Book review of "The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, 2nd edition, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra

Abstract

This is a revised, expanded and improved version of a book originally published on the 30th anniversary of the referendum in 1997. Its original strengths remain: the contextualisation of the 1967 referendum within the long trajectory of campaigning for constitutional amendment dating back to 1910; detailed discussion of the decade-long struggle of Indigenous and pro-Indigenous activists to persuade the government to hold a referendum on both Section 51(xxvi) and Section 127 of the Constitution; attentiveness to the disjuncture between the referendum’s legal consequences and its mythological status as the moment of Aboriginal citizenship; and the well-chosen collection of original documents comprising the second half of the volume (now made more reader-friendly by providing page references to the documents from Attwood and Markus’s historical analysis in the first half). The new edition incorporates research findings from the last decade of scholarship on the 1967 referendum and on pro-Indigenous political activism more generally. It also, helpfully, adds an index.