The Yes Badge
1967 · Referendum Campaign Button · Work 715 of 1,871
A small white domed disc catching the light on the lapel of a dark wool overcoat on a street in Melbourne in Australia in May 1967, the disc about twenty-five millimetres across, pressed tin under a clear celluloid skin, pinned through the charcoal wool, the wearer seen from behind over the left shoulder, so that the disc stands small and tilted in raking light, a grey felt hat brim at the edge of the frame, in the background soft in focus the red brick entrance of a school building used for polling, a queue of people in coats and hats seen from behind, fallen leaves on the pavement, low golden autumn sunlight from the right.
- What it was used for
- A round white badge with a pin on the reverse, 25 mm outside diameter, reading "VOTE / YES / FOR / ABORIGINES" in black lettering; Museums Victoria holds it as HT 33323. It was worn in the campaign for the Australian referendum of 27 May 1967. According to the State Library Victoria the Federal Council ran the publicity, with no 'No' campaign against it; the slogans were "Right wrongs: vote yes for Aborigines on May 27" and "End discrimination". The result: 5,183,113 Yes votes against 527,007 No votes, 90.77 per cent, with Yes majorities in all 6 states, from 94.68 per cent in Victoria to 80.95 per cent in Western Australia.
- What was new
- The vote deleted the words "other than the Aboriginal race in any State" from section 51(xxvi) and repealed section 127, which excluded Aboriginal people from population reckoning; the Museum of Australian Democracy calls 127 the only part of the constitution deleted outright, now blank. The barb sits here, and it concerns the label itself. Museums Victoria writes that the referendum allowed Aboriginal people to be counted in the national census. Background Paper 11 of the Australian Parliamentary Library, by John Gardiner-Garden, records instead that figures on Aboriginal people were collected and published in Commonwealth Year Books well before 1967, and that the referendum brought neither the vote nor citizenship - federal voting rights had existed since the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1962.
Further reading
- Badge - Vote Yes for Aborigines, Australia, 1967 (HT 33323), Museums Victoria Collections
- John Gardiner-Garden, The Origin of Commonwealth Involvement in Indigenous Affairs and the 1967 Referendum, Australian Parliamentary Library, Background Paper 11, 1996-97
- Referendum Day - Western Australian Museum
- 1967: Indigenous affairs - Museum of Australian Democracy
- The 1967 referendum - State Library Victoria, Such Was Life