Whose Voice is it Anyway?

One of the early referendum campaign ads depicts a future in which various seniors brag to their apparently spellbound progeny about how they voted ‘Yes’ back in 2023. But if you’re planning to vote that way, you may not be willing to wait for such adulation. A photo of your completed postal ballot won’t linger in your friends’ Instagram feeds more than a day, and it’s déclassé to put a “History is calling” bumper sticker on the family Cayenne. Enter Our Voices from the Heart, a hefty coffee-table book from Megan Davis and Pat Anderson. Filled with pretty photographs and big text, the work appears designed to sit conspicuously in the lounges and waiting rooms of the virtuous. Kmart is offloading them for $24, about the right price point for the Secret Santa at Rio Tinto or Arnold Bloch Leibler.

It’s clear from the words at the top of the cover — “The authorised story of the community campaign that changed Australia” — that the book was conceived during…