Through its then President, the Royal Society of New South Wales signed the Uluru Statement of the Heart declaration in January 2018. The Society’s Statement of Support, which has been on our website since 2018, included the following paragraph:
Our mandate, as the Royal Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest peak scholarly body, is the disciplined concern for excellence in knowledge across the natural and social worlds. From this base, we reaffirm the significance of our indigenous forebears in the strength and contribution of their own culture and knowledge to Australia as a whole. Their exclusion from government endorsing and paying attention to the collective ‘Uluru Voice’ is both a reprehensible return to human rights violations of the past, as well as a loss for all Australians from the indigenous culture, knowledge, and voice from which we can all learn, both for now and for our sustainable future.
The Society’s Council, at its recent August 2023, meeting reaffirmed its continued support for this statement.
Members will also be aware that in July 2023, with the referendum very much in mind, the Society presented an informative panel session titled “What we need to know about ‘the Voice’ — before we vote”. The panel, convened by Distinguished Fellow Emeritus Professor Peter Baume AC DistFRSN and featuring contributions from Professor Megan Davis FRSN FASSA, Christopher Publick AM, and Dean Ashenden, is available on our YouTube channel.