‘Cold heart’: Stan Grant unloads over No vote

In a speech at the ANU’s Crawford Leadership Forum on Monday night, the Wiradjuri man suggested that the strategy championed by Anthony Albanese to say the Voice did not deliver radical change was part of the problem.

“In the consultants’ suites and the lawyers’ dens, it was determined that if the voice was made so inoffensive people may say yes. Instead it was so inoffensive people found it so easy to say no,’’ Professor Grant said on Monday night.

“The voice was never a modest ask, it was monumental. Perhaps this was the opportunity lost by the yes campaign, to not let the voice truly speak.”

In his speech, titled The witness of poetry: how history is too heavy for democracy, he said the result left him in despair on the morning after the result.

“Our nation is set in stone: one word, no. Whatever hope there may be for a different Australia, I likely won’t live to see it,” he said.

“This morning I am hearing that word: no. That word without love. That word of rejection. That word from which no other word can come. This morning in the darkness I am hearing the cold-hearted no of a country so comfortable it need not care.”

Professor Grant said he felt closer to his black grandfather than his white grandmother on October 14.

“That’s what this vote has done, this is its cruelty: it has robbed me of you. Australia has decided who we are. It has reminded me of the space between us,” he said.

“The weary leaders will now return to the flinty ground of Indigenous suffering in Australia. They will chip away with what tools they have. God bless them.”

Professor Grant said he was sick of being portrayed as a troublemaker for raising important issues.

“We who dare to speak of justice or racism, we are cast as the provocateurs. We are the troublemakers. We are the truth that dare not speak its name,” he said.

“Better we speak of fairness or equality or unity. Emaciated words starved of truth.”

Professor Grant does not refer by name to No campaigners including Warren Mundine and Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price but does criticise those that say the no vote “puts an end to the politics of grievance”

“And in a pithy, media tested, inane sentence the hurt of my parents, my grandparents, the early deaths, the youth suicides, the lives lost to imprisonment, the snotty noses, itchy skin, and dazed look of another generation of inherited trauma – the solemn truth of what a nation has done to the First People – is waved away as mere contrivance. A collective gripe,” Professor Grant said.

“But the politician is so devastatingly convincing. The politician has no tolerance for history, pain is negated by progress.”

“I drink from a bubbler and I give thanks for running water. That’s the measure of history, we have running water now. Thank you colonisation.”

Ultimately, he suggested it was a missed opportunity.

“The voice, to me, was never about resentment. It was never about identity … But Australia would not shoulder that load. Instead we got a lecture about unity. Those who own history, claimed for themselves history’s final word: no,” he said.

“A nation is not written in a constitution, it is written in the heart. And our constitution was not big enough for our call from the heart,” he said.

“This is the Australia I bequeath to my children. Like all orphans they will have their memories and however pained they may be, they can never be reconciled. My dead: black and white – my ancestors – lie restless in this land.

“We have laid the sod over them, sealed them in. I thought in me they may be able to speak, that those two sides of me might find a common voice. “But we said no to that. My country has buried my ancestors for a second time.”

Originally published as ‘Cold heart’: Stan Grant unloads over No vote