Indigenous voice architect Megan Davis in select company

Megan Davis remains optimistic that there is a way forward after the failure of the voice.

Professor Megan Davis, visiting professor at Harvard Law and Companion of the Order of Australia, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week. Picture: Jason Grow

Megan Davis’s big brother, Will, took her to an army disposal store in Beenleigh before her first big break in 1998. Then a 22-year-old law student, she was going to Switzerland to participate in the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

“We didn’t have suitcases in our family because nobody went anywhere,” she says. “Willy bought me a backpack and he gave me $40 in cash. I remember the two orange-coloured notes. That is the money I had. Thankfully, someone from the UN met me at the airport in Geneva.”

Professor Davis impressed at the UN and was invited to apply for a competitive fellowship. She was selected and sat her final University of Queensland law exams while still there. It was the start of an extraordinary career in the United Nations, constitutional law and Indigenous rights that today, at age 49, makes her a Companion of the Order of Australia in select company with great Aboriginal Australians Lowitja O’Donoghue, Yolngu brothers Mandawuy and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, musician and storyteller Archie Roach and tennis legend Evonne Goolagong-Cawley.

Professor Davis’s work on the question of how Australia’s Constitution could or should recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people lasted 12 years and seven inquiries. She ultimately designed the meetings around Australia that are now regarded as the most thorough consultations of Aboriginal Australians ever undertaken. That process led to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and its request for a voice to parliament, a right to be consulted, in the Constitution. Australians overwhelmingly said no at the voice referendum on October 14, 2023, but Professor Davis’s Uluru Dialogue remains optimistic that there is a way forward. Working with a new generation of young Indigenous leaders, the Uluru Dialogue is talking to the 6.2 million Australians who voted yes and planning the next phase of the recognition movement. As Professor Davis puts it, “we are not done”.

Davis has spent a long time overseas or working on constitutional reform away from home. Picture: Jason Grow

The success stories of people who grew up poor are sometimes studied with testimonials about self-belief and toughness. Professor Davis has both. But she does not ascribe to a view that anyone can pull themselves out of poverty with the right attitude. This goes to the heart of Professor Davis’s own knowledge about how public policy helps or hinders the nation’s most disadvantaged children. She says her mother, Dawn Davis, knew this too. “My mother is such a key part of why I accepted this award and why it’s important,” she said. “It is not easy growing up in the underclass. It is not easy growing up poor in Australia.

“Everything she did was to take advantage of every lever of social mobility that she possibly could.”

Cumulatively, Professor Davis has been a long time overseas or working on constitutional reform away from home. But she is still there often in the blond-brick house she grew up in. She and her siblings share equally a caring roster for their 84-year-old mother. She was with her mother when she received the news about the AC. They embraced and cried.

Professor Davis grew up in a busy, regimented household that revolved around school. Homework before play. Weekends were for study and sport.

As a teen, she played netball and touch football, swam laps at the Beenleigh pool and learned to love watching rugby league: “Rugby league regulated our weekend study. I watched every game all weekend every season for five years at high school.” She has been an NRL commissioner since 2017.

Her father, Alfred Davis – a Cobble Cobble and South Sea Islander man – worked for Queensland Rail. He died from emphysema aged 60.

“My dad always worked. He had an early morning routine including shining his shoes, and he stuck to it. He had such an extraordinary work ethic and us kids got that from him. Our jobs are a big part of all our lives,” she said.

“All of my siblings, Alfred, Will, John and Lucy, work in the service of the community.”

Parents Dawn and Alfred had separated when Megan was in primary school. Dawn, a non-Indigenous woman, raised their five children on a single-parent pension in a housing commission house in Eagleby in Brisbane’s southeast. A former English teacher, Dawn surrounded the children with books from the library or bought cheap second hand. The siblings became prolific readers.

Dawn had been an English high school teacher and encouraged them towards the Western canon because that was what she knew best. There was also French poetry. Les Murray was big in their house, as were Henry Lawson and John Shaw Neilson. However, not all of Professor Davis’s tastes were scholarly. The 1978 skating romance, Ice Castles, was her favourite movie for years.

Roger Ebert, the only critic with a star on Hollywood Boulevard, gave Ice Castles two stars when it hit theatres. “Call me Scrooge; stories like this make me cringe,” he wrote in the Chicago-Sun Times. Not Professor Davis. The girl from Eagleby South State School had never seen an ice rink before and she was enchanted.

“I love Ice Castles,” she laughs. “We watched it in year 2 and all year after that we would play ice skating in the sand pit at school.”

Over 20 years at the University of NSW, Professor Davis rose to the position of professor of law, pro-vice chancellor in 2017, and is now a Scientia Professor, a title for the most distinguished professors at UNSW. Her skills as a researcher meant she was often in demand to assess bureaucracies that were not working. Her verdicts were not always warmly received; Professor Davis’s report on every Aboriginal out-of-home care case in NSW documented a startling lack of accountability, unlawful removals and an absence of consequences for public servants who did not do their jobs.

Her work at the UN over decades has been varied and enduring. Violence against Indigenous women was the focus of her time as chair of the UN’s permanent forum on Indigenous issues and she was rapporteur of the first UN report on violence against Indigenous women. For six years on the UN expert mechanism in Geneva she led in-country missions to Finland and Chile, and spent most midnights during pandemic lockdown as the lead expert on the Protection of isolated Indigenous peoples’ rights in Brazil under Covid-19. A highlight of her UN work was as lead negotiator for the successful repatriation of the Masa Kova, a sacred deer mask of the Yaqui people in Mexico.

She is currently a Harvard Law professor. As Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies, she is teaching the course she designed on Indigenous rights recognition, reform and retreat. Her Harvard students are learning about global trends illustrated by Chilean voters’ rejection of a progressive constitution last year, the defeat of the voice referendum in Australia, the proposed winding back of New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, and the weakening of the Finnish Sami parliament. As well, they are learning about court decisions that uphold the rights of Indigenous peoples in Canada and how these are underpinned by the foundations that constitutional recognition and treaties provide.

Professor Davis believes the latest push for economic empowerment of Indigenous Australians will struggle to succeed because there is no constitutional right to back them.

“In Australia we have had an economic agenda called ‘practical reconciliation’, or the practical approach, for 24 years. The fact it is bureaucratic-led and decoupled from legitimate community representation elected by the people is probably why it hasn’t succeeded,” she said.

“It’s succeeded for some, the middle class, but opportunity hoarding means those benefits are not trickling down. That’s why we aren’t seeing any dramatic advances in closing the gap.

“Much of the resources aren’t going where they are needed. Community knows this. It’s why most mob voted yes and remote communities overwhelmingly voted yes. The voice would have arrested that.”

Professor Davis is currently writing on the promises of the renewable energy sector, and says the economic benefits for Indigenous people in Australia are exaggerated for most. She says the only reason the First Peoples of Canada and the US have strong business opportunities is because of their constitutional right to be at the table.

Professor Davis has never supported changing the date of Australia Day because it just moves the issue to another day; “at the core of the grievance on Invasion/Australia Day is unfinished business. Moving the day doesn’t resolve that for me”.

She sees the many OAMs awarded each year to community volunteers as an important celebration of public service.

“Community volunteers and community workers are the real heroes of this country,” she says.