A Voice Letter from Wadeye

We are holding over the Chevalier Family Justice theme till later for a pressing Australian First Friday issue.

Leo Wearden has written this letter from Wadeye.  He can be contacted:

0402 850 084     and   This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Dear MSC Confreres

Yes to the Voice

The MSCs have always said Yes to our Indigenous people. I plan to continue that tradition by voting Yes at the 14 October referendum. In voting Yes, I want to acknowledge our First Peoples in Australia’s Constitution and to agree to their request to be heard on matters that directly affect them by our nation’s principal decision makers. 

I hope all my MSC confreres will vote Yes too.

My reasons are based on my understanding of our MSC mission and on my experience here in Wadeye, where I am parish priest.

The MSC Yes tradition started here nearly 90 years ago when in 1935 Fr Richard Docherty MSC set up what was then called the Port Keats mission. His initiative in this remote part of Australia, undertaken at great personal cost, exemplified the seminal spirit of the MSC Constitution. ‘We will be attentive’, it reads, ‘as our Founder was to those who suffer and are in need’. The Constitution goes on to say: ‘We will seek to identify the causes of their suffering and to discern what our response will be by following the light of the Gospel and by listening to the world and to the Church’. (#21) 

Wadeye, the biggest Aboriginal community in Australia, is precisely the sort of community that the Voice is intended for. Males in Wadeye die on average 20 years younger than the national average. Funerals are constant and many from tragic circumstances. The effects of long term substance abuse amongst the young are rarely out of sight. A few nights ago my sleep was broken by the psychotic howls of a man outside my house. One of the most faithful Church leaders regularly has 30 people living in his two bed room house, all unemployed. Young men turn up repeatedly at Wadeye’s monthly court sessions and are over-represented in NT prisons. Roads and other important infrastructure for the well being of the town go for years without attention. An outbreak of violence in 2022 attracted national publicity. The rioting traumatised the town and resulted in the smashing of buildings, burning of dozens of homes and cars and the flight of hundreds many of them holding children. The people hang on to the practices of their culture and their language but life is a constant struggle that saps self-confidence, dignity and pride.

As our MSC Constitution urges, I have tried to discern my response to this reality by listening. To me the situation in Wadeye amounts to a confused and complex cry from the depths. Sadly it is also representative of other major Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Its source is complex and manifold. It includes the lasting effects of colonial dislocation.  But as Pope John Paul II reminded Aboriginal people in Alice Springs in 1986, ‘What has been done cannot be undone’. He went on to say, however, ‘What can now be done to remedy the deeds of yesterday must not be put off till tomorrow.’ 

I think Yes is part of the remedy called for by the Pope. Many in Wadeye have indicated they favour Yes. It will not be ‘a magic wand; it’s going to take work’, as an Aboriginal leader from my part of Victoria says. But it makes sense to listen to respected First Peoples leaders who themselves have listened, in many cases for their whole lives, and are asking to take more responsibility for the situation of their communities.

Yes will not materially disadvantage other Australians. On the contrary it will demand more accountability of First Peoples and ensure better value for money spent.

What will change in Wadeye with a No result? It will ensure more of the same which, as the situation in Wadeye demonstrates, is not working.

Our bishop, Bishop Charles Gauci, and some other religious leaders have publicly stated they will vote Yes. I pray that all MSCs will join them. It will be our collective gift to the people of Wadeye and other First Peoples of Australia, and ‘must not be put off till tomorrow’.

Leo Wearden MSC

Wadeye, 4 October 2023