It's a cold morning at "Riverbend" and I'm still in bed listening to ABC Radio National's "Sunday Extra" and its segment "Lessons from the 1967 referendum" which gives me an added warm feeling as its guest speaker, Bain Attwood, Professor of History at Monash University, concludes, "I find it hard to imagine that the 'yes' case will succeed." I hope he's right and sanity prevails.
The last two paragraphs of Bain Attwood's essay are telling: "I assume – or at least I hope – that in the next month or so the Labor government and their closest Aboriginal advisers will tackle what Freud would call a state of denial – the state of knowing but being unable or unwilling to acknowledge what you know – and reluctantly agree that it would be best for the government to accept that the 'yes' case will probably lose, abandon the referendum for the foreseeable future, and seek to pass legislation that will create an Aboriginal voice to parliament.
If the government does this, it will undoubtedly disappoint the non-Aboriginal advocates and demoralise the Aboriginal advocates for the ‘yes’ vote. But perhaps the latter might be prompted to question their assumption that entrenching the Aboriginal voice in the Australian Constitution will ensure that their people will always be represented in Australia’s system of government. In reality, there is no such guarantee. An Aboriginal voice would remain, but any government could choose to ignore it. This is a discomforting truth about the position of a small, relatively powerless Indigenous minority in a settler colonial democracy. It means that their struggle for recognition, representation, and redistribution is a struggle without end."
You can read the full essay in the Australian Business Review or you can listen to the podcast at the top. I listened to it just now and feel a whole lot better for it. Time to get up and face a much brighter future.
This is my country too. I don't need another "Welcome to Country".
