Joanna Cruickshank is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. She is crowd-funding an effort to bring the performance of Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country to high school audiences.

When the Recognise campaign was unveiled in a blaze of publicity on Sorry Day three years ago, it seemed to many non-Aboriginal Australians like a no-brainer: the natural - if belated - follow-up to the constitutional referendum of 1967, which permitted the Commonwealth Government to make laws for Aboriginal people.

It may have come as a surprise to many, then, that as time has passed, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have expressed mistrust of or outright opposition to the campaign.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have eloquently expressed arguments both for and against constitutional recognition, and these arguments deserve a very careful hearing. To give just two examples, Rosalie Kunoth-Munks has argued against recognition and Larissa Behrendt has argued for recognition.

Though surveys on the campaign have been small in scale, an IndigenousX survey of over 800 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people found that a majority of respondents opposed the campaign but supported the introduction of an Indigenous Parliamentary body.

Non-Indigenous Australians need to listen very carefully to these debates, which reflect differences of opinion within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community over, among other matters, whether constitutional recognition would serve or detract from acknowledgment of Indigenous sovereignty and whether it would be merely symbolic or produce genuine structural change.

As a historian, I would suggest that we need to listen, not only to the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today, but also to the voices of their forebears, which help us place these debates in context.

In the colonial archive, of course, the words of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were rarely recorded. Yet there are exceptions. In 1881, for example, the Victorian Parliament made the unprecedented decision to call an inquiry into the management of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, located outside the town of Healesville. The Inquiry was called after sustained activism by the Woiwurrung people, on whose country Coranderrk had been established, in conjunction with their fellow-residents from other Aboriginal communities, who had come to live at the reserve.

For several years, the residents had written petitions and letters and sent delegations to the Premier, expressing their dissatisfaction with the management of the reserve. Eventually, ten Commissioners met over two and half months and called 69 witnesses - 23 of whom were Aboriginal. Though multiple colonial inquiries dealt with matters relevant to Aboriginal peoples' lives and welfare, this was the only one at which Aboriginal witnesses were allowed to testify.

As the Coranderrk Inquiry proceeded, a curious disjuncture emerged between the agenda of the commissioners and that of the Aboriginal witnesses. As one reads the minutes of the Inquiry - or watches the Inquiry brought back to life by the amazing verbatim theatre performance, Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country - it becomes obvious that the Commissioners were primarily concerned to investigate the material conditions of life on the reserve. Most of their questions to the residents focused on the inadequate provision of rations and clothing, poor treatment of the sick and the incompetence and unkindness of the hapless and possibly alcoholic manager, Mr Strickland.

By contrast, the Aboriginal witnesses to the Inquiry, while patiently answering these questions, repeatedly attempted to direct the Commissioners' attention to more structural matters. Since establishing Coranderrk in 1863, the residents had been repeatedly refused the profits of the highly successful hops farm they ran; their trusted allies, the Presbyterian lay preacher John Green and his wife Mary, had been forced to resign from managing the reserve; and the residents had heard repeated rumours that Coranderrk was to be sold.

As the Inquiry proceeded, it became clear that these rumours were true: the respected Age journalist, George Syme, caused a sensation by testifying that he had resigned from the Board for Protection of Aborigines when he realised that its members were conspiring to sell Coranderrk to local colonists.

The Woiwurrung Ngurungaeta or leader, William Barak, attempted in his testimony to correct the Commissioners' misunderstanding that the residents' complaint was primarily about poor management by Mr Strickland. In response to a Commissioner's patronizing question as to whether the residents wanted "the Government to give you all the food you want, and all the clothing, and no work?" Barak re-asserted the residents' request that "the Government leave us here, give us this ground and let us manage it and get all the money."

Some years later, Barak and his fellow residents would write a letter, published in the Argus, which rhetorically demanded:

"Why don't those whitefellows that want to break this station go and try to break some the squatters' stations? ... Whitefellows would not like us to come down to take their land from them and move them out of their homes. We are in Christian land and ought to love one another with brotherly love."

The Inquiry makes a powerful piece of theatre, but it also represents part of Australian history that has often not been prominent in mainstream discourse. It reminds non-Indigenous Australians that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people did not become political activists for the first time with William Cooper in the 1960s, with Eddie Mabo in the 1980s or Vincent Lingiari in the 1970s. Rather, these men were important figures in a long tradition of Aboriginal resistance to the attack on country, community and culture that started with the first European incursions into Aboriginal country and continues today.

That nineteenth century Aboriginal activists like the Coranderrk residents used European political methods such as petitions and appealed to their rights using the language of British law and Christian justice, should not blind us to the fact that they were fighting to maintain country and community according to values held long before British Christians arrived.

Yet these stories have largely not been told in our schools, in our newspaper columns or in our universities. Like the Commissioners at the Coranderrk Inquiry, Australian authorities and historians have often refused to recognize Aboriginal political activism in pursuit of structural justice, choosing instead to see such activism as requests for charity or individual justice.

The non-Indigenous undergraduate students whom I teach are almost always staggered to learn that the Public Records Office in Victoria holds hundreds of letters from nineteenth and early twentieth century Aboriginal women and men, who wrote to the Board for Protection of Aborigines (BPA), seeking access to their children, to the basic necessities of life, to opportunities to work, to exercise religious freedom and to land.

Whether sympathetic or hostile to Aboriginal claims to justice, my non-Indigenous students' perception of Aboriginal people is generally as passive victims, overwhelmed by the might of colonialism. Yet as they see when they listen to these historical voices, these men and women were writing not only to seek justice for themselves and their families, but were asserting their rights and maintaining culture.

Acknowledging the true history of the long tradition of Aboriginal activism might force non-Indigenous Australians to recognize that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been critiquing colonial society and seeking to assert their rights within it for a long time: their analysis of its injustices and how they might be remedied is sophisticated and we will do well to listen to it.

This is not the end of the Coranderrk story. The Inquiry was a temporary triumph, in that the BPA's management of the reserve was exposed to censure in the press and in Parliament and the closure of Coranderrk was prevented. Yet the majority of recommendations made by those Commissioners sympathetic to the Coranderrk residents were ignored.

In 1886, five years after the Inquiry, the Victorian Parliament passed the infamous so-called "Half-Caste Act" which divided families on the basis of social Darwinist pseudo-science, forcing Aboriginal people of mixed descent off missions while keeping those judged "real Aborigines" under the management of the BPA. This Act was catastrophic in its effects on Aboriginal communities and made smaller missions economically unviable, leading to the closure of most.

With few residents left at Coranderrk, the state took back much of the reserve. After World War II, the Victorian government allocated most of this land to returned servicemen. Those Coranderrk residents who had served the nation in war were not eligible to apply for this land, because they were Aboriginal.

The Coranderrk Inquiry thus became one in a very long line of Australian government Inquiries, Reports and Commissions into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander welfare whose recommendations have been left to gather dust, except for those that serve the purpose of sustaining the image and stability of the settler colonial state at the least expense possible.

From the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to the Bringing Them Home and Little Children are Sacred reports, the Australian state has excelled at drawing on the testimonies of Aboriginal people and the expertise of Aboriginal leaders to produce detailed analysis of the impact of colonization on Aboriginal communities - and then systematically failing to act on the recommendations produced. No episode illustrates this more perfectly than Kevin Rudd simultaneously apologizing for the Stolen Generations and ruling out the possibility of compensation for survivors - neatly dealing with two key recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report.

This history provides context for widespread Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scepticism about whether Recognise is just another exercise in symbolism for the purpose of easing white consciences and suppressing Indigenous activism. It should make all of us listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander critiques of campaigns that are light on consultation and heavy on promotion.

If the Recognise campaign is ultimately successful, we should demand that constitutional recognition open the door to broader structural changes - such as a treaty or an Indigenous Parliamentary body - that give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the meaningful political power that comes from recognizing their pre-existing sovereignty in this country. This would be a recognition that honoured the 23 Aboriginal men, women and children who testified at the Coranderrk Inquiry in pursuit of structural justice, as well as the many activists who have followed them.

Joanna Cruickshank is Senior Lecturer in History in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. She is currently crowd-funding an effort to bring the performance of Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country to high school audiences.