“When the cynicism would really get quite acute, I would remember what she told me about law reform being an exercise in imagination. It is also revealing in how Davis handles her opponents she channels Hilary Charlesworth, who supervised her PhD and who is now a judge on the International Court of Justice. That meeting marked the second of 12 “dialogues” across Australia that led, four months later, to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the elegiac call by Indigenous Australians for a Voice to parliament, a truth-telling commission and a treaty. Megan Davis, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Dean Parkin, Linda Burney and Thomas Mayo. I told them ‘you’ve got to suspend your disbelief, because the Constitution has a mechanism in it and it is built to change’.” It really upset the young people because I’d given this big soliloquy, telling them that we had to go into this exercise imagining that Australia can change and imagining that Australia can be a better place. “He said we were all wasting our time, that the government was never going to do any of this. “A senior Aboriginal politician got up,” Davis says, declining to name the man. For hours, participants vented about the failure of policies designed to tackle disadvantage. Instead, the meeting turned into an extended airing of trauma, mistreatment and dispossession. They had gathered in Broome to discuss self-determination and a pitch to the federal government for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to be acknowledged in the Constitution. In February 2017, Megan Davis helped chair a meeting of leaders from across the Kimberley and Pilbara regions.

Food Fight by Linda B. Davis