In 1967, Gubran elder Brian Champion Senior was in the bush near Kalgoorlie when a man arrived carrying voting papers.

Mr Champion was one of the few Aboriginal people in the region to vote in the 1967 referendum on whether they should be counted in the census.

“We were away, out in the bush,” he said.

“The bloke came around with the voting papers but we didn’t know nothing about voting at the time.

“But he explained it to us, and we voted. I put in a ‘yes.'”

It’s a different story in 2023 ahead of today’s Voice to Parliament referendum, with campaign material delivered across Australia and more Aboriginal people than ever enrolled to vote.

The result in 1967 was an overwhelming “yes”.

Referendum memories spark push for Voice

Prominent Aboriginal elders from across Western Australia say lessons can be learned from past referendums as people vote on the Voice to Parliament.

On May 27, 1967, Australians voted to change the constitution, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be counted in the national census.

Australians retuned a majority “yes” vote with 90.77 per cent voting for change.

While the majority of Western Australians wrote “yes” on their ballot papers, the state also recorded the highest “no” vote in the country with 19.05 per cent.

Menang elder Carol Petterson OAM was 26 at the time and remembers it well.

“We were living under the threat of prosecution by the native welfare department and living under the assimilation policy which meant we had to become white,” she said.

“It was a very scary time because you did not know if you were going to be arrested for doing something you thought you were doing as normal behaviour.”

At the time Aboriginal people in Western Australia were governed by the Aborigines Act of 1905, which gave the state government full control of Aboriginal people, allowing it to remove children from their families for assimilation into white society, now known as the Stolen Generations. 

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that Western Australia and Queensland, the last two states in the country, passed legislation allowing Indigenous people to vote.

Significant limitations applied until then, with WA’s Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 only allowing Aboriginal people to vote if they could speak English, had “industrious habits” and didn’t have certain medical conditions.

Humiliatingly, they were also required to demonstrate they were no longer part of the Aboriginal community. 

Ms Petterson, said the bar, and the cost, was far too high, and she did not vote in 1967.

“Aboriginal people could apply for citizenship rights but that meant you had to deny your Aboriginality, you had to divorce yourself from your people, you were not allowed to talk to your Aboriginal mother,” she said.

“No, I did not go through it, my mother did not go through it. We could not divorce ourselves from our Noongar families.”

Ms Petterson supports the Voice to Parliament and hopes her experience will highlight the inequality the Voice aims to address. 

“I was not born a citizen of this country; my mother died a non-citizen in the country of her birth,” she said.

‘A toe in the door’

The Goldfields region of Western Australia returned one of the highest “no” votes in the nation for its electorate in the 1967 referendum.

Representing about 90 per cent of outback WA at the time, it’s not the same electorate we know today.

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Mr Champion said he was not surprised by those results.

In the early 1960s he applied for citizenship to be able to get more work and have more freedom.

He said it wasn’t easy.

One of the conditions when you applied for citizenship meant you had to give up your cultural identity and to act like a non-Indigenous person.

“It’s very sad but very true,” he said.

Mr Champion said the lead-up to the referendum back in 1967 was different compared to the Voice to Parliament referendum of 2023.

“We were hard at work, I suppose we were in a world of our own,” he said.

Mr Champion said the “yes” vote from the 1967 referendum was something to be celebrated as he believed it led to progress for Indigenous people.

He is hopeful for the same outcome in the Voice referendum and said enshrining the Voice to Parliament into the constitution was a step in the right direction.

Mr Champion said he was hopeful the referendum would produce a “yes” vote and believed it would give his grandchildren the opportunities he never had.

‘On the radio’

Yindjibarndi elder Tootsie Daniels was too young to be eligible to vote in the 1967 referendum, but still remembers the conversations her elders had at the time and how it meant change for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

“I remember my uncle used to yell out to me, ‘The Aboriginal people are being talked about on the radio,'” she said.

“That was eye-opening to me, and I started to click on, so I went out and bought a radio so I could listen to what was happening.”

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Ms Daniels said she was happy for change in 1967 for her people.

However she has reservations about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and what it will mean for Aboriginal people.