“Sixty-five Thousand Two-hundred and Thirty-odd Reasons to Vote Yes”. My essay just posted.

My essay “Sixty-five Thousand Two-hundred & Thirty-odd Reasons to Vote Yes” is posted here on my website at “Riffs & Plaints.” https://www.marktredinnick.com/riffs-and-plaints/sixty-five-thousand-two-hundred-amp-thirty-odd-reasons-to-vote-yes

This referendum is what a poem is—an enormous moment. Let’s please not miss it. A chance to begin to set right a moral wrong and to set the house we live in on surer footings; an invitation to enter into a fuller and truer understanding of ourselves and a story as big and long as the continent, as various as its geographies.

Here’s a summary: What is envisaged by the authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is not a war, but a peace, a gift: The constitutional amendment—recognition of Indigenous Australians through a voice to Parliament—that we are asked to consider on 14 October begins to fix a structural injustice (dispossession and its aftermath) and allows Indigenous Australians to take constitutional responsibility for their destiny; it obliges a tone-deaf polity to listen to First Nations people; it opens the way to a practical Makarrata (agreement-making and truth-telling, a coming together after struggle, a reconciliation); and by these means, this constitutional reform, a small step in the direction of truth and justice and dignity for all of us on this land, will in time allow all Australians to step proudly into a story of belonging sixty-five thousand years old.