Generations have fought for everything we now enjoy. The no campaign says the voice to parliament will create “permanent race-based privilege” and a “two-tier society”, but that is already where we live. They worked to keep us safe in a racialised system that shortened their lives, limited their opportunities and pushed them to the fringes of a hostile society in their own land. They shielded us as best they could against intergenerational trauma. They didn’t leave us generational wealth. They didn’t collect antiques or buy holiday homes. Our elders didn’t work for personal enrichment or to accumulate an investment portfolio. The no campaign says the voice to parliament will create a ‘two-tier society’, but that is already where we liveĪt a forum in inner-west Sydney this week, Warren Mundine told the audience he was concerned the voice to parliament amounted to “a power grab by academics in the Indigenous elite, people and that who are concerned about losing their power”. We advocate for the rights of First Nations people because we can, and we do it to honour the sacrifices of those who went before us. We have used that education to improve our lives and those of our children. My cousins and I were the first to pass through the foreign land of tertiary education.
I finished high school and went to university. So many of our cousins, fathers, uncles, brothers don’t make it.
The average life expectancy at birth is now 71 years, but that’s the optimistic end of the scale for earlier generations. He was a talented footballer and a bright student with a love of numbers, but he had to leave school at 15 to help support his family. They, and later their children, moved constantly to keep ahead of the New South Wales protection board, which could have taken their children, including their youngest, my father. As the cook in a shearer’s camp, she met my grandfather and fled the terrors of that servitude as quickly as she could. Still a child, she was sent away at 14 to work as a “domestic”.
As a child on the mission, she was given a year’s worth of schooling, delivered at the end of a cane by the stern Anglican manager’s wife.
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