I would say that the majority of the Australian people voted Yes in favour of the Aboriginal people merely to clear their guilty conscience. It’s easy to put a mark on a ballot paper, and I must say this definitely, that there was a small minority group of sincere Australian people but I would say 75 [per cent] of those who voted Yes did it to clear their guilty conscience.
Incidentally, it’s interesting to understand why those terrible discriminative laws were put into the books. In the first place, our civic fathers, or the white man’s civic fathers of long ago, during the ‘soothing of the dying pillow’ era, the politicians, or the statesmen of that time, were writing over to Queen Victoria saying, ‘The Aborigine is dying out.’ And true, he was – they were poisoning him with strychnine in the waterholes and they were shooting him, and they were doing all sorts of things. And the Aborigine dropped from 300,000 strong to 80,000 in a very short period of time. So it was quite natural for them to say the Aborigine was a dying race.
Now it was during this period of time that the Constitution was being fixed, and as they thought we were a dying race, to save themselves a lot of bother they said, ‘Well we will not count the Aborigines and we do not have to make laws for the Aborigines, because they’re going to die out anyway’. And this is the reason today why Aboriginals have not had any education, any decent housing, any facilities that the white Australian enjoys today. It’s because of that stupid business of thinking the Aboriginals were going to die out.
Mind you, the Aboriginals are a determined lot, and they’re quite ungrateful. They didn’t die, they lived on and are still living on; in spite of the many attempts to commit genocide and assassinate us all, we are still here. I think we’ll last the white man out, truly.
