Book Event: Time to Listen (ANU Meet the Author, Canberra)

Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell will be in conversation with Kim Rubenstein on their new book, Time to Listen: An Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

In 2023, debate about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament swirls around us as Australia heads towards a referendum on amending the Constitution to make this Voice a reality. In Time to Listen, Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell explore how the need for a Voice has its roots in what anthropologist WEH Stanner in the late 1960s called the ‘Great Australian Silence’, whereby the history and culture of Indigenous Australians have been largely ignored by the wider society. This ‘forgetting’ has not been incidental but rather an intentional, initially colonial policy of erasement.

So have times now changed? Is the tragedy of that national silence-a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous agency and cultural achievements-finally coming to an end? The Voice to Parliament can be a transformational legal and political institutional reform, but only if we really listen to Indigenous people, and they are clearly heard when they speak.

Book here