Australia’s disastrous indigenous voice referendum

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Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.

My partner and I have just returned from the most magical trip. As guests of Western Australia’s tourist board we’ve driven almost 1,500 miles across the top left-hand corner of the Australian continent. This is the north-west: a landscape like nowhere else on the planet. Three times the size of England, they call it the Kimberley.

Starting from a town called Broome (easy to fly there) we made it overland to Darwin in the Northern Territory. We took about ten days in an all-singing, all-dancing Toyota camper van, sometimes sleeping under the stars, more often staying in comfortable chalets at a string of cattle stations turned campsites dotted along our route. Everywhere was clean and comfortable, everyone was welcoming, the steaks and swimming creeks were bliss, and I’d enthusiastically recommend this adventure – the ‘Gibb River Road’, they call it – to couples or families keen to get off the beaten track and into the bush, but without any danger, and always within reach of creature comforts. Many Australians do it.

I am writing at length for the Times about the experience. Suffice it to say here that if Walt Disney had created a giant asteroid as a strange yet beautiful combination of hot red earth, orange rock, cliff, mountain and semi-desert plateau, yet cut with ravines, gorges and mini-canyons packed with palm-fringed greenery where clear, cool water tumbles over waterfalls into deep lagoons… they’d still struggle to match the Kimberley.

Within the surprise, though, there were surprises, and it’s one of these I want to write about here. I had expected to find Aboriginal people living in these wild landscapes.