After an effort to give Aboriginal Australians a modest voice to parliament was resoundingly rejected, many Indigenous peoples are mulling what they can do next.
Ronnie Webb stands on the veranda of his shack in the town camp of White Gate. Alice Springs town camps are Aboriginal communities located within the town of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia. ALICE SPRINGS, Australia — It would have been the perfect day for a party. Hundreds of people had gathered in this desert town to celebrate the 50th anniversary of an Aboriginal health organization. Children played games and had their faces painted. Food trucks served fried rice and ice cream.
“This referendum was like a sieve shaking out all of our ugly nuances,” said Ken Lechleitner Pangarte, an Aboriginal consultant who works to bridge the cultural divide in town. “The question is: How do we go forward now?”On the morning after the referendum, Bernadette Shields went to Sunday mass in Darwin as usual. But this time, the mood among the congregation’s many Indigenous members was funereal.
“I’m in mourning,” said Shields, who didn’t think she would live to see a similar proposal. “I’m 77 — this heart can’t take much more.”Adding to her pain was the fact that the most prominent “no” campaigner was one of the Northern Territory’s two senators: Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, whose mother is Aboriginal and whose father is White.
“If we want to be completely honest about the situation, descendants of the Stolen Generation are those that have had access to an education, they often own their own homes, they are part of the Aboriginal middle class, they head up many organizations,” she said. Across Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people spent this week searching for how to respond to the referendum’s painful result. For Kngwarraye, who is in her 70s, the ceremony was a small way of reasserting herself, along with teaching her language, Arrernte.
With the Voice defeated, hopes for a federal commission to explore treaty-making and truth-telling appear to be dashed. Parliament could legislate the Voice, but it would be politically risky after the referendum failure and would lack the constitutional foothold Indigenous leaders wanted.some of which have started their own processes for establishing Indigenous advisory bodies, truth-telling commissions and treaty negotiations.that some Indigenous Australians fear is just the beginning.
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