Forty years on

It was forty years ago today....
Sounds like a song.
And it was forty years ago this very day that the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Can you remember what you were doing?
I was early in line at the record shop, rushed home with the truly amazing disc (yes, vinyl) tucked under my arm and couldn't wait to put it on our creaky little turntable.
In the days before pods, wav files, CDs even, the tinny little stereo could still blow your mind - with the right sounds.
Omigod, look at the cover.
Just look at those dope plants.
Who's that in the corner?
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
Shh.
Listen to this!
Twenty-two years old and full of shit and I wouldn't have missed it for quids.
Ah youth: where is thy sting?
And it's also forty years last Sunday since Australia struggled into the beginnings of a social and cultural transformation that is yet to be realised.
On May 27 1967 - I think it was the first time I voted - Australia voted in a Referendum to amend the Constitution to:
- allow Aborigine people for the first time to be counted in the national census; and
- to empower the Federal Government to assume responsibility for legislating for Aboriginal people over and above the States.
Astonishingly, a shade over 90 per cent of all voters said 'Yes' to the proposition.
And saying 'yes' to a referendum question is something Australians hardly ever do.
An earlier referendum on the question, in 1944, was defeated.
But that's probably because the central question of the referendum was to allow the federal Government to retain powers normally held by the States for the period of post-war reconstruction.
The fact that we did say 'yes' in 1967 is testimony to incredibly hard work done by a handful of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, like the Queenslanders Faith Bandler (whose father, I think, was a ni-Vanuatu) and the poet and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal; Jessie Street, a well-known social activist, one of whose sons later became Chief Justice of New South Wales; Victorian Bill Onus, whose son Lin became a leading Aboriginal artist; and countless other people from, as they say, all walks of life.
The feeling at the time was that it just had to be done and I think there was a lot of goodwill about the whole thing.
Certainly both parties supported it, which is increasingly a rarity these days.
And we all felt Aboriginal people had to be recognised as Australians and take their place in our society instead of being swept under the carpet, our treatment of them an embarrassment.
The campaigners built on the work of a handful of Aboriginal activists (although I doubt they'd have used the term then) in the 1930s, who petitioned the Government for Aboriginal representation.
One of them, William Cooper, made a heart-felt plea for recognition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary (or the Sesquicentennial, if you want to get pedantic) of the settlement at Port Jackson.
Bear in mind that at the time the authorities (funny old word, that) simply grabbed a group of blackfellas from missions and settlements in rural NSW, put them on trucks, drove them off to Sydney and kept them locked up in a camp before bringing them out in loincloths, waving spears, at the re-enactment of Capt Cook's landing - and his claiming the entire continent in the name of King George - at Botany Bay.
And then they trucked them back again into the obscurity of the Far West - out of sight, out of mind.
Caught in a flickering old black and white newsreel, Cooper nervously but unwaveringly asserts the right of Aboriginal people to be recognised and very generously offers to share their country with us.
In an early assertion of the right of Aboriginal peoples to share the economic wealth of the country with the rest of us, he says '...there's plenty of fish in our rivers for all to share...' or some such.
It is very moving to see it today and particularly moving when you consider all he was asking for was a seat at the table as an equal.
In legal terms the Referendum wasn't such a great change, as the eminent Aboriginal lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt, who is Director of Research and Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, pointed out on radio the other day.
It took five years for the Whitlam Government to actually set up a Department of Aboriginal Affairs, for instance.
But that little change was like a crack in the dam and it led to what might be described as big changes.
The forty years since have seen a roll-call of events, institutions and people: Nugget Coombs, Syd Jackson, Polly Farmer, Lionel Rose, the National Aboriginal Council, Gary Foley, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Noonkanbah, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory and other forms of Land Rights in the various States, the Tent Embassy, the Royal Commissions into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generations, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the Mundines, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Mr Djerrkura, Geoff Clark, the Krakouers, the Native Title Act, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Aiden Ridgeway, Yvonne Margarula, the late Murray Chapman, Kathy Freeman, Rover Thomas, John Mawundjul, John Bulun Bulun, Linda Birney, Marion Scrymgour, Barbara McCarthy, Alison Anderson, my friend Josie Crawshaw and so on.
(Without being facetious, and drawing the strands of this post somewhat together, the characters and events would have made a record cover to rival even Sergeant Pepper.)
And, in a simple illustration, forty years ago it would have been unthinkable for any official public gathering to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of whatever country the event is in; now it's unthinkable not to.
But Indigenous people are still dying early (average age of death some 17 years younger than for non-Indigenous people), are more likely to suffer preventable chronic diseases like diabetes, renal disease, tuberculosis; in remote areas are likely to be living in a house with as many as 30 other people, they are unlikely to finish school and and are highly likely to be unemployed.
That's not to say that the referendum itself was a failure.
It's successive governments that have failed in imagination, courage and determination.
It's governments who have shut out Indigenous people from a seat at the table.
Forty years on from expressing a national sense of purpose and unity on one of the burning questions of the age, we are now living under a government that is blaming Indigenous people for the conditions many of them live in and making them pay for services and infrastructure that people living in cities regard as theirs by right.
In 2007, we still have a long way to go and clearly a Constitutional change hasn't been enough to make serious change happen.
Perhaps it's time, once again, to say Treaty Now!