Judith White

Elders who lived through the 1967 referendum. Survivors of the Stolen Generation. Families whose children are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of the non-indigenous. Leaders who have traversed the country speaking out with a vision of a better, more inclusive society.

It was a day of shame, when history called and Australia turned its back, when Indigenous people asked for a Voice and this country refused to listen. When we were left among the world’s most backward nations in terms of Indigenous rights.

We’re not going to sit in silence now. The shame is on those in politics and media who spread the lies and disinformation that sullied the campaign. Coalition leaders turned the Uluru Statement from the Heart into a political football from the start.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott (now a No) gave the green light to the process of dialogues among Indigenous people that resulted in the 2017 Statement. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (now a Yes) rejected the Statement, starting the lie that the Voice – a very modest request – would be a third chamber of parliament.

The right-wing media, with Murdoch’s Sky News darling Peta Credlin in the lead, ran consistently with the lie that Yes would be divisive, and fostered yet more outrageous lies. Even some ABC programs muddied the waters in their pursuit of so-called ‘balance’. Even though 83% of First Nations people supported Yes, they trawled indigenous communities for a No voter in response to every Yes voter interviewed.

On the campaign trail we found ‘hard No’ voters clinging to absurd fabrications: that they would lose their homes and have to pay levies, that Parliament would lose its powers.

Social media of course played a part in spreading disinformation. But it has to feed on something, and as elsewhere in the world it feeds on social division and uncertainty. One of our most active volunteers here in Tweed, on the border with Queensland, pointed out weeks ago that ‘hard No’ voters are generally not happy people. They are fearful of losing the Great Australian Lifestyle. They look for someone to blame and don’t want to confront the historical roots of the issue.

Most people would not consider themselves racists – but they are vulnerable to the dog-whistle, perfected by John Howard and taken up by Peter Dutton, with its underlying racist, colonialist assumptions. So how do we shift them?

In the last week of the campaign Mick Gooda, former chair of ATSIC, was asked on the 7am podcast whether he would continue to fight for change if the result was No. “We’ve got no option,” he said. Indigenous people have had no option for 235 years. The rest of us must learn from them. A new era of truth-telling begins here. We must listen, and we must take part.

There is no lack of knowledge about the disadvantages faced by First Nations peoples, or about the history we need to confront to move forward. Indigenous people have never stopped telling their stories.

For more than 50 years historian Henry Reynolds has documented the frontier wars, and given the lie to the myth of peaceful ‘settlement’ by Britain. Lyndall Ryan and her team at Newcastle University have drawn the map of massacres. Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu, Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth and Margo Neale’s in the First Peoples books have shed light on the sophistication and complexity of pre-colonisation society.

Stan Grant and other Indigenous writers have told us what it was like for them to grow up confronting racism. Drawing on many hours of talking with dozens of elders, Melissa Lucashenko in her new novel Edenglassie has given us a compelling picture of life under colonisation.

This is not only the oldest continuous living culture in the world, it’s the most resilient. Driven to the verge of extinction, in the past 50 years it has had an extraordinary renaissance. Indigenous artists make our greatest, most original contribution to the world’s art. Musicians, dancers, film-makers and playwrights find a thousand ways to tell stories that matter to us all. Literature is immeasurably enriched by First Nations writers.

Every day of the campaign we learned something about the history and culture that can enable us to cherish Country. Even in conservative Tweed Heads, we shared unforgettable moments. We walked 400 strong down the main street on the day of the National Walk, in the company of elders from the 1967 referendum and with unexpected support from bystanders.

At the rally afterwards you could have heard a pin drop as Uncle Victor Slockee, in his welcome to Country, told us of the 30 Bundjalung families dumped during white ‘settlement’ on Ukerebagh Island in the Tweed, with no housing or resources, among them the family that would produce the first Aboriginal Senator, Neville Bonner. And of the Bundjalung leader the British misnamed ‘King Johnny’, whose grave on the road to Uki was desecrated by bulldozers.

The learning must continue. We can start by drawing on the strengths of the Yes campaign. With their vision of inclusion and knowledge-sharing, Megan Davis, Noel Pearson, Thomas Mayo, Rachel Perkins, Patrick Dodson, Marcia Langton and many more have proven to be leaders not only of First Nations peoples but of us all. They have had the support of sporting and cultural heroes, from Cathy Freeman and Evonne Goolagong Cawley to composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, from Adam Goodes and Johnathan Thurston to musician William Barton and Yothu Yindi.

They won massive backing from non-Indigenous musicians, artists, writers and other professionals. Writers for Yes, Artists for Yes, Doctors for Yes, Unions for Yes, even judges for Yes joined the campaign. The most highly educated, creative, ethical people in our community all voted Yes.

Let’s build on this. Let’s stand with our Indigenous brothers and sisters in the long, patient work of educating the Australian public, unmasking the lingering lies of colonialism and ensuring that the true history of this country seizes the imagination of the people.

This is what’s required for Australia to be truly independent, to be the nation that the Statement from the Heart asks us to be – a nation, as Noel Pearson puts it, that weaves together the triple strands of 65,000 years of Indigenous culture, the democratic society developed since Federation and the rich influences of multicultural immigration.

Yesterday must be not an end, but the beginning of a wave of truth-telling to sweep away ignorance and fear.

We stand, now and forever, with the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Voice, Treaty, Truth!

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Judith White was executive director of the members’ organisation, the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, from 2000 to 2008 and again in 2014 and 2015, and is author of the Society’s history Art Lovers.

Born in Lancashire, England in 1948, she holds two degrees from Oxford University, has worked in publishing and journalism and speaks Spanish, French and Italian. Her memoir, Children of Coal: A Migrant’s Story (2021), is the story of growing up in a North of England working-class community, moving to Australia and discovering the pain inflicted on lives across the globe by an empire built on coal.

Judith lives on the Tweed River in northern New South Wales with her partner, the journalist and author Alex Mitchell.