And it was symbolically at Uluru that in May this year the First Nations National Constitutional Convention met. It was part of an official process to discuss amending the Australian Constitution to give formal recognition to Indigenous peoples. The resulting Uluru Statement From the Heart called for the creation of a constitutionally enshrined voice for Indigenous peoples and a commission both to supervise “agreement-making” between the government and Indigenous peoples and to enable “truth-telling” about the past. The government has yet to decide whether to put these constitutional changes to a referendum.

The demand for recognition and a distinct Indigenous voice emerges, in part, from the historical denial of both. Eighteenth-century British colonizers created the myth of the “terra nullius,” the empty land, to deny the presence of people who had inhabited it for some 65,000 years. When Indigenous groups fought to protect their lands, colonists responded with the utmost savagery. Those who survived the massacres were turned into nonpersons; until 1967, the Constitution barred the counting of “aboriginal natives” for the census, erasing them from the public record.

This history was for a long time suppressed in Australian memory. Not till the 1980s did scholars such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan begin to address it. This led to the so-called history wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Conservative historians like Keith Windschuttle dismissed the critical, revisionist accounts of what became known as the “black armband” view of history and attempted to maintain the old story of Australia.

The conservatives largely lost the debate. Today, for instance, every public event, whether an academic conference or a sporting match, is preceded by an acknowledgment of the traditional owners and of the land on which the event is taking place.

Yet for all the acknowledgment of the past, the material disadvantage suffered in the present remains untouched. Life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is 10 years less than for the non-Indigenous population. The unemployment rate is nearly four times higher; the child mortality rate more than twice so. Indigenous Australians are incarcerated at a higher rate than any other group on earth, making up 3 percent of the Australian population but 27 percent of adult prisoners.