The Australian republic ought not be so divorced from the cry out of Uluru last May for an Indigenous voice to parliament and truth-telling

Most of us old enough to vote will remember where we were when our republic, with Malcolm Turnbull as helmsman, burbled down a whirlpool of acrimony and division to the rock bottom of public consciousness for almost a generation.

I was on my way to East Timor. Indonesia and its proxies had just razed the place, murdered and displaced the population, because the East Timorese had dared vote for independence from Jakarta despite courageously anticipating the very violence that eventuated.

Related: 'We want referendum': intensive Uluru talks call for an end to the fighting

We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

We have looked outwards rather than within, knowing what we want to reject but being less certain about what we want to create in the monarchy’s absence ... We have already ‘broken away’ and become an independent nation except in two crucial respects: we are without an Australian head of state and we have yet to anchor our vision of popular sovereignty in the continent’s Indigenous antiquity, as the Uluru Statement from the Heart invites us to do. This is the true source of a more mature and independent Australia – the grounding of our sovereignty on our own soil, in the songlines and histories of an ancient island continent.

Related: Turnbull's Uluru statement rejection is 'mean-spirited bastardry' – legal expert

Australia, among all settler-colonial nations, is in a unique position whereby the call for a new Republic of Australia can segue appropriately with the need for Aboriginal sovereignty, an end to injustice and abrogation of the humanity of Aboriginal people.

I believe a republic will be good for Australia, but not if it is simply an act of recolonising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples under normalised white supremacy ...

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