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From a distance they looked like anthills, endless mounds of red dirt baked and cracked by a sky so harsh it rarely wept. Some graves were scattered with stuffed toys. Others were marked by makeshift crosses and cheap bouquets, their faded plastic flowers turned brittle by that unrelenting sun.
Cradled inside this rusted earth lay the babies, toddlers and teenagers of Wilcannia. Another stolen generation, this one snatched by violence, disease and despair.
It was February 13, 2008. Kevin Rudd was clearing his throat in Canberra, preparing to offer the nation's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people an historic apology for the "profound grief, suffering and loss" inflicted on them by successive Australian parliaments and governments.
The word "sorry" echoed loudly around Australia that day. But by the time it reached Wilcannia it was barely a whisper as the living huddled in a local hall watching the apology on a borrowed TV set hastily hauled inside from the back of a ute.
As debate over the referendum on a Voice to Parliament grows ever more hectoring and divisive, that visit to Wilcannia still carries the same punch to the gut it did 15 years ago. It remains a visceral reminder of how little progress black and white Australia has made since then - and how we seem doomed to repeat the same old facile arguments.
I'd arrived in that small outback NSW town on the day of the national apology. The scarred earth of Wilcannia's boneyard symbolised the wounds inflicted on Australia's Indigenous people since white settlement. Sorry didn't seem an adequate enough word for a place tormented by poverty, addiction, domestic violence and shortened lives. I felt embarrassed by my whiteness.
Resignation wasn't hard to hear in the voices of many local Barkindji people. One of them had defied the odds by reaching the ancient age of 56. He'd helped dig many of Wilcannia's graves. His own car had served as a hearse. A year earlier he'd buried his own teenage son after he hanged himself.
A middle aged woman remembered how her grandmother always sensed when the welfare officials were coming to take her children. She would flee into the bush with her 13 kids, rabbit traps slung over their shoulders. "They'd live off the land for weeks, hiding and waiting until she sensed it was safe to go back," the woman recalled. "Because of that she didn't lose any of those kids. But look what it's done to so many others."
As I drove out of Wilcannia along a road that cut through a pocked and desolate Martian landscape, the local radio station was flooded with calls. Bemused whitefellas wanted to know why a formal apology was even needed.
"They weren't such a great happy nation as a lot of them like to make out," announced one caller "They were pretty horrible to each other at times."
The host sounded gleeful. So many kindred spirits were wanting a say. "I'm with you," he shouted. "And what's all this rubbish about kids in school having to watch Rudd's speech? I'd rather see my son in class ... learning stuff."
It didn't seem to cross his mind how fortunate he was to have a boy in school when so many of Wilcannia's sons and daughters were in their graves.
The airwaves these days are filled with the same voices of doubt and cynicism. The Outrage Train is gathering speed and its passengers question why we even need a Voice to Parliament.
Conservative politicians, sponsors of our bloated public service, complain it will add another layer of bureaucracy.
Ponderous lawyers, rich from exploiting technical law, complain about its potential complexity and constitutional dangers.
Grumpy whitefellas, making no pretence at understanding the proposal, prefer to be guided by their instinctive antagonism toward change.
Black Australia, if not as equally divided, appears just as uncertain. Some welcome a Voice as another attempt at picking the scab off our oldest wound by giving Indigenous Australians a say in the laws any future parliament will make for them.
Others are dismayed, claiming the Voice is another empty white gesture, a futile waste of money. The most strident say only an official treaty will help restore trust between our two cultures.
How hard can this be? No nation deserves so many tiny graves. No country deserves such a fractious and dispiriting debate. The argument over a Voice to Parliament has so far proved only one thing.
These past 15 years? We've advanced nowhere.
HAVE YOUR SAY: Have you decided how you will vote in the coming referendum? Are you confused about how a Voice to Parliament will work? Would you support an official treaty with Indigenous Australians? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au
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YOU SAID IT: Steve wondered if the battle against shouty phone callers had been lost. And were there strategies to combat them?
Ian responded: "When someone sits near me on a train or bus and they are yellin' down the phone! I play AC/DC till they move. No amount of 'excuse me I'm on my phone' deters me from my mission. I often get positive remarks; it's a good strategy."
Tom took a similar course: "It would be terribly tempting to look over the shoulder of a FaceTime caller and join in he conversation."
Another Steve had a different take: "Being old and doddery I had no knowledge of AirPods and the like until I got my latest hearing aids which are connected to my phone by Bluetooth, and of course I can answer by just tapping on my hearing aid.
"It took me a while to cotton on that all around me could only hear my side of a two-way conversation. I now either ignore the call, if in a crowd, or quickly tell the caller that I will call back.
"You can imagine the confusion when I'm listening to TV via Bluetooth and a phone call comes in!
"And to think that I can remember when to make a phone call we had to go to Mrs Judd's, two doors down the street!"