kimberley were considered a threat in the instance of a Japanese invasion, according to Neville Green, who records the incident in Triumphs and Tragedies: Oombulgurri, an Australian Aboriginal Community (2011). Best “took this to mean that the Kimberley Aborigines were expendable.” At their meeting, he asked the major if there was an extermination order. The major did not deny it, but “assured him that no Aborigines would be shot while he was the officer in charge,” Green writes. “Best’s concern was for the 939 persons counted at Kalumburu, Forrest River, Kunmunya, Munja and the Wyndham Native Hospital.” The major’s name was W.E.H. Stanner.

Expendable, unworthy of life, bare life, mere life, not politically relevant: to echo Agamben writing of the treatment of Jewish people under Nazism, the term “racism” is inadequate to describe such concepts. If what paved the way for the Wyndham Native Hospital was racism or eugenics or social Darwinism, then the task of understanding it is arguably not as urgent, since social Darwinism has long since been debunked and eugenics rejected, and we’re at least working on racism. But if what permitted the existence of the Wyndham Native Hospital was a decision between valuable or relevant life on the one hand and mere life on the other, and further if this is still, as Agamben contends, the underlying structure of the modern nation-state, then the urgency remains.

As an example, consider the health gap between non-Indigenous and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians: the difference in life expectancy and in the numbers of children who die under five, the levels of type 2 diabetes, and the suicides of young people in the Kimberley. If you consider all this as a legacy of racism, you will see certain solutions. More medicine, better access to healthy food, more youth drop-in centres, for example. But if you see it as a legacy of life categorised as “irrelevant” or “not worthy of life,” the task is much greater. And if, as Agamben contends, the excluded bare life and the sovereign are inextricably linked, if they give form to one another, then the inequalities also tell us something about how the Australian state creates and maintains itself.

There is, to use Stanner again, “a very interesting absence of declamation” in the word “gap,” as though it were just a reflection of what exists, of a natural occurrence. It seems to me that “gap” rebrands mistreatment into a racial profile, as if we thought high child mortality and low life expectancy and diabetes were linked to Aboriginality, as if they were not the consequences of a relationship of abandonment.

When I was in Wyndham, I met an elderly woman who had been moved there after her home in Oombulgurri — an Aboriginal community on the former site of the Forrest River Mission — was razed by the state government amid claims the place was dysfunctional. Her home was destroyed and she now lives along with members of her extended family in a corrugated-iron donga on the main road of Wyndham. A few years ago, her granddaughter hanged herself, age thirteen, a few metres away from the site of the old Native Hospital.

A life deemed unworthy of life. ●

This essay first appeared in Griffith Review 61: Who We Are, edited by Julianne Schultz and Peter Mares.

The post The hospital for bare life appeared first on Inside Story.