Alfred Deakin’s great-grandson decides that on the eve of the Voice referendum, a deeper truth should be considered about his great-grandfather, the architect of modern Australia.
, about the pain of life as a child stolen from his parents, when Peter Sharp told him he believed he knew who was responsible.This was a monumentally confronting claim.
He would, as Australia’s first attorney-general in 1903, rule in the service of his race that people of mixed Aboriginal and white blood were not Aboriginal at all.It was an attitude he had made law in Victoria in 1886, leading to catastrophe for Aboriginal communities.
He points to a long study of Deakin’s racial attitudes, published in 2018 by Dr Fred Cahir and Dr Dan Tout of Federation University, which reaches similar conclusions to his. Sharp, however, does not urge a changing of the university’s name. Instead, he says wants the truth to be told about Deakin, and hopes Australians will change the Constitution at the referendum.
Its official title, in the grand tradition of political forces reversing the meaning of their intention, was an amendment to “An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria”.It meant Aboriginal people of mixed descent were no longer classified as Aboriginal, and were to be expelled from the reserves on which they lived.
The so-called “Half-Caste Act” was long considered to have been driven by the Aboriginal Protection Board, which wanted to reduce the cost of maintaining Aboriginal people on publicly funded reserves. An engraving of Coranderrk Station, the government-run Aboriginal reserve near Healesville where William Barak lived.Sharp sees Deakin’s behaviour as an early indication of what would become his deeper and darker beliefs and intentions.
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