Up on Yolngu Country, on the remote eastern side of Arnhem Land, is a place called Gulkula.
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This part of the Northern Territory has been home to the clans of the Yolngu people for more than 50,000 years — a time span that is almost impossible to imagine.
From a time when the Gulf of Carpentaria was a great grassed plain and our continent was linked to Papua New Guinea.
From a time when the Yolngu traded with their northern neighbours, hundreds of years before European settlement.
Gulkula is a place where freshwater and saltwater meet. A place where, for generations, the Yolngu people have met to celebrate and discuss.
Today, it is also the home of the annual Garma Festival.
Hosted by the Yothu Yindi Foundation and held at the beginning of August, the Garma Festival is a four-day celebration of Yolngu life and culture. It is Australia’s largest Indigenous gathering, bringing together the people and clans from the region to celebrate and showcase art, song, dance and storytelling with those from further afield.
The festival is a place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people to come together, to be immersed in Yolngu culture, to experience, see, but most importantly listen, and to feel.
It is a place of discussion and debate, of learning about issues that impact not just the Yolngu people, but many First Nations people across the country.
So, in this special place, big issues are raised, considered and discussed, “as the deep vein of Garma should do, interacting and conversing, reflecting and learning, engaging in dialogue back and forth — the ebb and the flow, the fresh and the saltwater, the young and the old”, noted Yothu Yindi chief executive Denise Bowden in the 2022 Garma Report.
It was at Garma that Clare Armstrong, Canberra-based national political editor from the Daily Telegraph, Herald-Sun, Adelaide Advertiser and Courier Mail, spoke about the impact of rheumatic fever — a disease that is both preventable and manageable — on children in the North Cape.
A disease that is linked to overcrowding and limited access to health care.
A disease that should be unacceptable to all Australians, as it highlights the failure of us as a nation — one of the wealthiest countries in the world — to reduce such crippling inequalities in health care.
And yet, this easily preventable condition still continues to cause significant ill health and premature death among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
Ms Armstrong went on to say that local communities had been talking about this issue for generations. But despite this, the local federal member had never mentioned it in all his time in Parliament.
Upcoming Yolngu leader Rarrtjiwuy Melanie Herdman touched on the same issue in an article written at Garma by ABC journalist Dana Morse.
“There are a lot of people in our communities that have worked and that have stories of how things can get better, but they’re often not heard,” she said.
“We have to get people to understand that people have solutions locally, but they just don’t have the capacity to do it.”
This is such a familiar theme.
It is echoed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
In the heart-wrenching words “this is the torment of our powerlessness”, the current inability of First Nations people to have any meaningful input into decisions that affect their own communities is laid bare.
And in the words “When we have power over our destiny, our children will flourish” is the clear recognition of the crucial importance of having a say in decisions about you and your community.
This theme was touched on by Noel Pearson in a recent edition of the Saturday Paper.
In pointing out the inefficiencies of policies and programs that are implemented without input from the communities they are designed to ‘help’, Mr Pearson focused on the practical outcomes of decisions that were made in conjunction with communities.
“Eventually, when we rationalise Indigenous affairs and we spend money on things that are truly productive for Aboriginal people on the ground, we’ll get rid of a lot of waste, we’ll get rid of a lot of duplication, we’ll get rid of a lot of things that actually have no impact,” he said.
“It is actually self-determination at the end of the day, saying give us the power, give us the responsibility and then you can blame us for what happens.
“With the rights and responsibility, we will close the gap.”
As the discussions and debates at the Gulkula ceremonial grounds during the 2023 Garma Festival have now come to a close, it is worth considering one important lost opportunity of this year’s festival.
Invitations to Garma are made by the Yothu Yindi Foundation. Participants are welcome to come and listen, to put their case and to engage in dialogue.
It is disappointing that Opposition leader Peter Dutton, deputy Opposition leader Sussan Ley and Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jacinta Nampijinpa Price were all invited but chose not to attend.
It was a missed opportunity to participate and discuss how to reduce the disproportionate disadvantage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander communities.
And with the Referendum on the Voice to Parliament drawing closer, it was a missed opportunity for Australians to hear a respectful debate on the issue. To hear how each side will ensure this happens.
But it appears there is another insidious agenda in the referendum debate.
Both Mr Dutton and Ms Ley have previously spoken about their support for local and regional voices. Given Mr Dutton has said he supports a legislated Voice to Parliament and that he would legislate this if in power, it is somewhat disingenuous to then argue a successful Voice vote would result in a country divided on race, millions in wasted money and a Canberra bureaucracy. This is exactly what he is proposing through his legislation proposal.
So perhaps the real agenda for the strident, often inaccurate claims being put forward by the No campaign is revealed in this text by one Coalition MP during a recent parliamentary exchange between the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader, reported by Australian Financial Review political editor Phillip Coorey:
“We can’t win the election unless we defeat the Voice solidly, i.e. we need to defeat it to get to the election starting line.”
Mr Coorey goes on to say: “The Coalition’s aim is to defeat the Voice not because it opposes one per se, but because it wants to inflict a political loss on the prime minister.”
Is this the grim political reality behind the No campaign?
In the context of the above comment, it is becoming increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that some within the No campaign are using the most marginalised people in our country for purely political purposes.
To frame the referendum debate in terms of an election win is both reprehensible and an insult to the Australian people.
We want, and expect, more from our leaders, especially at this historic time in our nation’s story.
To find out more about the referendum about the Voice to Parliament, visit the following:
Shepparton Region Reconciliation Group