Stan Grant told Saturday Morning The Voice was a modest proposal to enshrine Aboriginal Australians into the constitution.
Photo: Harper Collins
Australian journalist Stan Grant’s new book Murriyang Song of Time is a response to the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum.
Grant is a Wiradjuri first nations Australian with a long broadcasting career, reporting extensively from around the world for more than three decades.
Grant told Saturday Morning The Voice was a modest proposal to enshrine Aboriginal Australians into the constitution.
“It sought to put into the constitution the acknowledgement of First Nations people, as the first peoples, which is obviously unquestioned.
“And then to form an administrative body, one that would have no veto power, would control no money, would not be able to make laws, but would be able to have input and advice into policy made specifically for Aboriginal people.”
It was a modest proposal, he said.
“That we thought as being acceptable to the broad population, it proved not to be and it was another disappointment for so many Aboriginal people seeking that that recognition in Australia.”
In the referendum, 60 percent of Australians rejected the proposal, which was a personal and political blow, he said.
“It was beyond the constitutional change. It was an existential moment. It was a moment to imagine what an Australia that puts at rest the blood that runs through my veins, both white and black.
“That forms a new way of seeing ourselves as Australians and to see that dashed was more than just the loss of a political mechanism, but truly the loss of a voice through which we may speak to each other and as one.”
The year since had been a struggle, he said.
“This book was a response to that by reclaiming something that is beyond politics, a sacred place to meet each other again.”
In May last year Grant stood down from presenting a prime-time show on ABC after receiving “relentless” racist abuse.
Grant said he had always endured racism in his career but it had escalated after he covered the King’s Coronation for the Australian national broadcaster.
Grant had spoken about the impact of colonisation on his people during ABC’s coverage of the coronation.
The true nature of the media was revealed in that time, he said.
“I saw the worst of it, and perhaps the truth of it.
“And the truth of the media, however much it likes to cling to the myths of its altruism or its accountability and its role in upholding democracy, the truth of the matter is that it is addicted to conflict.”
He had seen himself and his own family abused endlessly on social media and misrepresented in the mainstream media, he said.
“I had to ask myself, why am I still doing this? And so I walked away from it because I did not believe it had the language, or the love to speak to the gentle spirits of all of us.
“I don’t see myself as a journalist and a broadcaster anymore, and I’ve entered into, I think, a much truer space for me, which is in writing … the spoken word for me, always falls short of the beauty of the written word, or sometimes even the unwritten word, the things that are not said, the things we don’t need to say.”
His book is inhabited by a “sense of silence”, he said.
“And it’s strange thing to say, when there’s a book 250, 300 pages, that it’s silent, but there is a pervasive silence, and the silence not being non-speech, but the silence being the space so that we might hear each other, and I seek to inhabit that more.”
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