Thursday 14 November, 11.45am-1.15pm
The defeat of the Voice referendum on 14 October 2024 has been the cause of grief among many First Nations peoples and millions of others who voted Yes. The referendum result is already widely recognised as a landmark in the history of Australia. At the same time, the Voice emerged out of a wider call in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ for Voice, Treaty and Truth, an interlinked process with both a long history and a necessary future. This session will examine the meaning of the Uluru Statement and the 2023 referendum as part of this longer history, explore the role of the humanities in truth-telling, and discuss where the nation might go in the post-Voice referendum era.
Chair: Professor Mark Kenny
Professor Mark Kenny is Director of the Australian Studies Institute at ANU as well as being the presenter of the weekly political podcast, Democracy Sausage. A widely sought after broadcast analyst, he is a former chief political correspondent (SMH and The Age) in the federal parliamentary press gallery and served eleven years on the board of the National Press Club. Kenny writes a weekly column for the ACM group and frequently appears in multiple other publications including Australian Book Review, ABC, Crikey, Quarterly Essay, Meanjin and The Conversation. His research interests range across democracy, populism, media discourses and post-liberalism.
Speakers
Associate Professor Shino Konishi FAHA
Paper Title: Can truth-telling ‘heal the wounds’ of the past in the wake of the 2023 Referendum?
Since at least the 1980s, when activists proclaimed that ‘white Australia has a black history’, Aboriginal people have called for truth-telling about the past, and in the late 1990s truth-telling was heralded as a key to unlocking reconciliation through coming to terms with our ‘shared history’. As the Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation (2000) attested, ‘Our nation must have the courage to own the truth, to heal the wounds of its past so that we can move on together at peace with ourselves’. Yet, in the wake of the 2023 Referendum, fuelled by misinformation and lies, this vision of creating shared histories and achieving reconciliation through truth-telling now seems remote. Does this mean, however, that the wounds of the past can never be healed? Or can truth-telling about the past promise visions for the future other than reconciliation?
Shino Konishi is a Yawuru historian and Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include histories of exploration, cross-cultural encounter, and representations of Indigenous masculinity and labour. Her current work explores early collecting practices in Western Australia, imperial travellers’ observations of Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and methodological approaches to Indigenous biography.
She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012), which was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize, and The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A Biographical History of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island (2022) with Ann Curthoys and Alexandra Ludewig which won the Margaret Medcalf Award. From 2010 to 2014 she was the editor of Aboriginal History, and she is now editing a volume on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander biographies in collaboration with the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Professor Megan Davis FAAL FAHA FASSA [online]
Abstract pending.
Scientia Professor Megan Davis is Pro Vice-Chancellor Society (PVCS) at UNSW Sydney and holds the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and is director of the Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW Law. Professor Davis is the 2024-2025 Whitlam Fraser Harvard Chair in Australian Studies and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.
Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Prof Davis is a Sydney Peace Prize Laureate for the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2022 and in 2023 Prof Davis was named on TIME Magazine’s TIME NEXT100 list of the Next Generation of Global leaders. She was also named Marie Claire “Powerhouse of the Year” in 2023. She is a previous Overall Winner of the AFR Women of Influence (now Women of Leadership) awards in 2018 and has previously been named on the AFR Annual Cultural Power list and AFR’s Australia’s top Legal Powerbrokers list.
Prof Davis was co-chair of the Uluṟu Dialogue and worked on the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples for over twelve years and was instrumental in the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart.
She is a globally recognised expert in human rights and Indigenous peoples rights and was formerly expert and Chair of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva and expert member and Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issue at UN headquarters in NY.
Professor Kate Fullagar FAHA
Paper Title: Phillip, Bennelong, Precedents & Counterfactuals
This paper will discuss the legal settlement that never happened between the early colonists and Indigenous people in New South Wales. It will make the speculative argument that the first governor, Arthur Phillip, likely expected a treaty to eventuate between the Darug-speaking clans and British representatives in the Sydney colony. First I will discuss Phillip’s understanding and experience of British imperial behaviour in the New World before 1788, outlining the conventions, if limited, of British legal possession in the eighteenth century. Second, I will discuss Phillip’s specific dealings with Bennelong between 1789 and 1793 to make the case for his assumptions about treaty. Finally, I will muse on the implications for Australian history of this particular settlement never occurring, touching on both political consequences and the nation’s peculiarly amnesic attitude to Indigenous sovereignty.
Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She is also co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many indigenous societies it encountered. She is the award-winning author of The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020) and The Savage Visit (Berkeley, 2012); the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012); and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, 2018). She is Lead Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage project with the National Portrait Gallery called Facing New Worlds.
Professor Mark McKenna FAHA
Given the emphatic result in the 2023 referendum, it’s possible to conclude that the project which began in the early 1990s – reconciliation and an Australian republic, and the later campaign for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians and an Indigenous Voice to Parliament – has reached an unbridgeable chasm. In an increasingly polarised political culture, bipartisan support for meaningful constitutional reform will be difficult if not impossible to achieve, while constitutional reform that is capable of attracting bipartisan support is likely to be so uncontroversial that it will offer little substantive benefit for Indigenous Australians.
This paper seeks to understand the conflicting views regarding the Australian Constitution that circulated during the 2023 referendum. Although perceptions of the Constitution varied enormously – from those who described it as a ‘racist and colonial document’ to others who argued that even the smallest change would fundamentally alter ‘our nation, our democracy’ and way of life – post referendum analysis to date has paid little attention to the role these divergent perceptions played in determining the result. Many Australians appeared reluctant to change a document they believed to be central to their democracy at the same time as they knew almost nothing about it. One of the key reasons for the failure of the referendum was historical and constitutional illiteracy on a profound scale; so much so that it created fertile ground for many of the misapprehensions and falsehoods that gained purchase throughout the campaign.
The post-referendum ‘silence’ noted by many observers, also suggests that fundamental questions regarding the constitutional position of Australia’s First Nations’ people remain unanswered. For those who succeeded in bringing about the referendum, will the Constitution remain at the centre of their reform platform? If so, how will they seek to overturn the ignorance of the Constitution that is so pervasive in the electorate? And finally, what bearing does the referendum result have on the future prospect of an Australian republic and the constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians?
Mark McKenna FAHA is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sydney and Honorary Professor at the National Centre of Biography at the ANU. His research has ranged across the history of Australian republicanism and monarchy, Australian biography, histories of place and Indigenous history. He is the author of several prize-winning books, including Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: An Australian History of Place (2002), winner of the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction and Book of the Year in the 2003 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards; An Eye for Eternity, The Life of Manning Clark (2011), winner of the 2012 Prime Minister’s Prize for Non Fiction and five other national awards; From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (2016), winner of the Australian History Prize in the 2017 NSW History Awards; and Return to Uluru (2021), winner of the 2022 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award and shortlisted for the 2022 Prime Minister’s prize for Australian History.
He has held several distinguished positions overseas at Australian Studies Centres at King’s College London (2000), the University of Copenhagen (2006) and University College, Dublin (2011). In Australia, he was an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow in History at the Australian National University (2000-2005) and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2012-2015).