Senator Pat Dodson was not going to see a doctor on March 31. He was due at the Winnunga Aboriginal medical service in Canberra for a Covid jab. To describe the timing of that appointment as fortuitous is a massive understatement. Once there, Dodson told doctor Eric Sambaiew he had been feeling sick. That was an understatement too. The father of reconciliation was staring at death. Sambaiew sent Dodson straight to the emergency department at Canberra hospital, where he was found to have a life-threatening infection on his oesophagus and Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He has been absent from parliament and public life since, though on Thursday Dodson told The Australian he hopes he will soon be well enough to join the campaign for an Indigenous voice to parliament.

“The chemo does what it does, it knocks you about it, makes your hair fall out. You have good days and your bad days … hopefully, that’s all behind me,” Dodson said from his home in Broome.

“There’s no cure for the Hodgkin’s lymphoma as far as I know, but it can be put into remission. And hopefully, you know, you can get back to doing pretty much what you were doing prior.” After almost six months on the sidelines of the voice debate, Dodson says he is convinced of the goodness of Australians.

“I keep hearing ‘You have lost this, you may as well lay down and die’, you know, crawl into a hollow log and lick your wounds,” he said.

“I don’t believe that. I believe Australians are better than this. I believe Australians will look at this on the day and say ‘well this is a decent, honourable, good thing for us to do’.”

Dodson thinks of the Gartlans, the white farming family who treated him like a son in 1960s rural Victoria and demonstrated to him what reconciliation can look like. Marion Gartlan, a nurse and mother of five, looms large in Dodson’s memory because of the way she advocated for him during his school years. On one memorable day at Monivae College, Gartlan drove in from the family farm to confront a male welfare officer carrying out what had become regular visits to the school to question Dodson. Gartlan spoke to the welfare officer, then told Dodson: “Everything’s okay. You won’t be seeing him again.”

Long after the deaths of the Gartlans, Dodson remains friends with their two surviving children, Bud and Christine.

“I grew up in the little town of Katherine, I witnessed the Rights For Whites meeting and the Gurindji (people) walked off Wave Hill (station), it was the most terrible experience I’ve ever had in my life. So I’ve seen the worst side of what we’re capable of as Australians when it comes to Aboriginal relationships,” he said.

“But I’ve also seen the better side – the ’67 referendum, the positive nature of our response to so many things, the goodwill on a day-to-day basis. I mean, I deal with tradies in my life or just local business people or just people I meet at the shops. Australians, people travelling through as tourists. There’s a decency in Australians that I’m hoping and confident … will come through.

“Now that to me is what I’ve always hoped in and placed my trust in. And it began with the strength of Mrs Gartlan. The grace and goodness that I saw in a person who knew very little about Aboriginal people … she stood up to the welfare and got rid of them out of my life.”

He said he grew up in an era when government dominated the lives of Indigenous people. This was a time when “learned white folks believed they knew best what Aboriginal people needed”.

There had been periods when governments did take advice from Indigenous representative bodies, but those bodies were inevitably abolished. It was not a role Dodson nor any other Indigenous politician could possibly fulfil because of their obligations to their party and the electorate they represent including farmers, miners, Aboriginal people, small-business operators and local government.

“We face more of the same,” he said. “The referendum would provide an astrological shift for us if it was successful.

“It would create a shift in the axis of our relationship and that would be a good thing for all of us. For all Australians.”

After six rounds of chemotherapy, Dodson is full of gratitude for the care and kindness of Australians who learned he was ill and sent him good wishes. This includes political opponents.

“And it’s helped me immensely in my recovery process,” he said.

“I’m still recovering but I am a long way from where I was, so I’m hopeful that in the next couple of weeks I’d be a lot fitter than I am and hopefully be able to become involved in the process prior to the 14th of October.”