no to the no

Imagine that. Imagine claiming a whole vast and fast continent was empty, naming it Terra Nullius. The land of nothing. Imagine thinking you could fill it up with people you had no use for, people who had stolen, who had committed crimes. Imagine emptying your prison ships squalling on the Thames into big boats and sending those off far away south. And then you let your people starve, too proud and stupid to ask advice of the local native people, to ask them, “So what do you eat?” Imagine giving blankets out as donations, as a kindness, that had been seeded with deadly smallpox virus. Imagine poisoning waterholes. You steal their children and rape women and enslave women and men. You classify them as animals in the first Constitution, flora and fauna. You won’t let them out at night and Australia is crosshatched with Boundary Streets and Boundary Roads. You torment and torture men and women who have not paid a fine or who are drunk and disorderly and allow malicious racist police to murder them in cells. Imagine tolerating the suffering of a longstanding people who contract in their remote communities Dickensian diseases. Imagine ignoring the wisdom and courage of this oldest continual culture on all the earth, while you set fire to the continent you have stolen and then plundered. A billion native animals die. You won’t help and you won’t be helped. A coup arrives, a coup de grace, a shaft of insight in the form of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, written so graciously and with such courage and truth, and all the 3% of our population who have survived ongoing genocide ask for is just to be heard and to have some say in the running of the place, imagine just that, and you turn it down, call it division instead of progress, spit in the mouth of everything real and lasting, imagine currying the No vote and seeding doubt and calling it selfish and mean, imagine turning down this very small and modest and ambitious and generous-minded offer: we will help you run the place. We will bring our warriors and our mind. We’ll bring our heart back into the nation. Imagine turning down all of that. Inglorious, short-breathed, and stupid, and stale. Australia this is a referendum on our truthfulness and kindness. We are not enough.