10/28/2015 The 1967 Referendum – the State comes together? | Queensland Historical Atlas http://www.qhatlas.com.au/content/1967referendum%E2%80%93statecomestogether 1/4 Home Quintessential Queensland Distance Division Dreaming Development Home » Division » Separation The 1967 Referendum – the State comes together? They have made our rights wrong, Mapoon By: Jon Piccini The 27 May 1967 national Referendum was a turning point in Queensland’s political landscape, though not in the manner ordinarily conceived. Some 88% of the Queensland population heeded calls from a diverse coalition of Indigenous and nonIndigenous activist groups to ‘vote yes for aboriginal rights’ through making two small alterations to the Australian Constitution. This call for rights was particularly pertinent in Queensland – a state whose harsh protection regime and frequent dispossession of ‘native’ inhabitants in favour of mining or pastoral interests prompted comparisons with the American south, if not the Apartheid regime in South Africa. While the Referendum is memorialised as a moment in time when Australia's Indigenous peoples at last achieved full citizenship, the victory built on a long campaign which had already won most of these rights. The vote also reveals division in the Queensland landscape. A strong rural urban dichotomy and racialist overtones challenges the liberal myth of nearuniversal support. The victory also saw changing perceptions of government authorities by Indigenous activists, and consequential shifts towards more militant modes of protest such as ‘Black Power’. Let’s have a referendum – the context of constitutional reform Though part of a national campaign, the Queensland Branch of the Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (QCAATSI) and other like groups built on a tradition of local activism, providing a decidedly local tinge to proceedings. A year after activist Jessie Street launched a similar campaign in Sydney, 1958 saw the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement adopt a petition to change sections of the constitution that excluded Aboriginal people from the census and limited the ability of federal authorities to make laws on their behalf. QCAATSI was founded as a result of this, bringing together a variety of black and white groups ranging from the Cairns Aboriginal Advancement League to Brisbane’s Northern Suburbs United Nations Group. The group’s constitution stated its intention to support the national referendum campaign while seeking the ‘acceptance of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders within the Australian Community on the basis of complete…equality’. This was a task made difficult by the Statebased management of Indigenous affairs, with a FCAATSI leaflet explaining in 1963 how: an Aboriginal or partAboriginal person may be in a position where he is allowed to drink alcohol in one State, but not in another; he may be forced to vote in State elections in one State, but prohibited from voting in another; he may move freely in one State, but not in another…and so on. Queensland particularly ‘lagged behind the rest of Australia’ on Indigenous issues. One Indigenous woman remembers the period to have been ‘very confusing…we weren’t allowed to go into pubs, but in some places when I was with my (white) husband we used to be served and others refused to serve us’. Though the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander Affairs Act 1965 had given the State’s Indigenous inhabitants the right to vote and Black Panther Party, Brisbane, Manifesto 1972 Trades & Labor Council advertisement, 1967 Search