In his article, Phil references a need to recognise that the indigenous Australians never ceded sovereignty over their lands.

It is undeniably true that the indigenous peoples fought to retain sovereignty over their lands. This is one of the important historic truths which needs to be acknowledged in any reconciliation process.

However, it is important to understand that doing so does not undo or render invalid the constitutional arrangements which apply in Australia today.

The lesson of history is that sovereignty is almost without exception never ceded other than through force of arms. This depressing reality has been a feature of human societies almost from the very moment when what we call civilisations began to arise.

Thus the Babylonians seized lands that belonged to others in order to create their short lived empire some 4000 years ago before, in their turn, falling under the control of yet another emergent power.

Similarly, the ancient Gauls who lived in modern France and Belgium, did not willingly cede their sovereignty to the Romans. Instead, they were ruthlessly crushed by the Roman legions and forced to submit to the rule of Rome. The same fate befell the ancient Britons.

More recently, after World War 2, large swathes of Eastern Europe unwillingly fell under the control of the USSR and that control was maintained by force until the eventual collapse of the the Soviet empire in 1991. Now, of course, Vladimir Putin is unapologetically seeking to reinstate 'Greater Russia' by using military force to annex Ukraine.

The only situation I am aware of where sovereignty was ceded voluntarily was in Fiji.

In that case the indigenous ruling elite of the Fijian islands had attempted to establish an independent kingdom but found the task of controlling it beyond their capacity.

They eventually felt compelled to invite the British to take over the governance of the islands rather than fall victim to the depredations of the several European powers which were jostling to exert effective control over them. In a sense, they concluded that British rule was a lesser evil than foreign induced anarchy.

By happy chance the Fijians fell under the control of a British colonial power that was happy to agree to protect their basic rights, notably their ownership and control of their traditional lands. By even happier chance, this same policy was introduced in PNG some 20 years later.

In a somewhat similar way the Maori ceded their sovereignty over New Zealand to the British through the Treaty of Waitangi. In that case, the fierce armed resistance of the Maori during the so-called Maori Wars, allowed them sufficient leverage to extract a number of concessions from the British even though the treaty itself for a long time was honoured more in the breach than the observance.

So even if there is some sort of official concession that indigenous Australians did not voluntarily cede sovereignty of their lands, its material impact upon how modern Australia is structured or governed seems destined to be slight at best.

Specifically, notions that ownership of traditional lands might be recovered unconditionally are completely unrealistic. The current arrangements in relation to land rights already in place, with all their complexities and ambiguities, seem likely to remain in place largely unchanged.

To do otherwise would be to invite much strife and contention that would likely to hinder the achievement of other objectives in the Uluru Statement.

Apart from late arrivals like the Austronesians, the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea and Australia stem from the same migrant stock.

During the many glacial periods of the current ice age, the last of which ended 11,700 years ago, they occupied the same large connected landmass.

(We are currently in what is known as an interglacial period which separates us from Papua New Guinea by sea).

Although there would have been interactions when the glacial land bridge existed the two groups are thought to have effectively diverged from each other about 25,000 years ago.

If the indigenous people of Australia can claim to be the world’s oldest civilisation going back 65-70,000 years ago logic dictates that the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea should be able to make the same claim, even though archaeologists only put their occupation back about 46,000 years.

Like most indigenous people, Aboriginal Australians and Papua New Guineans are culturally shaped by their attachment to their land. In both places the use and occupation of the land is paramount.

Since Europeans arrived history has treated the two groups very differently however.

In Australia the British declared the land vacant and claimed it as their own. In official parlance they referred to the land they invaded and stole as ‘terra nullius’.

‘Terra nullius’ means "nobody's land". It is a concept that says ownership by seizure of a thing no one owns is legitimate.

The same thing could have happened in Papua New Guinea when it was a British colony except for two things.

Australia, driven by strategic concerns about its geopolitical security and the prospect of an eminently exploitable mining province on its doorstep convinced the British to cede it control of Papua in 1908.

And in so doing appointed a visionary administrator in the person of Lieutenant-Governor Hubert Murray who put the brakes on any idea of mass alienation of Papuan land by Europeans.

This was then extended to New Guinea when Australia acquired it as a mandated territory in 1921.

Up until 1993, when the concept of ‘terra nullius’ was buried by the ‘Native Title Act’, a political hypocrisy existed in Australia.

On the one hand it maintained that indigenous Australians had no rights to their traditional lands while up until independence in 1975 it had simultaneously acknowledged those rights for indigenous Papua New Guineans.

Indigenous Australians must have wondered how land rights could have been assured by its government for Papua New Guineans but not for them.

The answer, of course, was because the British had been taken out of the equation.

The ‘Native Title Act’ is far from perfect. It can only grant title to non-freehold and certain other classes of land.

The legal battles this involves are incredibly expensive and complex and throw different claimant groups into bitter competition with each other that irreversibly damage inter-family relationships. It is better than nothing however.

These shortcomings are one of the reasons why the Uluru Statement from the Heart is so important.

That statement if passed into law will finally acknowledge how badly indigenous Australians have been treated by successive Australian governments.

For Papua New Guineans they might like to contemplate the fact that if it hadn’t been for men like Sir Hubert Murray they might have gone down the same road of invasion and dispossession.

The history of Australian governments in dealing with the indigenous peoples is very dismal indeed.

The now departed and unlamented LNP government continued this tradition whereby weasel words were deemed an adequate substitute for meaningful action.

This lamentable domestic history tends to throw a rather flattering light upon the work of Sir Hubert Murray and his successors in PNG, who assiduously protected and preserved the land rights of the indigenous people even in the face often concerted attempts to over turn that policy.

When those rights were over ridden, as was the case in Bougainville, the appalling results only served to highlight the wisdom of Murray's policy.

Alas for indigenous Australians there was no equivalent to Sir Hubert Murray with the humanity and foresight to implement a similar policy.

The last 20 years or so have seen important changes, such as the Mabo and Wik decisions of the High Court, that have somewhat restored the ancient rights and liberties of indigenous Australians.

Despite this, there is still work to be done and the Uluru Statement has outlined some of those tasks.

Personally, I think that there is sufficient goodwill amongst the wider community whereby a constitutional change to create a Voice to Parliament seems to have a reasonable prospect of succeeding.

As usual, the reactionary conservative right will be opposed but the outcome of the plebiscite on gay marriage suggests that they no longer hold sway in the way they once did.

The negotiation and implementation of treaties relating to hundreds of notional indigenous 'nations' seems a much more problematic issue to me.

Even if you assume that what were once called 'tribes' may legitimately be conceived as 'nations', which is not a given, then the legal intricacies inherent in the process seem to me to verge upon the insurmountable.

To make this aspiration a reality, I believe that the Federal Parliament would need to pass special enabling legislation to allow such treaties to be written. I am sceptical that the current body of common and statute law is able to encompass such treaties although I may be wrong.

This legislation very probably would need to spell out some of the basic terms and conditions that might be applied to such documents so as to ensure, at a minimum, consistency with the prevailing constitutional arrangements relating to the states, territories and the Commonwealth, as well as other laws relating to such things as property and access rights.

This is not impossible but it is certainly bound to be complex, difficult and contentious.

So, it may well prove that embedding a Voice to Parliament in the constitution will be a relatively easy task compared to other proposals mentioned in the Uluru Statement.

I guess time will tell.

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.” - George Orwell