Kaurna land is the land of the red kangaroo, Jakirah Telfer told the hundreds of people packed into a theatre in Elizabeth on Wednesday.
“That kangaroo never goes backwards, only forwards,” she said.
Telfer, a Kaurna woman and the coordinator of South Australia’s yes campaign, told the crowd why it was important that the referendum launch be held in Adelaide, a place of previous progressive votes.
“As we have before, we’ll continue to lead in this country and in this world,” she said.
The setting for the launch in Adelaide’s outer suburbs is exactly the kind of heartland the yes campaign needs to win over to clinch victory. With yes expected to claim the inner cities and the no campaign likely to win over the regions, it’s the outer suburbs where many expect the campaign to be won or lost.
Some 40 minutes north of the city’s CBD, Elizabeth is a sprawl of fast food joints and schools with rusty footy posts surrounded by tattered wire fences. The entry to the theatre is within eyesight of the back of a long queue snaking from the Services Australia centre in the shopping mall across the road.
The line stretched out the door before the window even opened, past a man in hi-vis sleeping rough, his pop-up tent crammed into the back of a borrowed shopping trolley.
Inside, Elizabeth’s Playford civic centre had the buzz of an election launch, in a room packed beyond capacity with thrilled supporters.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young sat next to Labor’s Amanda Rishworth, with Senator Penny Wong a few seats down, and the crowd stood and hollered as the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, entered the fray.
But more noticeable and notable was the diverse non-political presence.
The packed room, which was officially at 400 RSVPs but felt like more than a few extra crammed into the standing room at the back, was filled with Indigenous campaigners and non-Indigenous alike.
Hazaras for Yes were there, and the Turbans 4 Australia president, Amar Singh, razzed up the crowd. There were union officials and retired people and members of the African community, and – of course – one random guy in a South Sydney Rabbitohs jersey.
It was a much more diverse crowd than, for instance, a corresponding no campaign launch in Perth last week.
A reverent silence fell when Uncle Moogy Major Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri man, stood for the welcome to country. “I played football with your father,” he told MC Shelley Ware, before asking the ancestors to sit down and help people make the “right decision”.
Albanese called it “an idea whose moment has come”.
“Don’t close the door,” he repeated, emphasising the refrain each time in his rousing speech, easily one of the best and clearest of his prime ministership.
When he called the Uluru statement a one-page document, a knowing chuckle rippled through the crowd. When he stressed the voice and constitutional change would be “straightforward and clear”, the crowd nodded.
Malinauskas, speaking last in his home state, situated the Indigenous voice’s place in history as the latest stitch in a long thread of progressive reforms championed by South Australians, including the 1967 referendum and the extension of voting rights to women. He noted that the “vague and terrible consequences” predicted by laggards over those changes had never materialised.
In one memorable line that will likely be played for some time to come, he painted the voice as both a powerful change but also a humble reform which shouldn’t be feared.
“If our forefathers and mothers can say yes to universal franchise, if our great grandparents can say yes to waves of migration, if our grandparents can say yes in 1967, if our parents can say yes to land rights, then this generation is capable of saying yes to an advisory committee.”
Without seeking to be unkind, it was exactly the sort of blunt message the yes campaign and Albanese should have been slapping on bumper stickers and screaming from the rooftops for months.
Albanese also warmed to the theme of “yes” as a way forward.
“Voting no leads nowhere. It means nothing changes,” he said “We rise to the moment, like the kangaroo and the emu on our coat of arms.
“They never go backwards, they just go forwards. And so do we.”
