An Absent Negative

Abstract

This article argues that the absence of a campaign for a ‘no’ vote in the 1967 referendum was crucial not only to its outcome but, more importantly, to its conduct and subsequent commemoration. Not having to face an organised opposition, the campaign for a ‘yes’ vote remained superficial, and its proponents failed to publicly explain either how constitutional amendment could secure Aboriginal citizenship or what that citizenship might entail. For the same reason, the referendum has been memorialised in the misleading terms set down by the ‘yes’ campaigners as the moment when Aborigines ‘got the rights’. This article has been peer-reviewed.

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Notes on contributors

Russell McGregor

Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of history in the School of Arts and Social Sciences, James Cook University, Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian ideas about Aborigines, including the award-winning book Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (1997). His more recent publications focus on post-World-War-Two Aboriginal assimilation policies, leading into his current research project on the place of Aborigines in settler imaginings of Australian nationhood.