Introduction
On 27 May 1967, Australians went to the polls to answer two questions. The first, concerning parliamentary terms, was forgettable. The second, concerning the Constitution, was historic. By an overwhelming margin—90.77 per cent of voters, the highest ‘Yes’ vote ever recorded in a federal referendum—Australians agreed to delete two references to Aboriginal people from the Commonwealth Constitution. Section 51(xxvi), which gave parliament power to make laws for “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State,” would now apply to Aboriginal people as well. Section 127, which stated that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted,” would be removed entirely.
The meaning of that vote has been contested ever since. For many Australians, 1967 represents the moment the nation finally extended full citizenship to its Indigenous peoples—a generous act of inclusion, belated but sincere. For many Aboriginal Australians, the memory is more ambivalent. The referendum changed the Constitution, but it did not, in itself, deliver land rights, end discrimination, or improve living conditions. It gave the Commonwealth power to act, but successive governments were slow to use it. The euphoria of 1967 was real, but so was the disappointment that followed.
This article argues that the 1967 referendum is best understood not as a single event but as a site of conflicting meanings: a moment of genuine popular mobilisation, a symbolic victory won at the cost of concrete promises deferred, and a turning point that both empowered and constrained subsequent Aboriginal activism. Drawing on recent historiography, contemporary accounts, and the recollections of those who campaigned for and against the vote, it contends that the referendum’s legacy is more complex than its overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote might suggest. The empty chair—the absence of Aboriginal people from the constitutional text—spoke on 27 May. But what it said, and what it meant, continues to be debated.
The Constitution They Never Signed
To understand what the 1967 referendum changed, it is necessary to understand what it left untouched. The Australian Constitution, drafted in the 1890s and enacted as British law in 1900, was a document of its time. It created a federation, distributed powers between Commonwealth and states, and established the machinery of federal government. About Aboriginal people, it said remarkably little—but what it said was damaging enough.
Section 51(xxvi) granted the Commonwealth Parliament power to legislate for “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State.” This exclusion was not accidental. The framers of the Constitution assumed that Aboriginal affairs were properly a matter for the states—and that the states, with their regimes of protection and control, were managing the “native problem” as well as could be expected. The exclusion also reflected a deeper assumption: that Aboriginal people were not, and would not become, participants in the national polity. They were subjects of governance, not citizens with claims on the Commonwealth.
Section 127 went further. It provided that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” This was not, as is sometimes assumed, a provision designed to exclude Aboriginal people from the census for all purposes. Its immediate purpose was demographic: the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives and the allocation of Commonwealth funds to the states depended on population figures, and the framers did not wish those calculations to be complicated by counting people who, in their view, were not integrated into settled society. But the symbolic effect was profound. Aboriginal people were, for constitutional purposes, non-existent. They inhabited the continent but did not count toward its population.
These provisions did not, in themselves, create the apparatus of discrimination. That apparatus was built by the states, through legislation that controlled where Aboriginal people could live, whom they could marry, whether they could own property, and whether they could keep their children. The Constitution simply enabled this by doing nothing to prevent it. As historian Bain Attwood has observed, Aboriginal people were “constitutionally invisible but administratively hyper-visible”—subject to intense regulation by the states but unrecognised as subjects of the nation .
The campaign for constitutional change was, in this sense, a campaign for recognition. It sought to make visible those whom the founding document had rendered invisible. But visibility, as later events would show, was not the same as power.
The Long Campaign
The movement for constitutional reform did not begin in 1967. It had roots stretching back decades, in petitions, deputations, and protests that had been largely ignored by white Australia. The Australian Aborigines’ League, founded by William Cooper in the 1930s, had organised a petition for Aboriginal representation in parliament—a petition that was never even presented, because the Commonwealth declined to receive it. The 1938 Day of Mourning, organised by Cooper and Jack Patten to mark the sesquicentenary of British settlement, had demanded “commonwealth citizenship” and “ordinary citizen rights.” The demand for constitutional change was not new; what changed in the 1960s was the political climate in which it was made.
The immediate catalyst for the 1967 referendum was a 1962 petition organised by the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (later the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, or FCAATSI). The petition, signed by tens of thousands of Australians, called on the Commonwealth to use its existing powers to legislate for Aboriginal welfare and to hold a referendum to remove the discriminatory sections of the Constitution. It was presented to parliament in 1963, where it was received sympathetically but without immediate action.
The campaign gained momentum in the mid-1960s, driven by a coalition of Aboriginal activists, trade unions, church groups, and liberal-minded white Australians. FCAATSI, under the leadership of figures like Joe McGuinness, Faith Bandler, and Doug Nicholls, organised tirelessly, collecting signatures, distributing pamphlets, and speaking at public meetings. The campaign was remarkable for its breadth: it drew support from the Australian Labor Party, which had long advocated constitutional change; from liberal Liberals, who saw the removal of discrimination as consistent with their party’s moderate traditions; and from a broad cross-section of civil society, including the YWCA, the Quakers, and the Student Christian Movement.
But the campaign was also marked by tensions that would become more visible after the referendum’s success. Aboriginal activists within FCAATSI were increasingly frustrated by the dominance of white spokespeople and the tendency to frame the referendum as a gift from white Australia rather than a right justly claimed. Faith Bandler, a South Sea Islander woman who became the public face of the campaign, later recalled the difficulty of maintaining unity: “There were always people who thought we were going too fast, and people who thought we weren’t going fast enough. The trick was to keep everyone moving in the same direction.”
The referendum question, when it finally came, was limited. The Holt government, which had succeeded the Menzies government in early 1966, proposed to delete the reference to “the aboriginal race” from Section 51(xxvi) and to repeal Section 127 entirely. This would give the Commonwealth concurrent power with the states to legislate for Aboriginal people—but it would not override existing state laws, nor would it confer any new rights. The campaigners knew this. They argued, nonetheless, that the change was a necessary first step: without Commonwealth power, there could be no Commonwealth action.
The Day Itself
27 May 1967 was, by all accounts, a day of extraordinary civic enthusiasm. Australians turned out in large numbers; queues formed at polling booths; the ‘Yes’ case seemed to be everywhere. The ‘No’ case, such as it was, came mainly from a handful of conservatives who argued that the change would concentrate too much power in Canberra and from a few remaining defenders of the White Australia policy who saw any concession to non-white people as a dangerous precedent. They were marginal voices. The overwhelming majority of Australians, it seemed, wanted to do the right thing.
The results were staggering. Nationally, the ‘Yes’ vote was 90.77 per cent—the highest ever recorded in a federal referendum. In some electorates, the vote exceeded 95 per cent. Every state recorded a majority; even Queensland, with its long history of restrictive Aboriginal legislation, voted ‘Yes’ by 89 per cent. The only electorates that returned ‘No’ majorities were a handful of rural seats where the Democratic Labor Party had campaigned against the referendum on anti-communist grounds.
For those who had campaigned for years, the moment was overwhelming. Faith Bandler, watching the results come in, recalled: “I cried. I couldn’t help it. All those years of work, all those miles travelled, all those meetings—and it had worked. The Australian people had said yes.” At the FCAATSI victory party in Sydney, Doug Nicholls led the crowd in singing “Advance Australia Fair” and then, in a gesture that spoke to the distance yet to be travelled, called for three cheers for the Queen.
But even as the celebrations unfolded, some activists sounded notes of caution. The referendum had succeeded, but what would it deliver? The Commonwealth now had power to legislate for Aboriginal people, but it had no obligation to do so. The states retained their existing laws, including those that enabled child removal, wage discrimination, and restrictions on movement. The Constitution still contained no recognition of Aboriginal prior ownership, no guarantee of equal rights, no protection against racial discrimination. The victory was real, but it was also, in important respects, symbolic.
The Power Not Used
The years immediately following the referendum exposed the gap between symbol and substance. The Holt government, which had sponsored the referendum, showed little urgency in using its new powers. The Gorton government that followed was similarly cautious. It was not until the election of the Whitlam government in 1972 that the Commonwealth began to legislate assertively in Aboriginal affairs—and even then, the limits of constitutional power became apparent.
The Whitlam government established the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, introduced the Aboriginal Land Rights Act for the Northern Territory, and adopted a policy of self-determinationSelf-Determination Full Description:Self-Determination became the rallying cry for anti-colonial movements worldwide. While enshrined in the UN Charter, its application was initially fiercely contested. Colonial powers argued it did not apply to their imperial possessions, while independence movements used the UN’s own language to demand the end of empire. Critical Perspective:There is a fundamental tension in the UN’s history regarding this term. While the organization theoretically supported freedom, its most powerful members were often actively fighting brutal wars to suppress self-determination movements in their colonies. The realization of this right was not granted by the UN, but seized by colonized peoples through struggle.. But its capacity to override discriminatory state laws was constrained by the Constitution’s federal structure. Section 51(xxvi) allowed the Commonwealth to legislate concurrently with the states, but it did not automatically invalidate inconsistent state laws; that required a deliberate override, which the Whitlam government attempted with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Queensland Discriminatory Laws) Act 1975, only to find itself mired in constitutional litigation.
The Queensland government, under the long-serving premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, proved particularly resistant. It refused to cede control of Aboriginal reserves, maintained a system of permits that restricted Aboriginal movement, and opposed land rights with unremitting hostility. The Commonwealth’s new powers, in practice, were insufficient to compel a recalcitrant state to change its ways. The 1967 referendum had given Canberra a tool, but not a weapon.
For Aboriginal people living under Queensland’s Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (still in force, in amended form, until the 1980s), the gap between the referendum’s promise and its delivery was painfully apparent. One resident of Palm Island, recalling the period, told oral historians: “We heard about the referendum. We thought it meant freedom. But nothing changed. The superintendent still had power over us. We still needed permission to leave the island. We still couldn’t marry who we wanted. It was like nothing had happened.”
This disappointment was not universal. In some respects, the referendum did produce change. The Commonwealth’s entry into Aboriginal affairs brought new funding, new programs, and new attention to issues that the states had ignored or concealed. The 1967 victory also energised Aboriginal activism, providing a model of successful mobilisation that would inform subsequent campaigns for land rights, legal equality, and constitutional recognition. But the gap between expectation and outcome left a residue of scepticism that would shape Aboriginal politics for decades to come.
The Politics of Memory
The meaning of the 1967 referendum has been contested ever since. For many non-Indigenous Australians, it remains a moment of national pride: evidence that Australia, whatever its past failings, is capable of change. The annual anniversary of the referendum is often marked by retrospective celebrations of how far the nation has come—a narrative of progress in which 1967 represents a turning point on the road to reconciliation.
For many Aboriginal Australians, the memory is more complicated. The referendum is remembered not as an end but as a beginning—and a beginning that proved slower and harder than expected. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, coined the phrase “the great Australian silence” to describe the erasure of Aboriginal people from Australian history. The referendum, he suggested, had broken that silence—but only just. “We have turned a corner,” he said, “but we are still in the same street.”
Recent historiography has deepened this ambivalent reading. Bain Attwood, in his influential study The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution, argues that the referendum’s meaning cannot be separated from the political context in which it occurred. The overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote, he suggests, reflected not a deep commitment to Aboriginal rights but a shallow consensus that discrimination was unseemly—a consensus that coexisted easily with continued opposition to land rights, self-determination, and substantive equality. The referendum, in this reading, was a symbolic gesture that allowed white Australians to feel good about themselves without changing very much.
This interpretation has been contested. Other historians point to the genuine mobilisation that the referendum produced, the new political space it opened, and the concrete achievements that followed, however slowly. The 1967 campaign, they argue, was the first time that Aboriginal affairs had been debated nationally, in public, with Aboriginal voices—however muted—playing a part. The referendum did not deliver justice, but it made justice conceivable in a way it had not been before.
What is clear is that the politics of memory surrounding the referendum have themselves become a political battleground. The 50th anniversary in 2017 was marked by calls for a new referendum—this time on constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The campaign for recognition drew explicitly on the memory of 1967, invoking its spirit while acknowledging its limitations. But it also faced criticism from Aboriginal activists who argued that symbolic recognition, without substantive change, risked repeating the pattern of 1967: a victory that changed the words but not the world.
Conclusion: The Chair Remains Empty
The 1967 referendum removed two references to Aboriginal people from the Australian Constitution. It did not, however, put anything in their place. The Constitution still contains no recognition of Aboriginal prior occupation, no acknowledgment of the unique status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, no guarantee of equal rights, no prohibition of racial discrimination. The chair that was emptied in 1967 remains empty.
This is not to diminish what was achieved. The 90.77 per cent ‘Yes’ vote was a genuine expression of popular will, a moment when Australians collectively declared that the old assumptions of exclusion and invisibility were no longer acceptable. It gave the Commonwealth power to act, and over the following decades that power was used—haltingly, incompletely, but undeniably—to improve the conditions under which Aboriginal people lived. The activists who campaigned for the referendum, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, deserve their place in the national story.
But the history of the referendum also offers a cautionary lesson. Symbolic victories are real victories, but they are not the only victories that matter. The gap between what the referendum promised and what it delivered was not an accident; it was built into the nature of the change itself. Constitutional amendment, without political will, without institutional reform, without the redistribution of power and resources, can only do so much.
The empty chair that spoke on 27 May 1967 continues to speak. It reminds us that recognition is not the same as justice, that visibility is not the same as power, and that the work of building a just relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians did not begin in 1967 and will not end with any single vote. The referendum was a moment, not an endpoint. Its meaning lies not in the past but in what we choose to make of it.
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