Colonial Office

• For many non-Indigenous Australians, it might seem the Voice to Parliament – the first step in the Uluru Statement’s process of “voice, treaty, truth” – is a recent idea.
• They’ve also existed in other settler nations like New Zealand and Canada where treaties were forged at the point of colonisation.

The Larrakia petition

• One famous example is the Larrakia petition to the queen, organised in 1972 to coincide with Princess Margaret’s royal visit.
• The Larrikia organisers waited patiently outside Government House in Darwin to hand the petition directly to Princess Margaret.
• When a police barricade prevented them and tore the petition, they taped it together and sent it directly to Buckingham Palace.

William Cooper’s petition

• Decades earlier, Yorta Yorta civil rights activist and co-founder of the Australian Aborigines’ League, William Cooper, spent the mid-1930s collecting more than 1,800 signatures from Indigenous communities across Australia for a petition to the king.
• As with the Larrakia petition, Australian government officials prevented the delivery of Cooper’s petition.

In other countries, it has been different

• In Canada and New Zealand, the British Crown did make treaties with Indigenous peoples at the point of formal colonisation.
• In these countries, the right of political representation has not been contested in the same way.
• That’s not to say these nations provide a direct model for Australia.
• Political representation is enshrined in the Māori Representation Act 1867, which gave all Māori men the right to vote.

Australia’s missed opportunities for treaty

• Australia was exceptional in Britain’s settler empire for having no formal history of treaty between Indigenous peoples and the Crown.
• But that doctrine did not necessarily hold true in perpetuity, and the continuing absence of treaties in Australia was not inevitable.
• By the 1800s, the mood of the Colonial Office (the British government department that managed colonies) had shifted.
• He suggested treaty arrangements should be made with Indigenous peoples in the territories of western and southern Australia to avoid a similar risk.

Truth: resetting the relationship, not just the record

• But in 19th century Australia, the frontier wars were far from secret.
• What’s missing from the colonial records are the voices and perspectives of the Indigenous communities who experienced the frontier wars.
• Legal scholars Gabrielle Appleby and Megan Davis have emphasised that the value of truth is not just in resetting the historical record but in constructively resetting the relationship between First Nations and the rest of the nation.