Home truths & brilliant lies

When: Thursday 14 November, 11.45am-1.15pm

The defeat of the Voice referendum on 14 October 2024 has been the cause of grief among many First Nations peoples and millions of others who voted Yes. The referendum result is already widely recognised as a landmark in the history of Australia. At the same time, the Voice emerged out of a wider call in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ for Voice, Treaty and Truth, an interlinked process with both a long history and a necessary future. This session will examine the meaning of the Uluru Statement and the 2023 referendum as part of this longer history, explore the role of the humanities in truth-telling, and discuss where the nation might go in the post-Voice referendum era.

Chair: Professor Mark Kenny FAHA

About the speakers

Professor Kate Fullagar FAHA

Paper Title: Phillip, Bennelong, Precedents & Counterfactuals

This paper will discuss the legal settlement that never happened between the early colonists and Indigenous people in New South Wales. It will make the speculative argument that the first governor, Arthur Phillip, likely expected a treaty to eventuate between the Darug-speaking clans and British representatives in the Sydney colony. First I will discuss Phillip’s understanding and experience of British imperial behaviour in the New World before 1788, outlining the conventions, if limited, of British legal possession in the eighteenth century. Second, I will discuss Phillip’s specific dealings with Bennelong between 1789 and 1793 to make the case for his assumptions about treaty. Finally, I will muse on the implications for Australian history of this particular settlement never occurring, touching on both political consequences and the nation’s peculiarly amnesic attitude to Indigenous sovereignty.

Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She is also co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many indigenous societies it encountered. She is the award-winning author of The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020) and The Savage Visit (Berkeley, 2012); the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012); and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, 2018). She is Lead Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage project with the National Portrait Gallery called Facing New Worlds.

Associate Professor Shino Konishi FAHA

Shino Konishi is a Yawuru historian and Associate Professor in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University. Her research interests include histories of exploration, cross-cultural encounter, and representations of Indigenous masculinity and labour. Her current work explores early collecting practices in Western Australia, imperial travellers’ observations of Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and methodological approaches to Indigenous biography.

She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012), which was short-listed for the NSW Premier’s Australian History Prize, and a number of edited collections including Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives (2015) with Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam. From 2010 to 2014 she was the editor of Aboriginal History, and she is now editing a volume on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander biographies in collaboration with the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Professor Megan Davis FAAL FAHA FASSA [online]

Scientia Professor Megan Davis is Pro Vice-Chancellor Society (PVCS) at UNSW Sydney and holds the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and is director of the Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW Law. Professor Davis is the 2024-2025 Whitlam Fraser Harvard Chair in Australian Studies and a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School.

Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Prof is a Sydney Peace Prize Laureate for the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart in 2022 and in 2023 Prof Davis was named on TIME Magazine’s TIME NEXT100 list of the Next Generation of Global leaders. She was also named Marie Claire “Powerhouse of the Year” in 2023. She is a previous Overall Winner of the AFR Women of Influence (now Women of Leadership) awards in 2018 and has previously been named on the AFR Annual Cultural Power list and AFR’s Australia’s top Legal Powerbrokers list.

Prof Davis was co-chair of the Uluṟu Dialogue and worked on the constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples for over twelve years and was instrumental in the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart.

She is a globally recognised expert in human rights and Indigenous peoples rights and was formerly expert and Chair of the United Nations Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva and expert member and Chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issue at UN headquarters in NY.

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