until the 1960s, Indigenous Australians were classified as animals under the Flora and Fauna Act
"I know that until the 1967 referendum altered our constitution to include all Australians as enfranchised citizens, our first peoples were regulated by the Flora & Fauna Act." What I presume Pickering means is not just that the Flora and Fauna Act covered Indigenous people along with everyone else, or even that it mentioned them specially (say, to give them rights to hunt on the land), but that lawmakers classed Indigenous people as "fauna". [...] Minor update, January 2022: The Indigenous actor Shareena Clanton also made the flora and fauna claim on ABC TV’s Q&A, to Josh Frydenberg. "My mother was born in 1965 and she was not considered a human being until the referendum came through from the flora and fauna act in 1967." Nyunggai Warren Mundine pushed back.