Senator Jacinta Price’s mum did not say Australia was uninhabited at the time of European settlement

^{By Renee Davidson}

In a bid to push the No campaign against the Voice referendum, social media users are wrongly attributing an “essay” containing multiple false claims, including that Australia was uninhabited at the time of European settlement, to former Northern Territory government cabinet minister, Bess Nungarrayi Price.

Ms Price is a prominent Aboriginal leader and the mother of federal shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is leading Fair Australia's campaign against the Voice to Parliament.

The essay, which has been copied and posted in several Facebook posts and shared more than 43,000 times across the platform, is titled “Reflection on Welcome to Country by Bess Price - Jacinta’s Mum”. 

But Ms Bess Price told FactLab she did not write the essay circulating on Facebook. 

The 720-plus word essay contains a number of misleading claims, including that Australia was “terra nullius” – land belonging to no-one – at the time of European settlement, and that Indigenous Australians had made no progress in the way of technology, agriculture and philosophy prior to British settlement in 1788. 

Ms Price told FactLab she never wrote statements such as: “The fact is, as uncomfortable and as unfashionable as it is, aboriginal Australia had not produced anything resembling a Shakespeare, nothing much in the way of technology, never discovered the wheel and no philosophy to speak of, in the 30,000 years available to it.” 

Further on, the essay says, “It therefore beats me why the Aboriginals are now so revered.”

The posts also contain four paragraphs about the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum, saying that it will reinsert race into the constitution after it was removed as a result of the 1967 referendum.  

“JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING TO CONTEMPLATE BEFORE SIGNING UP TO "THE VOICE” – TAKE CARE - WE ALREADY HAVE A PARLIAMENT THAT REPRESENTS “ALL” AUSTRALIANS!,” the post says.

One Facebook post is signed off with the name “Beth Price”, while another ends with her bio. Half of the posts contain an image of Ms Price.  

Comments posted by Facebook users suggest that many believe Ms Price wrote the essay. “Elder Bess Nungarrayi Price is Spot ON !” one user wrote, while another similarly claimed, “Says it all. And from an indigenous Australian.” 

But the claim is false.

In a telephone interview, Ms Price told FactLab “I was surprised and shocked to see it on Facebook. It definitely wasn’t me who’d written it.

“It really, not surprised me but, I just couldn’t believe that someone would actually put something like that together and could say that it was me who had written it,” she said.

Ms Price confirmed that she had written just one of the paragraphs featured in the essay, and that was for a Facebook post she made about Welcome to Country ceremonies in 2018.

“All the 'Welcome to Country', all the 'Smoking Ceremonies' and all the made up bullshit rituals about 'pay our respects to Elders past and present' is just one big lie!,” Ms Price wrote in the 2018 Facebook post. 

Speaking later on behalf of Ms Price, her husband, David Price, told FactLab that while they both stood by the comments made in the 2018 post, they wanted nothing to do with claims made in the current essay being shared on Facebook. 

“Her original quote has been embedded in sentences she didn’t write,” Mr Price said. “The rest of the article we want nothing to do with.” 

What about the claims made in the essay?

The essay contains three false claims about Indigenous Australian history. 

The first claim is that Australia was terra nullius at the time of European settlement in 1788. 

Terra nullius  – a Latin phrase meaning land belonging to no-one – was the legal term used by the British government to justify the settlement of Australia. 

The 1992 Mabo Case overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, recognising for the first time in Australian law that Indigenous peoples had lived in Australia for thousands of years and had rights to their land according to their traditional laws and customs. 

In his Mabo judgement, Sir Gerard Brennan, Justice of the High Court of Australia, wrote: “The fiction by which the rights and interests of Indigenous inhabitants in land were treated as non-existent was justified by a policy which has no place in the contemporary law of this country.”

The Mabo Case paved the way for the recognition of native title in Australian common law, with the passing of the Native Title Act (1993) enabling Indigenous Australians to claim traditional rights to unextinguished land. 

The second false claim in the essay is that Indigenous languages in Australia consist of around 290-363 dialects. 

There are, in fact, more than 250 Indigenous languages spoken in Australia, including around 800 dialects, according to the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). 

Lastly, the essay claims that Australia’s 1967 referendum removed race from the constitution. But that is also false. 

FactLab has previously fact-checked claims that the 1967 referendum removed race from the constitution and found them to be false. Race is mentioned in two sections. 

The 1967 referendum did not remove race from the constitution. Instead, it approved two amendments relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: Section 51 (xxvi) was altered and section 127 was deleted. 

The referendum for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament is expected to be held between October and December this year. Australians will vote on whether to change the constitution to establish the Voice to advise the parliament and government on matters relating to Indigenous people. 

The legislation to establish the referendum passed through the lower house on May 31, and was approved by the Senate on June 19. No date has been set for the referendum but it must now be held in two to six months.