While campaigning for the ‘No’ vote in the 1999 republican referendum, monarchists found themselves received most warmly in regional Australia, and Indigenous communities were no exception. According to leading ‘99 ‘No’-ers, rural Aboriginals didn’t see the Crown as the bejewelled head of an imperial machine that dispossessed them centuries prior, in striking contrast to their self-appointed spokespeople and agitators living in Sydney and Melbourne. On the whole less inclined to view Anglo-Celtic Aussies as their perennial foe, rural Aborigines saw the Queen as something like the traditional leader of Anglo-Celtic Australia—a Great White Elder of sorts. And while they mightn’t have seen it as their prerogative to campaign vigorously in her defence, they were unambiguously more inclined to work with an ancient and impartial monarchy than a fabricated politicians’ republic.

Which is hardly surprising. Numerous Indigenous activists have invoked the 1875 Pacific Islanders Protection Act, passed by the House of Lords and ratified by Queen Victoria, which declared that Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders ought to be acknowledged and treated as the original owners of the continent. While this and other Imperial Acts of the British Parliament have no legal force in Australia today, let it be known that the Queen was among the first Anglo-Celtic leaders to pay homage to the traditional owners of the land.

Fast-forward to 2015. The ‘Yes’ campaign is again being championed by white politicians and well-to-do urban Aboriginal activists, largely divorced from their poor and regional counterparts who still aspire to the traditional indigenous way of life. As Celeste Liddle, an Arrernte woman and the NTEU’s Indigenous Organiser, wrote in the Guardian, these ‘Yes’-ers refuse to acknowledge that many such Aboriginals are totally opposed to the referendum—which is also, from their point of view, understandable. The Australian Constitution was written in the British legal tradition and ratified without the enthusiastic support of Indigenous Australians. To many Aboriginals, wedging them into the Preamble would be the final blow to their resistance against those British cultural and legal norms codified in the Constitution.

As Constitutionalists, this attitude seems frustrating and sad. The Australian Constitution is among the greatest jurisprudential triumphs in history, and has ensured liberty and prosperity to Australians of all ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds for a century. But if we, both ‘Yes’ and ‘No’-ers, are serious about reconciliation, rushing through the upcoming referendum in the affirmative will accomplish nothing beyond further entrenching the power and influence of those urban Indigenous activists at the expense of regional Aboriginals. But there is an alternative. The powers of the monarch, as entailed in the Constitution and demonstrated powerfully in 1975, is to arbitrate constitutional disputes. Though many republicans (particularly of the ‘crowned’ variety) resent such talk, if we stop side-lining this important power of the sovereign we may resolve the question of indigenous recognition without indulging in a zero-sum game.

Perish the thought, but the Queen won’t live forever. And, happily, the Prince of Wales is slowly emerging from a long spell of unpopularity. When Charles ascends the throne, he will begin a long season of tours across the Commonwealth; his first official visits will probably be to Australia and Canada. In anticipation, representatives of both the government and the Indigenous community ought to petition His would-be Majesty to devote part of his time in Australia to making a formal offer of recognition and equal inclusion in Australia’s constitutional monarchy to a delegation of Aboriginal elders. It would entail neither changing the Constitution nor dragging anyone (least of all the regional Aboriginal communities) into an arrangement that alienates so many Australians. It will avoid speaking to Aboriginals in language that many of them don’t feel party to in the first place: an offer extended in friendship rather than a hurried bid to sweep hundreds of years of discontent and alienation under a rug of empty legalisms.

Those still interested in the Constitution’s integrity will see that this is the provision it sets out for such questions of its interpretation and modification. Happily, it also coincides with the manner and means that regional Aboriginals expressed a greater keenness for in 1999. It won’t be a quick fix—not by far. But it seems to be the best hope we have for respecting both Constitutional and Aboriginal interests.

If undertaken, this would prove a momentous turning-point in the country’s history, for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. We can’t seriously believe that Aboriginals who endure in their traditional way of life, despite the socio-economic hardships entailed therein, could respect a people so ashamed of their own past. European-Australians might finally shed the black armband they don when offering their hand to their Aboriginal countrymen, instead meeting them with their proud heritage planted firmly behind them, apologizing for its wrongdoings but not for its triumphs.

Far better to start from scratch—owning our mistakes as well as our successes—and offer that hand in reconciliation, than to crowd rootless European and Indigenous Australians into one bland, cultureless, post-colonial fiction. (I won’t say ‘post-post-colonialism’, but you get the idea.) This will require a great deal of bullet-biting. We’ll have to move beyond our lingering gripes with Charles’s personal life, and concede that the monarchy has a valuable, active role to play in Australian politics. And, importantly, we’ll have to stop apologising for the Australia that gave us the Crown and the Constitution, presenting this heritage as something a self-respecting Indigenous person might want to share rather than something to resent or be ashamed of.

There’s a greater lesson to be learned here about how Australians will define this nation moving forward. It’s perhaps not so curious that European and Indigenous Australians share the most common ground, not in an imagined society that sprung half-formed from some Terra nullius, but when we return to our respective and common roots. We’ve not boundless plains to share for nothing.