You can listen to the Front on your smart speaker every morning. To hear the latest episode, just say play the News from the Australian. From The Australian, I'm Claire Harvey. A special bonus episode of The Front for you today. It's the first in a series of episodes we're rolling out over the next six weekends. As part of The Australian's sixtieth anniversary celebrations, We've asked a handful of the nation's most eminent thinkers, commentators and experts to reflect on
the past six decades. Their observations about everything from power and politics to science and identity have been published in a special edition Glossy Magazine out today. First up is political firebrand Senator Jacinta Numbi imp Price, the opposition spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, was the secret weapon of the No camp during last year's referendum on a Voice to Parliament.
She felt the proposed advisory body wouldn't be effective in addressing the practical challenges faced by Aboriginal people in rural and remote communities. The voice was resoundingly voted down on October fourteen, with just over sixty percent of Australians voting against the constitutional change. Jacinta number Imp Price has written today on the theme of history. She says, we need to be honest with ourselves about the good and bad aspects of our national story if we want to move
forward together. That's today's episode.
Our Australian story is not perfect. There are shameful chapters, but the arc of our history has been overwhelmingly positive. It's a story that has few historical parallels.
That Senator Jacinta numbim for Price, reading an excerpt from her essay for The Australian.
The ends don't always justify the means, but honesty is required if we're to move forward and reconcile as a nation.
The father, David, was a history teacher and a white man. He hails from Newcastle in the New South Wales, Hunter although he has Irish heritage. He married Jacinta's mum, Woolbury woman and former Northern Territory minister, Bess Nongurai Price, more than forty years ago. They met in the town of Yondermou and later relocated to Alice Springs, where they raised Jacinta and her brother, Leonard, Jacinta's big brother died of cancer when he was just ten. She was three years
old at the time. The Price has traveled widely, and young Jacinta had been around the world and seen every Australian state before her thirteenth birthday. But it was growing up on Walpury Country, her mom's country as part of a mixed race family with a history teacher dad that had a huge impact on how Price thinks about our collective past.
I'm biased because my father was a history teacher, so I had no choice but to appreciate and value what history means.
Just Into not being Propriseed got her start not in politics, but in showbiz. Ah She worked as a singer songwriter throughout her twenties, releasing her first album in twenty thirteen. She describes her sound as a little bit country, a little bit folk, and a little bit soul, and the album was a tribute to her early life in the territory.
Two years later, in twenty fifteen, her mum, Bess officiated Just Into swearing in as a counselor on the Alice Springs Town Council, where she served until twenty twenty one. She ran in the twenty nineteen federal election, but lost to incumbent Warren Snowden. The next time round, she got up, winning a Senate seat as a member of the Country Liberal Party, and her views on indigenous issues, domestic violence and colonization have been ruffling feathers ever since.
The hard fact is that once modernity emerged across the globe, the hunter gatherer life was not going to last long. There is no alternative possible version of Australian history where Indigenous Isustralians would have been left alone to continue their way of life. The only question was about colonization by who and when, rather than if we're fortunate it was the British who arrived and not many of the other alternatives.
In her essay for The Australian and in her recent political life, just Into not being Proprised says, we have to talk frankly about the horrors some colonizers inflicted, like the massacres of Aboriginal men, women and children on the frontiers.
We need to understand the atrocities that occurred so that we don't repeat history. But we also need to understand the good that occurred within our history, the way in which we forged a way of life together and created
a unique shared Australian culture. I think we need to be able to instill pride within our children, within the generations to come, because if you don't have that sense of pride in who you are and where you come from, then we can't progress forward in a positive way, in a constructive way.
Indigenous leaders have spent decades pushing for treaty, but in the twenty tens this morphed into a vision for something much more specific, a three phase process, beginning with a voice to Parliament than a Macarata Commission, and then a treaty with First Nations people. Here's voice proponent and Cobble Cobble Woman, Professor Meghan Davis.
Macarata is the culmination of our gender. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self determination.
This became Anthony Albanesi's first pledge as Prime Minister, present and emerging and on behalf of the Australian Labor Party.
I commit to the ularu's statement from the heart and cold.
Macarata is a young word that translates loosely to coming together after a struggle. The Macarata Commission, proposed in the Ularu Statement, was to focus on truth telling about Australia's recent history, but as a significant player in the thumping defeat of the Voice, Senator Price isn't a fan of Macarata either.
I don't think we need truth telling I think the concept of truth telling in the framework of Indigenous policy Indigenous Australians is more driven by this notion that somehow modern non Indigenous Australians have to compensate for what occurred to Aboriginal people in our country's history. I wouldn't suggest the idea of truth telling is the way forward because I feel it's more of a reinvention of history, a
rewrite of history. If you're like, we need to add to our history, certainly there's a broader picture that's not being told that needs to complement what we've already been told about our nation's history, and I think that's what needs to be done through the education system, through our historians. But working together Indigenous and non Indigenous Australia in that way to fill that gap.
Instead, just enterprise backs a different kind of movement.
I think the advancement movement is about taking a positive view of ourselves as a nation and in order to solve our problems, we need to get on board with one another. No more separatism. How can we push for separatism when many of us, our DNA won't allow it, our family circumstances, our community circumstances doesn't allow for it. It's ludicrous. And you know, the Advancement movement to me
is about treating everybody equally. Is about you know, I guess for me politically also is serving astralogs on the basis of need instead of race. It's about looking forward in practical ways and applying practicality to our everyday lives.
Coming up what just internumpim Forprise says about guilt and responsibility. It's the Australian's sixtieth birthday on Monday July fifteen, and we're diving into our own history. Join ours subscribers at the Australian dot com dot a U and we'll be back after this break. Senator just inter Numpian for Price met her husband, Scottish Australian singer col and Lily, when they were both working in the music business. They married in a traditional ceremony and live in Alice Springs with
their blended family. It's a busy household with just Into's three sons and Colin's one all growing up together. At last year's Great Voice Debate hosted by The Australian in the run up to last year's Voice referendum, she described her family's mixed heritage like.
This, We've got a blended family. Boys that've got different backgrounds and heritage within them. You know, Risian, French, Creole, Malay, Indian, you know Irish, Scottish, Welsh, German, English. I think it's Chinese. The great great grandfather from Odam, Big Waldbury. They're Australian kids and ultimately this is personal for US.
Senator Price sees her own extended family dynamic reflected all around the country.
We've got that shared unity. I grew up in a place like Gallas Springs. Everyone was of mixed heritage and you know, there was into marrying going on. And that's the case right across Australia. I mean in the cities, I think somewhere like eighty percent of those who identify as Indigenous and married to non Indigenous Australians. So we're mixing it up. You know we are the Australian story.
She says, the idea that modern Australians should bear the responsibility and the guilt for the sins of the past is holding us all back.
I've spoken previously. I've written about the Connistant massacre which occurred in my family's country, the last sanction massacre occurred in nineteen twenty eight, and the fact that many of my Woppery family were murdered as a result of that, but that seventy five years after it occurred, we had a commemorative ceremony and invited those descendants of those who killed our family to say to them, look, we don't
blame you for what happened in our country's history. We want to recognize these were hard times, but we are now together as Australian as moving forward. And I think that was one of the greatest acts of reconciliation that I've ever been a part of, and it was just
a natural process for my family. And so I've spoken about history and that context, but I think it was important that day to talk about positive effects elements of colonization, modernization, if you like, because it's rarely ever really highlighted or discussed it's always within the lens of the horrors, the atrocities, and that everyone now has to compensate for what happened in our nation's history, and talk of reparations and all of those sorts of things, and we've got to move
forward from that.
This episode was produced by Kristen Amiot with the support of Bianco far Marcus. You can read the full essay by Senator Jacinta NumPy Enterprise in the special edition Glossymag out today or online at Big Australian dot com, dot ju