Sad for the Voice

At the beginning of December I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) saying that Megan Davis, the university professor and prominent Voice advocate, had been given a position at Harvard University. I was struck by a feeling of jubilation that she’d been rendered silent by the lack of success for her favourite cause and then had disappeared from the public stage in Australia to take a position overseas. This is what “booted upstairs” looks like.

Davis was a take-no-prisoners kinda gal, the type who punches first and asks your name second. Better to put down a rival before they can take you out even if it might be the wrong person.

I’d had a run-in with Davis on Twitter (when it was still called that) precisely about the Voice. I started writing about the Voice in 2017 when the initial report was released and I was watching developments carefully since then up to the time when Davis and I crossed paths in the cybersphere.

The ground upon which we squared off was littered with corpses from her previous battles so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to me that she took me for an adversary as soon as I mentioned the word “detail”. But it was detail that I wanted and detail that had been woefully lacking in public debates up to that point in time.

You got two types of contestant in the main, the people who were unthinkingly “for” the Voice and those who wanted to see it crushed. Davis saw only two types of contestant so when I mentioned the “D” word she bridled and lashed out verbally, nicking me with her tweets. I retired but never forgot, so it was easy to work in the shadows monitoring progress of the Voice toward polling day. 

I saw many things. I saw Labor politicians lambasting people on the right with insults and belittling replies. I saw people like Ms Davis following the lead the politicians offered. I saw other Aboriginal luminaries follow suit, always using strong language when mild replies might at least have made their opponents look bad. I saw the people who were trying to progress the Voice to a successful conclusion sink their own ship. Within 40 minutes of the polls closing Anthony Green had declared the result and the game was, unceremoniously, over.

Then silence.

The vanquished went off to lick their wounds and friends of mine said how sad they were. I wonder how sad people were in the Yes camp at any point from August 2017 to 14 October 2023? I wonder how downcast they felt while they were bruising the dictionary with their fast use of epithets designed to cause pain. How sad were they then? Were they sad when they insulted people who disagreed with them? Were they downcast in anticipation of the drubbing they’d receive at the ballot box? I wonder what Megan David pans to do from her aerie in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

Will she remain sad for long?