At a 'Walk for Yes' rally on Sept. 17, crowds in Melbourne hold a placard in the red, black and yellow of the Australian Aboriginal flag. Weeks later, voters rejected a constitutional reform proposal to add an Indigenous advisory body to Parliament.WILLIAM WEST/AFP via Getty Images
Jessica Friedmann is a writer and editor based in Braidwood, New South Wales.
In a short film released in 2017, the Indigenous activist and educator Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann offered a gift to the Australian people: dadirri.
A word from the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri languages of the Daly River, dadirri describes a quality of listening in stillness, which fosters connection, wholeness and peace.
“Dadirri recognizes the deep spring that is inside us,” Dr. Ungunmerr-Baumann told those watching. “This is the gift that Australia is thirsting for. It is something like what you call “contemplation.’”
In the lead-up to last weekend’s referendum on the creation of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, it had begun to feel as though Australians had taken the lesson of dadirri to heart. The Labor government, elected on the promise of change, took constitutional reform as a mandate, and the Voice saw consistent support in the polls. After a long and bitter fight for self-determination, Australia looked to finally shed its status as the only former British colony to exclude Indigenous peoples from its constitution.
But as the campaign ran its course, becoming increasingly grimy and bruising on the way to a decisive win for the No side, it became clear that many non-Indigenous people had either failed to learn how to listen, or were deliberately closing their ears.
The referendum marked the second time that a proposal for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament was put to a sitting Australian government. In 2017, the Uluru Statement from the Heart – conceived of and endorsed by more than 250 Indigenous community leaders in a landmark summit – was presented to then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government.
The statement called for substantive reform across three pillars: Voice, or “a constitutionally enshrined mechanism to provide expert advice to Parliament”; Treaty, “a process of agreement making … that formally recognises sovereignty”; and Truth, “a comprehensive process to explore the full extent of the injustices experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to enable shared understanding.”
But Mr. Turnbull’s government rejected the proposed Voice. “Our democracy is built on the foundation of all Australian citizens having equal civic rights,” he wrote in a joint statement at the time. “A constitutionally enshrined additional representative assembly for which only Indigenous Australians could vote for or serve in is inconsistent with this fundamental principle.” This response, in its dismissal of the legitimacy of Indigenous peoples as sovereign citizens, was described by one legal expert as “mean-spirited bastardry.”
The process leading to the creation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart was undertaken with bipartisan co-operation, but Liberal Party Leader Peter Dutton took up Mr. Turnbull’s talking points from the opposition, using the Voice to create a political wedge. This choice was made in full knowledge that referendums rarely succeeded without support across the aisle.
As the leader of the No campaign, Mr. Dutton argued that an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be “divisive,” and that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was “obsessed” with a process that didn’t represent “what people are saying on the ground.” Mr. Dutton promised a second referendum on symbolic recognition if the Voice failed; after the vote, he walked this promise back.
A prominent progressive No contingent also argued that the Voice would compromise the treaty process by bringing Indigenous people under “white man’s law” before the question of sovereignty was settled. Gunnai Gunditjmara Senator Lidia Thorpe resigned as deputy leader of the Green Party to campaign for this progressive No, and to represent the values of the Blak Sovereign Movement. (“Blak” is an Aboriginal cultural and political self-designation.)
But as the campaign ran its course, the far-right became a prominent and bullying presence in the debate, building a coalition of grievance, conspiracy theories, and half-truths. Campaigners for No deliberately created hesitation and fear, and support for the proposal plummeted.
Amid concerns about the psychological harm being done to young Indigenous people, some progressive No voters began to shift, reluctantly, to a Yes. But the damage to Indigenous health and safety was already done.
The debate, such as it was, exposed the pervasiveness of Australian non-listening. “Australians know and forget at the same time,” the historian Kate Fullagar writes. “We shatter silences and then build them up again. We fill gaps then re-gouge them.”
By ignoring the gift of Indigenous cultural concepts, Australians left themselves open to misinformation and anxiety about what a mature, healthy relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples might look like. Our national hesitation to endure the work of reconciliation, born of the estrangement the Voice to Parliament would begin to redress, is ultimately what condemned it.
This Sunday will mark the end of the week of silence called for by Indigenous supporters of the Yes campaign. There will be a chance for continuing dialogue, to keep the lines of communication open. But if Australia needed the Voice to truly hear the Voice, then what it needs now is another way to listen. It needs to learn the value of dadirri.