Jill Gallagher (centre) marches with other First Nations leaders in support of the Voice during the referendum campaign in Victoria. Credit: Tommy Clark/First Peoples Assembly of Victoria.

Treaty is not a new ask. Aboriginal people have been calling for Treaty since colonisation began. But what I have learnt, especially during my time as the Treaty Advancement Commissioner in the Victorian Treaty process, is that Treaty is hard work. Treaty is hard work and requires a lot of negotiation with government. And in order to negotiate, you need a political Voice who can sit at that table and represent Mob.

The ofcial ‘History is Calling’ placard used by the Uluru Dialogue during the referendum campaign.

In the lead up to the 2023 Voice referendum there were numerous diferent callbacks to events in our history. Earlier referendums were invoked, especially the overwhelmingly successful 1967 Referendum, which amended the Constitution to include Aboriginal people within its scope and was seen as a decisive vote ‘for’ Aboriginal people. This was contrasted with the more generally unsuccessful record of referendums in Australia: Only 8 of 44 referendums had passed. More substantively, the stories Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the country shared provided the foundation for the Uluru Statement and informed the call for structural reform and a Voice.1 It was then not surprising that Aboriginal perspectives on the past were highlighted throughout the campaign: from the ancient claims to First Nations sovereignty, law and Country that founded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims against the state to the massacres and other atrocities against Aboriginal people committed by colonists, especially those memorialised in statues that have continuing repercussions in communities today. The Voice was also connected to the longer struggle of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for recognition and rights: historical acts of resistance, mourning and activism, and progress towards and aspirations for land rights and treaty.

Children play on Country at the Ross River Dialogue, 2017. Photograph credit: Jimmy Widders-Hunt.

In my mind, the legitimacy of the rationale for a First Nations Voice in the Australian Constitution was – and remains – sound. The mechanisms of state, the legislative frameworks and policy development processes have for so long delivered challenges and impacted First Nations peoples in this country. Drawing on my experiences in native title, I want to make the case that structural reform that addresses these governance and historical societal construct issues is still desperately needed.

I take this opportunity to acknowledge our leaders from those regions around Australia who, through the Regional Dialogues and the First Nations Constitutional Convention, delivered the Uluru Statement. I acknowledge the women First Nations warriors who work their guts out for years but often don't get the proper respect and recognition they deserve. I learned so much from our staunch leaders in Professor Megan Davis and Aunty Pat Anderson, and the rest of the team on the Uluru Dialogue during the campaign, and all First Nations people who joined us on the Friday night hook-up across the country.

My attempt is to highlight some of those mechanisms of state that we, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, deal with in our day-to-day struggles. This is necessarily just a brief overview, a tip of the iceberg glance at these issues. I will start with native title and make some comments too about cultural heritage protection.

To understand the relationship between songs, singers and the melodramatic mode of Hindi cinema as well as the way in which Hindi film songs express what may be called “censored cultural desire” necessitates some understanding, in however general fashion, of pre-independence Bombay Cinema. In her impressive study of the political economy of this (early) cinema, Debashree Mukherjee has referred to it as a “gigantic aesthetic-industrial form” (2020: 96). This form developed its own idea of the screenplay, where the shooting script functioned not as a complete written dialogue but as a series of themes and motifs captured in a formulaic form of dialogue and song. This chapter provides historical background to this cinematic phenomenon, a history which, admittedly, is widely available in the critical discourse. Nonetheless, by providing this background here and, more importantly, by casting this history around the development of the Hindi film song tradition, I also want to dwell on the emotional impact of this cinema on the spectator. The theoretical points raised in the Introduction will guide me as I explore the links between songs and melodramatic feeling in the pre-independence Bollywood film.

Although the classical Hindu corpus of epic and dramatic material is foundational to any reading of Hindi cinema, including its songs, the more immediate antecedent of the form was no doubt Parsi theatre. Parsi theatre is characterized by melodrama, sentimentality and romance themes, which are well rehearsed in the films under consideration here. However, from neither Thoraval (2000) nor Kala (2007) does one get any precise statement about the transition from stage drama to silent films and thence to talkies. Javed Akhtar, the current doyen of Hindi film lyricists, on the other hand, is conscious of powerful intertextual connections. In conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir, he notes:

A central issue in discussing the history of film songs is the problem associated with the creation of a chronology to organize the discussion into periods. Scholars such as Anantharaman, Alauddin and Prasad, Arnold, Mishra, Morcom, Gopal and Moorti, have at some point been faced with questions about periodization. In the narrow context of this book, can one speak about periods, marked out by specific dates, in the production of the Hindi film song without falling into a “period fallacy”? By isolating 1951–1963, am I not suggesting that this time frame constitutes a finite, immutable period even when history tells me that no period can be confined to specific years without acknowledging or addressing some degree of chronological overlap. This acknowledgement made and the qualification conceded, nevertheless, in any study of Bollywood cinema as a rule of a period's distinctiveness needs to be articulated, even if only as a heuristic principle, to write coherently about commonalities and conventions that link a set of films together.15 This is the principle on which I move forward.

“Golden Age” is now such a common term. It seems every culture has had its own Golden Age, an historical period or era, when, as one looks back, the culture stood for something quite exceptional. The Oxford English Dictionary (the OED) gives it a more specific meaning: “the period in which a nation, etc., is at its highest state of prosperity, or in which some department of human activity is at its acme of excellence”. The OED works on historical principles, that is, it cites the first written use of the expression when the word is used first or when its meaning undergoes change.

This chapter discusses the counterbalance to positive outcomes by examining fitness technology's impact on social physique anxiety and stress through social comparison. This chapter utilizes Social Comparison Theory to elucidate how social and competitive factors can redirect individuals’ attention from personal growth to seeking external approval, thereby introducing possible psychological hazards. The dual impact plays a central role in the nuanced perspective that this book aims to offer.

Fitness technology has the potential to boost motivation and self-perception, yet its social and comparative aspects can pose notable psychological hurdles for numerous users (Codina et al., 2024). The data shows that certain features, especially those related to social sharing and peer comparison, heighten social physique anxiety, a type of anxiety triggered by the perception of others judging one's physical appearance (Zartaloudi et al., 2023). This section delves into how the social dimensions of fitness technology create settings where individuals might experience self-consciousness, anxiety, or pressure to conform to certain social fitness norms. The results are situated within Social Comparison Theory and relevant psychological studies, emphasizing how the design of the technology may at times compromise users’ self-esteem and welfare.

This chapter has four parts.

—The frst part is premised on the recognition that the terms “modern” and “modernism,” which play such essential roles in Must We Mean What We Say? and The World Viewed, all but completely dropped out of Cavell's lexicon in his later writings, and suggests that it is no wonder that this occurred simultaneously with his discovery of the depth of his afnity with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

—The second part begins to fesh out my intuition that Cavell's discovery of Emerson was a seismic event—as consequential as Must We Mean What We Say?, which began his philosophical life; The Claim of Reason, which declared his existence as the only kind of philosopher who could have written such a book or could have wanted to; and Little Did I Know, which closed the book on his life in philosophy.

—The third part explores implications of the fact that his 2005 book Cities of Words places Emerson within a tradition of moral perfectionism that Cavell traced back to the origin of philosophy in ancient Greece—and forward to his own work, declaring himself to be what he called an “Emersonian perfectionist.”

—The fourth part broadens the perspective by refecting on the implications, for the serious study of flm, of Cavell's embrace—and my own—of Emersonian perfectionism.

This chapter provides examples of the way sentimentality finds expression in Hindi cinema during the period 1951–1963. As I have previously argued, periodization is always problematic. However, the label the Golden Age does have heuristic value in as much as it bounds a particular group of films and songs together in a way that provides a set of texts for detailed comparative sentiment analysis. Before turning to the crux of the argument of the chapter – the “Golden Age” of Hindi cinema as the exemplary moment of the power of songs in the melodramatic register – several general comments about the period in question are useful to acknowledge, in particular, the variety of influential figures and contexts that characterized the Indian film industry at the time. As noted in the earlier chapters, for purposes of periodization, 1951–1963 is marked by the release of the film Awaara at one end, and Gumrah at the other end. Although Gumrah itself is not in colour, this film as the terminus post quem marks the beginning of extensive use of colour in Bollywood.26 More immediately for the argument of the book, it is a period in which the melodramatic form underpins all other genres of Hindi cinema: the social, the mythological, the fantasy, the tragic, the comic and so on. This kind of embedding meant that the films of the period, regardless of their use of a variety of narratives and genres, generally have an identifiable feel and cinematic affect. This “feel” persisted through the appropriation of the melodramatic acting ethos by some of Hindi cinema's most acclaimed and recognizable actors: Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Dilip Kumar, Nargis, Meena Kumari and Madhubala, the last four Muslim actors with a fine grasp of Urdu, the poetic language of Hindi cinema of the time.

While for the major directors of the period – V. Shantaram (1901–1990), K. Asif (1922– 1971), Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan and Guru Dutt – cinema was meant for popular entertainment, the Nehruvian ethos of secularism and human equality as the defining characteristic of the nation state was invariably embedded in the structure and discourses of their films. The period, so soon after Indian independence, marked a shift in the global awareness of this postcolonial cinematic form. Hindi films began to gain markets in the Middle East and the Soviet Union as well as in the burgeoning Indian diaspora.