When the apology burst onto the stage of Australian politics, during the closing decade of the twentieth century, the nation found itself poised between two national debates, one over the treatment and status of Australia's Indigenous peoples, the other over a new constitution for a nation entering the new millennium. Both of these processes involved and invited profound reconsideration of the political and social map of the Australian nation, although they apparently moved in opposite temporal directions. The constitutional debates sought to clarify the fundamental values of the Australian nation and articulate them in a legally binding constitutional document for the future, while the debates around Indigenous issues principally sought to deal with Australia's troubled past. Nevertheless, the two are best understood as inter-dependent processes. If Australia needed a new constitution, it was largely because the existing one represented neither the demographic and geopolitical character of the contemporary nation nor the aspirational values and political principles that would carry it into the new century.