The popular and long-running BBC/SBS program Who do you think you are? reaches back into written histories, stored documents, and family anecdotes found through to DNA profiling to find out where celebrities really got their skills and personalities from. This hereditary curiosity is increasingly relevant today as we acknowledge the reality of all humans being a ‘blend’ of both ethnicities (being defined as handed down interactive social behaviours, values, cultural and belief systems, and a common language) and races.

‘Races’, while widely used is technically inaccurate, as modern humans are comprised of the same Homo sapiens race via an anthropology going back as far as Australopithecus (being an ancient ancestor) via Homo rudolfensis, Homo habilis and then through to Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens. Human beings used to come in a collection of distinct races including the well known Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans with incremental amounts of successful interbreeding across most sub-branches. Modern humans are a blend of these races, subject to regional variations. Being a ‘blend’ is what defines the modern human. The reverse of crossbreeding is ‘in-breeding’ aka consanguinity which multiplies genetic and DNA errors to the ultimate extinction of the species and may be responsible for the end of Homo neanderthalensis. Hence the term of ‘hybrid vigour’ across livestock, horticultural, and most biotic species – right down to viruses.

The trek out of Africa for modern humans, (not the journey made some 2,000,000ya by Homo erectus into West Asia) was to the North and the East, most probably due to the last Ice Glacial Period (215,000ya to approximately 20,000ya) so tribal groups spread NE (warmed by the Indian Ocean) adapting to environmental conditions along the way that served to select the winners in inheritable genetic/DNA make-up from the losers.

This racial identification is a huge and complex study in anthropology and genetics/DNA/Haplotype and not one that can easily be glossed over by ‘identifying as…’ This brings the racial ‘Voice’ argument back to an across Australia ‘ethnicity’, which previously did not exist as a uniform group because there were some 500 different languages and tribes identified in Australia. Theirs was a landscape-based range of spiritual beliefs with no written language other than through artworks which were based on the landscape, climatic forces, and natural biota.

Of particular interest here are the Homo floresiensis tribal groups who may have been the first arrivals. These small, slight-framed people could have easily bridged from the island of Flores into the tip of Northern Australia some 50,000ya. They are believed to be extinct and it has not yet been agreed whether they descended from modern humans or the earlier Homo erectus. So far, their remains have only been found on Flores.

This is who we humans are: a geographic blend of ancestral/tribal based DNA that selected for the survival of our species wherever our tribes settled, and then socialised into ethnicities to identify our particular group and defend it against other ethnic groups. That ‘blending’ may have been by consensual personal attraction, but was probably more brutal via intertribal warfare and assault. Hence, we have the millennial histories of tribal-to-continental wars across our planet from the start of our species. We cross-breed dogs, cats, bovines, plants, and ourselves as the underlying reality is that to in-breed is against the laws of natural selection that seeks hybrid vigour versus consanguinity and all the compound errors in repetitive genetic transference that leads to the end of a species.

Having previously noted that the word ‘Indigenous’ relates to ‘of the land’ and taking the Cambridge Dictionary ‘people who originally lived in a space rather than people who arrived from somewhere else’ or Collins ‘Indigenous people or things belong to the country in which they are found, rather than coming there or being brought from another country’ we are brought back to the understanding of this continental plate. I have called it Raft Australia and it is unique as the ‘last shard off Pangaea’ that, over some 80 million years, evolved biota that could cope with everything from a deep freeze to a tropical sunburn along with massive droughts followed by equally massive floods. During which time amazing, indigenous survivors across plant and animal biota established Australia as their home. No pre-humans are on this list. We later walked, swam, or boated tens of thousands of years later into what was a vast, unknown, unending, and unexplored expanse because tribal groups in ‘Meganesia’ were curious, hungry, or were in flight. Interestingly The Wallace Line in Borneo proves that there was a counter migration of macropods from what was then Australia/Sahul into this part of Asia.

So to the current issue across Australia regarding The Voice is first the ‘identifying as Indigenous’ has to be put in perspective. Australia has no indigenous human backstory as our primate ancestors were indigenous to Africa. Perhaps the Voice might claim constitutional representation across Africa just as I might claim ‘indigenous’ representation into Scandinavian governments on the basis of my Swedish forebears? Second, that we are all a blend and all humans who were originally indigenous to Africa so we are now witnessing a distortion of the language of ‘English’ to suit a current ‘aggrieved’ ideology. Aboriginal? Yes. Indigenous? No.

I support an Indigenous Voice and for me that is a unique voice that I can’t find anywhere else in the world, a voice that opens up each day in Australia, it is the Good Morning Australia call from the Kookaburra. That should be the call across all Australian events from Parliament House to Sporting Fields. Remember the old cinema newsreels that opened with the Kookaburra’s famous call? Bring it back,

‘We are One but we are many, and from all the lands on Earth we come … I am, you are, we are Australian.’ Isn’t that enough!