When Coombs told Howson in October 1971 that ‘we are not certain that the Aborigines would accept what we propose but we believe their soberest advisers would tell them to’, he evoked one of the defining difficulties of his project. Coombs was a mediator between governments making policy and indigenous Australians choosing the manner and degree of their co-operation with (or rejection of) government. As mediator he could imagine common cause with other mediators (‘their soberest advisers’). With the mediator's tact, he could distance his tendered policy advice from his actual policy desires. To be an effective mediator was to cultivate estrangement and familiarity simultaneously – from government and from the constituency he advocated. Such estrangements and sympathies are the theme of this chapter.

The CAA and FCAATSI

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was formed in 1958. If the 1967 referendum was not FCAATSI's idea, it was certainly its triumph. It might be expected that those charged with equipping the Commonwealth with the policies expressing the referendum's goodwill would look to FCAATSI as a continuing embodiment of the mandate of reform. Yet in the memories of two members of the CAA – Dexter and Coombs – FCAATSI's light does not shine so brightly.

In 1981 Dexter recalled FCAATSI as ‘essentially a body of fairly leftwing trade unionists anxious primarily for a paid annual Easter holiday in Canberra.’ In 1984, without naming FCAATSI, Coombs evoked the pro-indigenous lobby before the referendum as ‘gatherings of organisations which were mainly white sympathisers, trade unions, radicals of all sorts of descriptions with a few Aboriginal members.’