Australia’s leading historian, Professor Geoffrey Blainey, has performed a great service in deconstructing the assumptions behind the Voice referendum proposal, by going back and looking at the historicity of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Just the name of this raises suspicions in my mind of emotion over reason. As Blainey points out, the document has a black arm band message of Black suffering and White guilt. But, Whites over time were enslaved and subjected to genocide, and generally treated worse than Aborigines were, which is not to downplay their suffering. All races have suffered. And as Blainey says, which is no longer done in the days of woke: “ ancient Aboriginal people themselves were champions at dispossessing their neighbours, and one day that fact should be taught in Australian schools. In every known part of the world the semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers had been deadly in their tribal warfare.”
There are, as Professor Blainey also documents below, numerous historical errors made, which strike me as odd, since they all favour the black arm band view of history. While the Voice referendum will be slugged out on policy issues that have moved away somewhat from the historical narrative, and most Australians anyway lack this sort of detailed historical knowledge, it is still a worthy contribution to show what lies behind it all.