This 2020 movie, directed by Stephen Johnson, is set in Arnhem Land in the early 1920s. It is about race relations on the Australian frontier.<\/p>\n
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Stephen Maxwell Johnson’s film High Ground, starring Simon Baker and\u00a0Jacob Junior Nayinggul.<\/span><\/p>\n It opens with Aboriginal people at a waterhole, an oasis of palms and running water. This peace is shattered by fire from repeater rifles. When it stops, the only sound is the flight of waterfowl and the buzzing of flies around black corpses. Blood runs in the sand.<\/p>\n That scene \u2013 inspired by the Gan Gan police massacre of 1911 \u2013 confirms the power of visual media in dramatising what the law calls mass-atrocity crimes. Think of Steven Spielberg\u2019s 1993 Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>. Or Ken Burns\u2019 documentaries, The West<\/em>, The Vietnam War<\/em> and The US and the Holocaust<\/em>. There is Rachel Perkins\u2019 documentary The Australian Wars<\/em>, broadcast on SBS in 2022 and backed by the work of two dozen historians. It detailed the forcible displacement of Aboriginal people to make way for expansion of grazing \u2013 a violent displacement.<\/p>\n My response to the terrifying scene that opened High Ground<\/em> went like this: \u201cThe survivors of this are saying that all they want is a pipeline to parliament called the Voice. That\u2019s all? Only access? Just give it to them. No argument. No delay.\u201d<\/p>\n High Ground cast members Jack Thompson, Witiyana Marika and Simon Baker at the film\u2019s premiere at the Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin in 2020. <\/span>Credit: <\/span>Andreas Rentz\/Getty Images)<\/cite><\/p>\n I have no romantic view of pre-1788 Australia. The story of colonisation is no single narrative. It\u2019s jostling counter-narratives. Some are happy, such as the triumph of our British-derived civic culture or our success at merinos and mines. A lot of good things arrived with the First Fleet. I support January 26 as Australia Day, believing it can be re-imagined by First Nations as a triumph of Indigenous resilience; they can rebaptise it Survival Day.<\/p>\n Yet since historian Henry Reynolds first pointed to the massacres, the evidence has slowly, steadily mounted. Professor Lyndall Ryan at Newcastle University, after 10 years of research, estimates 400 massacres of Indigenous people, 12 of whites. Dr Pam Smith, an archaeologist at one site in the Kimberley, has interred bones that had been burnt for six days to disguise the crime.<\/p>\n If there were no other reason to vote Yes on October 14, the cruelty of the Indigenous displacement \u2013 like nothing else in our history \u2013 would give us one.<\/p>\n Paul Keating\u2019s words from his 1992 Redfern speech say it all: \u201c… it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n John Howard and Tony Abbott, the best debaters in the Liberal camp, argue that the Voice will divide us by race, entrenching race in the Constitution. To this there is a simple reply. The racial divide was decreed by official, uniformed Australia with the vote of our colonial and, later, state legislatures. It was Australian state authority that resolved there were two categories of Australians.<\/p>\n One racial category was to have its land removed without treaty or bargain. One category, defined by race, could be marched in neck braces to jail or massacre sites. Only Indigenous people were classed by museums, as late as 1938, as Australian fauna.<\/p>\n As a former Australian foreign affairs minister, I was honoured to meet 14 Caribbean nations in New York and ask them to vote for us in the 2012 ballot for the United Nations Security Council. They approved what I said about the marine environment, climate, banning small arms. But their spokesperson added, unprompted, that they liked Australia because of \u201cthe Apology\u201d. The 14 Caribbean states voted for us. Kevin Rudd\u2019s apology had added lustre to our international reputation.<\/p>\n How is our international reputation going to look if the Australian people are seen to vote down the mildest of constitutional tweaks on behalf of our First Nations?<\/p>\n As premier of NSW, I had the support of all parties when in June 1997 I presented the first apology to the stolen generations delivered by an Australian parliament. When, last year, we celebrated the 25th anniversary, I again met people who had been torn from their mothers and stuck in institutions. One talked of his attempt at escape, walking a stretch of railway line to return to his mother. There is only one racial category of Australians who systematically received that treatment.<\/p>\n If you heard someone on radio talking about being wrested from his mum and stuck in a boys\u2019 home, then escaping and following a railway line in the hope of finding his way home, you would know that it was an Indigenous Australian.<\/p>\n Now, all these peoples request is a guaranteed Voice to the parliament, with their ideas able to be endorsed or rejected.<\/p>\n Think of the seizing of their land and the savagery that went with it. It\u2019s a triumph of the spirit of reconciliation that a Voice is all they seek.<\/p>\n Metaphorically, the gunshots still echo. Only one group suffered massacres and now it\u2019s time to make amends. High Ground\u2019s <\/em>footage is dramatised, but it\u2019s not fake. Doubters might stream it on SBS On Demand, where they can also find Rachel Perkins\u2019 The <\/em>Australian Wars<\/em>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s time to let kindness have its day in public policy.<\/p>\n Bob Carr is a former foreign affairs minister and was NSW\u2019s longest-serving premier.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n