Time to Listen: an Indigenous Voice to Parliament (2023)

The need for a Voice has its roots in what anthropologist WEH Stanner in the late 1960s called the ‘Great Australian Silence’, whereby the history and culture of Indigenous Australians have been largely ignored by the wider society. This ‘forgetting’ has not been incidental but rather an intentional, initially colonial policy of erasement. So have times now changed? Is the tragedy of that national silence—a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous agency and cultural achievements—finally coming to an end?