Often, when politicians depart the national stage, combatants struggle to contain their emotions. But when it came time for Pat Dodson to say farewell to parliamentary life, the 75-year-old Yawuru man was stoic. Emotion, a kind of preemptive mourning, coalesced around the father of reconciliation like a gathering swell. Dodson kept his feet and looked beyond the moment he found himself in to the unfinished business.
Dodson has been treated for cancer, treatment which required him to visit Noongar lands. In an essay he wrote for the Monthly earlier this year, Dodson explained he shaved off his beard – the facial hair he’d grown since 1967 – to show respect as a senior man visiting other country. As is common with people who have experienced life-threatening illness, Dodson is now physically altered by his experience. He walks more lightly on the Earth.
Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday there were few more reassuring sights than seeing Pat and his hat coming down a corridor towards you. There is something solid and enduring about Dodson’s physicality and gait that invites that reaction. The signature hat abides and the beard is coming back, but one of the more important protagonists in the story of reconciliation in this country is now frailer. History seems to flow through him.
Dodson is leaving politics because he can no longer discharge his duties as a Western Australian senator. Representation is a demanding business and his energy is ebbing. When he fronted journalists to say farewell, Dodson was supported by Indigenous colleagues from the Labor caucus: Linda Burney, the portfolio minister; Malarndirri McCarthy; Marion Scrymgour; and Jana Stewart. Burney thought she might cry, and did, briefly, before gathering herself in front of the cameras.
Dodson was back home in Broome when a majority of Australians rejected the voice to parliament; the no flowed west from the eastern states. He hadn’t started out as a supporter of the voice, but he became one. Dodson said he was leaving politics with “some sense of sorrow that, as a nation, we were not able to respond positively to the referendum”. His final day in politics will be Australia Day – an emphatic gesture, delivered entirely deadpan. Dodson practices that vanishing art of less being more.
Dodson didn’t pepper his farewell with the reminiscences politicians generally indulge in as they pack their bags for life beyond Canberra. There were no legacy lists unfurled or visceral scores settled. Dodson’s frustrations – and there have been many – were not measured out in soundbites to feed the circus of public life. A professional life spent in pursuit of justice was reduced to (as he put it) to some good decisions and some bad ones.
Dodson was razor-focused on what ailed his country. After the defeat of the voice, it was important to consider how to move a polity past a period of deep division and rancour to a zone of humble persuasion, because without persuasion, there is no progress. “I am concerned that the nation has to now reconsider its integrity and its honour, and how it approaches … not only the Australian problem we’ve now inherited from the no campaign, but we’ve got to resolve lingering problems that we still have with the first people. That has to continue.”
Asked how he felt about the prospects of next steps from the Uluru statement – truth-telling and treaty – Dodson said the lesson from the defeat of the voice to parliament was non-Indigenous Australians needed to come on board with the project of reconciliation. “You can’t have a treaty with yourself,” Dodson said. “You can’t have truth-telling on your own in some little secret room. It’s going to involve all of us … we should learn to deliver a dialogue between ourselves about those critical issues for the purposes of healing.”
Was there a way to revive momentum for constitutional recognition of the original inhabitants of the continent? Dodson was blunt. He referenced his life’s work.
“If you simply operated on momentum, you’d never go anywhere. You’d watch the polls, and go back to bed. But if you are about justice, and you are about dignity and you are about honour, and you are about integrity in this country, then you work towards to achievement of those things, and you work towards assisting the population to understand the necessity of these things. Why wouldn’t we as Australians want to embrace that and work in a positive way towards those positive outcomes, instead of wallowing in disagreement and division and discord and hatred and delivering nothing?”
Dodson’s final observations were directed at politics – the theatre he’d been conscripted to by Bill Shorten. The indictment was gracious, yet at the same time, utterly damning. Dodson said he trusted the Labor party to keep trying to right foundational wrongs. But it was abundantly clear he didn’t trust the polarised, winner-takes-all politics he was leaving to deliver any kind of breakthrough. The contemporary Punch and Judy show was taxpayer-funded circling of the drain.
The moral clarity of Dodson’s warning was clear to anyone listening. “We as a nation, and the political structures we have, have got to give us the leadership, the political leadership,” he said.
“We can’t do anything without people in this place collaborating together in a positive way with the same objective or similar objectives. Because if you don’t have that, you will continue to have this division and discord and we’ll all be diminished as a consequence, because this rubs off on all of us.
“We will wear the costs of this if we don’t come to grips with it.”
Whether anyone will heed this warning remains anyone’s guess.
