West of Alice Springs, where gentle sandhills meet an ancient stone range, a frail cluster of corrugated iron shelters and rickety houses cling to the wild desert.
It was to here, Papunya, once a gentle glade of mulga trees, that around 1000 of Australia’s last nomadic Aborigines were taken in the early 1960s to absorb white ways and ease their intended assimilation into modern Australia.
The heavy failures that flowed – here and elsewhere – are well known: constant unrest, breakdown of social order, chronic health problems, alcohol and substance abuse. It was the latter that led me down the 200km dirt track laced with wrecked cars and tossed liquor bottles to Papunya two decades ago, to the young petrol sniffers who were then dying in their scores across the desert.
Arriving at dusk, I was locked in a shed by the white boss, who would take me at dawn to where blazed-out kids would be finishing a night’s petrol sniffing in the bush. The forlornness of my assignment built as I lay in the desert, cold under a grubby blanket, listening to a drunken fight.
Then, from Papunya’s hall, came the sound of children singing in the language of their Luritja forebears. Those tender voices calmed the night, staying with me long after I witnessed the ragged older kids at dawn, petrol tins pressed to contorted faces.
I resolved to learn more of Papunya and returned, partly to ease my shame at having produced a miserable story from a place of beauty and inspiration.
Papunya was the cradle of Australia’s desert art movement, nurtured by a white teacher in the town, Geoffrey Bardon. In the early 1970s, he encouraged the people dumped there to transpose their ephemeral sand and body designs to boards and canvas. Those painters ignited a great artistic and spiritual conflagration across the deserts; a lost, humiliated people found a way to speak to the world of their own feelings in their own way.
On New Zealand’s election day, Australians will also go to the polls to vote in a nationwide referendum on whether Aboriginal people should now have a voice to the nation. Voters will be asked to recognise their land’s first inhabitants within the country’s 122-year-old founding document, the constitution.
Specifically, they will be asked to agree to modifying the constitution to establish a formal Aboriginal “Voice to Parliament” – a body elected by Aboriginals to speak on their behalf.
It is the Voice, championed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which is proving the more contentious. Polling suggests it will not join the eight referendums that have been successful, out of 44 since Australia’s federation began in 1901.
To New Zealanders, denying Aboriginal people the Voice will likely be perplexing. Aotearoa has, after all, lived with its own legislated Voice, the New Zealand Māori Council, since 1962. The country established dedicated Māori seats in Parliament in 1867 and has had the Waitangi Tribunal – which gave teeth to its now-183-year-old treaty with Māori – since 1975.
I hope the Voice is not lost. Defeat will suggest Aboriginals remain, to too many Australians, a strange, melancholic people, unneedy of the special consideration in public life that might have helped lift their inferior circumstances – by being heard and not just fleetingly seen.
Those men and women who 50 years ago first moved their art from sand to canvas enabled a nation to begin to feel their lives and longings. The singing that still whispers to me of that long-ago night in the desert says those voices should now be heard.
