Kylie Message-Jones | Old Parliament House should be more than stage for 'democracy sausage' happy snaps

In recent years, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House has become a popular place to cast a vote. It uses the slogan: "Vote where history happened".

Located on the opposite side of the road to Old Parliament House is the Tent Embassy. It was not in any of the images I saw. I started to think about what else was excluded from these photos, and what the photographs, as well as their exclusions, might come to say as historical records of the weekend's referendum on the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament.

This wasn't a random question. There is a tradition of photographing Aboriginal people outside or on the margins of this building.

On May 9, 1927, a journalist took a photograph of Wiradjuri man, Jimmy "King Billy" Clements at the opening of Parliament House in Canberra. Clements is standing alone on the steps of the building. Behind him, the building's front door is shut.

Clements and another Wiradjuri man, John Noble, had walked from southern NSW to attend the auspicious event. He said they had gone there to "demonstrate sovereign rights to the Federal Territory".

The image of Clements has been credited as recording the first instance of Aboriginal protest at the Parliament. It was a significant message made less than three decades after the 1901 Australian constitution had been founded on principles that silenced First Nations Australians and excluded them from the Commonwealth.

The representation of King Billy standing outside the Parliament set a tone for future images including one staged in the lead up to the referendum on May 27, 1967. This image shows former boxer Jack Hassen and his daughter demonstrating with a sign that says " give us equal rights throughout Australia". Again, they are standing outside the building.

Australians overwhelmingly voted "yes" in the 1967 referendum. Indigenous people were granted certain citizenship rights, and inclusion in the census. The constitutional changes made it possible for the Commonwealth to make laws regarding Indigenous Australians. It also created momentum for the land rights struggle by raising the profile of Indigenous issues with the wider Australian public.

Five years after the 1967 referendum, four men, Billy Craigie, Michael Anderson, Bertie Williams and Tony Coorey travelled from Redfern and set up a beach umbrella on the lawns opposite Parliament House.

The protest, which started on Australia Day, January 26, 1972 initially targeted the refusal of then prime minister Billy McMahon to acknowledge the land rights of communities in the Northern Territory. It reiterated the view that Aboriginal people were treated like aliens in their own land.

Photographs taken of the Tent Embassy and the demonstrations it supported clearly show the outsider status of the protesters. They show the four men and the beach umbrella standing in stark contrast to the building behind them. Another photograph clearly indicates the status of Aboriginal people by showing a stand-off between police and protesters on July 30, 1972 out the front of the building.

The incidents - and absences - represented in these images are not "one-offs". They represent a sustained pattern of prejudice and exclusion.

They show that the rights given to Indigenous people in 1967 were granted by a government that was still not intending to "let them in". Kept at arm's length by a watchful police force, the activists in 1972 were no closer to entering the Parliament House or meaningful dialogue than was King Billy, even despite the change that had occurred in the constitution in the time between these images being taken.

Last weekend's images are also part of this visual record. In some ways they represent the culmination of the previous images discussed here in that as Sana Nakata wrote in The Conversation: "The political subjugation and further marginalisation of First Nations' peoples is no longer historical legacy but a contemporary decision reinscribing centuries of paternalism".

But Old Parliament House is more than just a neutral stage for these pictures. As an official polling venue, a museum of democracy and place of learning, as well as the former Australian parliament, Old Parliament House holds significant political and cultural capital for Australians. The long white building features heavily in images of our national past.

Today, the images of Old Parliament House - and more significantly their exclusions - take on more meaning today as we reflect on the referendum's results. MoAD likes to think of itself as a "living museum of Australian political and social history".

It aims to provide a mirror on contemporary society as well as a concrete reflection of the colonial discrimination on which it is built. Its work in facilitating processes of national reflection and soul searching is more urgent than ever before.

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Central to this task - and the bigger project of truth-telling - is improving the historical and visual literacy of Australians to identify what historical exclusion represents, and what it costs us all. Looking and asking questions about what images exclude is as important for redressing historical blindness as it is a crucial skill in the analysis of information that fill in our media feeds on a daily basis.