theguardian.com Thomas Keneally

The polls had been favourable until a brutal press campaign kicked in against this kindly, long-overdue change

• Thomas Keneally is the author of the Booker-winning Schindler’s Ark

Wed 18 Oct 2023 13.26 BST

Last Sunday, many in Australia profoundly mourned the loss of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum, the greatest kindly amendment ever to be proposed for the Australian constitution, those dreary old articles of association by which our states and territories rub along together in far-flung federation.

When the referendum was announced in March this year, it was as a result of a message to mainstream Australia from Indigenous Australia, a statement made at Uluru near Alice Springs by Aboriginal representatives. They suggested constitutional recognition of the Aboriginal race’s ancient discovery and ownership of Australia, and proposed that their community’s disadvantages in modern Australia could be addressed through a group of Aboriginal delegates who would advise on federal laws affecting Aboriginal Australians.

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The ownership matter is no longer as controversial as it once was. In the 1970s a Torres Strait Islander named Eddie Mabo was shocked to hear that his garden on Murray Island belonged to the crown. He undertook a long, brave journey from regional courts all the way to the high court, to prove that his tropic garden was not the crown’s, but his own. That decision in 1992 declared that Indigenous Australians had never ceded sovereignty over their land. There were cries that every white-owned house and swimming pool would be imperilled, but the truth was that the decision allowed the Aboriginal people to claim in reality traditional and unalienated, as in not yet purchased under title and built-upon, land. With that decision began the custom of the “welcome to country”: a local tribesman, or at least an Aboriginal Australian, briefly, as a small polite gesture, welcoming people to public events and citing the local tribe and its elders, men and women, past and present. This will continue to be the practice; an acknowledgment of the established fact.