One of the few silver linings to the cloud that is the Voice is that it has brought the public’s attention to what some of the professional ‘Yes’ activists really think about Australia, as well as what they envision for its future. In fact, you could go far as to say that they have spent their entire lives preparing for this particular moment in Australia’s history. One such example is Thomas Mayo, who has been exposed as a committed decoloniser, whose list of demands includes reparations, the return of land and the tearing down of ‘harmful colonial institutions’.
Another individual is Ms Teela Reid, ’proud Wiradjuri and Wailwan woman, lawyer, essayist, storyteller and co-founder of @blackfulla_bookclub.’ Ms Reed is also a senior solicitor practicing in Aboriginal Land Rights litigation, current Practitioner in residence at Sydney Law School, an ‘Uluru Dialogue’ leader and a member of the Referendum Engagement Group.
Despite the fact that this country seems to have endowed bountiful blessings upon Ms Reid in terms of her career, she has been busy making some rather sweeping statements about just how awful Australia is. Our nation she believes, is a soulless, racist, empty shell of a country. ‘Racism’ she declares, ‘is synonymous with Australia. Australia wouldn’t exist without racism. Racism has nothing do with the colour of your skin, it has everything to do with power & privilege’.
With a heavy heart, she opines that ‘there is no point in blackfullas trying to explain our pain to a nation without a soul.’ Still, she seems to have be having a pretty good go at it, despite our apparent lack of soul. We learn that she has adopted an activist approach to her profession in the form of ‘rebellious lawyering’, which requires lawyers to focus on ‘lawyering, storytelling and activism’. Among other aspirations, Ms Reid dreams of encouraging ‘students to challenge the way they think about the profession’ (ie decolonise it) and hopes to start a podcast about Aboriginal Australians, their ‘cultural authorities’ and the legal system.
In 2020, she wrote in the Griffith Review that ‘the struggle for the First Nations Voice has been 250 years coming, ever since Captain Cook landed uninvited in 1770’, and that it was ‘about the fight for land rights, water rights and the right to save our planet from the colonial structures that have attempted to destroy it. It is about the fight for peace and justice, compensation, and reparations.’ ‘The Voice’, she opined ‘is the first step in redistributing power and enabling self-determination.’
It goes without saying that Ms Reid is the very embodiment of the success that she claims is impossible for Aboriginal Australians to achieve in this country. She is walking, talking proof that no matter your race or your sex, you can still become a senior solicitor in an elite Sydney law firm. Her successes in life have been made possible because she was fortunate enough to have been born into a society founded on universal values and institutions which give rights and freedoms to all, not just to certain groups.
Yet, Ms Reid is now rebelling against the legal profession into she entered of her own accord, and which provides her with a living. Indeed, she is now going out of her way to destroy her own profession from down from within, rather like Lidia Thorpe’s admission that she infiltrated politics with the sole purpose of bringing down the ‘colonial project’ The question is, what would Ms Reid and Senator Thorpe have in its place? A society operating on customary law, which as Jacinta Nampijinpa Price recently pointed out, lends itself to itself to violent payback including ‘spearing in the leg’, and which in many Aboriginal groups, accepts violence against women? I suspect not.
