 With Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt, we're absolutely delighted to welcome you to this special aeration. I acknowledge our guest speaker, Professor Stan Grant, Tracy Holmes, the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. Thank you for being here, Treasurer. We have guests from the diplomatic corps, ambassadors from Ukraine, and Latvia, my colleagues on the ANU Council in Padma, Raman, and Alison Kitchen. We have many distinguished luminaries from business and industry in the public service, Serengus Houston, Terry Moran, so many people who have made such a significant contribution to life in this country. And it's always an honour to host an event for the Crawford School because this school was established in honour of John Crawford. So John Crawford, who was an outstanding Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor of this university and made an immense contribution to public life in Australia, and he had this vision that we seek to adhere to at the Crawford School of an independent public service empowered by strong analytic and policy development skills. And the Crawford School is the preeminent school of this type in our region and as the first and only national university, it's right that we should seek to have a significant footprint across Australia and across our region. In fact, only last Friday I received a WhatsApp from my friend and the former PNG Foreign Minister, Rimbink Pato, who was so very pleased to have been appointed by DFAT to the advisory board of the Pacific Security College, which is managed by the Crawford School. And he was very pleased to be there in Samoa, and he sent me a big shout out to Professor Janino Flynn. So thank you, Janine, for the work you have been doing in the Pacific. We gather at a time of immense instability and volatility around the world. We meet at a time of reflection, deep disappointment, but empathy for those First Nations communities that we know voted overwhelmingly to have recognition in our constitution and their voice in the National Parliament enshrined in our constitution. I had a look at a map that's been created by a spatial analyst, Jesse Riley, and it made a profound impact for this analyst has put together a map that goes to the granular level of the voting pattern across the country from the recent referendum. And it goes to the individual polling booths and then overlays the ABS demographic statistics that show which booths have a majority of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander voters. And when all this data is put together, it is profoundly obvious that while remote and regional areas tended to vote no at an electoral level, or an electorate level, when you look at the individual polling booths where there were a majority of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders, the vote was overwhelmingly yes. So the voice referendum was the 45th time since 1901 that we've sought to change our constitution. 37 times the referendum question has failed to attract that very high bar of a majority of votes across a majority of states. Only eight have been successful in 122 years. But that doesn't mean that there are lessons that we can't learn. And I have no doubt that our guest speaker tonight will reflect on what this outcome has meant. While I share the disappointment of so many who campaigned for a positive outcome at the referendum, we shouldn't be overwhelmed by despair for there are opportunities and avenues to advance Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander welfare and wellbeing and lifestyle and living standards and outcomes. And I take great heart from what we're doing here at the Australian National University. And I know it's happening at other higher education institutions across the country. For we seek to lead in areas of Indigenous affairs, we aim to be a university of choice for Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander students and academics and staff. And I can point to our First Nations portfolio headed by the extraordinary PDU, which seeks to embed Indigenous culture and learnings and knowledge and history and language across everything that we do as a university. And I pay tribute not only to Peter's role in the recent campaign, but also for the initiatives that he's undertaking in the area of Indigenous economic equity and independence, quite extraordinary work. I can point to the ANU National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, where we are the managers of an historic collection of blood samples from Indigenous communities. And with deep consultation with those communities, we are now able to carry out research into the conditions and diseases that disproportionately affect Indigenous communities. I'm excited by our Gandaewara First Nations Innovation Hub, where we seek to come up with a pipeline of partnerships between government and industry and academics and consumers, based on core values of country and culture and community and prosperity from our First Nations communities. And I love our Innovation Hub, our Indigenous Innovation Hub at our engineering school, which seeks to embed Indigenous knowledge and know-how into relationships between our Indigenous engineering students and Indigenous organisations. And of course, education has such an incredibly transformative power, and so we seek to offer scholarships to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to give them the opportunity to graduate from the Australian National University. We pride ourselves on being a university that provides the stepping stones for leaders in the public service in the private sector. And we hope that a generation of Indigenous leaders will be coming through our university now. We have a flagship scholarship program called the Cambry Scholarships set up in 2019, and with a significant contribution from ANU, it's a $50 million program. We match the money that comes from our benefactors, philanthropists and alumni to ensure that the best and brightest Indigenous students can have an opportunity to study here with financial and academic support. Of course, it wouldn't happen if we didn't have a centre, a home away from home, to support our Indigenous students. And we offered 100 scholarships last year, and we have about 200 Indigenous students on scholarships at ANU at present. And so the Jubile Centre that is run by the amazing Aunty Anne Martin provides that welcoming, nurturing environment and communal space for our First Nations students. The Jubile Centre is a centre of excellence for our students' support, a true home away from home. Allow me to boast that when I was foreign minister, I hate saying that, when I was foreign minister, I did establish a scholarship program for Australian undergraduates called the New Colombo Plan. And it was an opportunity for Australian students to live and study and work at a university in a country in our part of the world, in our region, about 40 nations, in our part of the New Colombo Plan. And I thank the Treasurer and Minister Wong for continuing this program. Probably about 100,000 Australian students have been through it. But I was particularly proud of the fact that two of the winners of the prestigious New Colombo Plan scholarships, which are at the highest level, were Indigenous students from ANU. So while there is a great deal of hope and optimism, we still need to hear the truth of what is going on in this country. And I believe we are so privileged to hear from Professor Stan Grant this evening. Stan's stellar career in journalism and media is known to you all as well as his advocacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues. Like many in his community, he grew up in difficult times, in difficult circumstances. His memoir Tears of a Stranger speaks of attending 12 primary schools by the age of 12 and documents the brutal effects of dislocation and the bullying and the treatment he received. Stan is an optimist. I had a wonderful conversation with him at a budget event in Brisbane earlier this year. And he talked about his disappointment, but also his optimism. He has experienced the discrimination and prejudice that can be meted out to an Indigenous man in contemporary Australia. Yet he has a wisdom and an experience that he shares with us so readily. He has reached the highest levels and received the greatest accolades that you can receive in his chosen profession. So tonight we look forward to hearing from Stan about his reflections on the past few months and more. I look forward to listening to his intriguingly named speech. Oh, they've taken it down. I know what it was. The witness of poetry, the silent breath, or as he said to me as we were talking outside, how history is too heavy for democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Professor Stan Grant. My brother Paul, thank you so much for having us on your country, brother. It is the morning after the no before. Somewhere my mother is rising. She will pour water into two cups, her daily ritual. She prepares for this. Each night she places a spoonful of coffee into two cups, one for her, one for my father. This is her pledge to tomorrow. Mum and dad, they have always pledged tomorrows to hope. This is the poetry of living, poetic acts in a world that would tell us that poetry is dead, that would tell us that God is dead. In this world of callous politics where our humanity is polled and the tender complexity of our lives is reduced to a slogan or a choice, yes or no. And this morning I am hearing that word no, that word without love, that word of rejection, that word from which no other word can come, that word that speaks all languages and translates us into them. This morning in the darkness I am hearing the cold-hearted no of a country so comfortable it need not care. A country that feels right now soulless. A country of numbers and no words but one. No. A nation shorn of poetry. Theodor Adorno told us that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. It was a challenge to us all how do we find the words after catastrophe? Words fail as surely they must. Human all to human barbarity comes so easily to us that poetry can seem decorative, indulgent, and tedious or even worse just a lie. A way of telling ourselves that we are still capable of beauty, truth, or justice when our words and our deeds tell us differently. What meaning are words in a world of advertising? Poetry becomes obsolete, only advertisements now, said Adorno. The provocative lie he said that does not seek belief but commands silence. Adorno called this the silence of the total society, a society with no more words to speak. The Leviathan has devoured our words. What we have is what we call speak. Political speak, media speak, not words, but code. I know this language, I am well versed in it. Literary critic George Steiner told us exactly what it is. The detergent, emptiness, and uniformity of the jargon of the media and the marketplace in the West. I know the language of the op-ed column, words written for effect, words written with an audience already in mind. I know the performative parry and thrust of the television interview is too often an exercise in gotcha and evasion. Everyone knows their role. It may sometimes result in a headline but don't mistake that for truth. Not the big truths, how land is stolen without reparation, how countries are invaded with no accountability, how people are killed without conscience, how the poor stay poor, how money buys speech. These truths remain undisturbed, these truths are silenced. We swap truth for process. Will the voice close the gap? Will it disrupt government? A voice nothing more, nothing less. We who dare to speak of justice or racism are cast as provocateurs. We are the troublemakers. We are the truth that dare not speak its name. Better we speak of fairness or equality or unity, emaciated words starved of truth. These are the words that echo in the vast canyon of 24 hour news. My friend and former colleague Lee Sayles said that activism is killing journalism. With all respect Lee, no it's not. Journalism is dying because the audience sees right through it. People are turning off because they're on to us. They know that journalism is too often a racket with too many on the make or on the take, eating their ethics with each paycheck, their precious words bought and sold. It is a back street hustle with its cops and charlatans. Albert Camus nailed us. The press he said has its pimps just as it has its policemen. The pimp debases it and the policeman subjugates it. The people are a wake up to this. They know journalists are playing footsie with politics. They know journalists have politicians on speed dial, go to political balls, sup at political tables, share confidences and sometimes hide secrets. That's the game. Journalists claim as a badge of honour that no one should know how the journalist votes. That sort of anemic neutrality might get applause in white rooms, but people of blood and bone are not fooled. By the way, I voted yes. My friend Maria Ressa did not win the Nobel Prize by being neutral. She didn't give equal time to tyrants. There was no other side of the corrupt deterte regime. Give the other side and power will always have the last word. And there is no other side to Aboriginal suffering. We are the most impoverished and imprisoned people in the country. Where is the neutrality and the balance in that? Where is the neutrality in a 10-year-old black child's suicide? She can't survive Australia's neutrality. There is no neutrality in being black and poor. White Australian journalists might have the privilege of neutrality, but that stops at the grave side for me. It's not activism to stand with what is right and just. Activism is not killing journalism. In many parts of the world, the places that I reported from, activism may be all that is saving journalism. Activist journalists are the last line of freedom. Camus himself, a journalist, knew that freedom did not die alone. Justice perished with it. Every day, he said, he expressed his anguish confronted by the abasement of liberal energies, the prostitution of words, the slandered victims. No neutrality there. Lee said she wondered if her bosses would back her if she spoke out. I hope so, but I know they did not back me when I was attacked for speaking the truth of my family's history. I was coronation clickbait and the ABC was so neutral it could not raise its voice when one of its own was getting a kicking. ABC management apologised for their lack of courage. Lee is still there. I am not. The ABC claims a higher mission and maybe that is so. It still has some good and brave, but I know where its commitment ends. Adorno was right. We don't have language. We have advertising. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. That's what Adorno said. I heard it all the night before, the vacuous media punditry and profundity sacrificed for spontaneity. Psychology, philosophy, theology, history, the entire range of the human experience now just a TV hot take. Politicians who can't bear too much truth already reaching for meaningless political piffle. Healing and reconciliation. Words reduced to such polite convenience. Pink yellow words like purulent drainage from an infected wound. Medicinal words. These political words doused like neosporin soothing pain relieving words best applied within 24 hours useless on the deep wounds of our soul. This is Australia. This is who we are. It is a statement of fact. This is who we are. A nation that says no. I did not need a vote to remind me of my country. I was born into this country and I have known since I was young that Australia was for other people. A sunburned country, a land of sweeping planes. Beautiful one day, perfect the next. Throw another shrimp on the Barbie. Come on Ozzie, come on. I like the ads too. Those ads may be the most real thing about this place. A country with so much choice and abundance that we have no need for memory. We have sunshine, compulsory voting and a sausage sizzle. I'm not being cynical. The world has too much history. Too much democracy, too much tyranny, too much God, not enough God. As a reporter for four decades, I have been set adrift on Yates's blood dimmed tide. In the bombed out marketplaces and in the haunted eyes of refugees, I have seen where the ceremony of innocence is drowned. How peaceful Australia looks from afar. Oh bless our little haven from war and revolution. Better the political accountants that we call leaders than the philosopher kings of other lands. We have no manifestos or little red books, no Gettysburg address either. We don't portend to greatness. Our story fits neatly into a quarter acre block, a holiday campervan, or a beach umbrella. Our words are sung in television jingles, happy little Vegemites, Louis the fly, airplane jelly, the soothing provocative lies of our country. If you don't know, vote no. Australia, you know you're soaking in it. And who would not want to? Has it Australia served us well? Had I escaped the contest of the world, I too would revel in the glorious surrender of an Australian summer. It's hard to think of Australia as a place capable of evil. There is just so much sunshine, smiling faces and wide open spaces. DH Lawrence saw Australia as a place absolved from it all, the soft blue humanless sky of Australia, the pale white unwritten atmosphere of Australia, the white clarity of the Australian. But evil has happened here. People beheaded, flower poisoned, frontier raiding parties. What should we call that, if not evil? That it happened in our past. Does that make the evil any less? Were my ancestors any less human? And is history over? Not for us. My historical wounds are Australian. And there is no bleaching sun to fade our scars. The evil is known to us, the first people of this country. And this may be our curse. To see in Australia, others do not see and have no words to convince them that it is real. We have tried. Our best have tried. Oh, Jeru Ngunakul told us long ago, we did not have to know to know. She wrote without books or schools or law or philosophy, in my own heart, I know that hate is wrong. Injustice is evil. But words, even from the gentlest hearts, fail. Of course words fail. We have reason. We have enlightenment and rationality. So rational are we, that we've forgotten how to feel. Poet Carolyn Forchet says, at the site of the wound, language breaks. George Steiner reminds us too that language has its breaking point. Use it to dehumanize, he wrote. And something will happen to it. Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language. Thank God for those who will not let words die. Thank God for Paul Celan, who took back his language from the butchers who killed his parents. He would not live in Germany again, but he would not leave German words for the Nazis. He told us language was not lost in spite of all that happened, but it had to go through its own responselessness, go through horrible silences, go through the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech, the thousand darknesses of death bringing speech. And in finding the words he had to stare God in the face, he had to indict God in the horrors of people created in God's image. Listen to his poem. There was earth inside them. They dug and they dug. So their day went by for them their night. And they did not praise God, who they heard wanted all of this, who so they heard knew all of this. I believe in God. And so I ask, especially I ask, why God? How can you God? And so did Jesus on the cross. My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? And then what? Often we are left with no answer. I know I'm still asking. As Celan wrote, and we are nowhere. And so he said, we dig. Oh, you dig. And I dig. And I dig myself toward you. So it is left for those who must, who can do no other to dig, to retrieve words. And maybe, maybe we can find each other. Thank God for Vislawa Simborska, who knew the price that words demand of us. That writing can be, must be, the most dangerous thing we do. Writing can be a death sentence. Yet words are bigger than death. Writing, she said, is the revenge of a mortal hand. Write it. Write in ordinary ink on ordinary paper. Write, I don't know. Simborska's answer to the certainty of politics in that one line. I don't know. No. So in the name of Simborska and Celan and Nunako, in the name of writers everywhere, please, please God, do not, do not surrender precious words that people will die for, to politics, to media. Do not leave words to those who think they are right to those who always know. But who listens to the poets? I don't see them on Q&A or insiders or Sky News. Poetry is no match for advertising or media or politics. It's not impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz Adorno didn't say that. He said it was barbaric, precisely because the world we have created is capable of such barbarity. But still we try. And I have to believe in words. I have to believe. I have to believe that there is a word after no. And that word may not even be yes. If words fail us, there may be just a cry. As Adorno said, perennial suffering had as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream. My cry comes from the Australian shadow land. I have lived somewhere between A.D., hopes, Australia and Dorothy and McKellar's sunburned country. Both poems mourn in their own way. At my most wistful, when I'm far from Australia, I pine for McKellar's landscape. But then my reverie is jolted into hopes more stark reality. McKellar wrote her ode to Australia when she was homesick and far away. Hope was heart-sick and too close to home. Hope's Australia, not of droughts and flooding rains, but rivers of immense stupidity. Hope's Australia of second-hand Europeans. Hope's Australia, he said, they call it a young country, but they lie. She is the last of lands. Hope's Australia without songs, architecture, history. But our children do not recite A.D. Hope. His words sound treasonous, just like, yes, sounded so treasonous. With no surprise, I watched the television as the votes are tallied. Grateful that I have resisted the invitation to participate. On a night when my people would be denied a voice, I would not add mine. In any case, I would have no words for this moment. I hear nothing that does not make me feel sore. The victorious politician who says this no vote puts an end to the politics of grievance. And in a pithy, media-tested, inane sentence, the hurt of my parents, my grandparents, the early deaths, the youth suicides, the lives lost to imprisonment, the snotty noses, itchy skin and day's look of another generation of inherited trauma, the solemn truth of what a nation has done to my people. It's all waved away as a mere contrivance, a collective gripe, just in grievance. But the politician is so devastating and so convincing. The politician has no tolerance for history. The pain is negated by progress. And I am reminded that the most effective politician, sometimes the most dangerously effective politician, is the politician with no doubt. The complexity is confusion. The politician has all the answers she needs and resents our questions. Get over it, people. Australia has spoken. We are a great country, don't you know? Don't call us racists. Falls we are to dream even modest dreams. A republic, a treaty, a voice. That's not us. We are relaxed and comfortable. We do not need to say story. What's stolen generation? We decide who comes here and the manner in which they come. Don Bradman's batting average, 99.94. Don't you know? 37 years, the average life expectancy of an aboriginal man in Wilcania. Some numbers we don't want to know. Truth. Who needs that? Poetry. Who needs that? I drink from a bubbler and I give thanks for running water. That's the measure of history now. We have running water. Thank you, colonisation. The champions of no have won. It doesn't make them right. It doesn't make them superior. It makes them winners and that's democracy. They win and Australia is their place now. It is their country and we must live in it. And I think of the great Anna Akmatova, the beautiful poet of the alien lives of Stalin's Russia and how she told us of the cold calculation of survival. You will know everything except joy, even so. Live. In the absence of joy, I hear the voice of hopelessness. I told you so. What else did we expect from white people? This is also the sound of no. And Australia without trust and Australia irredeemable. There is no poetry here, either. Just politics. Just resentment. It is devastatingly convincing. It speaks to defiance. It speaks to a black truth that I know so well. And yet, like so much political language, it is empty. It is a caricature. Where I wonder, watching the television, are my people in these political words. My people, real, exasperating, loving, funny people. Where I wonder, are my parents. In all of the words spoken, words of politicians, activists, commentators, I don't hear my people. There are only the ashes of my people. Now changed into these hollow political words. And in these words, I am reminded of how estranged I am. I have a home in neither resentment nor triumph. I am with Paul Solan digging, digging myself to you. If I resent anything, it is that this vote, this yes or no, has forced me to choose. In that word, no, the nation has chosen for me. The nation has drawn a line, and I know on which side I am cast. This is a judgment on me and all the others like me. It is a judgment on my grandfather, long dead. And in this vote, somewhere in eternity, I feel my grandfather's hand slip from the hand of my grandmother, my mother's father, black, and her mother, white. My mother's black father cried over the death of his young child, and her grieving white mother shed the same tears. But tonight, it is my grandfather's tears that I must share. To note, as the votes are tallied, I am closer to my black grandfather than my white grandmother. That's what this vote has done. This is its cruelty. It has robbed me of you. Australia has decided who we are. It has reminded me of the space between us. That's the true loss. We lost a voice. Not just an administrative body enshrined in the Constitution. We lost a voice through which we may speak to each other. That's what I'm lamenting. I thought we could find a voice. A voice. Politics has left me mute, voiceless, words not even for my long dead grandmother now. Others need to speak for me. I open a book and read from the Chinese poet Xu Jimo. But I cannot sing freely. Silence is the tune of farewell. In the weeks since I have chosen to maintain my silence mostly, I have preferred poetry to politics. Poets like Les Murray, acts for echo and silence, unhuman silence. In his noonday axman, Murray warned it would be centuries before Australians would be at home in this land. Judith Wright found a deep truth in the silence. She made silence speak, as she wrote, I found for the night a sound. Still the noise seeps in. The news surrounds me like a house settling at night, creaking and groaning. The news pings on my phone. It's on the screen at airports, on the radio in the car, all that pointless punditry. Everyone telling us where and how the referendum was lost. It was uneducated voters who said no. Migrants were scared of division. The yes campaign had no clear message. What about cost of living? The no campaign had a ruthlessly effective message. Referendums are doomed to fail that should never have gone ahead, some say. I wrestle with another simple crushing thought. It reverberates in my head. I have heard this voice all my life. This voice that says they just don't like us. They just don't like us. Noise, noise, noise. Everyone picking sides, feeling more righteous than the other, looking for what is right in a history of wrong. No one can just say, I don't know. Tell the truth. Who does not become more uneasy? The more one thinks, the more one reads. If you're honest, you'll say yes. Like I do. When I think of Albert Camus, the poet who says he will not put himself in the service of those who make history, but those who suffer it. The Camus I admire. Then I think of Camus who also said, between his mother and justice, he would choose his mother. And then I wonder who he would betray. Who he would have killed. How many he would have killed, just to save his mother. And I ask myself, what would I do? And I question the limits of my justice. And I just don't know. And when I look around our world, heaving under resentment and history, everyone hoisting a flag. I know this is no time for flag bearers. There is a time for discussion. There is a time for debate. And sometimes amidst the noise, there is even insight. And on those rarest days, dare I say it, maybe compassion. But there is a place for silence, sacred silence. Sometimes truth needs to catch its breath. I remember someone commenting me once on an episode of Q&A. Thank you, I said. But it wasn't as good as a good walk. That's the truth. I am grateful and vain enough to be proud of some of the things I've done on television, but rarely was it as good as a good walk. It doesn't mean we should not keep striving for good journalism, but it had better be good because it is competing with silence. Am I wrong to want to turn off the TV? Am I wrong to want to listen to the poets, to the US poet laureate Tracey Smith? No. I know exactly how she feels when she writes, I don't want to hear their voices, to stand sucking my teeth while they rant. For once, I don't want to know what they call the truth, or what flag flickers from poles stuck to their roofs. Now, especially now, I don't want flagpolls. I turn to poets who know that truth is not found in emblems, slogans or rants. Poets who write truth in columns of smoke because they know it should not be easy to grasp. Poets like Cheshlove Milosh, who told us that poems should be written rarely and reluctantly under unbearable duress and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument. I have taken the title of my lecture from Milosh, The Witness of Poetry. I am drawn to Milosh as the witness of exile. And in exile, I find myself not alone, but free, or at least seeking freedom. Milosh always said he was from the borderlands of Rome and Byzantium. He was from the other Europe that descended into the dark heart of the 20th century. He was, he said, a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian. He wrote in Polish and lived in France and America. His life was framed by politics, by revolution and war and genocide and occupation. When I read him, especially now, I think perhaps I am an Australian to whom it was not given to be an Australian. Politics stands between me and you and however it is that I may see myself in this country. Like Milosh, I spent decades away from my home. Like Milosh, I found a home in others and I could look into the eyes of those like me in the borderlands and see something of myself. Milosh reminds me that there is a truth beyond politics, a poetic truth. He writes, I was not separated from people. Grief and pity joined us. We forget. I kept saying that we are all children of the king. For where we come from, there is no division into yes and no, into is, was and will be. He could have been writing about us. Milosh would never be so banal as to answer lies of division with appeals to unity. In the borderlands, we meet people, not flag bearers. We don't form lines. He would never balance history on the scales. He knew that murder weighed more heavily than progress. History was not in the past. He said, Alas, my memory does not want to leave me and in it live beings, each with their own pain, each with their own dying, each with their own trepidation. I can take Milosh's words and place them over my own country, for he too knew the liberal conceit of forgetting, how if we tell lies just often enough, we can make the truth disappear. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth, he wrote. So the weary travellers may find repose in the lie. After the day of the lie, gather in select circles, shaking with laughter when our real deeds are mentioned. In his poem, Child of Europe, he lays bare the utopian dreams of unending slaughter, the civilized Europe of Rousseau and Kant and Hume and Mozart and Michelangelo and Newton, and the reach for universalism and logic and how it could be put into brutal service. We sealed gas chambers, stole bread, knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before. As befits human beings, we explored good and evil. Our malignant wisdom has no like on this planet. So when politicians and commentators here celebrate unquestioningly, blithely, triumphantly the Enlightenment, think also of Belsen. I was in Germany again just recently. Inevitably, my conversation turned to the Holocaust. It always hovers. My friend's voice dropped to a whisper. He looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. Some things should never be spoken loudly. All around the world there is catastrophe or a shadow. And now we shout across history. And in the shouting, the devil strikes a bargain with God. Let them fight it out. In Europe, the continent is straining under the weight of its history. Old voices we hoped we would never hear are calling again. Blood and soil nationalists are trying to take back their countries, deciding who belongs. What is it to be French or Polish or Hungarian or German? Liberal democracies the world over are excoriated by clashes of identity and prey to malignant nostalgia. Politicians pledge to reclaim old glories, make their countries great again. They pitch to an imagined simpler time. And I ask simpler for whom? Liberal democracy wasn't built for this. Liberal democracy doesn't like ancestors. Its eye is always on tomorrow. History is a dangerous fault line. Nietzsche warned us of the grip of historical fever. Our wounds fester. We are poisoned against each other. All of the wars that I have reported are rooted in some historical resentment forged into barbed wire identity. Demagogues know its appeal. It's the call to arms of the religious zealot. The sons of old Cold War foot soldiers feeding on humiliation. The skinhead youths who tattoo 88 on their arms. The eighth letter of the alphabet. H. H. Hail Hitler. I have seen enough to know the identity warriors all drink from the same toxic well. I know as Milosh knew the lure of resentment. Like Milosh my historical memories are the memories of wounds. And he warns me as he no doubt warned himself do not gaze into the pools of the past. Their corroded surface will mirror a face different from the one you expected. The voice to me was never about resentment. It was never about identity. It was a release. It was a moment to lay our burden down. But Australia would not shoulder that load. Instead we got a lecture about unity. Those who owned history now claimed for themselves history's final word. No. Milosh knew these were the true identitarians. These are the ones who invoke history. Always secure, he said. The dead will not rise to witness against him. You can accuse them of any deeds you like. Their reply will always be silent. You can fill them with any feature desired. Proud of dominion over people, long vanished. You can change the past into your own better likeness. We are fashioned into the likeness of someone else's Australia. For me, like staring into a rippled pond. Australia is my contradiction. The black milk I drink at dawn. The voice was never a modest ask. It was monumental. Perhaps this was the opportunity lost by the Yes campaign to not let the voice truly speak. Instead it was shushed, shrunk small enough to fit into politics in the consultants suites and the lawyers dens. It was determined that if the voice was made so inoffensive, people may say yes. Instead it was so inoffensive, people found it so easy to say no. But don't blame them. Don't blame them for shrinking our ambition. They were bent over carrying the weight of Australia on their backs. The constitution is not our problem. Our conscience is our problem. The constitution does its job. It is an invisible hand. And that's how Australians seem to like it. But a nation is not written in a constitution. It is written in the heart. And our constitution was not big enough for our call from the heart. The weary leaders will now return to the flinty ground of indigenous suffering in Australia. They will chip away with whatever tools they have. And God bless them. This is the place of politics. It is bureaucracy and resources and meetings and inquiries. And history tells us it won't be enough. The voice was not a thing of politics. It was a theme of poetry. I may be naive to believe in poetry, but naive questions are the truest. Poets are not journalists. They don't use words like allegedly and claim. Poets are not objective and balanced. Not for poets either. The politicians throat clearing. Before I say that, let me say this. While they stall and think of how they can speak and say nothing. Poets know they don't have words to waste on lies. As Annie Erno said, accepting the Nobel Prize, hers is a solemn pledge to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed and enable beings to reimagine themselves. When the unspeakable is brought to light, she said, it is political. History is too heavy for democracy. Too big, but not for poets. Because poets know that history is so small. In seven short stanzas, Tracy Smith held history more tenderly than our nation ever could. History lives in the nobodies, she said. They rise from the dawn and dress. They raise the bundles to their heads and their shadows broaden. Dark ghosts grounded to nothing. They grin and grip their skirts. They finger the gold and purple beads circling their necks, lift them absently to their teeth. They speak a language of kicked stones. And it's not the future their eyes see, but history. It stretches like a dry road uphill before them. They climb it. I drank poetry with my mother's milk. And she wrote in the dark of night on a half empty stomach, mostly. In leaky ball-pent Byro, she wrote her poems of days gone by. She wrote about broken biscuits and how they made her cry. And how those shattered biscuits were her shattered family. And she cried tears of joy that she had them at all, my mother and the nobodies. On the day after the referendum, my mother rose and poured hot water into two coffee cups, her promise of tomorrow. They're old now. And soon I fear far too soon. There'll be just one cup, then none. No more tomorrows for my mother and my father. And then I will drink from my mother's cup. Thank you. Professor Grant, thank you for what was a beautiful and devastating and powerful speech, which I think you could tell had us all sitting on the edge of our seat. It was a beautiful aeration. And you very generously allowed us to open the floor for questions. Sure, yeah. So if people would like to ask a question, please raise your hand. We've got a couple of people with roving microphones. And perhaps just introduce yourself as you ask short and sharp questions rather than speeches from the floor if people don't mind. Don't be shy. Hi there. Dr Liz Allen from the ANU. Thank you for that, Professor. I'm just wondering, how do we go about holding space in the media and so on, and in kind of the public space generally, to have these sorts of conversations and to have them in a safe way? Yeah, thank you for that. I think by not filling it all the time would be a good start. I think we've become so accustomed to 24 seven years that it's always on and someone is always talking. And I think sometimes we do need silence. Sometimes we just need to sit. Sometimes we need to bow our heads. Sometimes we need to lament. And we need to give politicians time to think. I remember years ago, I was in Perth giving the curtain aeration, and they took me backstage to see John Curtin's things. I was really genuinely touched, genuinely touched to touch his things, this person who who shaped my country. And I thought of his life. He lived on the other side of Australia. He didn't fly. He struggled with alcohol. He struggled with mental illness, depression. He would disappear for days on end traveling across the Nalibor and no contact on a train. This man led us into a new future. He was there at the beginning of a new world after World War Two. We still live in his world. Would he have been Prime Minister today with those very human weaknesses that we don't allow our politicians to have and the endless demand that we speak that never allows us to think let alone listen? How on earth did we think we were going to vote? Yes. When we don't even have the time to ponder what yes would mean without the avalanche of lies, misinformation, platforming of hatred. How on earth could we find yes when we have stripped meaning from our words because we speak too many of them? We hold space by creating space and being kind in space and not always filling it. Other questions? Thanks, Danielle. Thank you so much, Professor. My heart stopped a little bit when you referred to the space between us and I wondered in your imagination what the poets would do with that space if we let them. We need to hear from them. I know that much. I know that I read the poets of the darkness of the 20th century. I don't go back to the headlines. I know that poets know that we live very small lives and the media thinks we live lives in headlines. Everything shouts. Everything is the end of times. And I think about what happens at the end of times. The end of times, a flower grows on a tree. A fish swims in the river. Child cries. We live through these ends of times every day and yet we go on. And I think that's what the poets would tell us, the poets that speak to me, the poets whose words determined often whether they lived or died, who paid the supreme sacrifice for how precious speech is. I think we've just devalued it by noise, by the churn of news, by politicians who don't have the time to speak because they must always be talking. And I think that's what the poets would tell us. Go into a silence and let the silence speak. We don't always have to feel the noise. And I think we will read poets about this time. A nation is a story. It is not a law. And I'm reminded of a Scottish poet and a politician, Andrew Fraser, who wrote these beautiful words. If I could write all the songs, I would not care who wrote the laws. The songs we sing, long after we've changed our laws. Perhaps we have time for one more from the floor. I'm conscious about that. Oh, there's two. Let's take one here and one there. Thanks, then. One here and one over there. Stan, even Butler, it's so lovely to see you again and thank you very, very much. My question is this. The history of referenda tell us that when you ask one question, you get one answer. When you ask two questions, maybe we get confused and we are naturally risk averse. How would a poet have asked a different question to get a different answer? I don't think we have to ask how, because the Uluru statement from the heart is one of the most beautiful poems ever written about this country. It was there. It was always there. The problem for my people is, as I said in the lecture, our curse is to know what evil can happen in a land, but not be able to find the words to tell others that it's real. Our story is written all over this land. I was born into that story. I was born into the story of my mother and my father. I was born into the story of my animal totem, the gauru, the magpie. I was born into the story of brother Paul tonight speaking a language that almost disappeared, that we can speak again in this country. My father said, who taught Paul to speak our language? He said, language doesn't tell you who you are. Language tells you where you are. That's what the poet would have asked. This voice was not about who, the lies that this was going to divide us. Who's divided today? The lie that this was about race. This idea that it was about identity. I am a Wiradjuri, Gamoroi, Daroile person. I don't have an identity. That is who I am. And my wife is a white Australian. And I share this room and this space with you. I don't seek an identity. I seek to live as I am in a world with you as you are and we breathe the air together. The poetry was always there. We're a nation that does not want to listen to the poetic hearts because there's too much noise. Thank you so much for everything you've shared with us this evening. My name's Corinna with the Attorney General's department. Where do we find the courage to say I don't know? That's the thing, isn't it? We are so always asked to have every answer. I'm guilty of that. I've got two politicians sitting here in front of me and I've interviewed them many times and I've always pushed them, but that's not what you said before. What do you mean that inflation won't be 5% at the end of the year? Can you guarantee that? You don't know, do you? But you don't know. And that's okay. You don't know. We don't know how things always end. We live in an age of certainty and yet we know one thing, that the answers from the 20th century are not going to be enough for the questions of the 21st. We live in a remarkable experiment, an extraordinary, extraordinary world. We share space with people we would never even have met. And here we are trying to rub along 24,000 different peoples in the world with our own cultures, language, customs, religions squeezed into 200 nations. We're rubbing along, trying to hold this incredible thing together. It's remarkable to me that it happens at all, but we don't know when things fall apart. And that's when we have to give ourselves the space and the kindness to find a way through. I do know this. There is more truth in the Borderlands. There is more truth in uncertainty than there are in flags and certainty. I know that much. I've covered far too many wars in the world to know that wars are easy and wars are certain. Our world is uncertain, but there's also one truth I absolutely know, that the cries of a mother and the death of a child, the fears of a father, are real to all of us. That's the world we live in between the world of certainty. We can say I don't know, and I think we have to be a bit kinder to allow people to be able to have that privilege of not always knowing, but always trying to know. First to know the reality of things, the nature of things, right? The ANU, to try to know, not always be certain. Stan, I wonder if I can take the privilege of the chair and ask you about the next chapter. So we had a brief moment to talk for you. So you're going on to lead the Conviction Centre. Constructing, Mr Schuett. It is a Conviction Centre. Sorry, I've had a lot of cold and flu medication today, so I'm very sorry, Constructing Centre. Can you tell us a little bit about how you'll take some of the things that you've talked about to get into that role? The person who hired me, Katie Stephenson, is in the room here tonight from Monash University. It's an institute that was born in Denmark, which is committed to trying to improve public discourse. You know, in 40 years of journalism, I know that journalism is part of the problem, but it also has to be part of the solution. We live in an incredible age where information moves so quickly, and it has shrunk our world. It's sped up events. It's so adrenalized. There's no coincidence in the fact that the proliferation of 24-hour news over the past two decades has also coincided with the retreat of democracy. That's not how we thought it would work, but that's what we're seeing around the world. Communications revolutions always precede upheaval. The Gutenberg press that preceded the wars of religion across Europe. The microphone that took the voice of a rabble rouser from the beer halls of Munich and amplified it across Europe. Twitter, 24-7 News, social media that is giving rise to some of the ugly voices of our world that encourages people to ransack the home of democracy in the United States, to retreat into our dark corners and echo chambers. And the media has to have some responsibility for this because we have failed too. We haven't failed because we're too activist. We failed because we don't act enough. We don't stand for justice enough. And in this faux neutrality and balance, we give voice to people who are not interested in the better angels of our nature. And so having lived through that experience, having personally paid a price for that with the abuse and violent threats against me and my family, then it behooves me to give some of that back to try to say, there is a better way. There is a way to be able to speak and there is a time to know when not to. And there's a time to bring clear clarity, knowledge, facts to bear and allow those things to speak greater than our opinions. So this is the work that we're committed to now with the Constructive Institute. It's out of Monash. It's joined with the Danish Institute. It's working across the Asia Pacific. And it is trying to find the answers to 21st century questions when we know the 20th century answers don't work anymore. And we know people are turning away from the media. And when people lose trust and faith, they can end up in some very dark places. So it's very important to me to be able to do this and even more so now I think after the voice referendum when I saw how misinformation and the lies and the platforming of hatred can damage a nation's soul. And I have friends who voted no and they're still my friends today. That's okay. But it was what we heard in the lead up to that that did so much of the damage. And that's what I want to focus on. Thank you so much. And I know I speak for all of us who'll be watching intently to see where you where you lead the Institute over the coming years. I'd like to invite Vice Chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt to join us on stage for the vote of thanks. Thank you Vice Chancellor. Thank you Janine. But thank you especially to Stan Professor Grant for what was an oration that will stand both the test of time but will sit for me personally for the rest of my life. In seeking to articulate across divisions you've opened up a whole range of avenues for reflection and discussion about the intersections of our history and our democracy. I'm not going to reflect too much on your oration because I think it is so powerful but so painful. It was powerful and painful poetry. But the single takeout I guess is how do we find the words to go beyond no. And I don't know that right now. But I want to work this group with you people around the country to find that answer. It won't be fast but it will require us to think and to reflect and not just talk endlessly. So you will have a friend in that and I hope the answer is poetic but I would be happy even if it's not. So let's thank Professor Stan Grant one more time.