The book Time to Listen explores Voice to Parliament through the lens of history and law

In Time to Listen: An Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell -two esteemed Professors at Monash University - explore how the need for a Voice has its roots in what anthropologist WEH Stanner in the late 1960s called the ‘Great Australian Silence’, whereby the history and culture of Indigenous Australians have been largely ignored by the wider society. This ‘forgetting’ has not been incidental but rather an intentional, initially colonial policy of erasement.

Lynette Russell AM is an ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Professor at Monash University’s Indigenous Studies Centre

In their new book ‘Time to Listen: An Indigenous Voice to Parliament’, Melisa Castan and Lynette Russell pose crucial questions about the Great Australian Silence and how it informs the call for an Indigenous Voice to parliament, from the colonial era till today.

• So, have times now changed?
  
• Is the tragedy of that national silence -- a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous agency and cultural achievements -- finally coming to an end?
  
• And will the Makarrata Commission, which takes its name from a Yolngu word meaning "peace after a dispute", become a reality too, overseeing truth-telling and agreement-making between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians?
  
  

  "The Voice to Parliament can be a transformational legal and political institutional reform, but only if we really listen to Indigenous people, and they are clearly heard when they speak." - Melissa Castan &Lynette Russell