I don’t think Marcia Langton has quite got the hang of this “threat” thing. As “Indigenous Voice” proponents increasingly resort to the only argument they know — bellowing RACIST! at anyone who disagrees with them, Langton has come up with perhaps the most welcome threat in recent history.
If we don’t pass the Voice referendum, we’ll never get another Welcome to Country again.
She does know a threat is supposed to be something the threatened party doesn’t want, yes?
“I imagine that most Australians who are non-Indigenous, if we lose the referendum, will not be able to look me in the eye,” she says. “How are they going to ever ask an Indigenous person, a Traditional Owner, for a welcome to country? How are they ever going to be able to ask me to come and speak at their conference? If they have the temerity to do it, of course the answer is going to be no.”
I imagine that most Australians couldn’t care less if they never hear from Langton again, quite frankly. And the “threat” of never having to put up with (let alone fork over a few grand for) the odious, “made-up bullshit” (in the words of Aboriginal woman Bess Price) of a “Welcome to Country” is hardly a threat at all.
Nor, ultimately, is Langton’s incessant screeching about “racism”. Because that’s all she’s ever done.
Mostly, one might suspect, because if she stopped bellowing it long enough for anyone else to get a word in, the essential vacuousness of her ideas would be too quickly exposed.
Take, for instance, her stance on the Voice, an issue solely predicated on race: “Aboriginal isn’t about race”.
Langton is astonished at the “mischievous” demands for a definition of Aboriginality that have emerged in the Voice debate. Being Aboriginal, she says, has nothing to do with race, but is “a cultural link, a claim of descent, an assertion or claim of identity, and acceptance by the community; it’s about being a member of a community by descent and culture”.
By descent. In other words, ancestry. Race.
She references the High Court decision in the 1983 Tasmanian dam case, which defined an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person as one of “Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and is accepted as such by the community in which he or she lives”.
So it’s the vibe. Bruce Pascoe, 100%, pure English by descent, can claim to be “Aboriginal”.
It’s almost as if Langton is trying to compensate for something.
Overseas she’s often mistaken for Palestinan, Moroccan, Algerian, Puerto Rican, Indian or Anglo-Indian or even Brazilian Portuguese. Langton almost snorts her answer: “As if I wanted to do that [pass as white].’
The Australian
Or maybe they’re just trying to tell you something. Nah, easier just to call it “racism”. You can explain anything and everything with “racism”.
And in the meantime: is she willing to put in writing that we’ll never get to hear another Welcome to Country again? Please?