Voice referendum: Signatory to Uluru statement Thomas Mayo visits Armidale

"We have close to 30,000 volunteers across the country that have already begun door-knocking and leafleting and helping Australians to understand precisely what they are voting 'Yes' or 'No' to," he said.

Mr Mayo was at the Aboriginal Keeping place in Armidale and had just spoken to a small handful of local elders, before he graciously made time for a brief interview ahead of the town hall meeting.

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"The town hall gathering in Armidale and other events like it that I will be attending over the next month is an opportunity for me to take people through the history behind 'The Voice,' which is a history of other statements and petitions by indigenous people that have all called for a voice that has been largely dismissed and ignored," he said.

Thomas Mayo is a signatory to the Uluru Statement to the Heart, he is a member of the First Nations Referendum Working Group and co-author (with Kerry O'Brien) of The Voice to Parliament Handbook - all the details you need.

Thomas said the referendum was about acknowledging indigenous history.

"It's a history of voices that indigenous people have established ourselves, or have convinced governments to establish, that always a successive government has essentially silenced," he said.

"So that's an important history that has informed and called for a constitutionally enshrined voice, we need to invite the Australian people to walk with us, to make a change and to recognize and listen to indigenous people,

"When we have had a voice throughout the last hundred years, we have seen great improvement to outcomes in health and education and employment (of indigenous peoples).

"When voices in the past have been silenced, when the representative bodies have been taken away, we see things get worse, we see the gap widening," he said.

At the Armidale Town Hall speaking event, Thomas opened up on some of his life experiences that have led him to understand and value unity and the importance of structure that comes with unity in achieving better outcomes in social justice struggles.

He recounted how, as a young man working on the Wharves in Darwin he witnessed how the strength of unity was able to support not only the workers on the wharves to improve their working conditions but also how they were able to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples and their long struggle for rights and recognition

"The voice is about unity, this is about coming together at a time when not enough change is being achieved and in fact, the gap is widening more," he said.

"The gap this year, of 17 measures, four of those have widened.

"The reason I am here is that I have seen that nothing is working, I was looking for how we could do things better.

"That's how I got involved in the process that led to the making of the Uluru Statement from the Heart that calls for a constitutionally enshrined voice."

It's with the support and belief in a concept of unity that Thomas has been able to find himself within arm's reach of a lifelong dream.

"I'm here because I believe in what the Uluru statement proposes and I believe the voice is going to make a difference for all of us," he said.

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