Graeme Davison AO

“The Voice is a long overdue response to ‘The Great Australian Silence’. Anyone born before 1960, and who recalls how seldom the voices of the First Australians were heard in the public discourse of our country in those years, must now reflect on the forces in the society, and in us, which silenced them. As well as I can recall, it was something halfway between a consensus and a conspiracy; a symptom of our deafness and of the pervasive, colonialist assumption that the white fella knew best. Whatever its origins – and they go very deep in our culture – it was a blot on our national life …”