Commentary

The defeat of the proposal in the recent Aboriginal constitutional referendum was unsurprising given the forces at work, which I discussed in ‘A Referendum in Trouble’ (ABR, July 2023). Most importantly, it lacked the support of the Liberal and National parties once their leaders decided to oppose it, largely for partisan purposes.

Do you know whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised in your state Constitution? If you responded with a mental shrug and a muttered ‘No idea’, then you would fall within the vast majority. In fact, from 2004 to 2016, each Australian state amended its Constitution to insert recognition of their Indigenous peoples. Yet the effect has been negligible and hardly anyone knows it happened. Why?

It was a busy day in February. I was in my office at Monash University, squeezing in some emails with one hand and a quick bite of lunch with the other. Yeah, a typical day for an academic. That’s when I came across an email sent to me by a PhD student from another Australian university who wanted to know about a research paper I had written. They sent me the title of the paper, the abstract, and the author list. 

It took me years to gather enough courage to introduce myself. Finally, deep into the Covid lockdown and a few months after receiving an award for my first collection of poems, I began my correspondence with Charles Simic by sending him an email to share the news, as if he were a family member, the one who would understand. He replied warmly, kindly, and in Serbian: ‘Draga Jelena …’

Like the nation at large, the University of Melbourne has a troubling history. Stretching back to Victoria’s early colonisation, that history is entwined with the oppression and dispossession of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

In his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner lamented that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples had been omitted from narratives of the nation’s past. Contending that this omission was ‘a structural matter’, he likened Australian history to ‘a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. He proposed that the kinds of stories which could bring Indigenous history into view for Australian readers would focus on the lives of individuals.

I have often spoken of trying to write in some meaningful way about what it means to belong to all times in this place that we call our traditional homeland. Aboriginal people know that we have been here since time immemorial. We have never lost track of the wisdom and knowledge that generations of our ancestors had developed over thousands of years about the powerful nature of this country. It was their knowledge that ensured the survival of our culture to this day.

On many occasions throughout our nation’s history, change seemed imminent, perhaps even just on the horizon, but it has always receded into the distance. The instigation and then closure of successive important representative organisations such as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, the National Aboriginal Conference, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples illustrate the impacts of electoral politics and the vagaries of political ideologies. Each decade seems to have brought a different structure, some more and some less representative than others. But there has been little continuity or coherence, in either the national or state administrative and political arrangements, in addressing the specific concerns of Indigenous people.

There are many impressive things about the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but one in particular has long puzzled me. As an Australian, I have always been struck by its excellent coverage of Australian words. I am not talking about the inclusion of obvious words such as kookaburra, woomera, and fossick, but rather the hundreds of lesser-known words such as wonga-wonga (pigeon), wurley (hut), and yarran (species of acacia), and even more obscure ones such as brickfielder, defined as a ‘local name in Sydney, New South Wales, for a thick cloud of dust brought over the city by a south wind from neighbouring sandhills (called the ‘Brickfields’)’. 

From the age of fifteen until his recent death at the age of seventy-four, the great Yolngu leader Yunupingu (1948–2023) was at the forefront of the struggle to change the Australian legal system in unprecedented ways. In 1963, with his father, Mungurrawuy, he drafted the Yirrkala Bark Petition, which presented to Parliament an eloquent claim for the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Arnhem Land before their country was, without their consent, turned into a bauxite mine. The Bark Petition was no ordinary document. On the one hand, it uses the antiquated language of a traditional ‘humble petition’ to Parliament, concluding in forms of speech that have hardly changed since the seventeenth century: ‘And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.’