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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack. This is 7am.

A war is still being waged against Indigenous Australians by a colonial state to this day. That was the vision sketched out by Senator Lidia Thorpe this week in a landmark speech. She says a Voice to Parliament would simply be window dressing and an insult to the intelligence of Indigenous Australians still living under violent colonisation. So is a Voice to Parliament really an extension of Australia’s shameful past? Or could it help overcome it?

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper and Yorta Yorta man Daniel James, on why it’s important to listen to Lidia Thorpe – even if you’re voting yes.

It’s Friday, August 18.

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Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“Thank you very much for allowing me to have a platform to tell some hard truths in this country…”

ANGE:

Daniel. This week, Senator Lidia Thorpe spoke at the National Press Club and she gave the most detail we've heard from her yet of why she's decided to oppose the voice to Parliament. What does she have to say?

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“Today I want to take you on a journey. A journey that talks about my country and my people.”

DANIEL:

She comes from…Lidia comes from the perspective, the black sovereign movement, that firmly believes that invasion is not over. The colonial experiment is still having a tremendously negative impact on First Nations people…

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“I want to talk about the pain that we are feeling and the fights that we are fighting.”

DANIEL:

…And you can hear that in her voice and in a presentation at the National Press Club this week. Stating the progressive no's case against the referendum and the Voice. She recounted her own people's history, and particularly the Gunaikurnai people from Lakes Entrance and East Gippsland in Victoria. And she recalled stories of how there would be people back in the day - first days of colonisation - that would go on holidays to what she said shoot black people.

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“On my grandfather's country, Gunai country - you call it Lakes Entrance, or the Gippsland Lakes, or the 90 Mile Beach, when you go on your holidays - it was a sport to shoot blacks. A sport to shoot blacks!”

DANIEL:

Gippsland in particular has a very dark history of massacres and poisonings and a whole bunch of other terrible, terrible acts that probably many of us will never know about.

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“How is this not war, Australia? How is this not war?”

DANIEL:

So her mindset in the Press Club this week was one as though Aboriginal Australia is still under siege. And if you look at some of the major indicators of, you know, incarceration rates, educational attainment, arrest rates, the amount of people that are still dying in custody.

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“My mob, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung, my Grandmother’s country, had 70 clans living in peace and harmony pre-colonisation…”

DANIEL:

She had come pretty much directly from a birthing tree on Djab Wurrung country which had been spray painted and it would seem poisoned…

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“The only way I can try to make the rest of the country understand the depth of pain we feel when sacred sites have been attacked is likening it to the death of our mother. Grief. Loss. Despair.”

DANIEL:

And so you could hear the anger and the emotion in her voice. And that reflected, I think, in the way she presented herself. And basically, you know, called out things like The Voice as being piecemeal, as being not enough - to use an Aboriginal, a slang term, a Koori slang term ‘gammin’ - and these were things that have been consistent with her approach towards the voice over a number of years. And so that's her mindset and that's the mindset of the black sovereign movement. It's a movement that has been born out of radicalism because in the view of that movement, change has been too slow and too piecemeal.

ANGE:

And Daniel, can you tell me about how Lidia Thorpe connected that history and that ongoing exploitation to the Voice to Parliament and her advocacy for a no vote? How does she make that connection?

DANIEL:

She sees the Voice as buying into the political processes and the political construct of the colony.

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“This country, your system of government has been built on lies, lies and the referendum for the Voice to Parliament is a continuation of these lies.”

DANIEL:

She refers to sovereignty and the sovereignty of First Nations people has never been ceded, and that The Voice becoming an advisory body to government in whatever shape the parliament decides that voice actually looks like she sees that as illegitimate, she sees it as token…

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“It is false hope because it is tricking people into genuinely believing that a powerless advisory body is going to protect our country and sacred sites, save our lives, keep our babies at home?”

DANIEL:

…and she sees it as a form of surrender to the colony and to all the institutions and constructs that come under that.

Archival Tape – Lidia Thorpe:

“When we begin to tell the truth that we can heal together as a nation and from this healing, a treaty will bring peace. So I invite you all to walk with me, embark on this journey. Stand with our people. Stand up for what really matters. Demand actual change, not tokenistic gestures.”

DANIEL:

You know, she has indicated in the past that she would be prepared to vote yes if things like recommendations from the Royal Commission into black deaths in custody were implemented - many of them haven't been implemented - but that's as close as she's ever come to, indicating any sort of support. And I think we saw at the National Press Club that her opposition to it remains very, very strong.

ANGE:

And after hearing Lidia Thorpe make these connections of these very real, legitimate wrongs that are still being done today with this political message, on the other hand, that Australians should vote No. What do you make of that? Does one follow the other?

DANIEL:

I’ve…I'll put it on the table now: I personally will be voting yes. And polls show that the majority of First Nations Australians support the Yes campaign. But I have a tremendous amount of empathy for the black sovereignty movement's position. I have a tremendous amount of empathy for Lidia Thorpe's position. What both sides, the Yes campaign and what we are terming, you know, loosely the Progressive No campaign. Ostensibly, they want to get to the same point. They want to get to a truth and treaty process. Now, the ways that both sides want to get there are quite different. One can be seen as appeasing the government and the colonial structures we have. One denies any sort of sovereignty that those structures have over us as a people. And that's a point that Lidia's looked to raise on a number of occasions, that we've never ceded our sovereignty. She did in the early days of this year around the Invasion Day, or Australia Day, whatever you like to call it, questioned whether the voice would be ceding sovereignty to the government, and that has since been quashed by the Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus and others. But that's the position… One doesn't recognise government, the other recognises government and is putting forward a pragmatic approach which the Yes campaign says is the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

ANGE:

We'll be back in a moment.

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ANGE:

Daniel, let's talk a bit more about history here, because history is really at the core of why people like Senator Lidia Thorpe are opposed to the voice. What do you think about when you think about the history of indigenous peoples trying to reach a settlement with the Australian Government?

DANIEL:

Well, I think back to my own people’s story, the Yorta Yorta people and a thing called the Maloga petition. Maloga was an Aboriginal mission set up by two missionaries, Daniel and Janet Matthews, and this petition dating back to 1887 was one of the first formal approaches to the colony of New South Wales and in particular the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Barrington, at the time requesting a small parcel of their own land, the Yorta Yorta people's land, to clear, to work, to produce wheat, to have cattle and sheep to graze upon. I recognising that that it is 1887, that's probably less than one lifetime after first contact and the decimation through things like massacres, murders, but in particular the disease, things like smallpox had absolutely decimated the the community up there as it had elsewhere, you add to things like the alcohol and that the rapes that were often occurring between white men and aboriginal women and girls. And this petition, this was seen as a way of moving forward and regaining some sort of control of our lives, buying into the new world that they found themselves in. And so in 1887 they wrote a petition to Lord Barrington, and it was eventually agreed to by the New South Wales Government through the Protection Association, that that parcel of land would be given to the people of Maloga at a place that the people of Maloga would end up calling Cummeragunja, which means our home in Yorta Yorta.

ANGE:

And so, the government at the time agrees to this – to hand this parcel of land to the Yorta Yorta, but thinking about this history of how governments have treated their promises to Indigenous people… that wasn’t the end of it, was it?

DANIEL:

Well, Maloga and Cummeragunja is a very good example because they did clear the land. I can only imagine what the old people and some of the younger people would have thought of losing the forestation around Cummeragunja, having those trees felled and seeing the habitat that had looked after their people for so long being decimated to buy into this new way of thinking. Farming in particular. What Cummeragunja shows us is that they were given the land. But as the Aborigines Protection Association became more centralised in its power, the further it was away from the decision making processes and the people it was making decisions about. Local farmers and pastoralists in the district started making representations to the New South Wales Government and their voices were heard over that of the Aboriginal people. And so eventually within ten years or so the land was taken back from the people at Cummeragunja and given back to the government which had as crown land, which was eventually sold off back to some of the pastoralists and farmers in the area. So it was a broken promise, but it was a decision making process that was made by people far away from Cummeragunja who didn't couldn't readily understand the impact it was making on people on the ground. And from my perspective, one of the things that the Voice has going for it is the representational structure that has been outlined by Marcia Langton and others that has regional representation, feeding up to that central voice that will speak directly to power. Because history, the history of Aboriginal affairs in Australia shows the further away decision makers are away from communities, the worse the outcomes.

ANGE:

And I guess it's easy to say, looking at all of this history, why someone like Lidia Thorpe looks at the Voice as just another example of a policy brought forward by a colonial government. She sees it in that tradition. But I guess you're saying you believe those injustices can actually be an argument for the voice?

DANIEL:

Yeah, exactly. And again, if I refer back to my own people, Yorta Yorta, we had some of the greatest advocates in the Aboriginal movement come from more and more people like William Cooper, Sir Doug Nichols and Margaret Tucker, who after setback after setback, such as what happened to Cummeragunja and subsequently to that, never stopped in their advocacy, they kept on chipping away. There was a pragmatism to them, and I think they also believed or having converted to Christianity, they all believe that there was a divine right, that the justice of this was so plain and simple for everyone to see, that if they kept chipping away at the edifice of governments and all the all its guises, that one day they would prevail and get what they want for their people to have their people give them some of their land back, given the justice that they deserve not to be treated any differently to to the white man.

So that's the perspective I take. But the reason I'm sympathetic to the black sovereign movement is, well, have a look at all the broken promises. You know, have a look at all the things that have been waved in the front of Aboriginal people's faces and then taken away. Have a look at the inaction around black deaths in custody. Why would you want to deal with these people? And from an Aboriginal perspective, because people like Lidia Thorpe and many like her, their perspective is what they can't be trusted and they're still trying to kill us. So it's amazing how history and what perspective you look at it from can very much inform and teach you about what's happening today here in 2023. But when you have the Yes campaign supported by the government of the day, governments across Australia and a large swathes of corporate Australia and you have a conservative No campaign that they are funded and they're well backed, it's going to be very difficult for the black sovereign movement to get a say in that no matter how strong or poignant their arguments might be.

ANGE:

Daniel, thanks so much for your time today.

DANIEL:

Pleasure.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today…

The unemployment rate has risen, with Australia losing more than 14,000 jobs in the month of July. The report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that despite unemployment rising, monthly hours worked increased 0.2%.

And…

Telstra has announced a record annual profit of $2.1 billion dollars. Despite record profits, the company defended the rollout of price increases for consumers. Since July, the average Telstra phone plan has gone up by $4 dollars per month.

7am is a daily show from The Monthly and The Saturday Paper.

It’s produced by Kara Jensen-Mackinnon, Zoltan Fecso, Cheyne Anderson, Yeo Choong, and Sam Loy.

Our senior producer is Chris Dengate. Our technical producer is Atticus Bastow.

Our editor is Scott Mitchell. Sarah McVeigh is our head of audio. Erik Jensen is our editor-in-chief.

Mixing by Andy Elston, Travis Evans, and Atticus Bastow.

Our theme music is by Ned Beckley and Josh Hogan of Envelope Audio.

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack, see you next week.

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