Actor Danny Glover has lent his support to the push for Australia’s constitution to be reformed in favour of its First Nations people, saying a country that doesn’t acknowledge its past becomes trapped by it.

Glover, who also campaigns on US civil rights, made the comments in an address to Australian union members at Sydney’s Trades Hall on Thursday, after hearing about the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The statement is a historic document from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across the continent, calling for a constitutionally enshrined place in parliament and a formal truth and healing process after centuries of dispossession and discrimination.

“This is a statement of strength, a statement of passion, it is a statement that tells the truth about the past,” Glover said. “If we cannot tell ourselves the truth about our past, we become trapped by it.

“This country is trapped in successions of Labor governments, successions of conservative governments, which have not dealt with the truth of its past … There is great rhetoric around it but what are the political projects that are necessary to change them?”

In his address, Glover spoke of the similar histories of subjugation and exploitation in Australia and the US, and historical links between unions and campaigns for civil rights in both countries.

“We have to find those allies again … and build, to change the nature of what is happening and bring first nations people into the discourse of this country,” he said.

Danny Glover viewed the Uluru statement of the Heart, which has been touring the country. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

“We have a lot of work to do, but history is what we have and making history is what we must do.”

Glover was invited to speak by Torres Strait Islander man and the NT secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia, Thomas Mayor, who is also an Uluru delegate.

The Uluru statement, delivered in May last year, was the result of nationwide dialogues between Indigenous people, and called for an Indigenous voice to parliament enshrined in the country’s constitution, a truth-telling commission, and a path to treaty.

Mayor said it was an unprecedented consensus “that many people said we couldn’t achieve”.

The statement’s requests were delivered as an official recommendation to the federal government by a purpose-created reform council.

But it was initially rejected outright by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as “too ambitious” and now sits, partially rescued, as the subject of a joint select committee.

Glover said the question of how to represent the original people of a nation was a question being addressed around the world, and was being crushed by the rise of the far right.

“We have to support the Uluru statement from the heart, there has to be a national referendum on that, and we have to work and continue to work to find the ways of justice.”

Danny Glover: ‘You always can tell the temperature of a country by the prison that you go to.’ Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

The Glover visit was a nod to the support given by US civil rights campaigner and opera singer Paul Robeson, who came and met with construction workers on the Sydney Opera House and Indigenous activists about 70 years ago.

Glover told the audience he last came to Australia 22 years ago, when he visited prisons.

“You always can tell the temperature of a country by the prison that you go to,” he said. “Always you find that those who are inhabiting those cells are men and women disproportionate to their numbers in the population itself.”

In the US it was people of colour, the poor and migrants. In Australia it remained – as it was two decades ago – Indigenous people.

Mayor has been touring the statement around the country.



“Everywhere I go, when you explain it to people they understand that this is a reasonable yet powerful proposal that should have been accepted by the government. But everywhere I went that hope built while Malcolm Turnbull’s started to disappear,” said Mayor.

Mayor said the international support of Glover further demonstrated the practicality of the statement, which was accepted by a far greater spread of the Australian people than the federal government believed.

“It was unbelievable that someone from another country came here to talk about the first people of Australia, and knows the struggle that we’ve had,” said Charline Emzin-Boyd, an Aboriginal education coordinator from the NSW Teachers Federation.

“To impart that knowledge and to share what they’ve had in America as a black person, to share it with all of our members here and non-Aboriginal people here, and say we have to get together and stand in support of the Statement from the Heart.”