By Jeremy Lasek, a prominent Illawarra YES campaigner
Next Monday, 14 October marks the first anniversary of the Voice referendum that history will record was comfortably defeated in most parts of Australia, except Wollongong.
As an active member of the local YES campaign, I have no plans to do anything to mark the occasion. What’s to celebrate?
Instead, my sights are focused on the second anniversary in 2025, and an exciting project to record the local narrative of the bitter-sweet-bitter referendum campaign in book form. Right now, we’re seeking contributions from others involved in the YES campaign in the Illawarra to get their personal perspective on how things played out through their eyes.
According to Jaymee Beveridge, the inspiring Aboriginal leader at the University of Wollongong's Woolyungah Indigenous Centre, the idea of a book came from the National Allyship Summit that her team hosted in August.
“One of the leading YES campaigners, Thomas Mayo, told delegates at the summit that traditionally after a battle it’s the victors who create the narrative and write the history. He challenged us to write our own history, and that’s what we plan to do.
"Through our book we want to capture our version of events during the local referendum campaign, so in 2050 and 2060 when our grandkids and great grandkids look back at what happened they get a more balanced perspective.”
The plan is ambitious – reaching out to the many hundreds of active YES campaigners in the Illawarra to capture their take on the referendum in their own words.
We want the book to capture it all – the good, the bad and the ugly. We want it to be a book containing powerful images and words, important learnings from the campaign, the whole range of emotions, and as many personal stories as possible. Most importantly, we want the truth to come out, something that was in short supply during last year’s campaign.
Our campaign was grassroots, there were so many special events at beaches and in theatres, a Windang Bridge Walk, a city-wide education campaign in shopping centres, at railway stations and via door knocking across most Wollongong suburbs.
While there will be many negatives – especially given the final result – and we must capture the truth of what happened, we also want to provide all of those inspiring, uplifting moments and experiences that we all shared.
The book needs to be honest; I expect it will be brutally honest at times, but for the supporters of the YES campaign it also needs to give us some hope for the future.
We expect our Illawarra-based book project will become a treasured, historic document and we hope it might be replicated in other places.
Contributions for the book are being sought by the end of November and anyone wanting to be involved may contact Woolyungah at wic-events@uow.edu.au
The plan is to have the book published and ready for launch in October 2025 to mark the second anniversary of the referendum.