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In March 2023, Stan Grant, a First Nation Widjuri journalist, writer and ABC radio and television presenter, gave an iconic talk “Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream”. Grant’s talk was as moving and inspiring as it was furiously-angry about what continues to happen every day to humanity’s aboriginal peoples, not only in Australia but throughout the world.

His talk became a finalist in the United Nation’s Media Peace Awards for its role in stimulating a greater public awareness and understanding of the common plight of Australia’s native’s. Grant’s words speak to the upcoming October 14th Yes or No Referendum Vote to decide whether or not it is important enough to grant its First Nation peoples a special ‘Voice’ to Australia’s Parliament. Listen to his heart-felt talk in this preface.

Stan Grant: Racism and the Australian dream – The Ethics Centre

Stan Grant’s intensely-personal testimony at once struck a chord in this writer’s own heart and soul; being as he is one of Irish descent, whose ancestors, long ago, were themselves dispossessed of their once sacred aboriginal homelands in the Old World, which still is the source of so much existential angst among himself and those of his kind, no matter how much time has since passed. The memory of indigenous peoples and the earth everywhere is simply an exceedingly long one not easily erased.

This writer’s Celtic grandfathers, grandmothers and kinfolk also once were forcibly-evicted from their own ancestral lands and forced to flee to wherever some safe harbour could be found in the New or Old World; forever after snubbed instead of honored and paid tribute to for their sacred lands that once were. Yet their memories in the minds of their descendants still possesses a vital, living resonance.

Especially each time they read again the cargo manifests of the ships that described them as “Vagrants”, instead of ‘Dispossessed Indigenous,’ as they were spirited away from that Green Emerald Isle of their ancient ancestry to parts unknown. A sad epitaph, to which many others in the world still can so readily attest.

While his Great, Great, Great Grandmother Bridget, before she could ever be forcibly evicted, suffering from extreme malnutrition due to a lack of food, other than the common grasses that lay underfoot, seeking some basic warmth, fell into her hearth and was nearly burnt alive before her kin outside, themselves seeking some meagre comfort in the healing warmth of the sun, noticed the smell of her burning flesh.

This writer many times has simply wished that someone like himself, in some long, long ago distant time and place, would have also attempted to say ‘Yes’ to a vote that would have given them their own strong. independent native voice in a now woefully disconnected world that day by day, month by month, year by year, continues to drift that much farther away from the basic human relationships with Mother Earth, Country and one another. It’s to their spirit and honor, as well, that these words also are forever offered. But how will the epitaph of the aboriginal peoples of Australia also one day read if the Yes Vote on Oct 14th isn’t so honored?

All those non-aboriginal peoples in the world, who still possess even a modicum of memory, however faint, of their own aboriginal past, and who care about the desperate plight of aboriginal peoples everywhere on our Mother Earth, and how their survival is intimately inter-twined to the fate of all of life on this beautiful. lush green and watery blue planet of ours, should be aware of the critically-important decision with which Australia’s voters now must face.

This vote symbolically represents a long-time coming reconciliation, not only between Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders and descendants of its non-aboriginal ‘Settler–Colonial’ forbears, but it represents a possible major turning point in the complicated, obfuscated, contentious ‘can of worms’ debate underway in the world between everything from climate change, the preservation of the planet’s endangered natural world and species of life, to the constant threat of nuclear war. A ‘Yes’ vote majority will mean the non-aboriginal world finally is prepared to either listen or not listen to its own aboriginal past and the many lessons that still awaits their conscious awareness.

Until now, on the eve of Australia’s October 14th Vote, these big world issues have never before been couched, in such plain talk terms, to both aboriginal and non=aboriginal voters alike, about what all is involved in Australia simply granting its aboriginal peoples their own SPECIAL VOICE TO PARLIAMENT. This thought scares the living Be-Jesus out of all those in Australia and the world who have strayed too far away from any living memory of their aboriginal past and its higher awareness of the meaning of life.

Instead of clarity as to what the actual question of whether or not aboriginal peoples should have a special voice to the Australian government’s daily conduct and future life of all Australians, the reality of the vote only continues to threaten the racists and ideologues in Australia and the world’s public and private sector, especially among their reactionary counterparts in the business, financial and mass media sectors. So heated and contentious has this debate on the vote become, that the vote’s critics, in a desperate attempt to scare Australia’s voters from voting ‘Yes’, attempt to characterize the ultimate outcome of the vote as Australia’s Brexit Moment.

But the long and the short of it all simply asks Australian voters to add to Australia’s Commonwealth Constitution, Australia’s ultimate law, the words:

“In recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia there shall be a body, to be called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, in the capacity of an advisory body, may make representations to the Parliament and Executive Government of the Commonwealth on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”

This is it, pure and simple. But, of course, it isn’t pure and simple because the corporate interests in the world, who continue to run everything just the way they like it, know that, in the long run, a ‘Yes’ Vote will negatively impact upon every aspect of their total corporate hegemony upon the planet.

EPILOGUE

Stan Grant, the First Nation Widjuri  journalist, writer and Australian Broadcasting (ABC) radio and television presenter, noted in the preface (Stan Grant: Racism and the Australian dream – The Ethics Centre), how: Australia was beginning to tear itself apart because of racism; much in the same way England essentially has done and continues to do to its own nation over its viscous and divisive class-based Brexit Debate, or; how the U.S. continues to do the same in its warmongering desire for world war in Ukraine. Stan Grant’s observations of what is happening in Australia are spot on!

According to an ABC Investigation report Australia’s White Supremacists are dividing the Yes and No Voters on different given long-standing political, cultural and racial issues surrounding the vote. Its report tracked down how the nation’s related, decades-old, contentious ‘land rights’ movement divisions have now been repurposed with the debate over the current Yes/No Vote. Red Over Black, a book and documentary, released in the early 1980’s, claimed the aboriginal land rights movement was a communist plot to erode Australia’s sovereignty.

The ABC report reveals how Australia’s white supremacist activists now are playing a major role in the anti-Yes movement by circulating the ‘Red Over Black’ book and documentary in rallies opposed to the Yes Vote all around Australia.

The report quotes Kaz Ross, a leading far-right and conspiracy theorist analyst, who has examined dozens of Telegram, Facebook and Wiki groups who continue to denigrate the Yes Vote campaign, as being a deliberate infiltration strategy by one Geoff Macdonald, a former Australian Communist Party member, turned right-wing activist, who initially, at the outset of the Yes/No Vote debate, was mum on this aspect of the Yes/No debate. Until, that is, the anti-Semitic website XYZ, founded by white supremacist David Hiscox, linked Macdonald’s efforts to the proposed ‘Voice’, describing it as communism by the back door”.

The scare and smear tactics of tireless, never-ending ideological “pro-Capitalism/anti-communist” propagandic news campaigns throughout the world, many owned by enormously-rich and powerful private family’s, like North America’s Shaw and Balboni Family’s, and the giant, octopus-like reach of their Corus Entertainment and Global Television Network’s, and other similar world news networks, have, for over a century since the Russian Revolution in 1917, continued to denigrate anything in the world, and especially now in Australia, that smacks of “left-wing socio-political-cultural communalistic” land rights, pro-indigenous issues.

Especially since the emergence of a new Telegram Channel, Aboriginal Voice Exposed (AVE), entered into the ‘Voice’ debate and now is one of the most shared anti-indigenous, anti-land rights, anti-Yes voices in Australia. It’s now virtually impossible to know the real truth today about any given world issue, so cooked, managed and manipulated are whatever the news source.