With singer-songwriter Paul Kelly and members of Midnight Oil, Mr Yunupingu created the defiant and challenging song “Treaty”. “Treaty” was composed in 1991 to demand that the Australian government honour a promise made by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke that his government would enter into a Treaty with Indigenous Australians by 1990.

 

Hawke made the promise after being presented with a bark petition calling for a Treaty at the Barunga Festival in the Northern Territory in 1988. The promise of a Treaty made by Hawke was ultimately worth as much as his infamous promise that “no child will live in poverty by 1990”.

 

Yet calls for a Treaty still resonate within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) communities.  Its advocates seek formal acknowledgement that Australia and its islands were occupied and owned by Indigenous first nations prior to their unsettlement by British colonialism.

 

They seek formal acknowledgement that these lands were never ceded or surrendered to the invaders and that surviving communities and peoples have an inalienable right to continuing custodianship over their lands. They seek formal acknowledgement that surviving communities and peoples have the right to exercise self-determination.

 

Such a Treaty should be the foundation upon which changes to the Constitution of Australia in respect of Aboriginal peoples should be made.

 

The referendum on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal Australians, in the absence of such a Treaty, has become a contested issue within the ATSI communities.  

 

Aboriginal Peak Organisations in the Northern Territory recommend “a vote for changes to the Australian Constitution which eliminate racial discrimination, support agreement-making and recognise and protect the culture, languages and identity of ATSI people”.  Many other ATSI organisations and personages support this position.

Yet a number of other influential ATSI persons and groups reject constitutional recognition as a deception and a diversion.

 

Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy spokesperson Wayne Wharton believes the referendum is “an empty, tokenistic distraction from the real issue, the real discussion about sovereignty...”

 

Phil Winzer, a Ngarabul man from northern NSW is also critical of the referendum. “There is no proposal to change the constitution to recognise that the entire land mass of the continent of Australia was legally and absolutely owned by the original nations that were here, and has never been legally ceded by them, and there is no proposal to recognise that our people had rights attached to that ownership as sovereign nations”.

 

Aboriginal activist and historian Dr Gary Foley believes constitutional recognition to be a “stupid and pointless idea” and “an idiotic proposition dreamed up by black middle-class bureaucrats and academics… designed to divert attention from the real issues.” 

 

There can be no genuine reconciliation between the ATSI peoples and the rest of the Australian people until a Treaty exists acknowledging ATSI people’s prior ownership of this country.

 

The Treaty must acknowledge that the essence of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the colonialist unsettlers was that the invasion of ATSI lands was essentially accomplished by force and violence or the threat of force and violence.

 

The Treaty must acknowledge ATSI communities’ rights to self-determination on the basis of real and lasting Land Rights.

 

The current Australian Constitution is a patchwork quilt of the competing requirements of different sections of the British imperialist-dominated ruling class that existed over a century ago.

 

It is unworkable and must be replaced by an anti-imperialist, democratic and republican Constitution that includes a Bill of Rights defining and enshrining our rights and liberties.

 

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