The citizens of Australia's federal capital city live in an unusual, privileged, First World bubble and it is an aspect of our civic bubbledom that very few of us know or ever even cross the paths of any First Nations peoples.
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A Canberran, I know and meet as many First Nations people as I know and meet Martians. I meet no First Nations persons at my most frequented haunts, at my tennis and golf clubs, say, nor at my favourite trendy brunch and coffee spots.
No First Nations people seem to live on my street in the bourgeois sub-bubble of my "leafy and sought-after suburb" (Real Estate's poetic description of it) in Canberra's aspirational inner south.
I mention this not to be frivolous but because my white, insular, but inquisitive ears do some conscience-stricken twitching whenever the forceful "Progressive No" figure Senator Lidia Thorpe alleges that armchair Yes enthusiasts are often "hand-on-heart do-gooders who think that they know best for us [Aboriginals]".
I have been a Yes enthusiast and wonder if I am in this a hand-on-heart do-gooder who thinks he knows best for Aboriginals.
Then, and bearing in mind the Progressive No belief that the Voice will be a token, powerless thing that will change nothing for First Australians, there is another, related Progressive No allegation that sets the ears and conscience twitching.
It is that we Yes enthusiasts enjoy the virtue-signalling glow of our Yesness; that we will get a masturbatory buzz out of making the effortless effort of writing a 'Yes' on our ballot papers. Then, our accusers accuse, we will settle back into the comfy illusion of having done something meaningfully worthwhile when in fact we will have done nothing to tackle First Nations people's true plights, to close any of the shameful gaps.
And to be a hand-on-heart do-gooder who thinks he knows what's best [for First Nations' people] is a form of racism as well, the challenging Senator Thorpe told the National Press Club.
Referendum-toey, Yes-intentioned readers (especially Canberran ones) when you look into the mirror do you see anything of these Progressive No assertions staring back at you? Is he or she a racist, the person in the mirror?
There is a surreal strangeness about being so very rapt in a proposal, the Voice, and in the debate about what it will or won't achieve for First Nations people when one is so experientially estranged from the peoples the Voice is all about.
It makes, for we do-gooders, everything about the Voice weirdly academic, almost literally so in the same sense that academic Egyptologists (Egyptology is the study of ancient Egypt) can never meet and mingle with the peoples that fascinate them.
This columnist will probably vote Yes but with a strong sense of being hopelessly underqualified, under entitled to vote at all.
Meanwhile, as if to help the nation's voters limber up for the intellectually taxing Yes/No demands of Referendum Day, ABC Classic radio occasionally requires its listeners to vote a spontaneous Yes (as in Yes, I love it!) or No (as in No, this is appalling and an insult!) to a sometimes divisive piece of music.
Tuesday morning's referendum, with Barbie the wonderful movie on all thinking minds, was the earworming Bubblegum 1997 classic I'm A Barbie Girl theme sung by the bubbly Danish combo Aqua (treat yourself to the hit's official video on YouTube), treated as a keyboard variation JS Bach might have imagined and played.
ABC Classic's exquisite little electorate is very refined (if only one could say that of the 17.5 million lumpenfranchised who will vote on the Voice). Eighty one per cent of those who voted in Tuesday's referendum rejoiced that, Yes, JS Bach is so splendid that he adds lustre to everything he touches so that this Bach Barbie is a masterpiece somehow managing to be both bright candy pink and dignified at the same time.
Some voters texted, and it was this voter's feeling too, that both pieces, Bach's and Aqua's, are so wonderful that both were given lustre by their musical fling with one another.
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A curmudgeonly 19 per cent (one imagines they were easily aghastable, conservative older voters, and that that they will vote No on October 14 as well) voted an aghast No, seething that it was an insult to Bach to contaminate him with this bubblegummery.
Life is, almost entirely, unfair. The looming, likely rejection of the Voice will reaffirm that gloomy truth. And if, as above, I continue to harp on Barbie the movie, it is because with its rapt critical acclaim, success and popularity (this week has brought news of it continuing to break box-office records galore) it give us a rare glimpse of life being fair.
Barbie the film is succeeding on its many, many merits, on its excellence. One only sees excellence triumph once in a pink moon.
When I go to see Barbie again (any day now) some of my eagerness will have to do with wanting to thank Greta Gerwig for the contrary excellence of her movie.
Other eagerness will have to do with two hours of happy escape into Barbie's world (the need for escapism is an underrated, sometimes sanity-preserving instinct) and away from this referendum-divided, embittered, racist Australia.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist
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Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
