Campaigning for a Yes Vote, contintued

The campaign was dominated by the familiar liberal themes of citizenship and federal control of indigenous affairs, in general promoting the idea that a majority yes vote would lead to formal equality and a new deal for Aborigines.

Image 3H: Joe McGinness, Charles Perkins and others campaigning at The University of Queensland, c1967

However exaggerated or mistaken these claims were, the FCAATSI's success in spreading this message ensured the referendum was regarded widely as a plebiscite on the acceptability of Australia's treatment of Aborigines. But if the referendum was, as McGinness and Bill Onus put it, an "acid test of white Australians," it was a test diluted by the absence of any detailed policy commitments. 12

Non-indigenous Australians could vote yes out of an abstract sense of fairness but without committing to any substantive change to the status quo. And, as the Government itself showed, it was possible to support a yes vote and remain wedded to racist ideas such as the belief that indigenous culture was inherently inferior, that Aborigines needed protection, control and above all assimilation into mainstream Australia.

Image 4E: Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal)

Image 4B: Joe McGinness

Nevertheless, from the positive reception given to FCAATSI's tireless campaigners at public gatherings and trade union meetings across the country, it is apparent that large sections of the public were responding with genuine goodwill. Through the efforts of the FCAATSI and its allies and as part of the deeper political shift to the left in Australian society, many people were beginning to question Australia’s colonial legacy and the nation’s place in the world, most notably with respect to its involvement in the war in Vietnam. A societal change was underway and the outcome of the referendum was one of its early manifestations.

Image: Aboriginal children campaigning for a yes vote, with support from the Queensland branch of the Builders Labourers’ Federation, May Day 1967

On the day over 90 per cent of all Australian voters and a large majority in every state voted yes. In Queensland 88% voted in favour. It was without doubt a vote for change.

But FCAATSI expectations would soon be deflated.

The Holt Government responded by creating a modest Office of Aboriginal Affairs and in September 1967 announced it had no intention of introducing any further measures specially to assist Aborigines.

It would not be until the election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972 that the referendum result led to substantive improvements for indigenous Australia.

The referendum campaign was the highpoint of liberal politics within the indigenous movement. By the end of the decade formal equality had been largely won. But progress on many fundamental issues, land rights, control of reserves, poverty, ill-health, police racism, was minimal.

Disillusioned with the limitations of liberal reform many indigenous activists in the late 1960s turned away from FCAATSI-style politics towards more radical ideas inspired by American black radicalism and the student New Left.

The founding of an Australian Black Panther Party, the establishment of a tent embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra and the use of street marches, especially in Queensland, were defining elements of this new era in indigenous politics.

Image 3K: Queensland Trades and Labor Council newspaper advertisement promoting the yes vote.

< < Campaigning for a Yes Vote

> > Organisations and Activists

 

 

1.

Jessie M.G. Street, Report on Aborigines in Australia, May/June 1957, p.3.
2.

Faith Bandler, Turning the Tide: A Personal History of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989), p.81
3. The Policy of Assimilation: Decisions of Commonwealth and State Ministers at the Native Welfare Conference, Canberra, January 26th and 27th, 1961, p.
4. Bain Attwood & Andrew Markus, The 1967 Referendum, or When Aborigines Didn't Get the Vote (Canberra: AIATSIS, 1997), p. 16.
5. Quoted in ibid., p.50.
6. Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, Government Legislation and the Aborigines, Feb 1964, p. 29.
7. Manfred Cross, typescript, Union of Australian Women Collection, Fryer Library UQFL193, Box 7.
8. Quoted in John Chesterman, Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality (St Lucia: UQP, 2005), p. 90.
9. Bandler, p. 97.
10. Attwood & Markus, p.35.
11. Bandler, pp.95-97.
12. Attwood & Markus, p.50.

 

 

Explore UQ Library
 
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•