Custodian Sammy Uluru Wilson hits back at claims Uluru shouldn’t be associated with the voice

The traditional custodian of Uluru, Anangu leader Sammy Uluru Wilson, has rejected claims the rock should not be associated with the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Anangu community leader Sammy Wilson. Picture: Ben Fry

The traditional custodian of Uluru, Anangu leader Sammy Uluru Wilson, has rejected claims the rock should not be associated with the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Mr Wilson has also rejected claims that it was not made clear after the National Constitutional Convention at Uluru in 2017 that the canvas people were signing was the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

In a video recorded recently at Uluru by the office of Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, central desert man Murray George says: “They didn’t say this is a statement for Uluru.”

Some may have interpreted this as Mr George claiming he unwittingly signed the canvas that calls for an Indigenous voice to parliament. But The Australian has established he did not. Mr George is among a small group of central desert men, longtime opponents of the voice, some of whom tend to be far-left activists who consider the voice too modest. Those activists are sometimes referred to as “the progressive no”.

Sammy Wilson, chair of the Central Land Council and his grandson Jacob in front of Uluru.`

Mr Wilson said the men in the video had always opposed the voice. “I was there that day they didn’t want to sign it,” he said. “They didn’t sign it.”

Asked if Indigenous people at Uluru for the presentation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart knew what the document was, Mr Wilson said: “Yes”. “People who don’t want to sign it they don’t join in,” he said.

Mr Wilson also disputed the cultural authority of the men in the video to speak for Uluru. He was responding to a statement by senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that senior law men of Uluru “are upset their sacred site Uluru has been exploited for political purposes, and as such they would prefer to see the elites’ Statement from the Heart destroyed”.

Mr Wilson, who lives in the shadow of Uluru at the small community of Mutitjulu, said Mr George and the other men in the video lived elsewhere.

“They not living in this community,” Mr Wilson told The Australian on Sunday.

“Where these people come from I don’t know where they Iiving. They come from Adelaide and talk behind this community.”

Senator Liddle defended her statement, saying on Sunday: “These men were not the only elders who’ve told me of their distress … they have since said they feel good about speaking out.”