On the Road With the Youth Convoy Campaigning for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament

Lingiari, whose legacy has become a symbol of the ongoing fight for First Nations rights in Australia, would eventually lead those workers south of the station, down an unsealed road and later into backcountry, for fears of being ensnared and shot by the stockmen they fled. 

Following his arrival in Kalkarindji, a 10-hour drive south of Darwin deep in the Northern Territory, Lingiari’s fight would continue for decades. Through that town—which rests on the land of the Gurindji people—his spirit is embodied and lives on across the country.

Last Friday, a convoy of 21 young Indigenous campaigners travelled south along that same road, as a soar of Wedge-tailed Eagles circled overhead, to mark the beginning of a collectivist fight of their own. 

Spread between two Toyota shuttle vans, a four-wheel-drive and a towering truck, these young First Nations campaigners varied as broadly in age as they did life experience. What united them was a will to do everything in their power to learn, educate and, ultimately, strengthen the “Yes” vote for a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to parliament. 

Gurindji, and the annual Freedom Day Festival that now commemorates Lingiari’s fight, offered these young campaigners a reflective springboard for theirs.

On approach to the outback land of the Gurindji people, the crew fizzed with excitement. Brought together from across the country by an Indigenous youth services organisation called Deadly Inspiring Youth Doing Good (DIYDG)—or, “Didge” for short—they were on the middle leg of a convoy that had departed Cairns some four days and 2,820 kilometres earlier, only to do it all again the following Monday.

For Shonteia Warradoo, an Umpila, Kuuku ya’u and Bundjalung Woman from Meanjin, Brisbane, the campaign boils down to the basic amenities, infrastructure and human rights First Nations people have been denied for more than 200 years.

“My community doesn’t have access to safe water, developed roads, stable reception; access to established health institutions, or even affordable groceries to feed themselves,” says Warradoo, the youngest on the convoy, at 18 years old. “A Voice would elevate these issues, so mob don’t have to leave country to access these resources for a more comfortable life that the rest of Australia is afforded to every single day.”

In Western Australia, the drinking water is contaminated in nearly a quarter of all remote Aboriginal communities. A damning report handed down by WA’s Auditor-General last year found that traces of arsenic, nitrates, E coli and uranium commonly contaminated drinking water in remote communities across the state. In many more cases, the water wasn’t even tested. 

The matter isn’t limited to Western Australia, either: access to clean water is an issue pervasive throughout remote Indigenous communities across the Australian mainland, as it is in the Torres Strait, along with access to physical and mental health practitioners, family services and functioning community infrastructure. 

“We know that there are hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, Aboriginal communities, particularly on the mainland, that not only have issues accessing water, but the quality of the water that people have in communities is substandard, has been for decades,” says Kenny Bedford, a Torres Strait Islander from the Meruam Tribe, Erub, and former mayor, who leads Indigenous engagement on the official From the Heart campaign.

“And we've become so used to poor water quality. We don’t know unless we go somewhere else and realise, ‘Actually, water tastes different’. Because it’s not just about hard water. Hundreds of thousands of people across this land are consuming water that has higher levels of calcium, fluoride, toxins that wouldn’t be acceptable in cities or in the wider community,” he says at a forum discussion at the festival on Saturday.

“It's a terrible situation that we’re all aware of. We’re also aware of how that, after decades, has turned into a lot of kidney disease.”

Prominent First Nations leaders argue that issues like these would sooner be settled by the introduction of an Indigenous Voice to parliament, as could the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian criminal justice system, where they account for more than 31 percent of the adult prison populous, compared to just 3.2 percent of the overall population. In youth detention, Indigenous children account for 49 percent of detainees, and just 5.8 percent of the population aged between 10 and 17 years old.

It’s a statistic the leaders at DIYDG are familiar with—their services cater to a broad spectrum of youth experiences.

“So we talk on this end of our spectrum, opportunities like this; a convoy and a space where young people have an opportunity to exercise their leadership, to develop their skills, to build their confidence, build and strengthen resilience, and have a space where they feel as though their voices are heard, they’re valued,” says Semara Jose, a Gudjal, Eastern Kuku Yalanji and Darnley Islander, who was a co-founder of DIYDG in 2015.

“We have young people who are in the most dire situations who are being safety-planned [by the government out of a family setting] to the streets. That the only safe solution, apparently, from our child safety system, is that you’re not going to have a safe place to sleep at night. You're going to be safety-planned to the streets,” she says.

“And that is the solution. Every day we experience these human rights breaches—young people just not having access to services, to housing, to a whole lot of different things.”

A Voice to Parliament was the first of three major policy suggestions made in 2017 by the Uluru Statement From the Heart, a written address to the broader Australian population. In it, hundreds of First Nations people converged to acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded, and call for three major reforms. 

It underwent an extensive, granular consultation process that took more than two years, and heard debate through 12 regional dialogues, folding in the voices of Indigenous communities across the country. At the end of the process in 2017, which began with a Referendum Council appointed by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull two years earlier, more than 250 delegates gathered for a convention at Uluru to present 12 succinct paragraphs to Australia.

The first reform it recommended, a Voice, would empower Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to form an advisory body that would consult policymakers on legislation that impacts Indigenous communities, a framework already underway in Norway, Sweden and Finland. A variation seen in New Zealand, meanwhile, goes further and sees seven parliamentary seats held for Māori representatives at every election. 

Once a Voice is enshrined in the Australian constitution, the statement calls for the formation of a Makarrata Commission—the Yolngu word for “a coming together after a struggle”—to oversee the Treaty-making and Truth-telling processes.

In the run-up to May’s federal election, prime minister Anthony Albanese promised voters that a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous Voice to parliament would be crucial to his policy platform, should he win.

When he delivered his victory speech from the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL Club in Sydney, on the eve of election night on May 21, he doubled down on its importance and committed to taking it to a vote before his first term expired. A couple of months later, he took his first material steps towards it, and in doing so gave the “Yes” campaign a valuable boost of momentum.

Giving a landmark speech at Garma festival on Arnhem Land in late July, Albanese said Australians would be asked a “simple and clear” yes or no question at the referendum. The question, he suggested, could be: “Do you support an alteration to the constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?”

 The speech gave way to a whirlwind of hope—and criticism. 

If Australia answers yes to a Voice, the constitution could undergo three changes, which Albanese said would offer Australians a “starting point” for dialogue. The change could see the addition of three sentences to the Australian constitution. They might be:

• There shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice may make representations to parliament and the executive government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
• The parliament shall, subject to this constitution, have power to make laws with respect to the composition, functions, powers and procedures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

The rest would be up to parliament. Details related to whether or not the body would be elected, or just how representative the Voice as a body would be, have so far been swatted away by the prime minister and his cabinet. As a result, proponents of the “No” campaign have been able to suck in a breath of air.

Those in opposition to a Voice come from a range of backgrounds. Few of them agree on a singular argument against a Voice to Parliament, and instead reach for concerns that those in favour of one have been able to extinguish: that a Voice would create a third chamber in parliament, for instance, or that a Voice would create a “false dichotomy” between Australians based on race. (Various indicators show that a version of one has already been at play in Australia to the benefit of non-Indigenous people since 1788.)

What the majority of those in opposition to a Voice have in common is a home on Sky News, their every thought splashed across the pages of any number of News Corp tabloids, and in the shared psychoses of conspiracy theorists around the country.

But not all of those against a Voice can be dismissed. A very real challenge laid bare before the First Nations people campaigning for a Voice has been creating a space for the Indigenous people around the country prepared to debate their concerns, to do so safely, without having their voices co-opted by the well-oiled machine of right-wing Australian politics. 

One commonly heard concern among Indigenous critics is that voting “Yes” for a Voice to parliament would be bending the knee to the Crown and, therefore, an act of ceding sovereignty—or one that risks devaluing the importance of Treaty-making.

Greens senator and First Nations spokesperson, Lidia Thorpe, is among the most prominent critics to share elements of that mindset. On Thursday, she took a harder line, and told one reporter that a referendum on a Voice to parliament would be a “waste of money” that could be better spent in Indigenous communities, right away. 

“You don’t need a referendum to have a treaty,” she said in an interview. 

Countless First Nations community leaders, including those who assumed a firm “pro-Voice” position at the Gurindji festival, have been quick to rebut: Can they be guaranteed the funds would ever arrive in their communities without a Voice? History, they say, would suggest not.

Even still, it’s an argument campaigners on the DIYDG convoy could empathise with. Serena Rae Thompson, a 25-year-old Waribarra Mamu woman from Millaa Millaa on the Atherton Tablelands, went to Youth Parliament earlier this year. While she was there, she thought the same. 

“So that is a lot of the original content that I was engaged with about the Statement From the Heart, via social media. A few of the accounts I follow, they’re very abolitionist, which is amazing,” Thompson says. 

“But I think I’ve had a shift in that, the fact is, so many people and so many communities came together [for the Uluru Statement From the Heart], and they did agree. But people who disagree and say that…‘Being indoctrinated into the Constitution, is that ceding sovereignty?’ I don’t believe that, because our sovereignty, it’s within ourselves,” she says.

Matters are only further complicated by the positions taken on Indigenous affairs by the newly-elected Country Liberal party senator for the Northern Territory, Jacinta Price. She has been labelled a “conservative firebrand” who stands squarely against a Voice to parliament—but several advocates have suggested it isn’t that simple. She also says there are more pressing issues facing Indigenous communities than a constitutionally enshrined Voice to parliament. 

Price, however, strays from the consensus shared by advocates around the country on a throng of mainstay issues being debated by leaders nationwide. On debate around changing the date of Australia Day, she says the date should stay the same, because she “wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for that white settlement”, and doesn’t view herself as a victim of Australia’s colonial history. 

She has supported punitive welfare instruments, like the cashless debit card, and suggested that family violence occurs in Indigenous communities because “we accept violence within our culture”, which she traces back to the patriarchy. Her name was met with a trickle of applause when it was read aloud at a welcome ceremony at Gurindji, as she sat among fellow politicians, one of few who didn’t deliver a speech.

To their own surprise, the DIYDG crew were treated like celebrities. Name-checked in speeches, praised by passers-by, they were beginning to come to terms with the scope of their role in real-time. Even Paul Kelly AO, who was there to perform, wanted to sport their merch. Still, they’re trying to figure out how they fit into it all.  

“We know we have a hell of a lot more opportunities and access to things that our parents, our grandparents, didn't have. And it's the magnitude of that, that responsibility, that weight on your shoulders that makes you go, ‘Do not take this for granted. Do not take the responsibility lightly’. That you go, ‘We have to do something, we have to be here’,” says Jose.

“But we are lucky because we have seen Gurindji, Vincent Lingiari, his story. The story of our elders has already laid bare the strength, the tenacity, the resilience, that you need to be a part of this movement, to be a part of change, and to do something meaningful.”

One year after Vincent Lingiari led workers off Wave Hill in 1966, Australia voted “Yes” to making an amendment to the constitution that would remove discriminatory references to Aboriginal people in Australia’s founding document. Decades on, historians would trace many of the developments since to the action taken that day.

In a book titled Everything You Need to Know About the Uluru Statement from the Heart, co-authored by Megan Davis, an Aboriginal academic and human rights lawyer, and George Williams AO, an academic specialising in constitutional law, readers are reminded that the 1967 referendum did not recognise Indigenous people, as it’s often remembered. 

Rather, it removed an “exclusion from the races power in section 51” that had prevented parliament enacting laws for First Nations people and scratched section 127, “which had prevented Aboriginal people from being included in ‘reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth’.”

The book’s authors stress that the fabled 1967 referendum did not grant Aboriginal people any new rights or recognition. “In terms of recognition, the referendum removed the only references to Aboriginal peoples in the document, leaving nothing in their place”. Torres Strait Islanders were never recognised at all. 

In its wake, the Holt and McMahon governments made incremental inroads to better governing for Indigenous people, “including the appointment of William Wentworth as Australia’s first minister for Aboriginal Affairs,” Davis and Williams write. But it wasn’t until the election of the Gough Whitlam government in 1972 that a new era of Indigenous law and policy would arrive. 

His government adopted the principle of self-determination, established the first Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Disrimination, which would later be written into the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. 

It would take Vincent Lingiari the better part of a decade to see the fruits of his fight begin to return to his land. After walking off Wave Hill in 1966, Lingiari was unmovable on the land rights owed to the Gurindji people. Whitlam later called for a royal commission to “examine ways to recognise Aboriginal land rights”, and the deeds to Lingiari’s land were returned to the Gurindji people, by Whitlam himself, in person, per the commission’s recommendations. 

Pouring a handful of soil into Lingiari’s grasp, Whitlam said: “Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand to you these deeds as proof in Australian law that these lands belong to the Gurindji people, and I put into your hands part of the earth itself as a sign that this land will be the possession of you and your children forever.”

Several reports and consultation processes have made recommendations since. Many of the artworks that have carried their messages, however, have come to line the halls and offices of parliament, says Dean Parkin, a Quandamooka man of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) in Queensland. He’s certain a Voice would be more than a symbol—the country is in a very different place.

“I've read some commentary recently that says, ‘Oh, that's just the vibe, it's just a feeling. It's not strong’. It's actually really deep,” Parkin says. 

“It's touching some really deep values in Australians across the country, the sense of fairness, the sense that it's time, this sense that it's our opportunity to do something good through a referendum on a Voice, which is right within our grasp.”

He turned the attention of a crowd watching him moderate a panel discussion to the year 1995, when a report was handed to then prime minister Paul Keating called Recognition Rights and Reform, in response to the High Court’s Mabo decision, which recognised that Eddie Mabo and a group of Torres Strait Islanders were owners of Murray Island.

Among the report’s authors, some 27 years ago, was Linda Burney, who will be charged with leading Australia to a referendum as the nation’s Indigenous Affairs minister, on recommendations she herself endorsed a quarter century ago. 

In order to get the country there, Burney and the Albanese government will need the support of the Greens to legislate for a vote—including Lidia Thorpe. When they meet next week, as has been reported, Australia’s Labor government will no doubt do all it can to shore up the broad support it needs. 

To the other 17 million Australians enrolled to vote, Jose says it’s simple. “The voice is for everybody.”

“Nowhere in our history, in the relationship that we as First Nations people have had with the Australian government, has there ever been a mandate for any Indigenous voice, any Indigenous person to be heard. There's never been any mandate. But if we get a referendum, if we win it—not if, when—then there is a mandate. And the only way that that can ever be taken away from us again, is if the Australian people decide,” she says. 

“But when they see it working, when they see the impact, when they see how deadly it is going to be. Then they will understand the power and the impact. They will understand why we are a sovereign people as part of this country and have a unique connection and a unique role in this country.”

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