The day after the Australian people rejected a proposal to recognise First Nations people in the constitution, elder Geraldine Hogarth wept in her Goldfields home.
“It’s a sad day for us. The grief hurts so much, it’s like a knife in your heart,” the Kuwarra Pini Tjalkatarra woman said.
Hogarth has lived in Leonora all her life and has spent her life’s work advocating for the education and wellbeing of community children – and was awarded an Order of Australia for her efforts.
But now she is processing the result and wondering where to from here.
Australia overwhelmingly voted against enshrining an Indigenous voice to parliament to advise policy and lawmakers on issues affecting First Nations people. Just 40% of Australians voted in favour. The ACT was the sole jurisdiction to vote yes.
The outcome is very different from that of the first nationwide vote about her people in 1967, Hogarth said.
That referendum changed the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were referred to in the constitution, removing the impediment to counting Aboriginal people in the census and giving the commonwealth the power to make special laws with respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
“I was about eight or nine during the 1967 referendum and I remember my family all talking about it and now it’s such a sad day for me. I have been crying – I know I will never live to see another referendum,” she said.
The grandmother has seen too many Indigenous advisory bodies come and go in her time and thought perhaps one enshrined in the constitution would offer protection and stability.
“They just kept chopping and changing. Nothing was ever concrete. You’d always think that they were there to stay but that never happened and there’d be a good one, then six months later it’s gone.”
Like many in her community in her home state of Western Australia, she found out the referendum was rejected hours before polls closed.
Many other First Nations people are also grappling with the results, not yet ready to speak out publicly about how they are feeling. A statement of silence backed by many community leaders and organisations is being widely shared, echoing some of the grief and rejection that Indigenous people who backed the voice to parliament feel.
While there are First Nations people in favour, there are those who never placed much stock in a non-binding advisory body with little power.
In the Torres Strait Islands of Mer or Murray Island, Melora Noah, a women and education advocate, disagreed with the idea of an advisory body, questioning how it would work and how it could adequately represent diverse communities like hers.
Despite her own vote against the proposal, she was shocked the referendum was defeated so thoroughly: “I didn’t think it would go down like that, I thought at least a few states would support it … As an Indigenous person it is still a let down,” Noah said.
She doesn’t believe the vote was one against Indigenous people but instead labels it a failure of communication, campaigning and a ticking clock. “People did not understand it, they didn’t know what they were voting for, it was too late and not spelled out. It’s like when you go buy a washing machine, you want to know what you’re paying for” she said.
“It was an eye-opener for me, that Australia voted no, but it’s not about blaming. The campaign didn’t spell out what exactly what they were voting for.”
Dr Tracy Westerman, a leading Aboriginal psychologist who advocates for trauma-informed and evidence-based suicide prevention in her work, said the voice was needed.
“We have child suicide rates six times the non-Indigenous child suicide rate. We continue to fund ineffective mainstream programs that show no impact of risk reduction,” Westerman said.
“That’s why we needed the voice, if we had remote Indigenous communities saying that these programs work for us, we would have effective funding.
“Now, we just need to continue to be grassroots lobbyists and keep talking and doing the things that we’ve always done. Black activism is always going to be the long game. The sad thing is, we actually asked for the lowest possible just to be considered,” Westerman said.
“There just needs to be a bit of time, reflection, healing. There’s a lot of pain today and that’s completely understandable because Aboriginal people, we just open our hearts up, like what we did with the national apology.”
In Leonora, Hogarth says she will have her cry and sit with the loss in her home and grieve – something that is far too common, with funerals and early deaths rippling across the community.
“Here in the Western Australia, in the Goldfields and elsewhere, with our Wongi, our Yamatji, our Noongar and all our other people, we are having funerals every week and we grieve our losses,” she said.
“But we are strong, we will have our cry and we stand up again. They tried to get rid of us but we stand up and we get up.”
