Painting Fakes

It's the first anniversary of the Voice referendum , and I've been reading Shireen Morris's Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum.  Morris is not an Aboriginal person but she is a constitutional lawyer and from 2013 onwards she worked for the Cape York Institute (CYI) under the leadership and guidance of Noel Pearson, first as an employee and later as an academic continuing their close collaboration.  No-one was closer than her to the events that led up to the Referendum, and I learned a lot reading her story. The story begins in 2012.  The then Labor Government had appointed an Expert Panel to advise on options for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.  Its key recommendation was to add a racial non-discrimination clause to the Constitution as a way of fleshing out the race power added in 1967.  This proposal was quickly and roundly trashed by conservative lawyers, with Greg Craven, one of our leading right-...

There have been, and will be, plenty of post-mortems on the recent referendum, from people on all sides of the political fence, black and white.  A lot of those people will be more qualified than me to comment.  This statement from the First Nations leaders behind the 'yes' campaign is a 'must read'.  By comparison my thoughts carry little weight, but here goes anyway.... I come at this as a partisan.  I was active in the 'yes' campaign although far from central to it.  I went in the big march, joined with others to make a human 'yes' on a local football field, put up a 'yes' sign on the tree in front of my house, handed out flyers at the local train station, shared stuff on social media.  Most of this was done despite knowing it looked like a losing cause.  I didn't want to contribute to that loss with my own defeatist apathy.   There are lots of nuances to the explanation for the 'no' vote, and I think they all have some truth to t...

 I'll be voting 'Yes' to the Voice.  I don't say you should, you should make up your own mind, but here are my own reasons for doing so, and my responses to the criticisms being made by its opponents. The basics of the Referendum on the Voice are set out here .  The vote will ask us to approve insertion of the following words into the Constitution. Chapter IX Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples 129 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia: i. there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice; ii. the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; iii. the Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws with respect to matters relatin...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dirty little secret of the Stolen Generation and the valiant efforts of the late Archie Roach to bring it to our attention.  Since then I've been reading about the even darker and dirtier secret that came before that - the fact that the British colonisation of Australia, and in particular my home state of Queensland, was accomplished through the use of deadly force against its original custodians.   This is not a pleasant or a pretty tale and there is really no fair way to soften it.  In his book Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland's Frontier Killing Times , published in 2013, historian Timothy Bottoms quotes an estimate that at the time of the first British encroachment into what became Queensland - the establishment of the convict settlement in Brisbane in 1826 - there were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people living here.  By the end of the century there were only about 20,000 First Nations people left.  He ...

I feel slightly sad at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Not deeply sad. I didn't know her. I never had much time for the monarchy. The signs of her impending death had been there for a couple of years in her increasingly brief appearances at royal events and, in the past year, her frequent absences and cancellations. She was 96, the time had come. The closest encounter I ever had with her was in  1977 when she came to Australia. Among other engagements she opened the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stadium at Nathan where the 1982 Commonwealth Games were to be held. School students were bused in from all over Brisbane for the occasion.  The ground had been levelled and the athletics track laid but as yet there were no stands. We sat on the grass while she made an extremely boring speech in her strange, plummy voice, then she and Prince Philip paraded around the track in their open-top limo treating us all to the royal wave. I felt a good deal sadder back at the end of July at the deat...

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right? This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     because he has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners     and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were faste...

When I first read Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu  about three years ago I was, like many readers, mightily impressed.  Pascoe takes the myth of Aboriginal people as passive hunter-gatherers and turns it on its head.  He argues that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, aquaculture, building of durable permanent housing, food processing and storage and active management of pastures and the game animals that lived on them.  The picture he develops is of a highly intentional, sophisticated and sustainable food economy. Since then I have become aware that a lot of controversy swirls around Dark Emu.  This has grown in the three years since I first read it as the book itself has continued to gain popularity, spinning out into a dance performance by Bangarra and a version for children.   Some of the controversy seems to me to have less than noble motives.  For instance, some people have launched personal attacks on Pascoe, suggesting he has faked his own A...