Sixty-five Thousand Two Hundred & Thirty-odd Reasons to Vote Yes

1.

I  W A S   W A L K I N G the track around the abandoned trachyte quarry near the top of this little mountain at whose feet I am lucky to live. I was walking the dogs on their leads, and they are young spaniels, so that was, as it always is, an exercise that refuses to run straight and never runs slow, unless it stops completely.

Walking with them, I find it hard to let as much of the place reach me as is proper, let alone to follow the track of my own thoughts, because of the need the dogs have to stop and scent about and rush ahead, rarely both of them at once in the same direction. Every walk with them is a random walk, a battle to hold a course through turbulence, to make order within chaos.

But the sun was out, and the wind was low and some wattles had thrown their mid-September amber like a whole era of stars, and I saw the spinebill schlep her slender trim song from one side to the other of the walking track, and up the slope among the lying cut rocks, I heard one half of the whipbird antiphon, a call without, yet, a response; about halfway up the largest of the brown-barrel gums (E. fastigata) that, with the ribbon gums (E. viminalis), hold the sky a long way up up there, I watched a grey fantail splay and hop its neat triangulated display of tail feathers as if it might only keep its balance up there by means of such extravagance.

Watching the little bird command its space and moment so impeccably made me aware, and allowed me even to dwell for a moment in, the sheer scale, the height and girth, the handsome substantiality of the tree, the sovereign gum, the primus inter pares of the lower slopes of Little Mountain.

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2.

T H I S  is Bowral I’m talking about. Gundungurra country: never, like anywhere else on this landmass, ceded, never signed over to the colonists who moved in and moved them on and claimed the place and renamed it. Bowral is from “Bowrel,” we think, a word that means “high”. And this is the highest point, this peak properly called “Little Mountain” (Mittagong), of the high ground here along the Wingecarribee where I live, and Little Mountain is the highest point between the coast at Sydney and the nation’s capital, southwest, in Canberra. By virtue of a thousand chances, I am free enough to walk here among these trees and birds and the brick-a-brack a vacated quarry visits on a place.

I am grateful for the chance, for all the chances, but I am uneasy. The physical ground I walk is sound; the legal ground I stand on quakes; the moral ground lacks all integrity. I walk where I walk because of, and in the aftermath of, the violent dispossession of those whose land this was and is, who held it sacred and hold it sacred still. I belong to and have had the advantages delivered by a colonising culture that took adverse possession of this land here, and the whole of what they ultimately called Australia, and which has never yet put right the illegitimacy of the claim the crown made to possession of this land, a multitude of disparate geographies, each of them, at the time the settlers came and took what they wanted, a self-governing nation, a state, a sophisticated social ecology, a polity.

And it is upon this illegitimate title—it is from the extended use of this taken land—that everything we now know as Australia and its (“common”)wealth is founded: the wealth that came from quarrying this peak, for example, whose rocks clad the Queen Victoria Building, and the wealth that my hard-working parents were able to accumulated (humble though it is) because they came into what was accepted as ownership of the real estate, one small suburban block of land in Epping in suburban NSW, I grew up on.

And I am troubled by the injustice and inequity that inheres in the current dispensation of the culture, of the nation, of the economy, of the system of governance, I belong to and have the freedom of. I am troubled by the theft and violence, the untruth and denial, and the ingratitude upon which my nation and my freedom are founded.

If Australia is a house, its footings are infirm; we have built on sand, not rock. There is something foundational we need to secure; there are cracks in the tower of belonging we inhabit. The structure of our being here together lacks integrity, and it’s past time to set that right. I am troubled by all this here among this quiet beauty that is mine to wander, not by any title of my own, not yet by any ancestral right thousands of generations long, but by virtue of the freedom of my citizenship of a state that did not rightly own what it claimed when it claimed it.

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3.

AN D I am troubled that on the edge of a grand chance to begin to put right a gross wrong, to begin at least to listen on all issues, as a matter of constitutional necessity, to the representatives of the dispossessed, we are, many of my fellow Australians, baulking. Within sight of, not so much the finish, as the start, we choke. Most of us, if the polls are right, can’t see a problem worth fixing, or we can’t understand the moral compunction to start listening to those whose silencing has bought us our wealth.

Science, as the authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart say, accepts that many parts of this landmass have been held for sixty-five thousand years, and for the greater part of that time governed and occupied and farmed and sacralised, by First Peoples, by the people of the three hundred or so nations who possessed and loved and managed and owned and were owned by these realms when Cook laid claim to some of this landmass in 1770 and when on 26 January 1788, Philip laid claim to all of it, falsely believing, or at least asserting, that the land was, as near as damnit, empty. It took about two weeks for the fallacy of that belief to be established. Everywhere settlers went they met resistance and evidence of established governance, of languages that had boundaries, of distinctive cultures and practices of land management. But the great Australian tragedy is that, aware of the bankruptcy of the basis of the claim for title here, and against protests from good minds and hearts in London and the colonies, Australian leaders and colonists pressed on with a dispossession that lasted a hundred years and cost many tens of thousands of Indigenous lives. And that was the basis, though never officially, of the Federation of Australia.

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4.

B U T this referendum is not about title. The time will come, as it must, when the settler culture pays what is owed for the land it—this so called “common wealth”—is founded on. There will be treaties, as there are in every other place on earth where a colonising power took over country held by First Nations people. Justice needs to be done, and reparation made, in the realm where the foundational injustice—the dispossession—was enacted. There will be integrity, then; there will be dignity, then, at the heart of a shared occupation of this land; there may be reconciliation. Australia, when we sort out an honourable peace between first peoples and second and third, may in time become in the minds and lives of all its people, a story sixty-five thousand years old: a place and a culture as long, as eternal, as the story of its first peoples, as new as the story of European occupation and the coming of western democracy, as complex as the three-hundred nations that comprised this world in 1770, and as intricate and manifold as the hundreds of languages and literatures that have settled it and called it home since the Second World War.

But do let’s get our first house in order, so that we do not forever remain an argument for an idea founded on false premises.

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5.

W H A T is proposed at the referendum on 14 October is a small step in the direction of truth and justice and dignity; it is a threshold (another one, a small one) I hope we do not fail to cross toward our maturing as a people. What is proposed is symbolic and practical and simple and, at the same time, enormous.

I take the trail among the gums around the quarry on the little mountain, and I hear the call of the whipbird that so far receives no response, and I watch the fantail pivot in the white gum, and I think about the small and vital question that is being asked of us, the offer that is being made, the chance that is being given. The poem, wrote, Francis Webb, is the enormous moment. Like the bird in the tree, like the whipbird’s plea and the antiphonal response it listens for—and like this constitutional amendment we are asked to vote for.

And I think this referendum is about what poetry (like birdsong) is about: the dignity, delight and freedom that arise from, and inhere within, moments of the world (human episodes, more than merely human phenomena, losses and loves) which we do not fail, for once, to miss or to bear true witness to. A poem speaks for what all other discourses (digital, conversational, commercial, political, academical, scientific) disregard or overlook or disdain or deny: the ultimate truth of our existences, felt in our hearts and carried in our cells, notwithstanding the silence the rest of our narratives keep about them—how our lives feel, moment to moment. The poem does justice—without blame or shame or stereotype or slander or platitude, without reduction or apology—to what Being feels like, to what our lives mean in themselves in this world; it catches and holds dear the truth of things down deep.

As Blake famously asserts, the politics of the poem is to speak for the world in the grain of sand, the heaven it reconstitutes in the wild flower, the eternity it helps you inhabit again inside the anonymous hour. And I would add, the revolution the poem perpetuates is the refusal of all that diminishes our sense of our selves and each other and the world.

I think this referendum is a moment like that. As enormous as that. And here’s some more news poetry tells: it is not the years that endure; it is the moments. And this is one.

Dispossession is lived daily by everyone on this continent who participates in the transactions of daily life. It is part of the truth of every Australian life, whether we bring it into awareness or not. We live in denial (and violence and refusal of the truth of how contemporary society got to be what it is) just as truly as we live in suburbs and relationships and democracy. This wants fixing for all our sakes, for the integrity of all our lives and for the justice that we’d all wish done to them.

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6.

T H E C H A N G E to the Constitution we are asked to vote for has two parts, and the two parts are interlinked: that Indigenous Australians be recognised in the Constitution; and that their recognition occur by means of the setting up of a body, to be called the Voice, to be consulted and to make (non-binding) representations to Government, on matters “relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

There is widespread support, it seems, and there has been for some time, for the first of these two propositions—for recognition, for acknowledgment in the Constitution of Indigenous People (“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples” is the accepted phrasing) and of their long-term governance of the land, their prior occupation of the geographies that became, with Federation, Australia. But a long process of national Indigenous dialogues, wider community consultation and expert advice, which began in 2015 and involved a National Constitutional Convention in May 2017, the drafting at that convention of the Uluru Statement of the Heart, the making of recommendations to government from the Referendum Council and the report of a National Co-Design Group, appointed by then (Liberal) Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Ken Wyatt, rejected the idea of recognition alone, and proposed instead “practical recognition,” linking recognition to a Voice to Parliament. That idea—an amendment to the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians through a Voice to Parliament—is in other words, an idea much older than the current moment. It is well-rehearsed and thoroughly considered and long-debated in Indigenous communities and among constitutional experts. (A series of regional dialogues of First Nations Australians, held in twelve locations across Australia from December 2016 to May 2017, overwhelmingly favoured the Voice, ranking it as the first reform priority (ahead of treaty-making and a process of truth-telling).)

And so it is that recognition in the Constitution through a Voice to Parliament is what Indigenous Australians have asked all Australians to consider and vote for. Nothing else. Just that.   

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7.

I N  O T H E R words, the Voice, the idea that recognition take the form of a body, written into the infrastructure of Australian democracy, is not a political idea, or a politician’s idea. It is not a Labor idea. It is not a White idea. It is not a Woke idea. It arises from First Peoples, where it emerged organically; it received close to unanimous support at the regional dialogues of Indigenous people and was endorsed by the National Constitutional Convention (whose 250 Indigenous delegates were elected by the participants in the regional dialogues) in Uluru in May 2017.

It is worth going into this detail because I think it is not widely understood where the idea of the Voice came from, and how it is the endpoint of a process of consultation and deliberation that has unimpeachable integrity and inclusiveness. We are asked to accept a constitutional change that enacts recognition of first peoples through the establishment and ongoing participation in our democracy of an advisory group of First Nations peoples. We are asked to accept this proposition by people who have seen their lands taken, their existence denied, their culture disparaged and dismembered, their citizenship only lately accepted. We are asked to agree that the democratic system that we participate in will take account of Indigenous voices and advice on all areas of policy that bear on Indigenous interests.

In light of the long history, first of denial and decimation of Indigenous Australians, and then of paternalistic and very often inadequate and tone-deaf policy initiatives with regard to Indigenous Australians, the reform seems modest and belated. And if you think of the long history of Indigenous disadvantage that has resulted from the silencing and exclusion—through denial, practices of annihilation, and universal dispossession—of First Nations people, the Voice proposal, the idea of this practical recognition, the idea that we will all now listen to those we’ve long silenced, is both modest and astonishingly generous.

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8.

Y O U would think, from the noise and outrage the Voice proposal has excited, that an indigenous advisory group was a new and radical idea. That we were the first nation on the planet to consider compromising our democracy in this fashion.

In fact, many countries have introduced such an arrangement in the last twenty years, and in none of them has democracy been corroded or the nation been divided on racial grounds; in none have Indigenous people used the vehicle of the advisory group to assume control or to stymie economic growth. Finland and Sweden and Norway have First Nations Parliaments with even more authority than the Voice will have. New Zealand reserves seven seats for Maori. In Colombia the constitution now requires the government to consult first peoples on some issues including, in particular, the mining of Indigenous lands.

It's also worth noting that such mechanisms, and in particular the Voice, are at one with the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, ratified by Australia in 2009. The point of a mechanism such as the Voice is, as the UN declaration puts it, to give “Indigenous people the right to participate in decision-making in matters which would affect their rights, through representatives chosen by themselves…”

No, Derryn Hinch, the Voice is not a lobby group. Nor are they a third chamber; the Voice has no power to block supply or enact legislation. They are a voice the rest of us are constitutionally obliged to listen to, just in case our moral obligation to consult and listen to those we have too long ignored or disparaged or patronised ever lets us down again. Just in case it turns out that Indigenous people, through a representational process that respects Indigenous cultural traditions as well as Western ideas of inclusion and due process, have some better ideas (than the system of government in play to date) about policies and procedures to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians.

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9.

J U S T  to recap then, and to be very clear: recognition of First Nations Australians through an advisory body enshrined in the Constitution is a proposal that culminates from fifty years of consultation with and among Indigenous Australians (since the 1967 referendum); it puts in place a mechanism that gives effect to a key term of the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous People; such Indigenous advisory bodies operate within other democratic systems, like Finland, and no First Nations’ putsches have been reported to date; and while this reform obliges (and sets up a neat mechanism for allowing) government (and all of us through them) to consult with and listen to Indigenous Australians on matters that affect their lives, it mandates nothing but listening. For two hundred and thirty years, the powers that be in Australia and the Australian citizenry have been very bad listeners to the needs and plight of First Nations Australians; the Voice compels us all at last to listen.

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10.

I F  Y O U read a book like Megan Davis and George Williams’s Everything You Need to Know About The Voice, which every voter should, you realise a couple of things most of us still don’t seem to comprehend.

One is how consultative and representative and how accountable, how robust, the process has been since 2015, that led to the proposal we’re all asked to vote on.

The other is how that process is really the end of a long endeavour led by Indigenous elders since the 1967 referendum, supported on and off by governments of both political stripes and pursued through a succession of Councils and Committees, and involving a referendum in 1999 which failed to win support for a poorly drafted preamble recognising Indigenous Peoples—an endeavour aimed at justice for, recognition of, and reconciliation with First Peoples. What we are asked to consider has already been long considered—by Indigenous Australians, by lawyers and governments and courts.

The process has not been tidy, but it has been sustained and focused and deeply thoughtful. Many fine people have dedicated their lives to this process, and justice is most of what they seek: A more dignified and grown-up Australia, a more high-minded Australia, an Australian polity of more legal integrity and more moral robustness. The work that has led to this current proposal runs deep and long and it is worthy of our respect.

When I hear this work trashed by the critics of the proposal, I am troubled; there may be some among the leaders of this civil rights movement whose motives were less than pure, whose behaviour was less than perfect, but many Indigenous leaders and many non-Indigenous supporters have worked hard and selflessly for fifty years to secure justice for First Nations people and to overturn the hypocrisy and denial upon which the Federation is founded, and by virtue of which injustice is written into the structures of government and the bases of power in this land. This work is worthy of respect, and it has yielded this very moderate proposal. It is wrong to depict it as some power grab. A leftist cabal. A coup.

One becomes aware how little engagement most Australian citizens have, or have ever had—or, worst of all, ever care to have—with the dispossession of Indigenous people upon which Australian prosperity with its built-in inequities is founded. “How can we sleep, while our beds are burning?” the Oils sang out in the eighties. We know the song, but few of us care to smell the burning, and fewer realise the work that’s gone on for generations, trying to see justice done, to see some rent paid, some fires put out.

How can it be that at the end of all that work, so many of my fellow Australians are asking “Where has all this come from? What is it all about?” How can we be so susceptible to claims that this reform will divide us—this reform which attempts a small putting right of a very great wrong, a mechanism that, by compelling listening, is likely to do more than a little good to people wronged for 230 years? One is only susceptible to the empty claim that the Voice is divisive if the division that began with denial and dispossession and was perpetuated by violence and policy, is, itself, denied or minimised or overlooked. The way, for instance, Jacinta Price, the opposition spokesperson for Indigenous Affairs, one of the leaders of the No Campaign, proclaimed at the National Press Club that colonisation had caused no trauma or harm to Indigenous people. It’s hard to say whether such a remark is most breathtaking in its ignorance or its recklessness, in its chutzpah or its cynicism. But this is exactly the sort of untruth the disengaged and sceptical are anxious to hear and predisposed to believe because they have lived their life inside a culture of denial, a habit of adverse possession of someone else’s land, a shutting of one’s eyes and ears, sustained for 235 years. Whether Jacinta Price believes what she said isn’t the point. She knows the damage it does (to the cause she opposes) by the false comfort it gives to people who’d rather not be troubled, at a time of high interest rates, by awareness of what national prosperity has cost the nation’s first people. Beginning with the theft of their lands.

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11.

W HA T became the Commonwealth of Australia at Federation emerged from a long process of congresses and conventions, too. Most of us trust in the probity of that process, though no one but white men took part in it, and it has yielded a lasting and robust system of representative democracy. We would do things differently now, but we rightly respect the process, notwithstanding its flaws. Equally, there is no good reason to mistrust the integrity and altruism of fifty years of deliberation and commitment and dialogue that have yielded this proposal for constitutional reform from the Indigenous communities of Australia. Particularly when the proposal for recognition through a Voice emerged from the same convention that produced the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

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12.

I  H A V E misgivings about the name. My own view is that “the Voice” is badly chosen. I’d have advised against using it—a phrase much less compelling than what it describes. The naming is well-intentioned, I think, but misjudged.

“The Voice” is a metonym that leaves too much daylight between what is meant and what is said. “The Voice” is airy and formless, and it has tended to awaken suspicion among those not accustomed to it as it has been used among Indigenous leaders and participants in the dialogues that led to the current proposal. How can a Voice, a vibrational thing, take a form? And what sort of form are we talking about? “Voice” has become a trope of our times, very widely used for perhaps too many things—“The Voice” is the name of a popular television show where unknown performers compete to be chosen for fame and glory; discovering one’s voice is the ambition of every aspiring creative, and it is code for “personality” or “personal story” or “personal integrity” in psychology and self-help. In particular, the idea of “voice” is an idiom associated with identity politics and theory, discourses which are to some otherwise fair-minded people, frighteningly austere, one-track-minded and radical.

“The Voice,” in other words, is a little too Woke for some and a little too commercial for others and for some, too vague to inspire trust.

All this, I have no doubt, is working against the majority acceptance of what is really a modest proposal—a deeply considered proposition that has garnered widespread support among Indigenous leaders and communities, an idea steeped in Indigeneity, an idea about justice and representation and practical change-making that has been a very long time coming. It’s not a proposal that belongs to the ideologies that are frightening off many who otherwise embrace it for what it is.

I wish it had a sober name like First Nations Council or Advisory Group. Could we not have called it a Congress or a Committee, a Panel or a Board? Less poetic terms, but less elusive, less redolent of a politics that has little to do with the modest and humble mechanism proposed. (Or an Indigenous term, in the same idiom as Makarrata, might have been the best choice of all.)

“The First Nations Parliament”: the term used in Scandinavia catches the importance of the body and its work and to the gravitas of the moment and the body. But can anyone imagine that term gaining traction in a constituency so easily scared as Australia?

But this is the name, “the Voice",” chosen by those in the Indigenous community who worked together to articulate the proposal they want to put to the Australian people. So this phrase deserves our respect. And we are not voting for or against a name or what we think it implies. We are voting for recognition of Indigenous Australians through a body representing them, whose work will be to make representations to Parliament on matters concerning the lives of Indigenous Australians. How it will be constituted falls to the Parliament, as is only right, and it may change over the years. But how it will run and what its organising principles are is well described in the design principles released by the Referendum Working Group for public discussion in late 2022 (and laid out in Megan Davis and George Williams’s book). Those design principles draw on the work of many expert panels and joint select committees and the Uluru Statement and other Indigenous groups over the past decade. So that no matter the shortcomings of “the Voice” as a brand, we know what we are being asked to vote for and what the scope and limits of its powers are. And the point of this body is to give voice to Indigenous people and for Parliament to listen. For all of us to listen.

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13.

O N Wednesday 27 September at the National Press Club in Canberra, where Jacinta Price a week or so earlier had denied that colonisation had worked so much as any ill-effects on First Nations peoples, her colleague Warren Mundine fronted up to make a declaration: The Uluru Statement from the Heart, he said, is “a symbolic declaration of war against modern Australia.” Now I don’t know how many declarations of war Mr Mundine has read, but I’m pretty sure the management of the retirement village down on Moss Vale Road, Bowral, who have the Uluru Statement hanging in their lobby, and who’ve had it up there since 2018, didn’t fix it there to declare a war. I’m pretty sure they have it on display because it inspires them to hope for and participate in “a movement of the Australian people for a better future,” to quote the last words of the short and inspiring statement.

The Uluru Statement is a mixed bag rhetorically, archaic and overblown here and there, and not the work of poetry one would love it to have been, but its tone is kind and its survey of history fair and its vision of the future inclusive and inspiring. I read in it no ultimata. It calls for and it seeks and it hopes and it invites. It offers the prospect that, through constitutional change, specifically a “First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution,” a crisis for Indigenous people that is “structural in nature” will yield to Indigenous people “power over our own destiny” so that “our children will flourish.” “They will walk in two worlds,” the statement goes on, “and their culture will be a gift to their country.”

What is envisaged is not a war, but a peace, and a gift: a people, three hundred nations, denied and violated and disparaged and patronised, will be heard, and being heard and recognised will heal, and being healed will help heal a nation divided one from another (first peoples from settlers) by exclusion, so that their “ancient sovereignty,” defined in the statement very clearly as a “spiritual notion,” ties to land and nature and “mother earth”, “can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.”

I read that the way the folks at Mt Eymard did. This constitutional reform, recognition through a Voice, begins to fix a structural injustice and allows Indigenous Australians to take constitutional responsibility for their destiny; it opens the way to practical Makarrata (agreement-making and truth-telling, a coming together, a reconciliation), and by these means it will allow all Australians to step proudly into a story sixty-five-thousand years old as their own.

If that’s the war, bring it on.

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14.

L O N G ago now (this would be the late 1980s), I remember a dinner party in Manly. My then wife’s friend Gina was introducing us to her new man, and I’d not long ago finished law school and I’d been reading Henry Reynolds’s The Law of the Land, which is a thing every Australian should do, and John, let’s call him, the new man, said after mains: “but where did they live, the Indigenous people? In the desert, right? Alice Springs? Nowhere near here.” And I said, “John, they lived here. Where else would you want to live? Look at the view and think of all the shellfish and the fishing and the loveliness of the beaches and bays. You know why it’s called Manly, right?” (I don’t think he’d heard that the place where we sat was dubbed “Manly” by Arthur Philip for the manliness of the men of the Eora Nation the governor’s explorers tangled with when the first put to shore where the ferry berths now.) “The question is why they’re not still here, the indigenes, or not many of them, and how it is you are here. How did that come to pass?”

I remember being struck by Reynolds’s invitation to consider how you’d feel if some folks with guns turned up one day, say tonight, and said to you and your family: “You don’t live here anymore; in fact, you never did; off you go.” It brought dispossession home to a young suburban man, who’d never, through the 1960s and 70s, been asked to spend much time considering the questions I was now putting to John. When I asked John how he’d feel if they knocked on the door now, he said, “anyone for coffee?” And so it was I killed another dinner party, and, with the help of Henry Reynolds, dispossessed, for a moment, some perfectly nice middle-class folks of their innocence.

For on the very land on which we ate our cheesecake, in Manly, some parts of the existential injustice visited on First Nations Australians, had almost certainly been transacted.

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15.

C A R L Jung thought that in all our lives there were aspects of our selves—trauma, shame, regrets, rage, loss, grief—we couldn’t face or own; he theorised that we put away our shames and horrors and fears in our shadow selves, in our deep unconscious, and turn from them; disowned, neglected, untended, they grew monstrous, he thought—they became grotesque versions, complementary opposites, of our espoused virtues, of those aspects of self we identified with. His thinking is bedded in ancient mystic understanding. Buddhism thinks a similar thought and advissd non-attachment. “The truth,” as the poet St John phrased it in his gospel (putting a positive spin on the same thing), “will make you free.” “If you bring forth what is within you,” wrote St Thomas in what is often called the Gnostic Gospel, “it will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.

This is the kind of thing Jung had in mind. The way to individuation and a reconciled Self, Jung advised, involved truth-telling, owning up to your unacknowledged selves, making horror tame and habitable again by dealing with it. By naming and inhabiting what terrified or wounded you, Jung felt that the obsessions and addictions that beset you in the present tense, all of them distorted versions of the thing that deeply ailed you, might lose their toxicity, their deadening power. Trauma, we now know, is carried by the body; old wounds, unresolved anxieties, can be triggered for many years, and when they are, they are felt as actual by the sufferer: PTSD, sustained abuse, neglect… Much dysfunctional behaviour, drug use, gambling, violence, in those who carry trauma is pain avoidance. It seems that relief from pain and from avoidant addictions entails naming and actualising the ailment, experiencing it again in the body, but in safety. “If you bring forth what is inside you, it will save you…”  

Australia has a dysfunctional relationship with land (an unhappy and uncanny irony on a continent that is home to the richest conception of belonging with land—the idea of Country—thew whole world knows). Australia has a real estate problem. It is our addiction, our daemon. The least house on the least nowhere suburban block has become unaffordable for all but the lucky; the young can never hope now to own a home; there are thousands homeless on the streets. This is a culture more than any other in the world that has made of the minor virtue of property ownership a virtue next to godliness. One of the indicators of the billowing equality gap in this land is the endlessly inflating price of real estate.

We are sick on real estate; we’ve made a mess of the suburban dream. This, I’m sure Jung would ask us to consider, is what happens in a dominant culture built on a profound anxiety, buried deep in its unconscious, about the legitimacy of its claim to any kind of title to land at all; a culture that chooses to forget, disclaim, or deny the lie that sovereign title is based on, the violence that took the land from those whose real estate it really was, and the shame that this has never been put right.

A house my parents bought for six thousand pounds in 1956 is now worth two million dollars. This is grotesque. They, themselves, if they were twenty-six and twenty-one now, couldn’t hope ever to afford the house we all grew up in and they repaid on one income. The real estate market is a gross distortion of value in proportion to the depth of anxious (half-buried) awareness of the injustice the whole system of real estate is based on. (This is a cultural malaise more than an individual one, I think.)

We are possessed by dispossession; our national obsession with the ownership of land, the absurdity of the price at which we trade small pieces of it, and the monstrous mess we’ve made of real estate in general is a measure of the depth of our national denial, I reckon, of the injustice upon which all non-Indigenous tenure on this continent is founded, and of how ongoing Indigenous disadvantage begins with the start of colonial adverse possession.

The housing affordability crisis, as it is politely put, is the monster that’s eating the great Australian myth: the fair go and the suburban plot and the safe and certain roof over your family’s head. It is the shadowside of the shamefulness of the way this continent was incrementally lifted, by the lie of terra nullius and by the violence of pastoral settlement, from the First Peoples of Australia. This shame-trauma affects all of us, and it afflicts the poorest and least advantaged among us most: the first peoples of Australia.

{The nature of the problem here is structural and spiritual, a broader societal expression of the same calamity that afflicts First Nations people, rising from the same source—the unredeemed wrong of the dispossession of First Peoples and the adverse possession of their lands by the colonisers and their descendants, for 230 odd years now.}

I know I’m scaring the horses here. Householders spook, especially in these days when the average house in Sydney will set you back a $1.3 million and rising, when the Sovereignty on which their title (and their enormous mortgage debt) is called into question. But this constitutional amendment has nothing to do with title; no one’s being asked to sign away their title. That never was the plan, nor is it a risk in law. Dispossession happened too long ago and the adverse possession has held for so long that in the eyes of the law, old claims would be said to have expired.

No one is coming for your house. Not in Manly, not in Mittagong, not in Mentone, not in Mandurah. This is about truth-telling not repossession; it’s about acknowledgment, not reparations. It’s a moral thing; not a legal thing. No one is  coming for your courtyard or your terrace; no one is suggesting you vacate and bugger off back to wherever their parents came from. Certainly not the Referendum Council or the drafters of the constitutional amendments that will create the Voice. Sovereignty, the Uluru Statement is at pains to point out, is a “spiritual notion;” although it was never ceded or extinguished, it “coexists with the sovereignty of the Crown.” That is the law of the land. So Mabo decided. So title is secure.

But the bringing forth what is within us all—a trauma of denial and dispossession; and, at the same time, a shared belonging here in these miraculous topographies, a shared story that includes war and resistance and ambition and altruism and heroism and awe and delight, a story also largely unspoken—can begin with this small step; the remaking of Australia, the larger becoming the Uluru Statement imagines, can begin with this commitment to listen to Indigenous articulations of need; from there we can move slowly into a more truthful, more honest and honourable understanding of all ourselves, and we can step into a story not 235 years old, but sixty-five thousand-two-hundred-and-thirty-five years old, rich and manifold with cultural understandings and epistemologies, and all manner of conceptions of title and estate and reality drawn from three hundred Australian realms and from all the nations of the world, including in particular the land of the first colonisers, from which Australians can proudly say they come.  

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16.

T H A T’s what this is for me, this referendum: a small enormous moment, a leaf that will speak a forest, call to begin the work of freedom and redemption and shared Selfhood. An invitation to a future in which Australia grows up and historical harm begins to heal.

This proposal for a Voice is the whipbird’s call, then. How else, if you wanted to feel more thoroughly at home here, on this little mountain, in this great land, could you respond to so beautifully pitched a plea, but Yes?

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17.

T H E referendum is a call to respond by ceasing to quibble and prevaricate and lecture and doubt and worry; it is a call to listen to those we have too long silenced. This is what the representatives of the First Peoples of Australia have determined that they want us all to do for them now: To acknowledge them and to undertake always to listen to them on matters that bear on their welfare. This is how an assembly of First Nations peoples, put together according to their principles of representation and drawing on years of regional dialogues and articulated clearly in the Uluru Statement, have said they would like to work toward reconciliation and the blossoming of a “fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood” for all of us.

From here, the drafters of the Uluru Statement have said, speaking for the consensus of First Nations peoples, they would like to move toward Makarrata: a coming together after a struggle. And that will involve treaties and a process of truth-telling. And those steps seem the right and fitting ones to take, and we have seen them play out in the direction of hope and justice in New Zealand and elsewhere in the world.

Some folks say they wish we were voting for a treaty instead; others wish we were only asked to vote for recognition; others say they’d like the Voice to be legislated not enshrined in the Constitution; others want to know exactly how this Voice will be structured and how it will work; others, in truth, would rather not have to be asked to think about any of this at all. But this particular proposal is what the descendants of the dispossessed have said they would like, as the best first step toward justice; this is what they have offered. As a beneficiary of a culture that has treated Indigenous people so poorly and as a participant in a political system that asked Indigenous people to tell us how they would like to proceed, it seems impolite and morally meagre to ask Indigenous people to wait longer or to come back with a proposal we like the sound of better. We have not listened long enough; it is time now to listen, and in this way begin to earn the right to share the fuller expression of our national selfhood that only reconciliation offers.