Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers

Freedom Ride Prelims 27/9/02 10:39 AM Page i In the 60s, segregation and discrimination were no less a part of Aborigin...

Author: Ann Curthoys

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Freedom Ride Prelims 27/9/02 10:39 AM Page i

In the 60s, segregation and discrimination were no less a part of Aboriginal life than of the lives of black people in the Deep South. We needed a civil rights movement . . . and in Charlie Perkins and company, we got one. This book tells with verve the story of the Freedom Rides and the conscience-searing triumph they were. The characters are skilfully conjured in all their youth and idealism. Ann Curthoys tells the story with an insider’s eye and the passion of a true believer—and there is no other way to recount this moral victory and the lasting change it helped edge into being. Bob Carr, Premier of NSW

In the early 1960s, most Australians could affect ignorance or feel comfortable about the racism, discrimination and poverty affecting Aboriginal Australians. The Freedom Ride of 1965 marked the time when those who had been comfortable with what was happening were confronted with reality. It forced other Australians to look at the darker side of the past and the present. It helped develop a new generation of Aboriginal leaders. Jack Waterford, Editor-in-chief, The Canberra Times

The record of the students’ Freedom Ride in New South Wales is profound. Ann Curthoys has recounted the brave action of the students’ determination to break the barriers that divided black and white Australia. Meticulously researched, the author has provided a compelling work. Faith Bandler

This book is a revealing window into the courage, humanity and commitment of the participants. It again focuses the nation on the continuing need for organised political action to secure social justice and a just reconciliation. Robert Tickner, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs 1990–96

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For my mother Barbara Lindsay Curthoys 1924–2000

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ANN CURTHOYS

FREEDOM RIDE a freedom rider remembers

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First published in 2002 Copyright © Ann Curthoys 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the photographs produced in this book. In the event where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly. Aboriginal readers are warned that this book contains the names and images of some Aboriginal people who have since died. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Curthoys, Ann. Freedom ride : a freedom rider remembers. ISBN 1 86448 922 7. 1. Curthoys, Ann, – Journeys. 2. Australia – History. I. Title. 994 Set in 10.5 pt Schneidler by Midland Typesetters Pty Ltd Maryborough, Victoria Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents List of illustrations

vi

Dramatis personae

x

Names Acknowledgements

xvi xviii

1.

Let’s have a Freedom Ride

2.

Getting ready

35

3.

On the way to Walgett

62

4.

High noon at Walgett

83

5.

Moree: Australia’s Little Rock?

114

6.

Clash at Moree

143

7.

‘Stirring up trouble’: The coastal towns

171

8.

Impact

210

9.

More Freedom Rides

240

Memory and meaning

274

10.

1

Epilogue: Whatever happened to . . .?

294

Select bibliography

313

A note on sources

317

Index

320

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Illustrations Page 6.

Page 7. Page 18. Page 26.

Page 49. Page 57. Page 95. Page 98. Page 99.

Page 111.

vi

Burning an imitation KKK cross at a student demonstration for US civil rights, Sydney, 6 May 1964 (Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1964). See note on page ix. A female student is arrested at a civil rights demonstration (Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1964). See note on page ix. Gary Williams and Charles Perkins on their first day as students at the University of Sydney, March 1963. Students demonstrate for Aboriginal rights during National Aborigines Week at Hyde Park and Parliament House, Sydney, 7 July 1964. Photographer: Michael Elton. John Powles, Charles Perkins, Pat Healy and Jim Spigelman plan the Freedom Ride (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 2000). Publicity notice for folk concert to raise money for the Freedom Ride, 21 January 1965. Machteld Hali draws the placard: ‘Good enough for Tobruk. Why not Walgett?’ Helen Gray, Machteld Hali, Norm McKay and Ann Curthoys hold banners outside Walgett RSL, 15 February 1965. Students demonstrate outside the Walgett RSL holding their banner, ‘Student Action for Aborigines’ and RSL worker offers drinks to the students (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 1965). ‘Nonsense! Of course you want a drink’. Cartoon by Molnar, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 1965. See note on page ix.

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Illustrations

vii

Page 129. Bob Brown, Freedom Ride supporter, standing outside his electrical goods store, Moree. Page 132. Ann Curthoys and Louise Higham interview Aboriginal residents at the Aborigines Welfare Board Station, Moree, 17 February 1965. Page 135. The students demonstrate outside the council chambers in Balo Street, Moree (Tribune, 24 February 1965). Page 138. Charles Perkins waits with children to enter the swimming pool, Moree, 17 February 1965 (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1965). See note on page ix. Page 138. Charles Perkins with children in the Moree pool on Wednesday 17 February 1965 (Australian, 19 February 1965). Page 145. The bus stands outside the Hotel Boggabilla, where students rested before interviewing people at the Aboriginal Station. Page 152. Students greet Charles Perkins at Inverell airport. Page 154. Charles waits with children outside the Moree pool, 20 February 1965 (Daily Mirror, 22 February 1965). Page 156. Police attempt to keep the crowd away from the students at the Moree pool. Page 156. Charles Perkins is led away from the pool. (Daily Mirror, 22 February 1965). Page 157. Bob Gallagher is hit on the head with an egg at Moree (Australian, 22 February 1965). Page 163. The Daily Mirror’s full-page coverage of the demonstration at Moree pool, 22 February 1965. Page 166. Cartoonist Martin Sharp makes a harsh comment on the citizens of Moree (Australian, 22 February 1965). Page 168. ‘It’s not too cold for me—it’s too hot.’ Cartoon by Eyre Jnr, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 February 1965, satirising the Chief Secretary’s lack of response to the Freedom Ride. See note on page ix. Page 173. Charles Perkins, Gerry Mason, John Powles and Brian Aarons wait in Grafton for the replacement bus driver to arrive, Monday 22 February 1965 (Daily Examiner, 23 February 1965). Page 178. The students hold a watermelon eating competition while waiting in Grafton. See note on page ix. Page 182. Clarrie Combo, chairman of directors of the Aboriginal Cooperative at Cabbage Tree Island, discusses problems with the sugar

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Page 187. Page 188.

Page 189. Page 192. Page 202.

Page 203.

Page 206. Page 207.

Page 208.

Page 225. Page 234. Page 242. Page 243. Page 246. Page 251.

Page 252. Page 255.

cane crop with Mr H. Jeffery, manager of the Cabbage Tree Island Reserve, Tuesday 23 February (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1965). See note on page ix. Bruce Petty cartoon of the bus leaving Moree (Australian, 25 February 1965). George Bracken, Aboriginal former lightweight boxing champion, criticises the Freedom Ride (Daily Mirror, 22 February 1965). The students arrive in Bowraville. Brian Aarons and Gary Williams drink together in Bowraville Hotel (Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Feb 1965). See note on page ix. Charles Perkins is barred from taking a child into the McElhone olympic swimming pool, Kempsey (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 1965). Students outside Kempsey swimming pool hold placards protesting against exclusion of Aboriginal people from the pool (Macleay Argus, 27 February 1965). Wendy Golding’s photo of the students posed outside the bus. ‘He does not drink, hates crowded pools, likes to sit in front at the pictures. How can we desegregate him?’ Cartoon by Molnar (Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 1965). See note on page ix. Ted Noffs welcomes back Charles Perkins at the University of Sydney on 26 February 1965. The Freedom Ride is over (Sydney Morning Herald, 27 February 1965). See note on page ix. The Student Action for Aborigines stall during the University of Sydney Orientation Week. See note on page ix. Students hold 100-hour vigil outside the NSW Liberal Party and Labor Party headquarters. Photographer: Bruce Adams. Members of SAFA visit Walgett in May and August 1965. Harry Hall’s place and members of Harry Hall’s family with two SAFA students, Walgett, 1965. The Luxury Theatre, Walgett, 1965. Marie Peters, Pattie Hall and Lorna Hall, participants in the demonstration to desegregate the Walgett Luxury Theatre on 7 August 1965. Harry Hall, Pattie Hall and Lorna Hall (Tribune, 18 August 1965). Ted Fields buys his ticket to the dress circle at the Luxury

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Illustrations

ix

Theatre, Walgett, Saturday 14 August 1965 (Tribune, 18 August 1965). Page 257. Walgett community members and students pose together for a group photo in August 1965. Page 265. A young Aboriginal man addresses a meeting near the Aboriginal reserve, Bowraville, 12 March 1966, while police watch. Page 267. Sue Johnston burns copies of the Aborigines Protection Act outside Parliament House, 13 July 1966 (Honi Soit, 20 July 1966). Note: Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the photographs and illustrations produced on pages 6, 7, 111, 138, 156, 168, 178, 182, 192, 207, 208 and 225. As these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

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Dramatis personae The students Note: Ages are sometimes approximate, and both age and enrolment in university courses are for February 1965. Charles Perkins, 29, third-year Arts, Arrernte man, born in Alice Springs, former soccer player, Aboriginal activist Gary Williams, 19, third-year Arts, Gumbaynggir man from Nambucca Heads Aidan Foy, 19, third-year Medicine, member of the ALP Club Alan Outhred, 19, third-year Science, member of the Labour Club Alex Mills, 25, third-year Theology, member of the Liberal Club Ann Curthoys, 19, third-year Arts, member of the Labour Club Barry Corr, 18, second-year Arts Beth Hansen, 19, third-year Arts, member of the Humanist Society Bob Gallagher, 19, third-year Engineering, member of the Labour Club Brian Aarons, 19, third-year Science, member of the Labour Club Chris Page, 19, third-year Medicine Colin Bradford, 19, third-year Science, member of the Labour Club Darce Cassidy, 22, part-time third-year Arts, also ABC radio producer x

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Dramatis personae

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David Pepper, 18, second-year Arts Derek Molloy, 19, third-year Arts Hall Greenland, 19, third-year Arts, member of the ALP Club Helen Gray, 19, second-year Arts Jim Spigelman, 19, third-year Arts, leader of the Fabian Society, breakaway group from the ALP Club John Butterworth, 20, third-year Science John Gowdie, University of New England, son of Presbyterian minister from Dubbo John Powles, 22, fifth-year Medicine, founder of the Sydney University Humanist Society, involved in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Judith Rich, 20, third-year Arts Louise Higham, 18, second-year Medicine, member of the Labour Club. Machteld Hali, 18, second-year Arts, born in Holland, raised in Indonesia Norm Mackay, 19, third-year Science, member of the Labour Club Paddy Dawson, 19, third-year Arts, member of the ALP Club Pat Healy, 20, third-year Arts, member of the Labour Club Ray Leppik, 22, postgraduate Science Rick Collins, 19, third-year Arts Robyn Iredale, 20, fourth-year Arts, in Geography Honours Sue Johnston, 20, fourth-year Arts, in History Honours Sue Reeves, 19, third-year Arts, member of Abschol Warwick Richards, 19, third-year Arts, member of the Student Christian Movement Wendy Golding, 17, second-year Arts

Also on the bus Gerry Mason, an older Aboriginal friend of Charles Perkins from Gerard government reserve in South Australia Bill Pakenham, from Punchbowl, driver of the bus until Grafton Ernie Albrecht, from Lugarno, driver of the bus from Grafton onwards

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Students on the follow-up trips Sue-Ann Loftus Owen Westcott, 18, second-year Arts Christine Jones

Aboriginal rights organisations and leaders AAF Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, a mixed-race organisation for Aboriginal rights founded by Pearl Gibbs and Faith Bandler in 1956. APA Aborigines Progressive Association, a largely Aboriginal organisation for Aboriginal rights, founded in January 1964, with Bert Groves, formerly president of the AAF, as president. The name had also been used by an earlier organisation in the 1930s. The Foundation The Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, founded in 1964 to provide support for Sydney’s growing Aboriginal population. SAFA Student Action for Aborigines. Formed in 1964 at the University of Sydney to organise the Freedom Ride. Lasted until 1967. Abschol Organisation under the leadership of NUAUS, founded to raise funds for scholarships for Aboriginal university students; from 1965, supported political campaigns such as the Referendum. FCAA Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, founded in 1958. Changed its name in April 1964 to FCAATSI—Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Aboriginal leaders based in Sydney Bert Groves, an Aboriginal man from the northwest of New South Wales, president of the AAF 1957–58, and of the APA 1964–? Charles (Chicka) Dixon, active in the APA and the Foundation Ray Peckham, Aboriginal man from northwestern New South Wales, now active in APA and the Waterside Workers’ Federation

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Dramatis personae

xiii

Non-Aboriginal activists Faith Bandler, founder and secretary of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship Allan Duncan, lecturer in Aboriginal adult education, member of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and chairman of the Foundation’s Education Committee Jack Horner, secretary of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship

At the University of Sydney Michael Kirby, 25, Law, president of the SRC, student representative on the University Senate Ken Buckley, senior lecturer in Economic History, secretary of the Council for Civil Liberties Peter Westerway, executive producer of the investigative Channel 7 television program Seven Days, occasional lecturer in Government Tom Roper, 19, third-year Arts, member of SAFA, later director of Abschol David Ellyard, 19, Science, member of SAFA Eric Doldissen, 20, treasurer of SAFA

At the University of New South Wales Bill Ford, lecturer in the School of Economics, former Fulbright scholar in the United States, observer of Freedom Rides in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961

Walgett people Aboriginal Harry Hall, Gamilaraay, ex-shearer, worker at Walgett garage, leader of Aboriginal people in Walgett George Rose, Yuwaaliyaay, from Brewarrina, sergeant in army during World War II, shearer and member of the AWU, settled in Walgett in 1949, leading figure in Walgett APA Gladys Lake, leading figure in Walgett APA

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Ted Fields, leading figure in Walgett APA Pat Walford, woman in her twenties, outspoken resident Marie Peters, 18, resident Pattie Hall, daughter of Harry Hall Lorna Hall, niece of Harry Hall

Non-Aboriginal Alex Trevallion, Town Clerk Athol White, manager, Oasis Hotel-Motel Tom Hogan, manager, Walgett RSL Club James Conomos, owner, Luxury Theatre

Moree people Aboriginal Lyall Munro Snr, shearer and local Aboriginal leader Lyall Munro Jnr, 14, living on Mehi mission Zona Craigie, 8, resident of Thompson’s Row

Non-Aboriginal Alf Sadlier, Mayor in 1955 when resolution banning Aborigines from the local pool was passed William Tait, Deputy Mayor in 1955 Bill Lloyd, Mayor in 1965 Bob Brown, 29, owner/manager of an electrical business

Aboriginal people in other towns Ann Holten, 16, high school student, Bowraville Pastor Frank Roberts Jnr, Bundjalung leader, Lismore

The clergy Ted Noffs, Methodist pastor supportive of Aboriginal people, associate minister of the Central Methodist Mission in Sydney, co-founder of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs

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Dramatis personae

xv

Reverend Peter Dowe, the vicar at St Peter’s Church of England in Walgett Ted Ryan, Methodist minister, Moree

The journalists Bruce Maxwell, cadet reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, travelled with the students Gerald Stone, migrated from the United States to Australia in 1962, reporter for the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, travelled with the students from Moree onwards Judith Rich, reporter for the Daily Telegraph from Moree onwards, also a student at the University of Sydney Peter Martin, reporter for Seven Days, Channel 7

Politicians and bureaucrats A.G. Kingsmill, chair of the Aborigines Welfare Board H.J. Green, Superintendent of the Aborigines Welfare Board Gus Kelly, Chief Secretary, responsible for Aboriginal welfare until 1 May 1965 Jack Renshaw, Premier of New South Wales until 1 May 1965, member for Castlereagh, the electorate in which Walgett was situated Eric Willis, Chief Secretary of New South Wales, 13 May 1965 to 19 June 1972 Bill Rigby, Labor MLA for Hurstville, one-time member of the AAF, one of the few supporters of Aboriginal rights in the New South Wales Parliament

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Names Aboriginal people a general term for the Indigenous people of Australia. The term ‘Aborigines’ was most commonly used in the 1960s, but is now less preferred. Indigenous the indigenous people of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Increasingly the preferred term by those whom it designates. Murris the term derived from local languages, meaning ‘our people’ or ‘us’, for Aboriginal people in southern Queensland and the central section of northern New South Wales. Kooris the equivalent term for Indigenous people in southern and eastern New South Wales. Kamilaraay a large language group in northern New South Wales; Walgett, Moree and Boggabilla lie in Kamilaraay country. Wiradjuri a large language group in western and southern New South Wales; Wellington is in Wiradjuri country. Bundjalung a large language group in far northeastern New South Wales; Lismore is in Bundjalung country. Gumbaynggirr the people of the east coast region near present-day Bowraville. Dhan-gadi, Ngaku and Ngumbar the people of the Macleay Valley, at the mouth of which lies Kempsey.

xvi

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Acknowledgments From the moment I started writing a diary as a student on the Freedom Ride in February 1965, there was a possibility I might write this book. I did not, however, form a definite intention to write it until some time in 1988, the year in which Indigenous political protest so effectively deflected the Bicentennial celebrations towards a more reflective reconsideration of the meaning of Australian history. Perhaps I was moved to write it by Peter Read, who interviewed me in 1987 about the Freedom Ride for a chapter in his biography of Charles Perkins. In 1989 I applied for funding for the research from the Australian Research Council, stating in my application that the Freedom Ride was a ‘key event’ in the history of the relations between Aboriginal and other Australians. My book, I said, would assist the development of ‘a clearer understanding of the historical processes through which a strong Aboriginal political movement emerged in the 1960s’. I saw the Freedom Ride then—and still do—as ‘a jumpingoff point’ for investigating some large themes in the history of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Australia. When the grant was awarded, I began serious work on the project in 1990, with the wonderful Kathy Moffatt as my research assistant. My original plan was to write the book during study leave in 1991. In April that year, John Docker and I retraced the itinerary of the Freedom Ride, interviewing many people and looking at the places that had witnessed these significant events two-and-a-half decades earlier. We travelled through the towns of Orange, Wellington, Dubbo, Gulargambone, xviii

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Acknowledgments

xix

Walgett, Moree, Lismore, Bowraville and Kempsey, and interviewed people, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who had been involved. My having been a Freedom Rider led many Aboriginal people to speak to me who may not have done so otherwise, though most of those interviewed did not wish to speak into a tape-recorder. So I took extensive notes while we talked and then typed up my diary each evening. Later that year I wrote my first academic paper on the Freedom Ride project, and delivered it at the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, and at the History Workshop conference in Oxford. What I learnt during 1991 was that the project had still a long way to go. I seemed to be endlessly diverted by the many and diverse activities of a busy senior academic in the 1990s—undergraduate teaching, graduate supervision, academic administration, consultancies, conferences, prize and grant committees, endless selection committees, committees of review, advisory committees, indeed academic committees of every imaginable kind. And there were still many intellectual lessons to learn. I found that I had to circle around my material before I could get directly to it. Through the 1990s I had a burst of writing activity on a wide range of issues, including national identity, the anti-war movement, the history of journalism, historical representation, second-wave feminism, Australian historiography, and colonialism and gender. But delaying me most of all was the realisation that I had still a great deal of research and thinking to do. I especially needed to interview the Freedom Riders themselves. After interviewing one of them, Beth Hansen, during my ‘retracing tour’ in 1991, I realised that I could not be the interviewer of the rest. Beth was, naturally, too aware that I had been there too, finding it difficult to tell me about things she thought I would already know, and feeling wrong-footed if I asked about details of events that I remembered or knew about and she didn’t. With the aid of a grant from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1993, I hired Inara Walden to do the oral history interviews for me. As a much younger person—Inara had not been born at the time of the Freedom Ride, to the amusement of many of her interviewees—I correctly judged that the Freedom Riders would feel bound to explain things to her that they would find odd telling me. In the interviews, we concentrated on asking about the Freedom Riders’ strongest impressions, and eliciting a lot more about who they were, their background, how they got involved, and what they had been doing since. I did a great deal of other research as well,

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especially at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies library; I also placed a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald (which yielded few, but valuable, replies), and one way and another collected vast quantities of material. Early in 1995 I moved from UTS in Sydney to the Australian National University in Canberra. This meant more academic administration and new, very demanding, teaching commitments, so my work on this book was seriously interrupted for several years. In the long run, however, the change proved to be valuable, bringing me into intellectual contact with a new group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who were also engaged in rethinking Australian history. I taught units on Australian Aboriginal history for the first time, working with Indigenous teachers where I could, and forcing myself to gain a wider understanding of the history to which I was attempting to contribute, submitting my ideas to the unblinking stare and close scrutiny only undergraduates can give. With additional small ARC grants, I was able to hire Lani Russell and Ann Genovese to help with the final phases of research, in the National Library, the Australian Archives, the Mitchell Library and the New South Wales State Records Office. I gave papers on the progress of my research to the ‘Gender and National Identity’ symposium organised by the journal Gender and History at the Rockefeller Centre at Bellagio, Italy, and the conference ‘Suffrage and Beyond’ in Wellington, New Zealand. Closer to home, I spoke to the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Australian Historical Association conference in Perth in 1994, presented a seminar on Indigenous Citizenship under the auspices of the Reshaping Australian Institutions Project at ANU in 1996, spoke to the Australian Oral History Association conference in Alice Springs in 1997, and presented papers to the History Division seminar at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU in 1997 and 2001 and at Macquarie University in 1998 and 2001. After such a long gestation, I have many people to thank. I sincerely thank the funding bodies that supported me—the Australian Research Council, the University of Technology, Sydney and the Australian National University. I especially thank the four research assistants who worked on this project at various times—Kathy Moffatt, Inara Walden, Ann Genovese and Lani Russell. All were brilliant researchers and wonderful to work with. Many of the Freedom Riders helped by consenting to interview, and by donating to me documentary material;

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Acknowledgments

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particular thanks must go to Aidan Foy, Barry Corr, Bob Gallagher, Brian Aarons, Charles Perkins, Darce Cassidy, Jim Spigelman, Louise Higham, Patricia Healy, Warwick Richards and Wendy Watson-Ekstein. Indeed, I thank all those—Freedom Riders and others—listed in the note on sources, who gave Inara or me their time in interviews. I also thank Frances Peters-Little for reading and correcting the Walgett chapters, and drawing for me an illuminating if eccentric map of the town. Others who over the years lent me material, passed on ideas and contacts, or discussed my ideas with me, and whom I wish to thank, include Andrew Markus, Barry Higman, Bert Castellari, Carol Johnson, Catherine Hall, David McKnight, Fiona Paisley, Georgine Clarsens, Gordon Briscoe, Heather Goodall, Jack Horner, John Murphy, Judith Keene, Kate Evans, Ken Buckley, Lyndall Ryan, Marilyn Lake, Nic Peterson, Paula Hamilton, Peter Read, Susan Magarey, Terry Fox, Tim Rowse, Tom Griffiths and Vicki Grieves. Special thanks to Brian Aarons and Pat Healy for reading the whole manuscript, correcting errors and discussing ideas, and also to Bain Attwood for reading and commenting on the first half of the book. Above all I thank the people in the Freedom Ride towns who gave so unstintingly of their time when I visited them in 1991, especially Harry Hall, Phillip Hall, George Rose and Gladys Lake in Walgett; Lyall Munro Snr in Moree; Tess and Vic Brill in Lismore; Bob Perry in Bowraville; and Bob Brown (formerly of Moree) in Port Macquarie. I have tried out my ideas for this project a number of times, and wish to thank the organisers and audiences at those events. I also thank my students in my Australian Aboriginal history classes at ANU and my Writing History classes at UTS and ANU, and the Grade 6 class at Lyneham Primary School (1998) whose interest and challenging questions spurred me on. I wish to thank my publisher John Iremonger, for giving me that extra push when it started to seem as if this project would never be finished, and for supporting this book so wholeheartedly, even through his own serious illness. Warm thanks are also due to my production editor at Allen & Unwin, Alexandra Nahlous, for her efficiency and support. ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, by Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal tribe from My People, third edition, The Jacaranda Press, 1990, is reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Australia. I thank Bruce Petty, Martin Sharp, Gary Williams, Darce Cassidy,

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Wendy Watson-Ekstein, the Search Foundation, the State Library of New South Wales, the Daily Examiner, the Macleay Argus, Honi Soit, the Fairfax Photo Library and News Limited for permission to reproduce cartoons and photographs. Finally, a special thank you to my late mother, Barbara Curthoys, who first interested me in Aboriginal rights and gave me valuable documentary material. I also thank my son, Ned Curthoys, and father, Geoff Curthoys, for being so interested and reading the entire manuscript and my husband, John Docker, for making detailed comments on the entire manuscript and whose continuing intellectual and personal support is incalculable.

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1

Chapter

‘Let’s have a Freedom Ride’

Y

ou can always start earlier in the writing of history, but I begin this story with a student demonstration for civil rights in the centre of Sydney on 6 May 1964. Held just nine months before the Freedom Riders set out on their remarkable journey from the University of Sydney’s graceful neo-Oxfordian quadrangle to the race-inflected towns of northern New South Wales, this demonstration—surprisingly, perhaps—supported the civil rights not of Indigenous Australians, but of African Americans. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. In their concern for racism overseas, the students’ actions were not unusual. Eminent anthropologist Bill Stanner had written a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald only four days earlier referring to that ‘mountainous fact of Australian mentality: that we are angered only by very distant racial wrongs’. Racial inequality was often understood more easily elsewhere than at home—at least in the imagination. Opposition to South African apartheid, for example, was growing rapidly at this time. After some large campus meetings, and a demonstration of thousands of students in Martin Place in Sydney in reaction to the shootings in Sharpeville in March 1960, there had been a lull in activity, though the Students Representative Council at the University of Sydney held remembrances of the event each year. Unlike British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who saw the Sharpeville shootings as ‘the turning point in the history of race relations’, and who recognised a ‘wind of 1


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change’ blowing through Africa, Prime Minister Menzies refused to protest officially against apartheid to the South African government. His refusal was taken to indicate tacit support and was roundly condemned by the Labor opposition. An anti-apartheid movement slowly developed which sought to pressure the Australian government into a stronger stand. Leading white anti-apartheid campaigner John Brink arrived from Pretoria in 1961, and became the focus of anti-apartheid activity in Sydney. In 1963, students at Melbourne and Monash Universities protested against apartheid in front of the South African stand at the International Trade Fair in Melbourne, while Queensland university students demonstrated against the gaoling without trial of black activists in South Africa. The cricket tour by the South Africans in the southern summer of 1963–64 was greeted by demonstrations of students, trade unionists and others at airports and cricket grounds during Test matches, though these were tiny compared with the massive demonstrations that greeted the South African (Springbok) footballers eight years later. As knowledge of apartheid grew, students began to campaign in earnest. The trial of Nelson Mandela and others in Pretoria was sympathetically covered in student newspapers. Their national body, the National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS), agreed in February 1964 to institute an anti-apartheid campaign. It would seek cooperation with churches and trade unions to pressure the federal government into a stronger stand against South Africa in the United Nations, and to implement a boycott of South African goods. The May demonstration that I’ve taken as the beginning of my story was, however, advocating racial equality not in South Africa but in the United States. Australian interest in and knowledge of US civil rights had been greatly increased a year earlier by reports of police violence against thousands of African Americans conducting peaceful demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. On 12 April 1963, Martin Luther King and Reverend Ralph Abernathy had been gaoled for marching in Birmingham in support of civil rights. Four days later, King wrote his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, a profound statement on the goals and tactics of the civil rights movement; it was to become something of a manifesto for the Australian Freedom Ride less than two years later. Once King was released, the civil rights campaign was stepped up, and now involved teenagers and even younger children on a large scale. In response, Birmingham’s Public Safety Commissioner, T. Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor—a white


‘ L e t ’s h a v e a F r e e d o m R i d e ’

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supremacist who routinely used physical force against civil rights activists—attempted to stop the marches on 3 May using police dogs and fire hoses at high pressure. As historian Robert Weisbrot tells it: Using fire hoses at a pressure set to take off tree bark, they blasted adults and children, the jet streams ripping their clothes and leaving them bloodied on the ground. Police swung nightsticks into skulls indiscriminately, and attack dogs set loose among the panicked crowd sank their fangs into three fleeing children. In America, graphic images had not accompanied earlier protests; now newspapers carried photographs of huge, snarling dogs lunging at black women and children. The images of dogs biting peaceful protesters, and of fire hoses, batons and fists being used against people seeking equal treatment in schools, restaurants, theatres and other public places shocked many and led to an outpouring of support for the civil rights movement. The Australian urban press, especially the afternoon and Sunday tabloids, carried similar images. Brian Aarons, who was to become one of the Australian Freedom Riders, remembered the images and their importance many years later: I can remember that in the US, when the Civil Rights Movement was being built up, led by Martin Luther King, there was a particular incident . . . where a police chief called Bull Connor had loosed the police dogs onto civil rights demonstrators and there were dramatic photographs on the front page of the Sunday papers . . . And there was a policeman with a dog—an Alsatian or German Shepherd—on a leash and the dog is biting or going for a black demonstrator. Brian had a good memory. The Sun, a Sydney afternoon tabloid, carried on its front page on 4 May a graphic photo of a dog, held on a leash by a policeman, biting a young black activist. It accompanied a story headed ‘Wild Dogs Turned on Negroes. Many children among victims’. Other papers, like the Sun-Herald on 5 May, carried similar images and stories. The Daily Mirror sent a journalist to the United States specifically to cover the riots and their aftermath. ‘What an affront to human dignity,’ it editorialised, ‘that the Negro demonstrations should be met with such brutalities as turning fierce Alsatian dogs on children, knocking men,


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women and children off their feet with water from fire hoses, and charging demonstrators with batons.’ Brian Aarons and some others in the Eureka Youth League bought about 100 copies of the Sun-Herald, and used the front page as a poster to call a protest meeting. The Birmingham events, involving over a hundred thousand protesters and nearly fifteen thousand arrests, finally convinced the US President, John Kennedy, that the federal administration needed to intervene. He introduced a Civil Rights Bill to make it illegal to discriminate against black people in employment and places of public accommodation, enabling the US federal government to compel local school districts to desegregate, and affirming the right to vote in national elections. Soon afterwards, the massive March on Washington, on 28 August 1963, attracted up to a quarter of a million people, providing the occasion for King’s moving ‘I have a Dream’ speech, followed by the memorable singing together of the movement’s anthem, ‘We Shall Overcome’. The civil rights movement was clearly gaining strength. Australians knew about the growing American movement not only from extensive press coverage, but also from television. Two years earlier, Four Corners had pioneered a new style of documentary on Australian television, and the ABC carried reports from the BBC as well. Robert Raymond, who had just arrived at Channel 9 from the ABC’s Four Corners, produced as one of his first programs for Nine ‘The Negro Revolution’, to coincide with the March on Washington. According to his memoirs, Out of the Box, he assembled from the United States Information Service library ‘a visual history of black America, going back to slavery and the Civil War’. It used interviews with notable black and white Americans and the Bob Dylan song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, sung by a new folk group, Peter, Paul and Mary, for its musical theme. The program, Raymond accurately recalled, went to air in prime time (9.35 p.m.), only a few hours after the March on Washington took place. After President Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, his replacement, President Lyndon Johnson—to the surprise of many—took up the cause and sought to push the Bill through Congress. It was always going to be tough getting it through the race-conservative Senate. For several months, Southern Senators tried to defeat the Bill by filibuster. It needed a two-thirds majority to close the debate; once the Bill was put, it would require only a simple majority. There was to be a crucial vote on procedure on 6 May.



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May 6 happened also to be Commem Day at the University of Sydney, an annual university holiday commemorating the founding of the university in 1850, and marked since 1896 by a procession through city streets and collection of money for good causes. That year the good cause was the ‘South African Committee for Higher Education’, an expression of growing student anti-apartheid sentiment. Commem Day was also traditionally a time for student pranks. In 1963, for example, a group of students had ‘invaded’ one of Sydney Harbour ’s islands, Pinchgut, so named for the hungry convicts who had been kept in isolation there over a century earlier. One of them, Darce Cassidy, was dressed as Fidel Castro. Soon to become one of the Freedom Riders, Darce was from a wealthy North Shore background, and by this time was a member of the leftleaning Sydney University ALP (Australian Labor Party) Club. Now, in 1964, Darce and the others in the ALP Club decided Commem Day provided an excellent opportunity for a more serious action: a student demonstration outside the US Consulate in support of American civil rights. A leaflet was distributed in the morning, urging students to join the demonstration that afternoon. It began: ‘Would you like to be jabbed by an electric cattle prod? To be set upon by an Alsatian police dog?’ and went on to ask whether its readers would like to be ‘clubbed, imprisoned, lynched, castrated or burnt? You wouldn’t? Then you’re lucky you’re not black. These are the methods used by the white supremacists in the American Deep South.’ Today, 6 May, the leaflet went on, was the last day the Civil Rights Bill could be passed. All over the United States, ‘people are demonstrating in support of the Bill, and we should support them’. The ALP Club’s plan proved successful. The usual Commem Day procession took place without incident in the late morning, on a mild autumn day, with student floats passing through the city and students collecting about £2000 for the South African Committee for Higher Education. But this was to prove no typical Commem Day; a new spirit of rebellion and political awareness was in the air. At around 1.30 p.m., a large crowd (the press estimated it at 2000) gathered outside the US Consulate. Some were robed as Ku Klux Klansmen and set fire to a 10-foot (3-metre) wooden cross they had erected in the centre of the roadway. Darce Cassidy had brought the cross: ‘I had the cross (an old wooden clothes line wrapped in cloth and soaked in petrol) in the back of my car. We took it to Wynyard Street, sat it upright in a garbage can weighed down with bricks, and set it alight.’ About 50 students sat down on


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Image rights unavailable

Students set alight a mock Ku Klux Klan cross outside the US Consulate in Wynyard, Sydney, to symbolise white racist opposition to the Civil Rights Bill before the US Congress. Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1964.

the roadway in a peaceful protest, while the rest watched. I was there, a second-year student, one of the watchers—a little apprehensive, as I remember. I would have preferred us not to challenge the police in this way. The students chanted: ‘We want the Consul.’ Police began arresting those sitting down, while other students tried to free them. The tussle developed, as the Daily Telegraph put it the next day, ‘into an all-in brawl’ between police and students. Twice police called for reinforcements, and with vastly increased numbers order was restored by about 2.30 p.m. Around 50 students and a Channel 7 cameraman, Richard McNicoll, were arrested; later, those aged under 17 were allowed to go. Newspaper coverage tended to focus especially on the young women being manhandled by police. One of them was Arts student Pat Healy, later to be one of the Freedom Riders. When interviewed in 1994, she recalled that this had been a key moment in her involvement with leftwing student politics. Although she had come from a well-known political family, her grandfather being Jim Healy, the former communist leader of the powerful Waterside Workers’ Federation, until this moment she had not been politically inclined. She recalled:



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I just thought it was a good idea. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been involved politically I guess my ideas had been very much formed by my family. And I’d gone along and unfortunately I got arrested . . . I just happened to be on the edge when the police were sort of pushing things through and I think I turned around and said to a big burly copper ‘Don’t push me’, being a very sort of brash type. And he sort of grabbed me and I struggled and subsequently got charged with assaulting said policeman which was really pretty ridiculous because at that stage I was about a size 8 in clothes, I was very very small, and this copper was about 6 ft tall [2 metres] and made about three of me. The next day, hundreds of students gathered at Central Court to hear the charges. Twenty-five students were formally charged, and all but one pleaded not guilty to their various charges of offensive behaviour, resisting arrest, using insulting words and obstructing police. Among them was another student who was later to join the Freedom Ride: John Powles, a fourth-year medical student. John was already a seasoned political activist, having helped establish the Humanist Society on campus, become a member of the Council of the New South Wales Humanist Society, and been involved in the university anti-nuclear movement. At the court, the ALP Club distributed a leaflet in support of the arrested students, saying ‘it is tragic that Australian students seeking to support the civil rights of others should have their own civil rights brutally abused’. Image rights unavailable The leaflet called on the unions to demand that the charges be withdrawn. The university’s Students Representative Council swung into action. Its president, Michael Kirby, also the student representative on the University Senate and later to become a High Court judge, called a A female student is arrested. meeting of all those arrested and Daily Telegraph, 7 May 1964.


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anyone who had witnessed or photographed the arrests to assist with legal representation. Ken Buckley, a senior lecturer in Economic History at the University of Sydney, and secretary of the recently formed Council for Civil Liberties, stressed the right of students to protest and not be pushed around by police. A few days later, Richard Walsh, better known for his editing of the controversial Oz Magazine at this time, edited a special supplement of the University of Sydney student newspaper Honi Soit on the arrests and the subsequent campaign in the students’ defence. The defence campaign was highly successful: of those whose charges were proceeded with, ten were acquitted outright, five had the offence proved but the charge dismissed under the First Offenders’ section of the Crimes Act, and just six were fined, of whom at least two had their appeals upheld. Meanwhile, in the United States itself, students were pleased to learn, the Senate voted on 10 June to close off the Southern filibuster, thus making way for the passing of the Bill a week later and its presidential signature on 2 July. The Commem Day protest raised not only the issue of the rights of protesters, but also some other very disturbing questions. Why, many people began to ask, were university students so prepared to demonstrate for civil rights in the United States, when they should be campaigning against racism in Australia itself? Brian Aarons remembers that ‘the point was made, both in private conversations I recall and also publicly, that all this was done for the rights of black people in America but nothing had been done about . . . you know, what were we doing about Aboriginal rights’. This was especially true of overseas newspaper comment, which was directed both at the notorious ‘White Australia’ immigration policy and the question of Aboriginal rights. The Ceylon Observer carried a commentary on 10 June headed ‘Strange Reactions’, which thought the students’ demonstration for US civil rights ‘must surely have brought guffaws and giggles from any who gave these reports a second glance’. It continued: For this is the one country into which no human being is permitted if the pigment of his skin has acquired even the slightest shade of colour—be it brown, yellow or black. We ‘coloured’ folk in Ceylon can even go to the U.S. and make it our home and be discriminated against, if we so choose. But Australia? Very definitely NO . . . These demonstrators . . . would have done well to look around their own



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homeland and probe the complete LACK of coloured neighbours. If these demonstrators cared to look a little further and deeper, they would have come across as nauseating a form of social hypocrisy in their own backyards as that they were demonstrating against. I refer to the treatment of the Australian Aborigines. There was also commentary in the United States itself. The demonstration had been covered in the American press, the New York Times reporting on it on 7 May under the heading ‘Sydney Students Riot Against US: Battle Police at Consulate in Protest on Segregation’. The American Life magazine commented: ‘Students in Sydney have just rioted against racial prejudice—in the US! Conveniently overlooking the fact that Australia herself possesses some of the most stringent racial exclusion laws in the world.’ Honi Soit reprinted the Life comment, sent to it with a letter from Charlie Pyatt III, an African American in San Francisco. His letter, also published in Honi Soit, first thanked the students for their support: ‘News of your sympathy demonstration reaching our shores caused America to look with silent embarrassment (including Negroes)’, then mentioned the Life magazine comment, and went on to ask: ‘If you cannot deny this, and if your concern was sincere, profound and genuine, I ask you most humbly, most appreciatively, can you find the sympathy in your hearts and consciences to conduct PEACEFUL demonstrations against these laws in your own country?’ Within Australia, many people also commented that the students should have been protesting for the rights of Aboriginal people. One letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 11 May, from Mrs R. Schodde, was particularly telling. After noting that students had also held demonstrations against the visiting South African cricketers when they were on tour, she wrote: The motives behind these demonstrations may be admirable, but in the midst of their righteous indignation these students seem to have completely forgotten the plight of the Australian aboriginal. It is a relatively simple thing to join a crowd shouting slogans condemning discrimination in other countries and deluding themselves that they are championing the cause of coloured people. It is quite another thing to help our underprivileged aborigines in a constructive way . . . How many of Tuesday’s demonstrators have ever mixed with an aboriginal


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socially? How many would invite an aboriginal to their homes? Or how many of those students would contemplate marrying an Australian of coloured blood? Only when all Australians stop treating the aboriginal as a second-class citizen and accept him into the white society without reservation can our student groups protest against racial discrimination in other countries without seeming hypocritical. Criticisms like these hit home. What, indeed, had the students been doing in support of the campaign for Aboriginal civil rights? For, though there was truth in the claim that white Australians were more likely to deplore racism abroad than at home, there was in fact an active Aboriginal rights campaign in existence. Politically diverse and multi-racial, it sought full citizenship for Aboriginal people, taking up a range of issues from around the country as they came to light, often in the less ‘settled’ regions of northern and western Australia. Key figures in these organisations were frequently Christians, anthropologists, or from the Left. Leading Christians in the Aboriginal movement included Charles Duguid, a Presbyterian minister in Adelaide known for his writing and activism on behalf of Aboriginal people, the Reverend Frank Engel, the secretary of Division of Mission of the Australian Council of Churches, and Barrie Pittock, a Quaker. Duguid’s book No Dying Race, published in 1964, became a key text for the growing Aboriginal movement. Both Engel and Pittock were becoming prominent advocates of Aboriginal land rights, influenced by travels and knowledge of the situation in the United States and New Zealand. Anthropologists like T.G.H. Strehlow, Donald Thompson and A.P. Elkin were also influential, in various ways given their very divergent politics. T.G.H. Strehlow’s book White and Dark Australians, his printed lecture ‘Assimilation Problems: The Aboriginal Viewpoint’, and Elkin’s books such as The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (1938) and Aborigines and Citizenship (1960) were all part of the reading of concerned citizens in these years. Also important were the voices of a growing number of Left-liberal intellectuals, including historians like Brian Fitzpatrick, who included a chapter, ‘Disinherited Australians’, in his The Australian Commonwealth (1956), and Ken Inglis, who wrote a book on the case of Max Stuart (an Aboriginal man unfairly tried for murder) in 1962. In January 1962, Aboriginal Affairs, an independent and voluntary association to stimulate thoughts on subjects concerned with Aboriginal



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welfare and advancement, was established in Melbourne. From April that year, it published a bi-monthly news-sheet, On Aboriginal Affairs, edited by Ian Spalding, which provided in-depth information and analysis on a regular basis. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was especially active on Aboriginal rights, its influence so great that it was beginning to cause concern in some circles. The Party had taken Aboriginal issues seriously since its inception in the early 1920s, and continued to do so through the succeeding decades. Before World War II, the communists had seen Aboriginal issues through the framework provided by the international communist body, the Comintern. This rested on a distinction between tribalised peoples, who were seen to have the rights of national minorities, and detribalised people, for whom equal citizenship rights were appropriate. This view was restated at its sixteenth congress in August 1951, under the heading ‘Safeguard the Native Races’. From 1954, however, influenced by a change in international communist policy, the CPA more or less abandoned its former distinction between tribal and detribalised peoples, and took up the Aboriginal cause with a new intensity. Communist policy now emphasised the exploitation of Aboriginal people as workers, and sought to establish the unity of all Aboriginal people in different parts of the country in a common struggle for full citizenship. Aboriginal matters were given high priority, with leader Sam Aarons calling for CPA members’ commitment in the Tribune, the party’s newspaper, on 19 January 1955. From then on, the communist press consistently gave a great deal of publicity to Aboriginal issues, publicising examples of prejudice, drawing attention to Aboriginal activism such as strikes and anti-eviction protests, and encouraging Aboriginal membership. The priority given to Aboriginal rights by the CPA flowed into the various organisations over which it had influence. One was the Union of Australian Women, a nationwide communist-led women’s organisation which from 1958 adopted and actively pursued the CPA interest in Aboriginal rights. It sought to include Aboriginal women in its own ranks, and had succeeded in doing so for some years, with prominent Aboriginal members including Pearl Gibbs and Dulcie Flower in Sydney, Gladys O’Shane in Townsville and Gladys Elphick in Adelaide, until it became clear that Aboriginal women preferred to form their own organisations. In unions with Communist Party leadership, support for Aboriginal rights


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stepped up from the mid-1950s, notably in the Waterside Workers’ Federation, which attracted a number of Aboriginal members, the Sheetmetal Workers Union, led by long-time pro-Aboriginal campaigner Tom Wright, and the two building workers’ unions, which also had some Aboriginal members. New organisations developed in the 1950s focusing specifically on Aboriginal rights—or, as it was more commonly put at the time, advancement. In New South Wales, Aboriginal activism had a long history of opposition to the surveillance of the Aborigines Welfare Board and its predecessors. The Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship was formed in 1956 by Pearl Gibbs and Faith Bandler, and had a mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal membership, many of its members being close to the Communist Party. One of its Aboriginal leaders, Bert Groves, left in 1958 and in January 1964 he was one of those who formed a new group, the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), a title reviving that of an earlier organisation of the late 1930s. Unlike the Fellowship, the APA’s constitution ensured the dominance of Aboriginal people in the organisation (unless married to an Aboriginal person, others could only join if nominated by an Aboriginal person and accepted by a majority of members at a general meeting). There were mixed-race organisations also in other states and territories, notably the Coolbaroo League in Western Australia, the Council for Aboriginal Rights in Victoria, the Aborigines Advancement League in South Australia, and the Northern Territory Council for Aboriginal Rights. These organisations frequently drew attention to the situation of Aboriginal people by pointing out how far Australian practice diverged from the principles enunciated in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights of 1948, which Australia had signed. A decade after the Declaration, Aboriginal rights remained extremely limited everywhere, with restrictions on freedom of movement, control of property and freedom of association with Europeans. Only if one had an ‘exemption certificate’ could equal rights be granted. In Queensland and Western Australia, there were government controls over marriage and Aboriginal people did not have the right to vote in elections. There were restrictions on the right to drink alcohol in all states except Victoria. Throughout the country, town councils and businesses practised various forms of exclusion of Aboriginal people from town amenities, and employment inequality was rife. Aboriginal people were moved on and off reserves



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without reference to their basic right to freedom of movement. More starkly, in the outback regions of the country, Aboriginal people were exploited—sometimes brutally. In most parts of the country, authorities removed Aboriginal children from their families, from a strange mixture of genocidal intent (by which I mean a desire to ensure that Aboriginal identity was extinguished) and welfarist concern for neglected children. In 1957, veteran campaigner Mary Bennett’s book, Human Rights for Australian Aborigines, drew attention to these practices, and to how different they were from the UN principles which Australia itself had supported. Yet international censure and opprobium did not matter a great deal to state governments, whose focus was far more local. Aboriginal rights activists had been arguing since the 1930s that there would only be substantial gains when the Commonwealth government, more susceptible than state governments to international opinion, took responsibility. Commonwealth governments, however, left Aboriginal affairs largely to the states, and responded to pressure to take action by arguing that their hands were tied by the Constitution. There were two relevant clauses. Section 51 provided that the Parliament had the power to make laws with respect to ‘the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State’, and section 127 excluded Aboriginal people from the census. When Jessie Street, well-known Australian feminist and supporter of human rights now living in London, returned to Australia in 1956–57 to investigate the situation for the British-based Anti-Slavery Society, she found governments citing the Constitution as the reason for Commonwealth inaction. She concluded that the Constitution must be changed to establish Commonwealth control, which she saw as essential for the framing of an appropriate national response to the UN Declaration, and to facilitate meeting Australia’s local and international obligations generally. Faith Bandler and others in the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship took up the idea, and a campaign for a Referendum for constitutional change began in earnest. Leaders of the state-based Aboriginal rights organisations around the country began to move for a national body to coordinate their campaign for constitutional change and for a new national government policy. The Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) was accordingly formed in February 1958, and campaigned energetically on a wide range of issues.


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Accompanying the growing campaign domestically was an increased level of criticism internationally, just as the Aboriginal rights campaigners hoped and Australian governments feared. Australia was deeply concerned by attacks by Soviet leader Krushchev in the United Nations on its Aboriginal record. The meeting of the UN General Assembly on 13 October 1960 is often remembered as the occasion on which Krushchev pounded his desk with his fists and brandished a shoe to emphasise his objections to the rulings of the UN president. Yet it was also the occasion when the Assembly supported Krushchev’s motion to debate a declaration of independence for colonial peoples. Accusing Australia of having exterminated her Aboriginal population, Krushchev said: ‘Everyone knows in what way the aboriginal population of Australia was exterminated.’ With racial discrimination becoming an embarrassment internationally, the Commonwealth was forced to take some action, despite its supposed lack of relevant powers. In fact, the Commonwealth government had been attempting to develop some common policies and approaches through meetings of Commonwealth and state Ministers of Aboriginal Affairs, with a landmark meeting in 1937, followed by another in 1951. These did not provide for the citizenship rights and freedoms that many activists in the 1930s had wanted, but they did progressively develop policies of inclusion and assimilation rather than exclusion and segregation. A Commonwealth Parliamentary Select Committee to Enquire into Aboriginal Voting Rights was established in 1961; one of its members, Kim Beazley Snr, was to be profoundly influenced by its deliberations and remained a strong parliamentary voice for Aboriginal rights thereafter. As a result of the Select Committee’s report presented on 19 October 1961, the Commonwealth government removed discriminatory features from its own legislation—for example, extending the franchise to Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory in 1962, a move followed by both Queensland and Western Australia. Through all this, there was concern about communist influence in the expanding Aboriginal movement. The growing emphasis in the movement on autonomy rather than assimilation was interpreted in a detailed ASIO report in 1962 as the result of communist influence, in line as it was with international communist policy for minorities. At a meeting of the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations in June 1963, the Soviet delegate confronted the Australian delegate with section 127 of the Constitution as evidence of discrimination against Aborigines. Yet



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unwelcome scrutiny was coming not only from the communist world. International pressure greatly intensified with the adoption on 20 November 1963 of the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It not only reaffirmed the principles contained in the UN Charter and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also affirmed the necessity of ‘speedily eliminating such discrimination, in any form, throughout the world and of adopting national and international measures to that end’. Henceforth, governments were not only urged by the United Nations to cease all practice of racial discrimination themselves, but they were also expected to work to eliminate it from their society altogether. Senior public servants serving on an InterDepartmental Committee on Racial Discrimination, formed in response to the changing UN situation, secretly agreed in March 1964 that ‘there was an urgent need to remove, as far as practicable, instances of racial discrimination in Australia in order to ensure that Australia’s international reputation and influence are not to be seriously endangered’. Equally troubling for the Australian government was increased pressure from the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The payment of lower wages to Aboriginal pastoral workers was directly in contravention of ILO Convention 107 on the employment of Indigenous people, passed in 1957. The FCAA took this issue very seriously, with one of its leaders, a white Communist Party member named Shirley Andrews, compiling for its 1962 annual conference a detailed report revealing the widespread payment of low wages, especially in the pastoral industry in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, and the restricted employment opportunities in Victoria and New South Wales. When the Australian delegation to an ILO conference in 1963 realised that the Aboriginal wages question might receive critical ILO scrutiny, the Australian Council of Trade Unions was galvanised into action, passing a resolution in favour of equal pay for Aboriginal pastoral workers at its Congress in September 1963. Soon after, the Equal Wages for Aborigines Committee of the FCAA headed by Andrews conducted a public campaign on the matter, widely distributing a pamphlet, The Facts on Wage Discrimination Against Aborigines. Kim Beazley Snr proposed in Parliament on 8 April 1964 that Aboriginal workers in the Northern Territory cattle industry be paid award (equal) wages, and a long and well-publicised debate ensued. The Referendum campaign was rapidly gaining ground. Beazley


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initiated an urgency debate in the House of Representatives on 30 August 1962, calling for a Referendum on section 51. A public meeting in Sydney a few weeks later, on 6 October, launched a national petition, eventually taken with 40 000 signatures by an Aboriginal delegation to the Prime Minister.57 The Labor Party continued to campaign on the issue, with Arthur Calwell, the leader of the Labor opposition, moving unsuccessfully in the House of Representatives on 15 April 1964 for a Referendum to remove both racially discriminatory clauses from the constitution. Students were not quite yet part of this growing public protest and debate. When they protested publicly about racial policies within Australia itself, they had nearly always been concerned with immigration rather than Aboriginal policy. Several developments made them keenly aware of overseas opposition to the ‘White Australia’ policy. Student organisers attending overseas conferences found Australia’s reputation as a racist society deeply embarrassing. More importantly, on campuses around the country—especially at the universities of Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland—the considerable number of Asian students entering the universities under the Colombo Plan or privately put paid to older ideas about Asian intellectual inferiority, and facilitated feelings of friendship towards Asian people generally. At the newly opened Monash University, the first student demonstration in October 1961 was a picket, along with students from the University of Melbourne, of the West End Private Hotel in Melbourne for refusing board to three Nauruan women ‘simply on the grounds of colour ’. Students carried placards reading ‘Ban the White Australia Policy’ and ‘Racial discrimination is immoral’. Shortly afterwards, a meeting of about 800 students at the University of Melbourne formed Student Action, which mobilised hundreds of students in protest against the ‘White Australia’ policy during the federal election campaign of November 1961. Both Menzies and Calwell made angry attacks on the students, and Student Action became front-page news, attracting generally negative newspaper reports and editorial comment. Over the next two years, the student campaign against the ‘White Australia’ policy continued. Student Action groups appeared in Sydney and Brisbane in 1962. Sydney University students demonstrated outside the Immigration Department in Sydney in January that year in support of three Portuguese seamen threatened with deportation by the Menzies government; the day before, students from the University of Queensland had staged a similar demonstration outside the Immigration Department



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offices in Brisbane. In April, more than 250 students at Melbourne and Monash Universities and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology marched in protest at the action of the Immigration Department in deporting Mr Willie Wong; by September, Queensland students were picketing a hotel for its refusal to serve beer to an Indian and two African students. A key figure in the New South Wales branch of the Association for Immigration Reform was Ken Rivett, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales. The School of Economics at Rivett’s university had several active members of the association, including Bill Ford, soon to become a key figure in the Freedom Ride story. Darce Cassidy joined the committee of the association and began to write articles and speak to meetings about the need to abolish the ‘White Australia’ policy. The Students Representative Council at the University of Melbourne put pressure on the National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS) to adopt a policy of clear opposition to the ‘White Australia’ policy. NUAUS agreed, after its own survey in 1963 of a random sample of its members in all ten universities and the university colleges in Townsville and Newcastle showed that almost 70 per cent of students nationwide favoured liberalisation of immigration policy, with Monash students being most in favour at 84 per cent and Townsville University College students least so, at 52 per cent. Very slowly, student interest in Aboriginal issues did develop, though less among the political radicals than among students simply interested in helping fund scholarships for Aboriginal people to attend university. In 1950 and again in 1951, NUAUS had urged the state governments that ‘greater educational facilities be made available for Aboriginals’. In 1952 it agreed to sponsor a scholarship scheme for Aboriginal students, providing an establishment grant of £1300 and requesting the Students Representative Councils in each university to set up local appeal committees, with Melbourne acting as a central organising committee. Jennifer Crew, director of the scheme in 1955, presented a complete report and wanted to broaden NUAUS’s Aboriginal policy beyond scholarships, but it refused. Plans for a scholarship scheme gradually became a reality: in 1957 Melbourne University agreed to act as trustee and the first two scholarships were awarded, though neither student graduated with a Bachelor’s degree. Abschol committees at a number of universities were formed, and raised funds through appeals to schools and private industry, button days, film showings and concerts. The University of Sydney made Abschol its


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charity for its annual Commem Day collection in 1961. By August 1964, there were Abschol committees or directors in most universities, including the University of Sydney. Students in the Abschol branch at the University of Sydney raised money through an annual collection, and also through lunch-hour entertainment shows featuring artists such as Jimmy Little and Tony Morrison. In May 1964, at the time students were being criticised for doing so little for Aboriginal rights, Abschol was sponsoring a visit to the university of 42 Aboriginal children from the Sydney area. Abschol had little involvement in public political debate on the broader questions of Aboriginal rights. In 1963, however, with Margaret Valadian (an Aboriginal university student at the University of Queensland) as director, it persuaded NUAUS to agree to a motion requesting the state governments to take action to deal with problems preventing ‘Aborigines as a group from participating in or gaining benefit from education’. The following year, NUAUS passed a motion urging the Commonwealth government to call a Referendum to change the Constitution. These were still small steps, and on the whole NUAUS and Abschol remained aloof from the growing Aboriginal rights movement. Abschol was, however, starting to achieve its aims of assisting Aboriginal students to attend university. In 1963, scholarships were awarded to students of Aboriginal descent, at the Universities of Sydney (going to Charles Perkins and Gary Williams, both of whom enrolled in Arts) and Queensland (Margaret Valadian and Image rights unavailable Betty Anderson, both in Social Studies). It held a national conference in May 1963, and by mid-1964 its national funds exceeded £11 000. Charles and Gary’s presence at the University of Sydney was to change both them and the Gary Williams, left, and Charles Perkins, university forever. Gary, born in right, at the University of Sydney on their Mullumbimby in Bundjalung first day as students, March 1963. (Photo courtesy of Gary Williams) country (his father’s country),



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grew up in Nambucca Heads, in Gumbaynggirr country (his mother’s country). His family, he told me in interview, had a history of resisting white authority, having opposed segregation of the picture theatre in the town, and fighting hard against children being taken away (and if they were taken and then made their way back, making sure they were not taken again). His schooling had been at the Aboriginal school on the reserve, then a convent school, from which he won a bursary to attend Woodlawn College in Lismore. After he completed the Leaving Certificate in 1962, he was welcomed at the start of the university year in 1963 at St John’s College, having just turned 17. Sydney for him was a much wider world than he had ever known, and through his uncle, Clive Williams, he met the growing network of Aboriginal activists. Charles Perkins, by contrast, was already an experienced political leader. His story has been told in detail a number of times, including his autobiography, A Bastard Like Me. This book is notable not only for the story it tells but also because, appearing in 1975, it was one of the first of a long line of such autobiographies, one of the main means by which Aboriginal people have communicated their individual and community experiences to a wider non-Aboriginal audience. Peter Read’s Charles Perkins: A Biography also tells his story well. Born in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory in 1936, of Arrernte and Kalkadoon descent, he had gone to school in Adelaide (‘I failed seven out of eight subjects in the final year at Technical School in Adelaide, so I was no academic giant’ he told me), played soccer for several English teams in 1957–59, and then became a noted public speaker for Aboriginal rights in Adelaide, being elected vicepresident of the FCAA in 1961. Charles came to Sydney in late 1961 or early 1962, where he played soccer for the Pan-Hellenic team, met a range of Aboriginal and nonAboriginal activists, and in particular struck up a friendship with Methodist minister Ted Noffs. Noffs’ first posting in 1951 had been as a Methodist pastor at the Far West mission at Wilcannia, where he had become close friends with many Aboriginal people, observed the dire conditions under which they lived, and developed respect for their spiritual beliefs. He had spent time in the late 1950s in Chicago, doing his Master’s degree in Theology, and had been influenced by racial politics there. On his return to Australia, he became associate minister of the Central Methodist Mission (CMM) in Sydney, and used its welfare agencies to assist the growing urban Aboriginal population in inner


20

Freedom Ride

Sydney. He wrote in The Methodist at this time: ‘One of the most explosive social questions facing Western society today is that of race.’ He outlined its importance in South Africa, the Deep South of the United States and in London, and reflected on the future of European relationships with the Aboriginal people of Australia. ‘Have we,’ he asked, ‘reached a point of no return so far as the building of a bridge between the cultures is concerned?’ His answer was no, given the emergence of Aboriginal–European committees throughout the nation ‘aimed at building new and better relations’. There was also, he thought, ‘a growing recognition throughout the country of the significance of the culture that the aborigine people represent’. He drew his readers’ attention to a new factor in Aboriginal affairs—the large numbers of Aboriginal people forsaking the fringe dwellings and reserves in country towns for the cities. The time had come, he said, to offer assistance, though ‘aid must never again be given patronisingly or in the form of welfare handouts’. Ted Noffs now arranged for Charles to speak at public meetings under the auspices of the CMM, and one of these speeches at the Lyceum Theatre was so successful that Noffs realised a new Aboriginal leader was emerging. He was also important in supporting Charles’s desire to go to university, encouraging him to study for his matriculation through the Metropolitan Business College. Charles did, and finally arrived at university in 1963 at the age of 27. Although he was not the only Aboriginal student, Gary Williams having started at the same time, he was to become the most visible on campus. When my research assistant, Inara Walden, interviewed Charles in November 1994, he told her: I was very pleased when I walked through the gates of Sydney University, and I thought ‘This is it’. I knew that something was going to happen as a consequence of me going through there, personally and in Aboriginal Affairs, because the fire in the belly was well and truly alight by then . . . and things were going to happen. I was going to make them happen. And I was very determined but I didn’t know what to do really, but the subjects I chose were really tuned into what I wanted to do later on, for example Anthropology I, II and III, Political Science I, II and III, the other two were Psychology and Social Theory or Sociology. So I was training for the future. In May 1964, Charles’s political activity was still more off campus



21

than on. He was closely involved in plans to provide some kind of welfare and social support for the growing number of Aboriginal people in Sydney, who had migrated to the city in search of work. By this time there were about 6000 Aboriginal people in Sydney, and public discussion of their needs was growing. The year before, on 3 May, the Labor Lord Mayor, Harry Jensen, had chaired a well-attended public meeting from which had emerged the Aboriginal Affairs Association, aiming to assist Sydney’s Aboriginal population. Its committee included Noffs as chair, Perkins and Ken Brindle (an influential Aboriginal Sydney man) as vicechairmen, and Bill Geddes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, as treasurer. Geddes was a New Zealander who hoped to achieve some of the same closeness between the university and Indigenous students that he had witnessed in Auckland, and readily made the Department of Anthropology’s facilities available for the early meetings of the association. Just five weeks before the students’ May demonstration for US civil rights, a well-publicised general meeting of the association had been held in the Anthropology lecture room. The committee undertook fund-raising, found a property in lower George Street which would be suitable as a cultural, social and welfare assistance centre, and at a meeting on 1 July changed the name of the society to the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and agreed to purchase the building. Student protest meetings on Aboriginal issues were still rare. One of the first was at the University of Melbourne in mid-1963, when its ALP Club held a meeting on the proposals to disperse the Aboriginal community at Lake Tyers, the last remaining Aboriginal reserve in Victoria. Gordon Bryant, president of the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, drew students’ attention to a range of injustices, such as the fact that Aborigines on the reserve could not be visited without the permission of the Aboriginal Welfare Board. Clyde Holding described the slum conditions, the low wages and the forcing of families away from the settlement. Pastor Doug Nichols, a Victorian man of Djadjawurung and Yorta Yorta descent, a preacher in the Church of Christ and noted Aboriginal political leader, also spoke, asking that Lake Tyers be retained. The national student body, NUAUS, began to take a much stronger and more openly political position on Aboriginal issues when Robert McDonald, who had been one of the leaders of Student Action in Sydney, became its president. At its Annual General Meeting in March 1964, just two months before the Wynyard demonstration, McDonald publicly


22

Freedom Ride

criticised the federal government’s refusal to guarantee its support for the rights of Northern Territory Aborigines, and ‘its unwillingness to take adequate steps towards elimination of discriminatory practices’. Noting the principles established by the United Nations, he urged the government to ‘make an immediate and unequivocal declaration of its support for what are basic human rights’. The meeting supported the ongoing campaign to eliminate the two discriminatory clauses in the Constitution, and ‘laid down a comprehensive program for student action on aboriginal affairs in 1964’. NUAUS sent two observers to the FCAA annual Easter conference in Canberra, to consider affiliation and to learn more about Aboriginal organisations and issues generally. Although NUAUS decided not to affiliate at this stage, the basis had been laid for new lines of communication between students and off-campus organisations for Aboriginal rights. Perhaps goaded into action by the criticisms of the May demonstration, members of the Labour Club at the University of Sydney urged the national conference of the Australian Student Labour Federation, the umbrella body for the Labour and ALP Clubs around the country, to organise a protest on ‘the treatment of Aborigines’ on National Aborigines Day in July 1964. This was a day that had begun in 1957 as a government attempt to publicise its assimilation policies, but had gradually been taken up as a focus for campaigning by Aboriginal rights organisations. By 1964, the day had extended to a National Aborigines Week. A fairly small demonstration was held in Melbourne, when about 200 students displayed placards and distributed leaflets headed ‘Australia’s Disgrace’, first in a march around a large city block and then on the steps of Parliament House. They moved to nearby gardens for a rally, addressed by the state leader of the opposition Mr Stoneham and Clyde Holding, the state ALP spokesman on Aboriginal affairs. A much larger demonstration was held at the same time at the University of Sydney. In June 1964, several students formed a committee called the ‘Sydney University Organising Committee for Action on Aboriginal Rights’ to organise action around National Aborigines Day on 8 July. The committee consisted of three students who were later to join the Freedom Ride—John Powles, Hall Greenland and myself (as treasurer)—plus the student and folk singer Jeannie Lewis and another student, Christopher Sweeney, who was active in the Civil Liberties Association; both Jeannie and Christopher had been arrested in the May



23

demonstration at Wynyard. Hall Greenland was a second-year Arts student and a member of the university’s ALP Club, while I, another second-year Arts student, was a member of the communist-influenced Labour Club. Louise Higham, a first-year medical student who was soon to become one of the Freedom Riders, was also involved in organising the demonstration as a member of the Labour Club. She wrote to the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, letting them know about the proposed demonstration on 8 July, and seeking information about reading material ‘we could sell on the bookstall the Labour Club will be opening in the near future’. This committee organised a public meeting and concert in Hyde Park, in the centre of the city, with substantial student support. Jeannie Lewis helped arrange the folk singers, Hall Greenland wrote on behalf of the ALP Club to the trade unions to raise funds for financial support, while I wrote on behalf of the committee to the university’s clubs and societies with the same request. I remember helping to write and produce the leaflet, a copy of which I still have. It was signed by the committee, and supported by a range of clubs and societies including Abschol, the ALP Club, the Anglican Society, the Civil Liberties Association, the Education Society, the Humanist Society, the Jewish Students Union, the Labour Club, the Newman Society, the Students’ Christian Movement, and the Students Representative Council. It was headed ‘Mass meeting today—Demonstration tomorrow’, and then ‘Poor bloody Abos!’ (What, quite, were we thinking?!) It went on: 150 years of persecution, extermination, indifference, prejudice, discrimination, paternalist ‘welfare’ policies and sheer neglect have left the original Australians as a depressed racial minority. This abhorent [sic] situation is ignored by a complacent society. The community’s conscience MUST be awakened by protest action. This has succeeded in the USA—it could do so here. The leaflet advertised a meeting at the university that day, 7 July, with speakers Senator Lionel Murphy, Ron Hancock (of the BWIU, a director of Tranby College and a former member of the FCAA) and the Reverend Alf Clint. Murphy, who nine years later became Attorney-General in the Whitlam Labor government of the 1970s, spoke of the Queensland Act that restricted Aboriginal people’s freedoms—in, for example, handling


24

Freedom Ride

their own money, choice of marriage partner, and deciding where to live. He drew attention to the discriminatory clause in the Constitution that meant Aborigines were not counted in the census, and the fact that the government had recently rejected Arthur Calwell’s attempt to have the offending clause removed. Ron Hancock outlined trade union support for Aboriginal people, mentioned the ACTU taking up the issue of Aboriginal wages the previous year, and drew attention to a recent incident in Walgett where two 9-year-old children had been locked up over night for taking two table tennis bats, two balls and a packet of crayons, an incident we return to in detail later in this story. The Reverend Alf Clint, an Anglican priest with strong socialist convictions who had first developed cooperative enterprises in Papua New Guinea and subsequently persuaded the Australian Board of Missions to support the development of cooperatives in Aboriginal communities, spoke about the success of the cooperative movement. The leaflet also advertised a peaceful demonstration for the following day at Parliament House. Students were urged to ‘make your placards (or “police-proof ” smocks) tonight’. The themes were to be:

Equal Rights here * End Legal and Social Discrimination now * Equal Opportunities for Aborigines * Education for Aborigines Students responded, with about 500 attending the rally-cum-concert in Hyde Park and the demonstration outside Parliament House, designed to give publicity to the legal and social discriminations against Aborigines. At the Hyde Park event, Gary Shearston sang a number of freedom songs from America, as well as songs written by the Aboriginal poet Kath Walker, later to be known as Oodgeroo. One song, I remember, was a musical rendition of her poem ‘Aboriginal Charter of Rights’, first presented to the 5th Annual General Meeting of FCAA in Adelaide held over Easter 1962. It went: We want hope, not racialism, Brotherhood, not ostracism, Black advance, not white ascendance: Make us equals, not dependents.



We need help, not exploitation, We want freedom, not frustration; Not control, but self-reliance, Independence, not compliance, Not rebuff, but education, Self-respect, not resignation. Free us from a mean subjection, From a bureaucrat Protection. Let’s forget the old-time slavers: Give us fellowship, not favours; Encouragement, not prohibitions, Homes, not settlements and missions. We need love, not overlordship, Grip of hand, not whip-hand wardship; Opportunity that places White and black on equal basis. You dishearten, not defend us, Circumscribe, who should befriend us. Give us welcome, not aversion, Give us choice, not cold coercion, Status, not discrimination, Human rights, not segregation. You the law, like Roman Pontius, Make us proud, not colour-conscious; Give the deal you still deny us, Give goodwill, not bigot bias; Give ambition, not prevention, Confidence, not condescension; Give incentive, not restriction, Give us Christ, not crucifixion. Though baptized and blessed and Bibled We are still tabooed and libelled You devout Salvation-sellers, Make us neighbours, not fringe-dwellers; Make us mates, not poor relations, Citizens, not serfs on stations. Must we native Old Australians In our land rank as aliens?

25


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Freedom Ride

Banish bans and conquer caste, Then we’ll win our own at last. Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal Delegates from an International Student Seminar held the week before at the University of New South Wales attended. The seminar had been organised after Australia was rejected as a venue for the International Student Conference (ISC) because of its racist immigration and Aboriginal policies, with New Zealand chosen instead. Some of the ISC delegates were invited to Australia after the conference. From Malaysia, the United Arab Republic, Israel, Hong Kong and India, they spoke in support of any move to end racial discrimination in Australia. Charles Perkins also spoke, outlining numerous discriminations against Aborigines, including the fact that they were not counted in the census. ‘We rightly protest against the racial discrimination in South Africa and the USA,’ he said, ‘but we also have the same problem in Australia. We don’t want charity, just give us the freedom and opportunity to lift ourselves.’ Gary Williams again drew attention to the gaoling of the two 9-year-old Aboriginal boys at Walgett. As Honi Soit reported of the speeches by


Students demonstrate for Aboriginal rights outside Parliament House, Macquarie Street, Sydney, 7 July 1964. (Photo by Michael Elton and reproduced with permission of the Australian Photographic Agency collection, State Library of New South Wales)



27

Charles and Gary: ‘Both speakers said Aborigines wanted to integrate into society, but not to be completely assimilated. They said that their people wanted to retain their culture etc. but to still live as ordinary citizens without discrimination.’ After the rally, the students moved from Hyde Park along Macquarie Street to state Parliament. They chanted slogans and sang songs, holding placards and banners depicting such themes as ‘End Discrimination Now’, ‘Civil Rights Now’, ‘Civil Rights for all Australians’, ‘Education for Aborigines’ and ‘You’re right if you’re white’. They distributed a pamphlet headed ‘Are You a Racialist?’ asking ‘Do you condone the existing discrimination against Aborigines?’ and drawing attention to the discriminatory clauses in the Constitution, the gross denial of civil rights in Western Australia and Queensland, and the fact that Aborigines had no land rights on their reserves. Even in New South Wales, where there was less legal discrimination, the pamphlet pointed out that there were examples of discrimination, including the locking up of the two Walgett children and the exclusion of Aborigines from the artesian baths and swimming pool— a popular tourist attraction—in Moree. The pamphlet concluded with the demand that: 1. The Commonwealth government remove Section 127 and the discriminatory words in Section 51 by holding a referendum at an early date. 2. The State governments abolish legal discrimination in their respective states. 3. The people of Australia do all they possibly can to end discrimination against Aborigines. The protest was notable for the lack of a police presence, its peaceful nature, and generally positive publicity. SRC president Michael Kirby said the demonstration aimed to draw parliamentary backbenchers’ attention to discriminatory clauses in the Australian Constitution, and to get the state government to support scholarships for Aboriginal students. After the meeting, I (as treasurer) wrote to various clubs and societies seeking financial contributions to offset the costs of the demonstration. Having achieved its immediate objective, this committee faded away, and a new organisation with a new leadership developed in its place. Although very active in the July demonstration, I was not involved in the developments and events of the next few months that I now relate.


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Freedom Ride

I’ve pondered possible reasons—personal, political, my studies—but in the end, I simply cannot remember why I vanish from this story until February 1965. After the National Aborigines Day demonstration, and the establishment of the foundation, Charles was beginning to look for a new way of organising student action for Aborigines. In later years, he was well aware of the importance of his presence to the development of Aboriginal politics on campus: ‘I played my part in terms of bringing the Aboriginal element into it.’ He met with several others to discuss the foundation of a more permanent student organisation for Aboriginal rights. One was Labour Club student Brian Aarons. It was a combination that might seem surprising, given Charles’s suspicion of communist influence in the Aboriginal movement, and Brian’s role as a communist student. It could not have happened at the University of Melbourne, where the communist students had been excluded from Student Action. Charles in fact seems to have been unaware of Brian’s communist connections, and the two got on very well; they joined up with several other students and staff to call a meeting at the university for 20 July to discuss what forms of action students could take in support of Aboriginal campaigns for equality. Also involved in calling the 20 July meeting were two of the academics at the University of Sydney. One was lecturer and Council for Civil Liberties secretary Ken Buckley; another was Peter Westerway, a lecturer in Government. Peter had a particular interest in politics and the media, and was much influenced in this by Henry Mayer, a pioneer of Australian media studies whose foundational text The Press in Australia appeared that same year. Although he had recently moved to the position of executive producer of the investigative Channel 7 television program Seven Days, Peter still maintained a teaching role at the university. He had a clear interest in covering Aboriginal issues on Seven Days, having aired a program called ‘The Australian Aboriginal and his Future’ on 9 July, during National Aborigines Week. This covered the issues and activities of Aboriginal people in Sydney, and also on Palm Island in Queensland. It explored the formation of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, and included a panel discussion featuring Bill Geddes, Charles Perkins, Michael Sawtell—an 80-year-old former bushman who had been involved in Aboriginal rights organisations and the Aborigines Welfare Board—and Allan Duncan, an adult education teacher much involved with Aboriginal education. The other two names on the list of those calling the meeting



29

were Peter Martin, a reporter on Seven Days, and Kevin Martin from the Students Representative Council. These six collectively distributed a leaflet to 29 clubs and societies on campus. They explicitly addressed the troubling issues raised by the Commem Day demonstration: ‘This was fine as far as it went, but what now? How can we show our sympathy and support for our own coloured minority, the Aborigines?’ They asked all clubs and societies to ‘appoint two representatives of your club to attend a meeting in Gosper rooms 1 and 2, at 1 pm, to consider the matter’. At this point, the leaflet said, there was a range of options to consider: a) more demonstrations in the city; b) collections, voluntary labour, e.g. Abschol or the new Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs centre at Central; c) a long vac demonstration continued over 2–3 weeks, e.g. ‘freedom rider ’ buses in northern NSW and Queensland, and d)??? suggestions welcomed. The contact person was Peter Westerway. This was the first mention of a possible Freedom Ride in print. The idea of demonstrations or voluntary assistance was by now familiar, but how did the idea of ‘freedom rider’ buses get on to this list? It seems that Charles first pondered the idea of an Australian Freedom Ride after a conversation with Peter Westerway. Peter remembers his contact with Charles Perkins when he delivered a lecture in mid-1964 to a Government class at which Charles was present: It was in the Old Geology lecture theatre, one of those cantilevered lecture halls, and I was talking about politics and the media. I remember that the major point that I was making was that television was critical, and radio was now less important than it had been, and that if you wanted to do anything about television you had to be talking in terms of pictures. Without pictures it didn’t work. And that’s all I remember having said. The reason I remember it is that after the lecture was finished Charlie stayed behind and said to me what could he do about publicising the Aboriginal cause. And I remember we were sitting in the body of the lecture hall, not down at the lecture podium, and I repeated this stuff about pictures and said, ‘Look, television’s all about short grabs, you have to be able to


30

Freedom Ride

see interesting pictures or they won’t use it. They only use things which they have pictures to illustrate. Talking heads are dead on television.’ And we began to talk and I think I suggested about the Freedom Rides in the United States and the way in which that had been done. And as I was talking it occurred to me that there was no reason why you couldn’t do something similar in Australia and I said to him, ‘If you get together a group of people who will go on a bus ride around what has come to be called the Deep North of New South Wales, I suppose I’ll send a camera crew with you. And we’ll do a documentary and put it on Seven Days.’ The US Freedom Rides to which Peter Westerway drew Charles’s attention had occurred three years earlier, in the northern summer of 1961. Indeed, the term Freedom Ride is even older—having been used, for example, in Jamaica in 1957 to refer to a procession of 4000 city cyclists who rode miles through city streets and lanes in ‘joyful celebration’, as Public Opinion, the local newspaper, put it, of the removal of a tax on their bicycles. One cyclist carried a banner saying ‘freedom ride’, and the newspaper reporter, Jervis Anderson, took the word ‘freedom’ seriously: Like the cyclist whose bicycle was appropriately bannered, they were on a real ‘Freedom ride’, for like many of our forefathers who were born in shackles, many hundreds of them for the first time in their lives were going to be allowed to ride throughout Jamaica without having to pay for it. It seems likely that the term was around even earlier. The aim of the US Freedom Riders in 1961 had been very specific: to challenge segregation on interstate buses and in interstate bus terminals. The original thirteen Freedom Riders, seven black and six white, had gone in two buses from Washington to New Orleans via Alabama, and more buses had travelled soon after from Birmingham to New Orleans via Jackson, Mississippi. When they encountered racist violence at Anniston and Montgomery, Alabama, and at Jackson, Mississippi, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had organised buses of Freedom Riders from different parts of the country to converge on Jackson. More than 300 Freedom Riders had been arrested, and their cases were heard from August onwards. The Freedom Rides had provided dramatic headlines in several



31

ways: the joint action of black and white students; the racist violence they encountered; and their success in achieving their immediate aims. After the Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a regulation prohibiting segregated bus facilities. The commitment to a Civil Rights Bill, though, would have to await the shocking events in Alabama two years later. Australians knew of these Freedom Rides through the mass media— press, radio and television. The attacks in Anniston and Montgomery, Alabama and the violence and gaoling of Freedom Riders in Jackson were well covered. Newspaper reports emphasised the hostility of the whites, the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on 26 May 1961: ‘Highway patrolmen, troops in helicopters, National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, and local police with savage dogs on leashes kept angry white crowds away from the “freedom riders” when they arrived from Alabama.’ Although the coverage was overwhelmed by the much more extensive coverage at the same time of one of Australia’s great murder mysteries—the Bogle– Chandler deaths on New Year’s Eve in 1960, and the inquest through May 1961—Australians did know about the US Freedom Riders and the violence they had encountered. They related the term Freedom Ride less to the specific idea of desegregating transport facilities than to the more general notion of a racially mixed group of students travelling by bus, confronting and drawing attention to segregationist practices so publicly that these practices had to end. The 20 July meeting attracted a dozen people, those present signing their names on a list. They were: Charles Perkins, Jim Spigelman, Brian Aarons, Colin Bradford, Robert Gallagher, John Powles, Beth Hansen, Eric Doldissen, Brian Jardine, Judith Mahony, John Russell and Bill Ford. The first seven of these later became Freedom Riders. We’ve already met Charles, Brian and John Powles. Jim Spigelman was an especially significant addition to the gradually forming group. The surviving written records reveal just how important his organising role was soon to become. He was a second-year student enrolled in Arts/Law, a member of the Labor Party and the university’s ALP Club. Beth Hansen, an Arts student, was a member of the Humanist Society and came along with her boyfriend John Powles; she was to become very important to the new organisation. Colin Bradford and Bob Gallagher were both friends of Brian’s in the Labour Club. The meeting canvassed several options for action, but it was soon


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Freedom Ride

clear that a Freedom Ride on the American model was becoming the favoured plan. Bill Ford, a lecturer in the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales, spoke to the group about his experiences with Freedom Rides in the United States. He had won a Fulbright scholarship in the late 1950s and studied at the University of Illinois. Later, at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Industrial Relations, he developed a close friendship with Bob Singleton, an African American who was a local leader of CORE and led the Freedom Ride from Los Angeles to Jackson, Mississippi in the summer of 1961. Bill remembers that ‘when they went off in the summer of ’61 and were gaoled, I flew to Jackson, to be with my friends at their arraignment. It was an incredible experience attending the mass meeting, the courtroom drama.’ Now he spoke to the meeting about the Freedom Rides in the United States, ideas of non-violent protest, and the possibility of doing something similar here. Ford had a history of interest in Aboriginal issues, having met Charles Duguid in Adelaide before he went to the United States. Beth Hansen says of this meeting: ‘The start of it for me was Bill Ford, and some blonde woman that was with him . . . She and or him had been to the States and had some connection with the Freedom Ride there, and they came out and gave a talk at one of the lunchtime meetings. That is my memory of where the idea started.’ A committee was formed, consisting of Charles Perkins, Jim Spigelman, Beth Hansen and Eric Doldissen (who did not, in the end, go on the Freedom Ride). Attracted to the idea of a Freedom Ride, and hoping for a larger attendance, the group called another meeting in the MacCallum Room for Friday, 31 July. Clubs and societies were again urged to send representatives. The group produced a leaflet reporting on the idea of a Freedom Ride, and the importance of publicity about discrimination against Aborigines: ‘While our initial impact on the country towns and aboriginal settlements is likely to be short lived and therefore possibly ineffective, it is hoped that student action of this kind will draw public attention to the problem.’ Publicity was the main focus, and the leaflet also announced that ‘Peter Westerway will be leaving the University soon to become Director of Public Affairs at ATN Channel 7. He would like to send a camera crew along with the bus to film a documentary for ATN.’ The meeting on 31 July was much larger. It seems to have been moved from the MacCallum Room to the much bigger Old Geology lecture



33

theatre. Again Bill Ford spoke about the American Freedom Rides and the possibility of doing something similar in Australia. Warwick Richards, a politically interested student in the Students’ Christian Movement, and later to become one of the Freedom Riders, remembers the meeting well. He was struck by the breadth of political views represented there: There was an intention to form an organisation that would be broadly representative of the different religious, political and philosophical points of view at the university. So each of the religious groups was invited to participate, all the political factions, sects and parties and a number of them did. Obviously the right wasn’t directly involved but the communists, the Labour Club, the various Trotskyite factions . . . there were a number of Jewish students who were involved, there were Christians . . . It was intended to unite students and essentially to combat racism and to right social wrongs. Pat Healy remembers it too: The things I remember were a large meeting in one of the large lecture theatres at Sydney U, that Bill Ford, who had been in the USA on— might have been a Fulbright scholarship or something like that—and he had been involved in the civil rights struggles. And he got very enthusiastic and very involved and he gave a talk about it. And I know that after that a lot of people were sort of saying: ‘We should do something like that in Australia.’ Brian Aarons remembers that: There was this very big meeting, it would have been probably 300, where a guy called Bill Ford who had recently come back from America . . . he spoke at this meeting and very sharply raised the question about—‘Well, you’re doing these things for the black movement in America, what about here?’ . . . I think he’d been deliberately invited by the organisers of the meeting to talk about how the civil rights movement worked, and out of that came the idea for a Freedom Ride. Charlie Perkins used to say to me for years afterward that just after that meeting—I think it was the same afternoon, or it may have been a day or two later—he and I and a fellow called Barry


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Freedom Ride

Corr were talking about what had come up at the meeting and as I recall it Charlie said: ‘Well, are we going to organise a Freedom Ride?’ and we all said: ‘Well, yes we are, that’s what we’re going to do.’ The decision had been made. There would be a Freedom Ride.


2

Chapter

Getting ready

O

n the evening of Friday, 12 February 1965 a white touring bus stood at the front of the University of Sydney’s historic main building. Begun in 1855 and completed in 1862, the large twostorey sandstone building had a good view over the city. Well-kept lawns swept down to busy Parramatta Road, the main artery to the suburbs of the west and beyond. Twenty-nine students waited with their bags and suitcases and rolled-up sleeping bags to get on board and start their journey. Second-year medical student Aidan Foy remembers that ‘there was some sort of banner at the front or along the side’, and photographs and film footage show a large banner inscribed ‘Student Action for Aborigines’ along the side of the bus. It did not say ‘Freedom Ride’, a term the students had come to see as somewhat patronising. They called it simply the ‘SAFA bus tour’. Only one of the students—Charles Perkins— was Aboriginal; a second, Gary Williams, would join later. There was also on the bus another Aboriginal man, Gerald (or Gerry) Mason, a lay preacher and an older friend of Perkins’s from Gerard government reserve in South Australia, one of the better-funded reserves in the country. Gerry was a gentle and rather conservative man who, it later emerged, had had no idea this bus tour had a political purpose. The composition of the group would change slightly as the tour went on, with five students joining later, one changing her status on the trip from ‘student’ to ‘journalist’, and three leaving before the end for a mixture of personal, work-related and political reasons. The students ranged in age from 35


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18 to 29, with most about 19 years old. Of the 34, eleven—or about a third—were women, a gender ratio roughly reflecting that of the student population at the university as a whole at that time. There was a short farewell ceremony. Beth Hansen remembers the ‘send off, with Ted Noffs’s blessings, from the university grounds, Noffs on the steps of the bus’. I remember this too. Darce Cassidy, on tour not only as a student but also as a reporter for ABC radio, recorded the farewell. From this point until the major conflict in Moree, he recorded everything indefatigably. A program he made from the tapes still survives, providing us now with a remarkable record of the voices, ideas and people associated with the Freedom Ride. We can still hear Reverend Ted Noffs’ travellers’ prayer: Almighty God we thank thee that thou hast given us life and liberty in this great land Australia, and we ask now that thy blessing will rest upon these Australians as they journey out as they endeavour to bring reconciliation and healing among people who have been divided because of the colour of their skin . . . Give them travelling mercies and give them, we pray, that word that will be a word not only to the people of Australia, but perhaps a word to the people of the world of our concern and of our love for people no matter what the colour of their skin may be. So go with these young people we pray and bless them in all that they seek to do. And these things we ask in the name of Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen. In retrospect, Noffs’s mention of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘healing’ is remarkable for prefiguring much subsequent politics on Aboriginal issues. Yet it is worth noting that, while the students appreciated this blessing and support, probably less than half were Christians; the rest were a mix of atheists, agnostics and Jews. As one of the atheists, I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable. Aidan Foy, whose family was ‘traditional Irish, Labour, Catholic’, remembers that he’d ‘never actually heard a Protestant praying in public before, I remember that’. Then, on a quite different note, a group of visiting Black American folk song and dance performers from the ‘Go Tell it on the Mountain’ stage company sang songs in farewell. They were by no means the first African Americans to support the Aboriginal cause. Forty years earlier, a group of visiting Black American seamen had attended the Australian Aborigines Protection


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Association conference in Sydney, and only four years before the Freedom Ride, in November 1960, Paul Robeson had visited Australia for an eightweek tour of Darwin, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and Sydney, as well as towns in New Zealand. His four concerts in the Sydney Town Hall, where he sang ‘folk songs of many countries, Negro Spirituals, popular songs’, had made a considerable impact, and he became— famously—the first performer at the half-built Sydney Opera House, singing to the building workers. He had supported the Aboriginal cause at a reception in his honour at Paddington Town Hall organised by the New South Wales Peace Committee and the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship; it was attended by 1500 people, of whom about 30 were Aboriginal. Listening to the recording today, it is hard not to be moved by these African American voices singing on a February summer evening in support of a Freedom Ride in Australia: We shall overcome, we shall overcome We shall overcome some day. Oh deep in my heart, I do believe That we shall overcome some day. And with that, soon after midnight, the bus with its load of students drove off into the night. It had been a hectic six months between the decision and the setting out. A new organisation had been formed, a constitution drawn up, publicity arranged, an itinerary worked out, and over 30 students attracted to and prepared for the trip. It was a remarkable feat for a group of people who were mostly still too young to vote. Yet they had a confidence distinctive to their generation—a sense of innovation and adventure. Only a few weeks before, the Rolling Stones had visited Sydney, and seven months earlier the Beatles had made their historic visit, rapturously received by youth all over the country. The music somehow expressed the mood of the age group and the time. This was a generation that produced a New Left beyond earlier Cold War certainties of either the self-congratulation of the ‘free world’ or the rigid authoritarianism of communism, interested in challenging consciousness as well as social structures and institutions, and as concerned with issues of ‘race’ (and within a few years ‘gender ’) as those of class. In the process of forming itself, this generation both inherited many loyalties, political and


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religious, from their parents, yet in the end had a curious lack of respect for the authority or wisdom of their elders. They—we—were no longer to be dutiful sons and daughters. The large meeting on 31 July which resulted in the decision to hold a Freedom Ride had occurred shortly before the end of second term, and there was a lull in SAFA activity during the four-week vacation. In that time, however, student action on Aboriginal issues was greatly enhanced when NUAUS held an Aboriginal Affairs conference on 17, 18 and 19 August, using the broader term ‘Aboriginal Affairs’ to denote a new extension of its interest beyond the traditional concern with providing scholarships. Three of the scholarship students—Charles, Margaret Valadian and Betty Anderson—attended, along with 21 other students. Papers were delivered by three people experienced in Aboriginal activism—Alan Duncan on education, Shirley Andrews on legislation and Barry Christophers (another communist activist in the Aboriginal movement) on wages and employment. Over 100 motions were passed, including a suggestion for a tutorial scheme for Aboriginal students (such schemes became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s), the holding of work camps to build facilities or provide services requested by Aboriginal people themselves (these work camps became popular during the mid-1960s and later), support for the FCAATSI Referendum campaign to remove discriminatory clauses from the Constitution, more local control in Aboriginal communities, making Aboriginal people ‘aware of their rights as regards copyrighting of arts and artifacts, Aboriginal ritual and cultural activities in general’, and many other issues. Student interest in Aboriginal issues was rapidly rising. When third term started on 7 September, plans for a Freedom Ride went ahead. The name of the new organisation was settled—it would be Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA)—and a constitution was adopted at a meeting in the first week of the new term. The name was a clear derivation from the Student Action groups that had opposed the ‘White Australia’ policy a few years earlier. The objectives of Student Action for Aborigines, as stated in the constitution, were quite modest, and well within the equal rights perspective of the existing Aboriginal movement. They were: 1. to arouse public attention, especially within the University, to fundamental Aboriginal problems in health, education, housing, etc;


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2. to break down social discrimination barriers to the extent possible by student action; and 3. to stimulate the interest of Aborigines in improving their situation within society. Office bearers were elected. Some continued from the meeting at the end of second term: Charles Perkins as chair; Jim Spigelman and Beth Hansen as co-secretaries; and Eric Doldissen as treasurer. Jim rapidly became a key figure in the organisation. Born in Sosnowiec, Poland on New Year’s Day in 1946, he had come to Australia with his family in 1949, and by this time his father owned a jewellery shop at Circular Quay. At Sydney Boys’ High School he had been disturbed by the lack of support for the Asian Colombo Plan students in contrast to that for an American exchange student, and had complained to the headmaster (‘that’s because of my Jewish background more than anything else . . . I’m sure it came from my Jewish background that racism had a very high salience’). To these four main office bearers were now added John Powles as vicepresident and Pat Healy as publicity officer. A committee of six was formed, with Colin Bradford, who had been at the initial meeting, one of its members. Colin had migrated from England with his parents—his father was a bricklayer and his mother a typist—when he was three years old, and he was now a second-year Science student, active in the Labour Club. Another member, Chris Page, would also go on the Freedom Ride. The son of a left-wing North Shore doctor, Chris was now a second-year medical student. Four members of the committee did not go on the Freedom Ride, including Margaret Hall and Anglican Society student David Sloper. One of the other committee members was David Ellyard, another Anglican and chair of the Students’ Camp Association, sponsored by the New South Wales Christian Youth Council, which had just organised the second annual camp for Aboriginal and European high school students in Lane Cove, Sydney. He was an important figure in SAFA, though he did not join the Freedom Ride. Now, with its name, constitution and structure in place, the new organisation went into full swing. SAFA’s first task was to agree that the Freedom Ride would indeed be a bus trip to racially discriminatory towns. Warwick Richards remembers ‘a number of meetings at the university that were planning it and there was a lot of discussion: “Should it be a bus or should we take cars?” and there were a number of people who had


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various views about how that ought to be done.’ Its next task was to gather together enough students. Jim Spigelman wrote an article for Honi Soit on 24 September, describing the new organisation, its aims and its decision to conduct a ‘Freedom Ride’ in order to attract publicity, and asking any student sincerely interested in participating to give his or her name and address to SAFA. Publicity became a major activity of the new group, partly because that was a main aim of SAFA and partly to raise enough funds to hire a bus. In a leaflet distributed to the media on 14 September, SAFA announced its aim of arousing public attention to Aboriginal disadvantage, and its chosen method of a bus tour around country towns in northern New South Wales during February. In addition, the leaflet announced, students would undertake a social survey to back their protest with statistical information on housing, wages and so forth. While it is not clear just when and how the idea of a survey arose, it is likely that Pam Beasley, an anthropologist who conducted a survey of Sydney Aboriginal people for the Foundation, may have had an influence. The survey was strongly supported by Ted Noffs and the Christian clubs on campus, who were concerned that there was insufficient knowledge of actual conditions in country towns; Noffs may also have been a little apprehensive that radical action might have negative effects on the Aboriginal people in the targeted towns. The survey, the leaflet announced, would cover housing, education, health, employment, social welfare and racial attitudes among both Aborigines and whites. SAFA’s media release was effective. Three days later, the Sydney Sun carried a story, ‘A Bus Ride to Freedom’, which featured a photograph of Charles Perkins and reported that students ‘will go in mixed parties to hotels, picture shows, milk bars and swimming pools which, they believe, discriminate against aborigines. The Freedom Riders will then buy tickets, call for drinks or order meals for the whole party, aborigines as well as whites. Their plan is strictly non-violent.’ The Sydney Daily Mirror, the Australian and the Sunday Telegraph all picked up the story, while Eric Baume interviewed Charles Perkins on radio. There was some mixed response in letters to these newspapers, with one letter to the Sunday Telegraph suggesting that ‘Aboriginal people are quite happy with things as they are, the Freedom Ride would just stir up trouble’. As a result of this media coverage, Charles Perkins received supportive letters and some donations from individuals, like Dorothy May, who said,


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‘I am with you all the way, though financially I cannot help much (encl. 10/-) I will help in any other way that I can . . . Here’s luck to your campaign.’ Mr T. Frawley congratulated SAFA for ‘taking the initiative in this very just and much needed movement and to wish you every success in your aims’. One letter from Boronia, Victoria, offered best wishes: ‘This action has long been needed to highlight the fact that we have racists in our country, who by intention or ignorance, are hampering the integration of Aborigines.’ The story was picked up interstate—for example, in the Hobart Mercury—leading Eleanor Brinton to write approvingly to Charles: ‘It is quite time somebody did something about race relations in this country. We do not have the problem in Tasmania as the first white settlers apparently shot most of the original inhabitants or drove them into the cold part of the country where they could not survive.’ Some of those already involved in Aboriginal rights issues were a little concerned at the announcement of a Freedom Ride. Ian Spalding, editor of On Aboriginal Affairs, sent a telegram to Jack Horner of the AAF on 18 September: ‘Please consider prevailing upon Charles Perkins have Freedom Riders survey discrimination scene before seeking notoriety and alternative deterrent stop force entrench difficulties some localities. Ian.’ He followed this with a letter on 30 September, saying that when he first heard of the move he was worried about it, since there was no way of knowing from the newspaper reports ‘how well considered the whole project was’. He applauded student interest in social discrimination, but was concerned that ‘the repercussions could be so great, damaging, and even ineffective unless made to fit the needs’. His own view was that discriminatory practices could be removed ‘by quite short and rational negotiation which leaves no bad odour’. Media stories of Aboriginal disadvantage and lack of basic civil and human rights continued to appear. The Australian on 30 September carried a feature story by Jock Marshall headed ‘Color Bar!’ which emphasised Australian governments’ poor record in Aboriginal affairs. A week later, the Australian published a letter from Jim in response to this story, which told its readers about the Freedom Ride, the survey, the interest television stations had expressed in covering the trip, and the fact that SAFA had received several donations in response to the Australian’s earlier article. The students were hoping, he said, for more donations towards the cost of chartering a bus. Jim’s letter generated another group of letters and


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donations. Jean Culley, from Port Melbourne, wrote in support saying ‘to my mind this is a tremendously important task you have all set yourselves, and from my rather limited experiences of racial intolerance will need a good deal of courage and level headedness’, and enclosing a cheque for £5, a substantial sum. Marion Hellier wrote from Surfers’ Paradise, saying: ‘Such a “fresh” approach should do much towards awakening a lethargic public. The several worthwhile organizations who have been working to assist the Aborigines do not gain the all important publicity which this “freedom ride” should do. I wish your mission success and am enclosing a small donation.’ Margaret Langford wrote from Belfield, in Sydney, enclosing a cheque and expressing her doubts about the assimilation policy: I feel that the Aboriginals might be happier if they could evolve a way of life to suit themselves . . . I feel that they should be assisted to work out their own salvation independently of the white community. In the process, we might even learn to work out ours! I hope that your ‘freedom Ride’ will be successful: problems cannot be tackled until their precise nature and extent are revealed. Above all, I hope that the Aboriginals themselves will form an organisation to look after their own interests. The ideas behind the Freedom Ride continued to develop as the months of preparation went by. The common political philosophy binding this diverse group of students together was the idea of nonviolent direct action, its inspiration in a very direct sense the US civil rights movement. The SAFA publicity leaflet had been quite explicit: ‘Such student action has worked well in the USA, we have to make it work here.’ In his article in Honi Soit that same month, Jim Spigelman had said: ‘We intend to adopt appropriate methods of passive resistance.’ The notion of non-violent direct action, he explained, was modelled on the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee in the United States, which had ‘achieved so much in the Negro struggle for civil rights’. Another leaflet printed just before the bus set off said: ‘The team has been largely patterned on the concept of the Freedom Riders who were involved in programmes of integration in the United States.’ And indeed the tactic of non-violent action had good claims to effectiveness. Since the students’ demonstration in May, Congress had


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passed the Civil Rights Act. It had not, however, ensured the right to vote, and in the months just passed—May to July—nearly one thousand volunteers had gone to Mississippi to participate in the ‘Freedom Summer’, designed to register blacks to vote and establish ‘Freedom Schools’ for black Americans. It is little wonder, then, that the Australian students were impressed by the idea of non-violent direct action as a means of pursuing a campaign for racial equality. It seemed to be working. Of all the American civil rights literature, the most influential by far on the Australian students was that written by Martin Luther King. SAFA was especially interested in his letter from Birmingham City Jail, and reprinted a condensed version from an American journal, The New Leader, which had published it in full on 24 June 1963. In the reprint, it became ‘Our Struggle’, and anyone going on the Freedom Ride was encouraged to read it. Aidan Foy remembers that ‘we all had a pamphlet, in advance, of Martin Luther King’s speech “Our Struggle”’. The organisers also encouraged the Freedom Riders to read the full text and ‘a vivid description of the events surrounding it’ in Martin Luther King’s latest book, Why We Can’t Wait, available from the Pocket Bookshop in Sydney. It would make ‘ideal light after-exam reading’. ‘Our Struggle’ makes fascinating reading today. Written on scraps of paper with a pen smuggled into King’s cell in Birmingham City Jail in Alabama in 1963, it was an impassioned response to criticism from churchmen who accused him of creating tension between blacks and whites. In this letter, King argues against gradualism and for immediate, direct, non-violent action. The purpose of direct action, he writes, is ‘to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation’. King goes on to say, in reply to clerical critics who said the time was not yet ripe for such radical action, that: Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was ‘well timed’, according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait’. It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never’ . . . I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes’ great stumbling block in the stride towards


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freedom is not (the White Citizens’ ‘Counciler ’ or) the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. Beth Hansen also remembered this pamphlet, and it made a lasting impression: There was the quote about how what was worse than the Ku Klux Klan sort of people were the white middle class, the ones who set a timetable on other people’s freedom. It’s just a quote that’s hung in there forever . . . the other Martin Luther King quote was ‘creating a constructive crisis’. King concluded his letter with these words: We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. One day the south will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo–Christian heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. No black Australian—or indeed white Australian—had ever written quite like that, nor believed that the goal of Australia was freedom. Yet the sense of a contrast between conventional Australian notions of democracy, equality and fair play on the one hand and the continuing reality of racism on the other was sufficient for King’s oratory and ideas to have resonance in a country very different from his own. Jim Spigelman wanted to learn more about the US Freedom Rides of 1961—how they had been conducted, and what lessons the Australians


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might learn from them. In December he wrote to the US Consulate in Sydney seeking the addresses of several American civil rights organisations—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The consulate wrote back several days later with the first three addresses, but was unable to trace the address of SNCC. Jim wrote to all three, and received a reply from Bobbie Knable, the community relations officer for CORE, who replied rather briefly: The Freedom Rides in the southern part of the United States were made on public buses. The riders were both Negro and white. Their purpose was to show, by example, to what extent violence and intimidation were used to enforce local segregation laws. Somehow, Jim also found SNCC’s address, and received a reply on 16 January 1965, which was not especially helpful: ‘We do not have the specific kind of information available which you need.’ The SNCC people, however, did suggest that Jim read Jim Peck’s Freedom Ride, an eyewitness account, and that he look at some of the American periodicals of the time; they also enclosed a copy of their publication The Student Voice. I don’t know if Jim or the others did get hold of a copy of Peck’s Freedom Ride (it would not have been easy, as this was an American book and Australian book distribution was then closely tied to Britain), but if they had they would have read an exciting narrative of the quite dangerous 1961 Freedom Rides. Peck was one of the white Riders, who was subject to vicious attacks by white supremacists in Birmingham when a group of black and white students attempted to enter a whites-only waiting room at the bus station. A photo of his bandaged head appeared in newspapers and on television screens around the world, including in the Australian papers. His story was a warning, both that white desegregationists could be hated even more than their black counterparts, and that non-violence could be met with violence. SAFA also had access to some more direct information about the US Freedom Rides and civil rights movement. At the end of the year, it again invited Bill Ford to address it, as well as Sondra Silverman, a radical American then studying at the Australian National University for a doctoral thesis on political movements, comparing the US civil rights


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movement, the British anti-nuclear movement and the Australian labour movement. The SAFA newsletter explained that ‘they were involved in the “Freedom Rides” in the USA and we look forward to further cooperation with them’. Bill and Sondra told the students about non-violent protest techniques, and gave them some American publications. While there is no record of what Sondra said that day, the thesis on which she was working distinguishes between ‘non-violent direct action’ and ‘passive resistance’. The former derived its ideas from Gandhi, and its essential element was its ‘refusal to sanction cooperation with what is regarded as evil’. It was more than a political tactic; it was a way of life— the continual pursuit of truth by non-violent means, having permanent regard for both ends and means. ‘Passive resistance’, on the other hand, derived from the early twentieth century British suffragettes, was purely a tactical weapon. In civil rights discourse, both in the United States and Australia, the terms were generally used interchangeably, and what was intended seems to have been something in between—that is, an ethically sustainable political tactic. In 1998, Bill Ford remembered very clearly a meeting at the Foundation before the Freedom Riders left, when ‘I was sharing my experiences with the group and The Bulletin wrote it up as a major feature’. It did indeed. Sam Lipski’s article ‘The Freedom Riders’ came out in The Bulletin on 20 February, when the Freedom Ride was in progress, but he had been researching the article for some weeks before. Lipski recorded Bill Ford as saying: Don’t any of you go into this tour with preconceived ideas about what you’re going to face. When the first Freedom Riders came down from California to the Deep South there were 3000 police and troops ready to greet them when the 13 of them got there. Now this isn’t going to happen here. Passive resistance works in some kinds of situations, but it doesn’t in others. Obviously it wouldn’t have done the Jews very much good against the Nazis. But it did work with Gandhi in India and it is working with students and Negroes in the Deep South. Bill Ford’s advice was very precise, and very much within the philosophy of ‘non-violent direct action’ and ‘passive resistance’. He told the SAFA group:


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If you find a segregated swimming pool just go and stand out in front of it. Just stand there. Don’t go climbing over fences or trying to force your way in. The real key to this whole thing is to get some visual image across, to make certain that when you do something the Press, radio and television know about it. But if you go into a segregated bar and someone pushes someone else aside and a brawl starts—well, you’ve lost everything. You’ve got to have discipline. Don’t dissipate your energy demonstrating all over the place. Pick out one or two key centres and make sure you’ve got the camera on you. Remember a passive demonstration is the most effective. Any violence and you’ve defeated our own purpose. One of those at this meeting was Alex Mills, soon to be one of the Freedom Riders. He remembers that ‘that night there was a zing click click . . . I could see there was something valuable in this thing—the conditions for Aboriginal people were bad and this was an effective way of doing something about it.’ Alex was rather different from most of the other students. For one thing, he was from a country town, whereas most of the others were Sydney born and bred. He had gone to Orange High School, his father a carpenter and his mother a domestic worker before her marriage. Later, he became the leader of the Presbyterian Fellowship in Orange, and was at university studying Theology in order to become a Presbyterian minister. For another, he was a member of the Country Party, which meant his politics were more conservative than those of most of the other Freedom Riders. He had, however, got to know some of the others— Charles and Warwick Richards—the previous year when they had shared the same Social Theory I class. These three had formed a critical minority in the class. As Warwick, who joined SAFA early on, remembers it: I guess we were all there under the misapprehension from the student handbook that it had to do with, you know, political and social theories, but it was really social work for social workers . . . The main text was a dreadful book by Ben and Peters called Social Theory of the Democratic State, which was taught laboriously through most of the year, and this was an extremely conservative text with all the sort of welfarist implications. A small group of us including Charles and myself, we would sort of argue from one side of the room with the class and the lecturers about that.


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Little preparation was done during October and November, the examination period, but once exams were over, planning became intense. A newsletter, SAFA Talkabout, was devised to keep SAFA members informed and to call meetings. The first edition, in early December, reported that SAFA badges had been printed, called a committee meeting at Charles’s home in Forest Lodge on 14 December, and contained a slip at the bottom that asked students to indicate whether they intended to go on the trip. A letter signed by Charles, John Powles, Gary Williams, Paul Cohen and Ken Buckley was sent with explanatory material to academic staff members in the faculties of Arts, Law and Economics. A meeting on 21 December at the Foundation, which had opened at its premises at 812 George Street near Central Railway just a few days before, heard the Aboriginal leader of the Aborigines Progressive Association, Bert Groves, speak on the Aboriginal view of the trip, though what he said is not recorded. John Butterworth, a second-year Science student who was to become one of the Freedom Riders, agreed (along with another student, Des Moore) to seek further information from the Teachers’ Federation about education facilities in the towns to be visited. That very day, in fact, the federation had published its report on a survey it had conducted of Aboriginal pupils in New South Wales secondary schools, revealing serious educational disparity—not so much from differential education provision as from the deprived social and economic conditions in which pupils lived. The solutions were seen to be in Aboriginal employment, housing and special assistance. This report was widely disseminated and discussed, even reaching an international audience via the New York Times, to the consternation of officials in the Department of External Affairs. It was also agreed at this same SAFA meeting that the students needed to inform themselves as well as they could about conditions in rural New South Wales. Alan Duncan, Australia’s first full-time tutor for adult Aboriginal people after many years as a teacher in country schools, a member of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship and also chairman of the Foundation’s Education Committee, explained to the students about the location of Aborigines in settlements, reserves, towns and so on, while Pam Beasley spoke on the ‘anthropological aspects’. Intending Freedom Riders were asked to look at two articles just published on ‘assimilation versus integration’ in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 and 16 December. Signed simply ‘a Staff Correspondent’, these articles noted the growing critique of assimilationist policies in many quarters. The second article


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From left to right: John Powles, Charles Perkins, Pat Healy and Jim Spigelman plan the Freedom Ride. (Photo courtesy of Fairfax Photo Library)

said assimilation meant nothing less than ‘the complete absorption of the aboriginal race by the white community’, and went on: ‘The aim, as it was in the ruthless days of exploitation, is that eventually the aborigines as a race will disappear.’ In support of this critique, it quoted Alan Duncan: ‘Aborigines are a proud people. They don’t want to lose their identity, become just like us. We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can change them, make them adopt our ways. For instance, aborigines have a very strong community feeling; they share everything . . . They don’t accept the individualism of white people.’ These articles prompted a correspondence to the Herald, leading it to comment in an editorial on 26 December that ‘there is a new and lively interest in New South Wales in aboriginal welfare. It seems to be a questing, deep-seated interest, concerned . . . with a systematic rethinking of policy.’ The editorial suggested that present assimilation policy should be abandoned for one of integration, which would mean the survival of Aborigines as a ‘separate and distinct segment of the Australian people’. Then there was the question of where to go. All indications were that the towns in the north of New South Wales had the most blatant discrimination, and SAFA had settled on this region as its focus back in September. The meeting of 21 December agreed on an itinerary: the bus


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would go, as Jim Spigelman wrote to Jack Horner of the AboriginalAustralian Fellowship three days later, ‘from here to Dubbo, then north to Walgett, Moree, etc. then touching the Queensland border on our way to the coast and through Lismore, Kempsie [sic] etc’. Wellington, Gulargambone, Boggabilla, Tabulam, Bowraville and Taree had yet to be included. The students tried hard to learn as much as they could about conditions in the targeted towns. None of them, including Charles, had direct first-hand experience, for Charles was from central Australia and had now been living in cities for some years. He did, though, gain a good understanding of conditions generally from the Aboriginal people he met through his work at the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. Charles was exceptionally busy working at the Foundation during the summer vacation: Sam Lipski reported that, in his first eight weeks, ‘Perkins has had nearly 1000 interviews with job-seekers, with evicted families, abandoned children, people seeking information about social services, about education and many who come because they have nothing else to do’. An excellent opportunity to research the situation further in at least some of the towns—Walgett, Moree and Kempsey—came when Charles was invited to join an 1800-mile (2900-kilometre) light-plane tour through New South Wales in early January in the company of Ted Noffs, the Australian journalist Graham Williams and photographer Aubrey McCarthy. The group visited the southern town of Nowra, the western towns of Cowra and Wilcannia, the northwestern towns of Walgett, Moree and Armidale and the east coast town of Kempsey. The four newspaper stories by Williams were scathing in their condemnation of the racial inequality endemic in country towns. The first, on 4 January, focused on Aboriginal poverty in Wilcannia, and the second on racial discrimination in pools, hotels and cinemas in places like Moree, Walgett and Kempsey, concluding: ‘Racial discrimination is the result of deeprooted prejudice.’ The third focused on schooling conditions in Cowra, and the final article in the series discussed the assimilation and advancement leagues in Armidale, Kempsey and Nowra. Charles gave a talk about this trip to a general SAFA meeting on 13 January. This meeting also confirmed the timing of the Freedom Ride—the two weeks before Orientation Week, that is, the second half of February—and that the itinerary would be through the towns previously listed, adding Taree. There was a major discussion about whether the tour


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would focus only on the survey, or on demonstrations as well. The notice for the meeting had said: ‘This general meeting is most critical and all members and others are requested to attend’, and indeed it was critical. The issue had become the nature of the tour itself. As Jim later wrote, the survey became for a while a ‘bone of contention’ between those who had come from the Christian societies—who favoured it—and those from the ALP Club—who accepted it ‘somewhat begrudgingly’. Colin Bradford remembers that ‘in the planning stages there was a real argument about whether we should be demonstrating at all, or whether we should be just getting factual information then coming back and doing something about it’. So great had this disagreement become that at one stage Jim wrote: ‘It was suggested that no demonstration should occur during the vacation and that only a social survey should be carried out.’ Colin remembered David Ellyard, in particular, ‘arguing that we should just have a fact-finding mission and not be demonstrating as well’. Charles himself seems to have briefly favoured the survey over the demonstrations, announcing in SAFA Talkabout (No. 3) in early January that at the General Meeting on 13 January he would ‘explain reasons why emphasis is now on the Social Survey aspect more so than the integrating of cafés, pool, etc’. The motion to focus only on the survey and to abandon demonstrations was, however, ‘overwhelmingly defeated’ by the General Meeting, and a compromise was reached. The Freedom Ride would give equal emphasis to both. Indeed, this was the view of a number of students in any case—especially those in the Labour Club who, as we shall see, were active in preparing the survey. In the end, Ted Noffs agreed to organise and direct the survey, and to oversee the processing of the results. The survey idea impressed the media. Sam Lipski, for example, noted that ‘they are obviously on the tour with a different expectation than American students. They are not going so much to right a social injustice, the form of which is clear and known, as to find out what form the problem takes.’ The Australian carried a story on 20 January which emphasised the survey and the role of Ted Noffs. Yet by and large the students seem to have constructed the survey themselves. It eventually had six parts, with a one-page sheet of questions for each. They were: Aboriginal Attitudes; European Attitudes; Living Conditions; Health; Occupations and Incomes; and Schooling and Education. Bob Gallagher remembers that a lot of time was spent in the committee meetings on


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preparing the questionnaires. So too does Alan Outhred, who recalls that, on Colin’s suggestion, he had ‘participated in various working groups, for example, designing the surveys that we were going to do’. Alan, Bob and Colin were all friends. Bob was in the Labour Club; he was an Engineering student who had grown up in Ryde, his father an official in the Federated Engine Drivers’ and Firemen’s Association, and his mother a selfemployed dressmaker and occasional factory worker. Alan was another doctor’s son, his father at that time Chief Medical Officer for the Joint Coal Board with fairly radical political views. His mother was a strong supporter of Aboriginal rights and later a member of the Save Our Sons movement in opposition to Australia’s involvement in the war in Vietnam. The students sought assistance from academics in devising the questionnaires, with Jim Spigelman contacting several departments within the university. Tom Brennan, the head of the Social Work Department, gave a talk on doing a sociological survey, and how to interview people. Wendy remembers getting help in developing the questionnaire on ‘European Attitudes’: I was involved in that, being a Psych student and being interested in that, and there was a book, The Roots of Prejudice or something—from which I gained a lot about the dynamics behind prejudice and I remember going to—I think it was—the School of Clinical Psychology, there was somebody there who helped me put the questionnaire together . . . the questionnaires had to be written in a non-loaded fashion, so that we weren’t actually leading people to give an answer in one direction or another. Aidan Foy and John Powles devised the survey on Health, while Bob Gallagher rather ingeniously devised the one on Living Conditions which mainly focused on housing: As I say, I was the engineer and so there were a number of these survey questionnaires assembled and I constructed the one on the housing conditions, the condition of the houses. I got the . . . standard council planning regulations about light and ventilation, water, sewerage, electricity and sort of constructed a questionnaire around that.


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The survey not only received praise from the media, but it also assisted SAFA in its approach to the Aborigines Welfare Board for permission to enter the Aboriginal stations and reserves it controlled. The board by this time had been in existence for 25 years. It was the successor to the earlier Aborigines Protection Board, which had been established in 1883 when it became clear that the Aboriginal population would not disappear as had been generally thought during the ‘frontier’ period, and new policies of protection, surveillance and ‘improvement’ were put in place. The Protection Board had established a number of reserves throughout the colony specifically for Aboriginal use, and under the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 acquired much-increased powers over the Aboriginal peoples it controlled. For example, the board now had the power to break up those reserves where white farmers wanted the land, to concentrate large populations in others, and to move the people on and off reserves at will. It also intensified its program of removing Aboriginal children from their parents and placing them in institutions that trained them to become useful as labourers and domestic servants. After Aboriginal discontent rose to a peak in the late 1930s, and the system of surveillance and control seemed to be coming unstuck, the Aborigines Protection Board was abolished in 1939 and replaced by the Aborigines Welfare Board the following year. The new board was charged with the task of implementing the policy of assimilation, which meant trying to persuade and educate Aborigines to take their place as individuals or small families in white society. Its entire assimilation project was in direct conflict with the wishes of the vast majority of white townsfolk, who wanted Aboriginal people kept out of town, and opposed Aboriginal access to schools, clubs, picture theatres and swimming pools. They were especially opposed to the central plank in board policy: the relocation of individual Aboriginal families to houses in town, and many town councils refused the board permission to acquire land for this purpose within town boundaries. The result was that in 1965 few Aboriginal people actually lived in houses in town, and some of those who did had ceased to identify as Aboriginal. With a fast-growing Aboriginal population, the closure of some reserves and the inability to rent houses in town, an increasing number of Aboriginal people lived in unofficial shanty towns on unauthorised land, often now-disused common land on the edge of town, or along riverbanks. These shanty towns were usually without a clean water supply, proper sanitation, any form of electricity, proper roads, rubbish collection or other town services.


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On the other hand, the people there were more or less beyond board control, and often regarded themselves as having more autonomy and independence than those on the stations and reserves. Almost 7000 people did live on the stations and reserves run by the board. In these years, Aboriginal people often had to make a direct tradeoff between reasonable living conditions and freedom from surveillance and petty interference. Housing over 2600 people between them, the sixteen stations run by the board in 1964 usually had basic weatherboard houses, and facilities like a school, a recreation hall or a rudimentary medical centre. Each station had full-time white resident supervision, usually with a married couple in charge as manager and matron. The residents were employed in outside occupations, yet direct supervision of the people remained extensive. These sixteen stations were often referred to somewhat confusingly as ‘missions’, which they were not; they were government run and managed enclosed communities. Between the stations and the shanty towns, along the scale of Aboriginal options, lay the reserves, 42 of them, housing over 4000 people. These were also under board control, but were distinguished from the stations in not having a resident white manager. Their inhabitants were, however, supervised to some degree by a range of people—perhaps the teacher at the reserve school where there was one, or the local off-site board welfare officer, or—most frequently—the local police. The reserves also had a much lower level of housing and facilities than the stations. While they had some homes built by the board, they consisted mainly of makeshift homes built by the Aboriginal residents themselves from discarded materials. The Freedom Riders could visit the shanty towns and the towndwellers relatively easily, but they needed board permission to visit those who lived on stations and reserves. Requests for permission had to go to full meetings of the board, held once a month. In mid-January, Charles and Jim went to see the chair of the board, Mr A.G. Kingsmill, and soon afterwards, on 18 January, Charles wrote him a formal letter seeking permission to enter ‘all reserves, plus missions, and town homes of Aboriginal people’ on the planned route through Wellington, Dubbo, Walgett, Moree, the Queensland border, Lismore, and back to Sydney. The main object of the tour, he wrote, was the ‘comprehensive survey of Aboriginal life in the main towns visited’, under the direction of ‘the Rev. T.D. Noffs who did a similar survey in America’. He also mentioned


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the more political purpose of the tour: ‘SAFA proposes also to integrate certain theatres, swimming pools, etc. which discriminate against Aboriginal people’, and pointed out that the ‘tactics will follow the pattern set by the Rev. Martin Luther King. It is passive non-violent action.’ He enclosed a copy of ‘Our Struggle’. Charles went on to reassure Kingsmill that the students ‘do not intend to create confusion or disturbances that will lead to violent action’. The board replied that it would consider his application at its next meeting on 16 February, three days after the tour had begun, and instructed its managers not to grant permission to the students to enter the stations and reserves until then. It also promised that as soon as the decision was made, telegrams would be sent to all the board’s officers en route. This meant the students would have to leave Sydney without the all-important permission, something which must have caused some concern to Charles, Jim and the others. However, they decided to go right ahead and hope for the best. The background research went on. Jim received a valuable letter from Jack Horner, the non-Aboriginal secretary of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship for eight years from 1958. Horner had written to SAFA in September when the original Freedom Ride publicity went out, offering to supply information and contacts if the students wanted it. Now, on 24 December, Jim took up the offer. After reading the fellowship’s Monthly Bulletin, he wrote to Horner ‘that you could be of great importance to our tour’. He outlined the itinerary and requested information on ‘instances of discrimination in this approximate area’, as well as names and addresses of people to contact in the towns. Horner’s reply on 19 January was long and informative. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘you will find that discrimination and prejudice are greatest where there are large concentrations of Aborigines, e.g. Kempsey district, Walgett, Woodenbong, and least where there are only small groups, e.g. Yamba, MacLean, Casino.’ He outlined some specific instances, as follows: Kempsey—Baths and Public halls. Kinchella Boys’ Home, from which many boys have absconded lately. We understand there is no longer an ‘Aboriginal ward’ at the hospital—but are Aborigines treated in exactly the same way as Europeans, or put on verandahs, etc.? Is Green Hills School (nominally a Public School) still used solely by aborigines, other parents preferring to pay bus fares to send their children into town?


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Moree—We have heard that the school bus picks up Aboriginal children from the Station after it has delivered other children to school, and takes them home before school finishes, so that they lose up to an hour a day. Moree has a very bad name for discrimination generally— a sort of hard-core attitude, which should yield you a lot of material. Walgett—no doubt you have all the material on this town. We had correspondence with the manager (Mr White) of the Oasis HotelMotel, in which he admitted putting up a notice ‘Aborigines by invitation only’ . . . There are many issues worth taking up in places like Walgett, but it is essential to pick the unassailable ones, and to check carefully the facts given. Horner also enclosed a list of stations and reserves, with numbers of people living on each one, and people to contact in each town—school teachers, ministers of religion, Aboriginal leaders like Pearl Gibbs in Dubbo and Frank Roberts in Lismore, and other interested individuals. Horner’s letter went on to outline the AAF approach. It sought, he said, ‘to give Aborigines some say in their own affairs’. The Welfare Board, he wrote: gives no opportunity to assume responsibility, with stations under the control of a manager, who has wide powers, and the need to get his permission even to visit their families. There is no provision for a committee of residents to make their own decisions. There is little education, and most adult Aborigines are barely literate. The Board is so unpopular with Aborigines that they decline to get involved in its policies. Although Aborigines in NSW are eligible to vote in state and Federal elections, only a minority do so. His letter concluded with warm wishes: ‘We are convinced that this will be very valuable, and we wish you very well indeed.’ Jim replied gratefully five days later, seeking further information, which Horner helpfully supplied. Despite all their preparations, the students had in fact relatively little direct contact with Aboriginal people living in the towns to be visited. Charles was still seen by the Aboriginal people there as an outsider. Alan Duncan, who had very extensive contacts with people in these towns, recalled in 1994:


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There was a little bit of a negative attitude, I suppose more apprehension than anything else, because [through] my work with Aboriginal communities, they as far as I’m aware, were not consulted very much at all. Now that’s not a criticism, it’s just a fact. And some of the older people there, Ella Simons for example at Taree, who was a matriarch there; I’m trying to remember Mary Dureaux at Kempsey, her attitude, I think it wasn’t quite as negative in a way as say Ella— but a lot of the older people on the Aboriginal stations were very apprehensive about what would happen (a) when the students arrived and (b) after they’d gone. This was really what the worry was, what was going to be the effect on the local community about people busting in, you know, stirring up a hornet’s nest and shooting off again, so that was the worry. At the same time as the students were researching the trip, they were also working hard to raise enough money to hire a bus. Beth Hansen organised the tenders, choosing Saint’s Bus Company (which still exists), which charged £460 after a £77 concession. The earlier publicity had attracted some donations, but they were nowhere near this amount. There were other ways of raising money, like the sale of Christmas cards with an Aboriginal motif, organised by Chris Page, which brought in £30. Several lunchtime folk concerts were held at the university during term time, raising £62, and a public folk concert, organised almost single-handedly by Pat Healy, netted £72. This concert was held in Paddington Town Hall on Thursday, 21 January, with non-Aboriginal folk singers Gary Shearston, Jeannie Lewis and Declan Affley and others, and Aboriginal singers Jenny Bush and Alan Moarywaalla. A good deal of the money for the bus tour in the end came from the students themselves. Student members of SAFA paid 2 shillings membership, and those going on the Freedom Ride had each to pay £10 to contribute to the cost of the bus and food. In the end, the £460 Publicity notice for folk needed for the bus came from the funds concert to raise money for raised by all these means, and additional the Freedom Ride.


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SAFA subscriptions levied after the bus returned. The main approach, though, was to keep costs down. SAFA looked for free accommodation in church halls and country showgrounds. Warwick Richards remembers that, because Charles had contacts with the Methodist church through Ted Noffs, he hoped that the Methodists ‘would provide a sort of a network of support’; this, he says, ‘was a bit controversial obviously’. Alex Mills remembers that he wanted the Presbyterians to be involved. When people at one SAFA meeting asked ‘How are we going to do the washing?’ and ‘How are we going to eat on this trip around?’, he thought: Well, why not do things like contacting a few of the Presbyterian churches around and ask some people to cook a bit of food for us, get a few things organised like that. That just sort of seemed a fairly reasonable thing to do, and I guess I was a few years older than a few other people who hadn’t had those experiences. So I somehow seemed to get involved in it as the quarter master or words to that effect . . . I know I ended up having a bit of an office—a phone and an office there in the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs for the last few weeks doing something about organising. Pat Healy and Beth Hansen actually bought the food, though. Pat remembers going to ‘one of the big bulk food stores down in the Dixon St, Haymarket area’. In addition to Alex’s efforts with the Presbyterians, Jim Spigelman wrote many letters to churches, councils and agricultural societies. Showgrounds were offered at Lismore and Kempsey, and a National Fitness Hut in Warwick. Church halls were made available in many towns, and some of the letters of permission survive. In two of the most important towns, Walgett and Moree, church halls were made available for free. Reverend P.J. Dowe, the vicar at St Peter’s Church of England in Walgett, who will reappear in our story, wrote saying the students could stay in the hall on 14 and 15 February. Ted Ryan, of the Methodist parsonage in Moree, also wrote, saying ‘the Church hall would be available for your group as a dormitory’. He mentioned also that: ‘I wrote to Charles Perkins and volunteered to help in any way I could if he would let me know exactly what the team intends to do here and how I might assist. I have not received any information. Be assured of our cooperation.’


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Jim also wrote to a number of unions seeking support and information. Though generally pro-Aboriginal at this time, especially after the ACTU policy of 1963, the unions contacted were not as enthusiastic as SAFA might have wished, largely because they seem to have feared that SAFA’s militant tactics might disturb their own longer-term strategies in support of Aboriginal demands. The Teachers’ Federation is an interesting example. It was to be expected that the federation would be helpful and supportive, given its strong commitment to the cause of Aboriginal education. Gloria Phelan, its research officer, replied to Jim’s letter offering her personal support and referring his request to the federation executive. However, when the letter finally came on 28 October from I.G. Lancaster, the general secretary, it was not the support SAFA expected: While the Federation agrees with the need to publicise cases of discrimination, it suggests that this type of action is premature at this moment, and may have an undesirable aftermath as far as the Aboriginal people themselves are concerned. You will appreciate, therefore, that the Federation cannot accede to your request at this juncture. The Australian Workers’ Union, New South Wales branch, wrote a fairly formal letter, advising Jim that ‘there are no legal discriminations concerning the employment of Aborigines in the State of NSW, all awards and acts of parliament give them equal rights’, and seeking information on any breaches of the law. Jim also wrote to the Liquor and Allied Trades Union, seeking support for SAFA’s plan to desegregate clubs and hotels. Aboriginal people had been barred by law for a century from drinking or buying alcohol (unless they had an exemption certificate); this did not actually prevent drinking, but it did make it more clandestine and expensive, and served to exclude Aboriginal people from public bars, clubs and other forms of sociality. After a campaign led by the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, the relevant section of the Aborigines Protection Act had been repealed in March 1963. There was now no legal basis for any refusal to serve liquor to Aborigines on the grounds of their race, though there was also no legislation as yet making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race. Some publicans still refused to serve Aboriginal customers at all, or served them only in designated parts of their hotel. One challenge to this practice occurred with demonstrations in January 1964 of six Aboriginal people, along with


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representatives of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, a Mirror journalist, two Members of Parliament and Channel 7 at the Clifton Hotel in Redfern, fast becoming an area in which many Aboriginal people lived. The hotel had finally agreed to serve Aboriginal people on the same basis as others. Yet some city and many country hotels continued to segregate their customers. The union replied to Jim on 9 February rather cautiously: ‘We are prepared . . . to examine the merits of any particular instance and take any action deemed to be appropriate.’ Still searching for more information, Jim Spigelman also wrote in late January to church bodies which had had significant contact with Aboriginal people in the towns. Noel Flint, the pastor at the Church of Christ, Gilgandra, wrote suggesting the students visit the schools and dwellings in Gilgandra. He already knew something of the students’ plans, having met two of the students, one of them Chris Page, on a preliminary tour a week or two earlier. While little record of this trip remains, we do know that they visited Gilgandra, that their tour cost £13, and that they arrived back in Sydney only a few days before the bus left. The Reverend Flint now told Jim that ‘there is not much discrimination’ in Gilgandra, though ‘the Western Stores and Nelson’s timber yard require a guarantor before allowing credit’. He added the information that in nearby Gulargambone ‘they may go to the counter and be served but cannot sit at the table in the restaurant and there is a separate section in the theatre’. Gulargambone was added to the itinerary very late, and this letter may well have been the catalyst. At the end of January, the fourth edition of SAFA Talkabout informed everyone that an itinerary had been fixed and called a General Meeting for 4 February. This was the deadline for those intending to go to pay their £4 deposit. An itinerary was printed, showing that the bus would visit and survey ten towns—Wellington, Gulargambone, Walgett, Moree, Boggabilla, Tabulam, Lismore, Bowraville, Kempsey and Taree—with some other towns on the way as stopovers. The trip would cover a total distance of 1390 miles (over 2300 kilometres). Finally, everything had been done. On Friday, 12 February, the bus, the 29 students, some parents and well-wishers gathered at the university. I returned from my family home in Newcastle and joined the group of students waiting to leave. It was after midnight when we finally all boarded the bus and waved goodbye. Aidan Foy remembers us ‘all driving


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off in the dark’. As the white bus slowly went down the hill and then out along Parramatta Road through Sydney’s western suburbs and along the Great Western Highway to the towns of the west and north, our thoughts began to turn to the unknown and possibly dangerous situation we were about to enter. Each of us had our own thoughts on the opportunities, pleasures, dangers and perils that might lie ahead. The American Freedom Rides had been attended by violence. Could anything similar occur in country Australia? Despite all the preparation, few of us had any real idea of what lay ahead.


3

Chapter

On the way to Walgett

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hile the students are chatting and gradually falling asleep on the bus in the early hours of the morning, let’s pause and learn more about those we’ve already met, and meet the rest. What did they have in common, and how did they differ? What were their family and class backgrounds, their political and religious beliefs, and their fields of study? For most of the journey, Charles Perkins was the only Aboriginal student. Gary Williams, though involved in SAFA, felt wary of going to places outside his own country. He joined the tour when it reached Bowraville. This nearly all-white composition marked the Australian Freedom Ride off from the American Rides that had inspired it. As Sam Lipski noted, on the American Freedom Rides, ‘the dynamism for the freedom riders was supplied largely by Negro university students themselves’. There are some other interesting features of the group. About two-thirds were from one faculty, the Faculty of Arts, and the rest were divided between Science (six undergraduates and one graduate), Medicine (four undergraduates) and Engineering (one). All but six were entering just their second or third year of university study. All but one—John Gowdie, whom we’ll meet shortly—were from the University of Sydney. There had been some talk in the preparation phase of students joining from universities in Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, but this idea seems to have faded. The class backgrounds of the students were extremely diverse. They 62


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ranged from wealthy (Darce Cassidy) to solidly middle class (most of the others) to working class (Colin, Bob, Brian and Pat). Most were from Sydney, but several had grown up in country towns, including Alex in Orange, John Powles in Deniliquin and John Butterworth partly in Moree, while I had grown up in Broken Hill and Newcastle. Just over one-third of the students were from the organised Left. The largest group came from the Labour Club, some of whose members were in the Communist Party, or its youth organisation, the Eureka Youth League (EYL). Brian, Pat, Colin, Bob and Alan, who had been involved in the planning and preparation, were all in the Labour Club. Three more joined at this point. One was Norm Mackay, a second-year Science student along with Brian, Colin and Alan, and a close friend of Brian’s. His parents were both teachers and Communist Party members living near the Aarons family in Fairfield in the western suburbs of Sydney. Another was Louise Higham, a good friend of mine. Her father, like Alan’s and Chris Page’s, was a left-wing doctor and her mother a nurse and receptionist for the home-based practice. Both parents were Labor voters and atheists, with wide cultural interests. She was just about to enter her second year of Medicine, which she abandoned later and transferred to Arts. She was a member of the Folk Music Club, where she ‘received the powerful “Jim Crow must go” message of many of the songs in the concerts at the Wallace theatre’. I was the last in this group. I was about to enter the third year of an Arts degree, specialising in Modern History. My father was an academic scientist, a senior lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Newcastle, while my mother had just gone to the same university as a mature-age student to do an Arts degree, and was to become a psychologist on graduation. Both were committed communists, but it was my mother who introduced me to Aboriginal politics. She was involved not only through the Union of Australian Women, which strongly supported Aboriginal rights, but also in 1961 established, along with several others, the Newcastle Trades Hall Aboriginal Advancement Committee. This committee campaigned in support of a rent strike by the people at Purfleet mission station near Taree, a protest against the appalling state of housing and an incipient demand for land rights. As a result of my mother’s activism, Aboriginal people from Purfleet came to our home in Newcastle from time to time, and I gained in my teenage years some idea of Aboriginal conditions and political activism.


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Shortly before the Freedom Ride started, I had written an article, ‘The Fight for Aboriginal Rights’, for Left Forum, the extremely transient journal of the Labour Club. It indicates the strong influence of the Communist Party’s position on Aboriginal issues on my own thinking, namely the need for equality, and the importance of black and white people organising together for Aboriginal rights. It also reads now like the work of a History student. It began: Ever since the first European settlement of Australia in 1788 the Australian white population has degraded the Aboriginal population, originally by methods of shooting, poisoning, starvation, brutal seizure of land and destruction of the aboriginal social organisation, and later by the more ‘progressive’ policy of ‘Protection’. It went on to discuss the destruction of the population, and the limitations on Aboriginal people’s basic freedoms: ‘Innumerable instances of social discrimination exist all over Australia, whether in a place of leisure such as a hotel bar or a swimming pool, a place of work, or a place of social welfare such as a hospital or school.’ This history of destruction and discrimination existed, I argued, because the Aboriginal population ‘by its very existence constituted a threat to the European acquisition of the land’. In addition, ‘the new Australian settler, like his counterparts in Africa, Asia and America, used aborigines as a source of cheap labour’. I concluded with a call for racial equality and an end to legal and economic discrimination: ‘This can only be done through the development of a strong integration movement consisting of aboriginal and white Australians, which must aim firstly to secure those formal rights which are still not held by aborigines, and secondly to attack and destroy the discrimination and hostile racial attitudes now existing.’ With a quarter of the students connected to the Labour Club, the Eureka Youth League or the Communist Party, it is understandable that Charles and Jim were both concerned about the fact and the appearance of too many communists on the trip. The Bulletin had reported on the impending Freedom Ride several weeks earlier, offering cautious support but also warning of the dangers of communist influence. Whatever the number of communist students actually on the trip, there was always the danger that the Freedom Ride could be written off as a communist plot, given the general tendency to associate any radical cause with



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communist influence and the strong actual association of communists with Aboriginal organisations at the time. As Sam Lipski accurately put it: ‘The Communist Party’s interest in Aborigines dates back to the party’s inception, and has changed as the international Communist line has changed. But at no time in its history has CPA interest in and work amongst Aborigines been more active than it is today.’ To counter charges of communist influence, Charles and Jim announced publicly that they would not allow a communist ‘stacking’ of the tour, and that they had discouraged members of the Eureka Youth League from enrolling. Whether the latter was literally true or not (and there is no evidence that it was), this announcement did effectively remove the question of communist influence from most coverage of the tour. In all its publicity, SAFA played down the fact that up to a quarter of the students were indeed associated either with the CPA, the EYL or the Labour Club. The students concerned also kept their political allegiances muted, for that was the approach of the time. The question was to reappear, though, as we shall see. There was a group of three students from the ALP Club, to become four when Hall Greenland joined the bus in Walgett. There would have been five, had not Jim Spigelman at the end of 1964 led a breakaway group which soon became the more centrist Fabian Society. The four had been involved in either the May 1964 demonstration for US civil rights, or the July rally and demonstration in Hyde Park, or in SAFA itself. Aidan Foy had been deeply involved in the organising phase, and now joined the Freedom Ride. He had arrived in Australia with his mother as an assisted immigrant from northern England in May 1962 (‘Australia being as far as my mother could possibly get from my father at the time’). His mother eventually became a schoolteacher ‘so that she could get a job to keep us because my father didn’t’. In his Labor-voting family, ‘people who voted for any other party were nearly as bad as Protestants but not quite as bad’. Aidan remembers that initially some of the students in the ALP Club had described SAFA as ‘a middle-class guilt, condescending organisation, we thought there were more important things at that stage. And then the bus tour idea started and suddenly everybody wanted to be part of it.’ At this point, Darce Cassidy, Paddy Dawson and Hall Greenland decided to come. Three of the four—Hall, Aidan and Darce—leant towards the Trotskyists in their political position, while Paddy, the son of a noteworthy academic at the university, Madge Dawson, was probably


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more anarchist and libertarian in his politics than the rest of the group. Darce Cassidy’s position was a little unusual. As a full-time ABC employee and part-time student, he needed to get time off to join the Freedom Ride: I heard about the Freedom Ride on the grapevine, and asked the ABC for permission to cover it. Initially they said no. I had not been there long enough to have any annual leave, but had accrued three days off in lieu of overtime. Finally they agreed to let me have two days on duty, and three days’ leave. Together with the two weekends, this would give me nine days . . . My role became a bit ambiguous. I was still a student at Sydney University, and a financial member of SAFA. I was also an ABC journalist. The remaining students were from a wide variety of backgrounds, and had quite different reasons for joining in. Two, John Powles and Beth Hansen, came from the Humanist Society. Warwick Richards was in the Students’ Christian Movement. ‘I was the first member of the family to have gone to university. My parents left school at the age of 15 in both cases. My father was a bank officer and my mother was basically a house person who had various part-time jobs but never had a career of any sort.’ Sue Johnston, a History Honours student as I was, came from the very middle-class suburb of Beecroft, and was to become an important figure in SAFA during and after the tour. Her father was a solicitor with the NSW State Railways, dealing with workers’ compensation. Sue had become interested in Aboriginal issues through hearing Paul Robeson sing in Sydney four years earlier and through her university study of race relations in American history. Jim Spigelman was not the only student on the tour born overseas. Machteld Hali was born in Holland and grew up in Indonesia, before arriving in Australia to attend university. Wendy Golding was a secondyear Arts student whose Jewish parents had left Vienna after Hitler annexed Austria, going first to New Zealand and then in 1952 to Australia, with 5-year-old New Zealand-born Wendy. They came, she recalled, from a ‘very middle-class cosmopolitan rather sophisticated background’, and were ‘very small “l” liberal in their thinking’. She said later that ‘because I was very aware of the persecution of the Jews I guess I was very aware of injustice to any peoples anywhere on the basis of



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creed, colour, race, religion—whatever it may be. So that’s probably what gave me a sensitivity to the Aboriginal issue.’ Two months after the Freedom Ride, she wrote in The Bridge, a Jewish magazine, that she had for a long time ‘shuddered at stories of Hitler’s regime and shaken my head about the American Negro situation’. The Freedom Ride offered her ‘the opportunity to put my fine words into action’. Judith Rich, who knew Charles from their Anthropology class, had a similar background to Wendy’s, though she was born in Australia. Her Jewish parents had also left Vienna in 1938 or 1939, and fled as refugees to Australia, where they met and married. She, too, had grown up with an interest in questions of race and racism. Some of the students, such as Alex Mills, came from politically conservative backgrounds. Robyn Iredale joined up because she was about to do an Honours thesis in Geography on rural–urban migration of Aborigines and her lecturer, Diana Howlett, had recommended she join the bus: ‘I was a bit apprehensive because I didn’t know any of the people.’ Robyn was from a large, conservative, religious family in West Ryde, her father an accountant at the Water Board for 43 years, her mother the organist at the Methodist church. She was, she says, ‘basically brought up anti-Aborigine, anti-anybody who was different, and we were even brought up antiCatholic, because that’s what Methodists were like . . . I went off to university and that changed me.’ Another, Derek Molloy, was an Arts student studying Anthropology who had been invited along by his friend, Alex Mills, just four days before the tour. From an Anglican background, his father was a lawyer who had earlier been involved in the Australian administration of Papua New Guinea, and his mother a nurse. He thought the Freedom Ride was to be a survey only, and was taken aback to find it also involved demonstrations against racial discrimination. There are nine students still to introduce. Four of them (John Gowdie, Hall Greenland, Barry Corr and David Pepper) joined later; we will meet them as they join the bus. Five of them, two women and three men, I have not been able to trace for this book. The women were Sue Reeves, a third-year Arts student involved in Abschol; and Helen Gray, a secondyear Arts student. The men were John Butterworth, a third-year Science student; Ray Leppik, a graduate Science student; and Rick Collins, a thirdyear Arts student.

O


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The bus travelled through Sydney’s western suburbs, past Penrith and on to the Great Western Highway as it left the coastal plain and wound up through the Great Dividing Range. After passing through the cool mountain towns of Katoomba and Mt Victoria, the student bus travelled down the slopes to Lithgow and Bathurst, and then on to the Mitchell Highway to the inland town of Orange. A distance of 170 miles, or 280 kilometres, the trip probably took around five hours. The bus arrived at its first stop, Orange, before dawn on Saturday, 13 February. ‘I seem to remember we arrived at Orange in darkness,’ says Bob Gallagher. We went at 8.00 a.m. to the Presbyterian Church of St John’s, a very fine old church with a church hall next door, for breakfast. Pat Healy recalls: ‘Alex had arranged for us all to have breakfast in this large hall. That’s about all I remember. Staggering off the bus to have this wonderful breakfast that was all organised by these country ladies.’ Alex provides some more detail: I’d organised some people in the Presbyterian Church of St John’s there that I’d grown up in to get breakfast for the students, and organised for the Mayor of the town, who happened to be the president of the Labor Party, and the Deputy Mayor to come along and meet up with me . . . We probably had the [local] TV [station] along. I can’t remember, but anyway we got a little bit of hype there. And then I went off to see my cousin and came back late, held the bus up from making a start, so they went crook on me in Orange, which was right—they’re all rearing to go and here’s Millsie off visiting his cousin. At around 9.30 a.m. the bus left Orange, and went on to Wellington, arriving two hours later. Wellington, a pretty town at the junction of the Bell and Macquarie Rivers, had an interesting history. The Aboriginal people in the region were Wiradjuri, one of the most populous Aboriginal groups in New South Wales, who had first encountered Europeans in 1817. Europeans established sheep and cattle farming soon after, with the usual devastating effects on traditional sources of food supply. A prison farm was set up in 1823; when the soldiers and convicts left in 1830, the military buildings were given to the Church Missionary Society. With government funds, a mission was established under the leadership of the Reverend William Watson. The mission emphasised the education



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and segregation of children away from their parents, and agriculture as the basis of civilisation. Aboriginal people were employed on the mission as shepherds, threshers, gardeners, ploughmen and draymen, and some had built and settled into huts. The whole enterprise, wrote social scientist Charles Rowley in The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, resembled a workhouse rather than a place of conversion to Christianity. The missionaries’ efforts were undermined by the contradictions their society presented to the people: ‘The gospel of love was being preached while white men were flogging each other and shooting black men.’ After the closure of the mission in 1843, the Aboriginal people in the Wellington region worked for pastoralists and other employers, and camped on the properties or on the edge of town. Gradually, they came more directly under the purview of the colonial and then state governments of New South Wales. By 1965, Wellington had both a board-managed station known as the Nanima reserve with its own school just out of town, and an Aboriginal shanty town on Crown land near the river. We could not visit the former, as the board had not yet met to consider our application to enter, and had in the interim instructed the manager to keep us out. When we arrived, the police warned us not to go there. Warwick Richards remembers the ‘circling policemen, who were sort of walking suspiciously around the bus’. Of necessity, therefore, our focus had to be the shanty town and the town itself, though there was no sign of Aboriginal families in town. We split up into a number of smaller groups, and I was in one of the groups that went to the shanty town. The idea was that we would conduct our survey, investigate claims of racial discrimination and, if we found any, make some kind of demonstration against them. We had little idea of what to expect. There were few if any contacts between the local Aboriginal community and us students, including Charles. As Rick Collins later remarked: ‘No one who was brought up in the city could’ve known what was going on out there, and we were just a bunch of green kids.’ In that situation, the survey could serve to emphasise, as Brian put it, that ‘we weren’t white students breezing in and kicking up a fuss about Aboriginal rights, we were going to try and talk to Aboriginal people and get their own version of their actual conditions’. Some of the students, however, were not very interested in the survey and thought we should focus on non-violent protests. Darce remembers:


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I think there had been a good deal of debate on the bus, and before, about what we should be doing. Some were pushing the survey, saying that the important thing was gathering the facts. Others were saying that in a broad sense we knew the facts from investigations already carried out. We had a fair knowledge of what the world was like; our task was now to change it through some kind of confrontation. At Wellington, it seemed to me, the survey faction still held the upper hand. Only a few months earlier, Charles Rowley had investigated the situation in Wellington, along with many other towns, as part of his research into the status of Aboriginal people across Australia for the Social Science Research Council. The results of his research were not yet available, and were later published in Outcasts in White Australia, part of his influential trilogy that did so much in the 1970s to inspire non-Aboriginal people’s desire to understand. He had written to Mr H.S. Kitching, the Area Welfare Officer in Dubbo, who provided considerable information about the shanty town. Kitching told Rowley that there were 40 adults and 67 children, living in fourteen dwellings made mainly of scrap iron, and provided a list of the dwellings and their inhabitants, with a column denoting the ‘caste’ of each family—H.C. (half-caste), Q.C. (quartercaste), L.C. (lesser-caste, i.e. less than quarter-caste)—with L.C. the most commonly noted. He also pointed out the local council neither provided services (there was no water or sanitation service) nor control of the settlement, so the people were ‘free to live without restriction as to social standards or social behaviour’. That Saturday afternoon, we got out our survey forms, walked up to the tin shacks on the settlement, introduced ourselves to their residents and asked our questions. Looking back, there is something a little touching about this strange cross-cultural encounter. We were finally about to meet the people whose cause we hoped we understood and wanted to publicise. Would the questionnaires, so carefully prepared in Sydney, be useful or entirely inappropriate? The survey form I had that day was probably the one headed ‘Aboriginal Questionnaire’ and had a total of 29 questions. Some of these sought to elicit the ideas of Aboriginal people about their treatment (‘Are the white people giving the Aborigines a fair chance?’), their sense of worth (‘Are the Aboriginal people as good as the white people in every way?’),



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ideas about committees to ‘deal with Aboriginal assimilation’, the Aborigines Welfare Board, experience in getting jobs, accessing health services, whether their situation had improved at all over the last twenty years, and their views about not being counted in the census. It also asked for opinions about not being accepted for the recently instituted national military service, an issue that had received some media attention during January 1965. One question was ‘Do you think that Aboriginal people are happier than white people?’, while others sought to elicit views on whether Aborigines should be on reserves or in towns, whether ‘the Aborigines should stand up for their rights or just accept the situation as it is?’, whether they should ‘preserve some of the old customs or adopt all the new ones?’, how Aboriginal people were discriminated against, and how ‘the Aboriginal situation could be helped’. Now, either totally or largely untrained as interviewers, we students walked around the settlement just outside Wellington, looking for Aboriginal people to interview. We got a tremendous shock. We really had no idea until this moment what it was we were protesting about. Here it was, the utmost poverty in our well-off First World industrialised country. Pat Healy remembers: ‘Wellington. Dry, dusty. And that’s where we first started to see the living conditions for Aboriginal people. I have a visual memory of Wellington more than anything else. I can just visualise these hot, dusty shacks. I don’t particularly remember what we did there.’ Soon after the Freedom Ride, she told an interviewer that her first reaction had been ‘complete numbness and shock. You know roughly before you go what you are going to face, but you simply don’t realise until you get there and see for yourself. Take the houses they live in. I could hardly believe it when I first saw it.’ I still remember Wellington clearly, for the poverty, and the feeling of trespass. That evening, perhaps realising that this was getting to be something serious and disturbing, I started to write a diary. The diary was written in a Croxley spiral notebook, and I have kept it all these years, through fifteen house moves. I remember writing it each night from then on, sometimes in rather poor light. I deliberately wrote it in a very matter-of-fact way, careful not to say anything that was embarrassing, should it be found and read by another student. There was no privacy on the bus, and the chances of having a diary read were potentially high. It does provide, however, a reminder of many of the details of the bus tour, and some idea of my own experience of it at the time. My first entry concerns our stay in Wellington:


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Interviewed about ten tin shacks of people. Most of us found the questionnaires unsuitable. Houses of tin, mud floors, very overcrowded, kids had eye diseases, had to cart water (very unhealthy) from river. People fairly easy to talk to, kids quite friendly. General picture of extreme poverty but not a great deal of social discrimination. Got seven interviews on the settlement just outside the reserve, and two in the town. General picture of scarcity of jobs. Mainly garden work, which is very seasonal. Average of three months of year out of work. Some working on a dam nearby. Some did shearing jobs. Did not encounter or hear of any women with jobs at all. Did not seem to know much about social services. Thirteen of the completed survey forms for the ‘Aboriginal Questionnaire’ in Wellington survive, nine from women and four from men. Two of the women were named Ah See, possibly descendants of one of the Chinese families that had arrived in the region in the nineteenth century looking for gold, and owned and managed stores and market gardens for decades afterwards. It is difficult, now, to know what to make of these answers, and hard to tell what the students and the Aboriginal people of the settlement understood what each wanted of the other, or thought the other could do. While the respondents varied in their answers to the question ‘Are the white people giving the Aborigines a fair chance?’, all agreed ‘the Aborigines should stand up for their rights’ rather than ‘accept the situation as it is’. Only two thought Aboriginal people should ‘preserve some of the old customs’; the others agreed they should ‘adopt all the new ones’. All said Aboriginal people should live in the towns rather than on reserves. Clearly, the question of acquiring houses in town was uppermost in these answers; when asked how they thought ‘the Aboriginal situation could be helped’ or how the health standards of Aboriginal people could be raised, answers ranged from ‘better housing’, ‘build more homes’, ‘nice homes with water, etc.’ to ‘do away with missions and put Aborigines in towns, mixing’ and ‘put them in town’. When asked for examples of discrimination, the answers included ‘up to twelve months ago not allowed in pubs’, ‘Courthouse Hotel’, ‘hotels, shops’, ‘employment’, ‘putting them out of town’ and ‘won’t let them live in town even if can afford [it]’. While we had been interviewing people at the settlement, Jim and Charles and some of the others had been in town. They asked some local



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Aboriginal people about which pubs discriminated against them, and went to the one named ‘The Courthouse’, which some Aboriginal people said refused to serve them. Jim started capturing the events of the Freedom Ride on super-8 film, to which he added a commentary in 1987. His film shows Darce interviewing an Aboriginal man, whom we then see outside the Courthouse Hotel, talking to Darce and Charles. It seems from my diary that this man was allowed in, but only because he was with the students: ‘The publican said he only prevented Aborigines from coming in “if they were disorderly”.’ Charles then went into the same hotel, and there was some discussion between the barmaid and the publican before they served him. When Darce interviewed him outside the hotel, Charles reported: Oh well the lady, the barmaid, asked me what I wanted and then went over, very reluctantly went over to the tap to serve me and then stopped serving, pouring out the beer, and went and asked the manager. The manager came over and had a conference and they both looked at me very slyly and then decided that I was a possibility, a doubtful case and so they decided to give me a glass of beer. Very reluctantly, after asking me twice, the manager himself that is. This meant that the students did not have direct evidence of racial discrimination in the hotel, making it difficult to demonstrate about the matter. Darce also interviewed the local Salvation Army officer, who said there was no discrimination in Wellington’s hotels, as did one of the drinkers he interviewed. He went with a team administering the ‘European Questionnaire’. This form asked people to agree or disagree with a range of questions, such as ‘The Aborigines are just as honest and public-spirited citizens as the Europeans. Do you agree?’, ‘The Aborigines are morally inferior to most other people. Do you agree?’, and ‘Does it worry you that the Aboriginal population is increasing at a rate about twice as fast as that of the European population?’ And so on, for seventeen questions, followed by four questions where respondents were to choose between two alternatives—for example, ‘Would you prefer Aborigines to live on the reserves or in the town?’ Finally, there were two open-ended questions, one asking ‘What sort of qualities would a “good” Aborigine have?’ and the other asking about the qualities of a ‘bad’ Aborigine.


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While these filled-in survey forms have not apparently survived, Darce did record an interview with some of the local white townsfolk. The theme in their comments was that Aboriginal people did not know the value of houses, money or education—though also, in one case, that ‘if they had the same chance as the whites, nobody really knows’. Darce also went with a group who spoke with the Anglican minister, Archdeacon Graham. He saw only one problem, that of ‘educating the Aboriginal so that they can be integrated into our community . . . They know so little about employer–employee relationships, about landlord and tenant relationships, and to my mind about personal hygiene. They need to be educated on those matters so they can take their place in the community.’ A child told Darce that Aboriginal children were her friends, though her mother would not allow Aboriginal children to play at her house, as ‘they make a mess of me dolls and that’. Aidan Foy and John Powles, meanwhile, had investigated the hospital. They probably took with them the Health survey that they had devised, of which no copy seems to have survived. Aidan remembers going to the tiny hospital ‘and the matron showing me the little black babies in the hospital, obviously keen to tell me how well they looked after them’. He also remembers interviewing a general practitioner. ‘The medical people interviewed by and large welcomed us. I think they thought they’d get some more resources if there was a bit of a fuss . . . We just marched in and asked matron to please answer some questions, and in every case that I can recall she did.’ There were three other questionnaires prepared by the students, which may have been used that day. In addition to those on attitudes and health, there was an ‘Occupations and Incomes’ survey, with ten questions about employment, including the nature of the employment, wages, training, locality, union membership and discrimination on the job, and seven questions about unemployment, concerning its duration, nature of the unemployed person’s training, union membership, social and unemployment benefits, and reasons for unemployment. The fifth questionnaire in the survey was on living conditions, and again, I have no copy. In view of the centrality of housing issues in Aboriginal politics at the time, this is rather a shame. The sixth, also seemingly lost, focused on schooling and education, and was designed to be put to school principals in each town. It asked about the number of Aboriginal students who completed primary school, the numbers in each class in high school,



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non-attendance, the nature of and reasons for success and failure in exams, ideas about mixed versus segregated schools, curriculum, standards of homework, levels of acceptance and thoughts about employing Aboriginal teachers. Later in the afternoon, the students compared notes. They agreed that, although there was some evidence of racial discrimination, especially in the Courthouse Hotel, there was nothing substantial enough to justify a demonstration. Although Wellington may have had an assimilation organisation in the early 1960s (the board report said it did), there was no sign of it in 1965, and if there was one, it may have been largely or entirely white. In any case, the students had not made contact with politically active locals, and this was a major barrier to any further action. Many years later, Charles recalled that the students hadn’t been able to take the matter further partly because he, Charles, had in fact been served in the hotel and partly because: There weren’t enough Aboriginal people around to support us, and we wanted to get Aboriginal people to support the things we did. So after a while we decided to leave it at that and go on. We went on to the next town. There was discrimination in the pubs there, but it was more sophisticated, it wasn’t so blatant, and we wanted a clear-cut case of discrimination. And with that, at around 5.30 p.m., the bus left town for the nearby large town of Dubbo. We had been in Wellington for a total of five, perhaps six, hours. We were learning a lot, and indeed it could be argued that it was in Wellington that we started to become a group. Jim Spigelman later said: ‘At the outset we were not yet a unit—and didn’t become one till Wellington.’ The bus arrived in Dubbo an hour later. We all had dinner, went for a swim in the local council pool, and then walked to the Dubbo Hotel, where we noticed a sign above the doorway: ‘Aborigines not allowed in the Lounge without the Licensee’s permission.’ This same hotel had a large Aboriginal clientele in the public bar—in part because, as Charles Rowley later wrote, ‘that was where Aborigines had got their supplies when it was illegal to sell to them’. We didn’t do anything about it, but instead went to the Methodist church where we were to stay. Alex Mills remembers that the Methodist minister, John Mason, welcomed us, and


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that he was ‘the guy who later became the leader of the Liberal Party’. That evening, Alex visited Jack Gowdie, the Presbyterian minister in Dubbo, and told him, his wife and his son John about the bus ride, and what it was about, as Alex understood it. John, a first-year student at the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, and involved in its Society for Aboriginal Advancement, decided to join us. Gowdie had gone to school with Aboriginal children, and at UNE helped with a school support scheme for Aboriginal children. He had also been influenced by reading Charles Duguid’s No Dying Race, which began with a quote from John Ruskin he still remembered pretty accurately 30 years later: I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy it. I heard a falsehood told, and was compelled to deny it. Nothing else was possible for me. I knew not what would come of my actions, or whether I was fit for them, but here was a lie, full set in front of me, and there was no way round it but over it. For us, Dubbo was simply an overnight stop, but in fact it was a place of some significance in Aboriginal Australian history. It had traditionally been an important camping area before European settlement, and continued as a centre of religious activity, with the Aborigines Inland Mission located there, and large religious gatherings being held there from time to time. It had been a centre of Aboriginal protest in 1938–39, when William Ferguson and Pearl Gibbs led one arm of the all-Aboriginal Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) seeking equal rights (the other arm of the organisation was based in Sydney, and led by Jack Patten). The all-Aboriginal political movement of the late 1930s is probably now best remembered for the ‘Day of Mourning’ it held on Australia Day, 26 January 1938, in protest at the triumphal sesquicentennial celebrations, emphasising that for Aboriginal people white settlement was not something to commemorate and celebrate. In rural New South Wales, the target of protest was the Aborigines Protection Board; Gibbs and Ferguson wanted nothing less than its abolition. In December 1938, a meeting of the APA at Talbragar, the riverside Aboriginal reserve 5 miles (8 kilometres) out of town, called for support for the agricultural development of Talbragar, Nanima and Burra Bee Dee reserve at Coonabarabran. The following year, the APA mounted a major campaign against the board for moving people around against their will, providing poor schooling,



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denying social welfare benefits and removing children. A major conference of the APA in Dubbo over Easter 1939, with 60 Murris attending, criticised not only the board, but also the white towns for segregating schools and hospitals. The APA faded away during the war years. On Sunday, 14 February 1965, we were up by 6.30 a.m., and left with our new recruit, John Gowdie, on board at 9.15 a.m. There was as yet no newspaper or television coverage of the Freedom Ride, but someone must have had a radio, for we heard there was some local radio publicity about our presence in the area. The next stop was Gulargambone, not far from the Castlereagh River, in what had once been Kawambarai land, just north of Wiradjuri country. Just 30 miles (48 kilometres) from the slightly larger town of Gilgandra, it was—and remains—a very small town indeed. It had one hotel, one café, one grocery store and several hundred permanent residents. The white residents lived on one side of the Castlereagh River, and the Aboriginal people on the other. About 120 people lived on the reserve, less than a third of its population of five years before, and it was to halve its population again within three years of our visit. It was no wonder people were leaving: the reserve consisted of several shacks, with very few amenities such as electricity or sewerage, and had a rubbish tip and a sanitary depot about 150 metres from the houses. Three months later, Mrs Baxter, one of the residents, explained to a television reporter how the shacks were made: They buy their own tin; they buy their own piece of timber from the mill. Sometimes they make one-room places, sometimes they make two-room places, but they can never get enough tin or timber to make verandahs and bathrooms, or a washhouse or anything like that because the tin’s too dear for them and they’re only just working men. As in Wellington, Charles and the other Freedom Riders had little or no contact with the local Aboriginal people, so it was again a matter of conducting the survey. We had permission to visit the reserve, though only for an hour. Visiting the Gulargambone reserve was a sobering experience. Darce recorded an interview with Jim, who commented on the lack of normal facilities, the poor conditions of the houses and the proximity of the sewerage to the reserve. Jim’s film of Gulargambone


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shows an unidentified Aboriginal man standing outside one of the houses, the camera panning to emphasise the makeshift corrugated iron roof. Charles told The Methodist a month later: ‘We found a reserve about 2 miles [3 kilometres] out of town. It was in a deplorable condition— sub-standard houses surrounded by barbed-wire fencing, not much water, no electricity. Fifty yards [metres] from the reserve was an open sewage pit the stench and flies from which came across the reserve causing a lot of diarrhoea, eye sore, skin sores, etc. among the people in the reserve.’ Jim later remembered it ‘mainly because the Aboriginal community was the other side of the town rubbish dump’. He was shocked by the conditions there: It was well out of the town, and it was very depressed, I mean just appalling conditions, and that would have been my first experience personally. I mean I’d heard and they’d sent pictures, but my first experience of Aboriginal living standards directly. That’s why I remember Gulargambone; I can’t remember what happened there. Everyone interviewed remembered it in much the same way. Not that everyone did remember Gulargambone—Charles, for instance, said to Inara in 1994: ‘I have no memories of Gulargambone’, and Norm McKay commented: ‘Gulargambone has sort of terrible memories for some reason but I can’t quite remember why.’ Many of the others, though, recall how shocked they were by what they saw. Warwick, for instance, said Gulargambone was the first place where the situation of Aboriginal people was really brought home to him: I remember—pretty sure it was Gulargambone—going to a mission. Some of the experiences that stand out from the Freedom Ride—a lot of it obviously at that distance of time is a series of impressions that meld together—but what was fairly striking was the stark images of deprivation that one got first hand in going into living conditions where there were, you know, houses with no doors and with no windows and cars with no wheels and no sanitation and no water, flies, rubbish, people cooking over fires, children obviously ill with running noses and flies in their eyes and all of those sort of things . . . I think the thing that struck me most were just those sort of very stark conditions that made quite an impact in terms of the



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very abstract ideas of racism and deprivation that we had before we headed out. Alan Outhred has similar memories of recognising that the situation was far worse than we knew how to imagine: ‘Certainly, we knew we were going to strike conditions that were rough for the Aboriginal people we were visiting . . . but on the other hand to actually come and see—it certainly increased my understanding.’ For Pat Healy, it was ‘very hot . . . very hot and dry . . . There’s this sort of procession in my mind of huts and fibro houses and tin sheds and hot, dusty, flat, isolated living areas, with very primitive facilities. Blocks of toilets and showers and taps. Kids running around in the hot dust.’ Robyn Iredale says: ‘Well I’d never seen that sort of life before so I suppose I was shocked. But I’d read about it, I knew about it, but, yeah, I found it pretty disgusting that people lived like that. But it was taken for granted—I mean, nobody really questioned it too much in those days, you know, that was just the way Aborigines lived.’ I too remember a feeling of shock. My diary reminds me that I ‘spoke to Mr and Mrs Baxter—very old and very interesting’. I now have before me the form noting my interview with Mr Baxter that day. He agreed that Aboriginal people were as good as the white people in every way and should have more say in their affairs, and disagreed that the Welfare Board was doing a good job. He thought Aborigines should be on reserves, not in towns, and that they should stand up for their rights. I also noted in my diary that ‘Welfare board and police very much disliked’. Warwick remembers the people’s hatred of the police well: One thing that struck me when we were interviewing Aborigines on the trip, I think at Gulargambone . . . four Aborigines who were telling us about the police, and they were recently out of gaol and they told us that they were staying out of the town on the reserve, which was essentially controlled by the police. And the police would simply roll in, come through the door or the window, at any hour of the night. If there’s any kind of disturbance out there, the police would roll out and would know who the troublemakers were and would simply go and arrest people. So they could be in bed with their wife and the police would come and drag them out and thump them. And they got so sick of this that, even though they knew the consequences, every


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now and again when they’d had a few drinks they’d decide they’d had enough, they’d wait behind the door until the police arrived and then they’d thump the Christ out of the police and go to gaol for six months after being beaten up in the police station. And they said it was worthwhile. The message Robyn Iredale received was the people’s hatred of the board. She spoke to another Mrs Baxter on the Gulargambone reserve (there were several Baxter families, and several Carrs), who said the ‘people on the Welfare Board [were there] to better [their] own ends’. Their conversation then turned—perhaps surprisingly, given the totally secular nature of our questions and concerns—to spirit beings. Robyn noted on the back of her survey form: Belief in Spirits. Little woman—see her dressed grey, or hear her—walks up flat. Once a week or once a month. See her come up to flat land to the fence— never hear her go . . . Mrs Baxter thinks it is the daughter she lost—same size. Son thinks it was a ghost. Robyn remembers this interview well: I’ve got a really interesting slide that I think is Gulargambone, where we went out to a reservation, and I remember talking to these Aboriginal people about spirits and the spirits of ancestors and so on, and I asked them could I take a photo of them standing in front of their little tin shed before I left. And when I got the photo developed, there looks like there’s another person there, and to me this was really strange because I’d had this conversation and then the photo comes back with an almost mystical other person in it. In the afternoon, we conducted our surveys in the town. Beth remembers Gulargambone as an ‘isolated one-horse town, three shops in the main street . . . The dryness and the dust.’ She remarked: ‘Don’t remember any connection with the Aboriginal people there. I remember eating in a café, and the high school, some connection there.’ For Aidan: ‘Gulargambone was sort of a novel experience. It was a funny little town. I’d never been in a place quite as wild as that.’ He also remembers going to



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the hospital: ‘I went to see the babies . . . and I think they were on the verandah off the one ward. There would have only been a tiny hospital there with a few beds.’ To put on a demonstration, we needed firm evidence of discrimination and support from the local Aboriginal community. It was soon clear we had the first. We quickly confirmed that only certain Aborigines were allowed in the hotel, none could get served in the one and only café, and blacks and whites sat separately in the picture theatre. One of the survey respondents reported that, in the café, Aboriginal people were ‘not allowed to sit down and have a meal’, and that they could not stay and drink in the hotel. Charles later told an interviewer that ‘in the café aborigines can stand up but they can’t sit down for any meals. The proprietor said that when he first came to the town he did allow aborigines to sit down for meals but the white people complained and wouldn’t do business with him. So now he won’t allow aborigines to sit down for meals.’ Another survey respondent, an 18-year-old, said the local constable ‘picked on’ the young men. Noreen Carr said that in the picture theatre you ‘can mix, but because of attitudes of whites don’t feel right so sit separately’. She also reported discrimination at ‘dances, work and school’; in the long run, she wanted homes in town. Darce recorded an interview with an Aboriginal man that confirmed these accounts: Cassidy: Can you go into the picture show in Gulargambone any time you want to? Man: Yes I can. Cassidy: And you sit anywhere you like? Man: Ah . . . no. Cassidy: Why’s that? Where do you have to sit? Man: Well it’s not so much that you’re made to, but there is a separate spot in the picture hall for the dark people . . . Cassidy: Now we’ve heard some stories about the café here. What goes on there, can you get a meal there? Man: Ah, no, you can’t get a meal there, but you can get anything else that you want there. It was crystal clear that racial discrimination was rife in Gulargambone, yet the leaders of the Freedom Ride agreed that this was not the place for a demonstration. We didn’t have local support and, perhaps even


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more importantly, we didn’t have any media coverage or interest at this point. We would have been demonstrating with hardly an audience. We had to go to a bigger town. So, at around 4.00 p.m. we left Gulargambone and drove on to Walgett, arriving three hours later. Hopefully, in Walgett, we would meet up with the local Aboriginal people, confirm the existence of racial discrimination and, at last, demonstrate against it. We were itching for some action.


4

Chapter

High noon at Walgett

T

he students desperately wanted media attention, and knew something more striking than an amateur survey was needed to get it. Walgett seemed especially promising for our purposes, given its reputation for racial discrimination and the presence of Aboriginal people who had already proven they were willing to speak out. The town seemed to be waiting for us, to test our mettle. The question was, were we up to the task? The Walgett township lies at the junction of the Barwon and Namoi Rivers, the natural boundaries for two traditional language groups—the Gamilaraay (in older texts rendered as Kamilaroi) and Yuwaaliyaay (Uralarai); other nearby groups included the Wayilwan (Wailwan). All are known as Murri, the name for Aboriginal people in a large region covering Queensland and northern and central New South Wales. Amongst the first Europeans to visit the area were Thomas Mitchell and his party in 1831. Frontier violence was rife in the 1830s and 1840s, reaching its peak in 1843 after the manager of the Gingie station on the Barwon River was killed. Pastoralists continued to press into the district, and direct conflict seems to have been over by 1855. The numbers of Aboriginal people in the district dropped rapidly in the wake of white settlement, partly as the result of violent conflict, but mostly from starvation and disease. Once direct conflict was over, the various Murri groups wanted to stay on their own land. Many began working on the pastoral stations, which were originally mainly cattle but later predominantly sheep. 83


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Heather Goodall, in her book Invasion to Embassy, and John Ferry, in Walgett Before the Motor Car, tell some of the story of these survivors and fighters. Permanent camps were established at several sites near the town of Walgett itself, the most popular being at Namoi Bend, with many smaller camps on the stations. In 1895, the Aborigines Protection Board established a reserve at Gingie station 6 miles (10 kilometres) out of town in order to keep people away from Walgett and under board control. The people, however, refused to go there for several decades; Gingie station only became a reality when the board forcibly removed people from the Namoi Bend settlement to it in 1925. The camp at the Bend continued, however, and its population grew after 1936, when the board closed down the Angledool station, 60 miles (100 kilometres) to the north. Angledool had by this time become a problem station, with the demand for pastoral labour declining, poor housing and epidemic trachoma. On 26 May 1936, over 100 people were taken away by truck to Brewarrina, but over the next few months and years, many went on to Walgett and other towns. Angledool remains important in the memory of many Walgett people. As Frances Peters-Little, whose mother’s family is from Walgett, points out, many Walgett people have continued to identify with the Angledool mission, right up to the present. ‘Proclaiming Angledool as their site of Aboriginal heritage and culture,’ she writes, ‘their links to Angledool were perhaps strengthened by the terrifying events surrounding the night it was abandoned at midnight during winter in 1936 when families were split and forced on to the back of cattle trucks and transported to unknown destinations.’ Soon after the growth in its Aboriginal population as a result of the forced removal from Angledool, the Aboriginal political movement of the late 1930s came to Walgett. A public meeting in Walgett chaired by the Mayor, held on 20 February 1939, heard Bill Ferguson and Jack Kinchela of the Aborigines Progressive Association speak about the need for change, and passed a motion asking for Aboriginal representatives on the proposed new Welfare Board (a request which was granted). The Welfare Board carried on the plans of its predecessor for more control over the growing Aboriginal population at Walgett. The Gingie reserve was upgraded to a station, with a manager appointed in 1941, and became known as the Gingie mission. Despite somewhat better facilities than at the campsites, many people refused to move there, and continued to camp at the Bend. They could afford to do so: the war meant employment.


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When Marie Reay studied Aboriginal society in Walgett during World War II (one of the first anthropologists to study a ‘part-Aboriginal’ community), she found the Murris there much engaged in shearing and cutting scrub. Reay also found sharp racial segregation; racial intermixing was not possible, and any white people mixing with Aboriginal people were regarded as Aborigines, not whites. Most whites did not know Aboriginal people personally, and saw them in town brawling and drinking, regarding them as ‘unclean’. She reported that, though they failed to keep Murris out of town, the whites did keep places of entertainment segregated. After the war, the high demand for Aboriginal labour initially continued, with Welfare Board annual reports indicating 96 per cent male employment. From the 1950s, however, pastoral employment gradually decreased, and as a result the station camps gradually disappeared. The residents from nearby Dungalear pastoral camp, for example, moved into Walgett, though some people continued to work on the property during the 1950s. With the station camps disappearing, the population of Walgett continued to grow, with men living in or near town and working in a range of occupations on the nearby properties—as shearers, drovers, musterers and labourers. Others worked in blue-collar jobs for the council, the Department of Main Roads or on the railways. By the mid-1950s, the Walgett white townspeople were becoming alarmed at the rise in the Murri population, alleging that public drunkenness was driving whites out of the town. One of them, businessman Mr John Cooper, was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph on 25 August 1957 as saying the Aboriginal people in Walgett were drunken and lawless: ‘I’ll be packing up unless the Government does something about the aboriginal problem.’ Cooper told the Telegraph that the Aboriginal population had increased by 30 per cent in the last eighteen months, so that the numbers of Aborigines and whites were almost equal: ‘They seem to think they can come to Walgett, do as they like, and have no fear of reprisals.’ Cooper was quoted as saying the women would ‘make a play for any white man who looks as if he can afford to amuse them’. Cooper’s suggested solution was to appoint a welfare officer who could keep the people in check. In response to the Telegraph’s story, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship sent a delegation consisting of its secretary, Irene McIlwraith, and Mrs Garland, wife of John Garland of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, a fellowship affiliated union, to Walgett to investigate. They stayed for four days, from 6–10 September, and talked to many people. As McIlwraith, a


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refugee from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, wrote to John Garland soon afterwards, they had walked ‘the length and width of Walgett on foot from dawn to dusk’. Their report provides an unusually detailed glimpse of race relations in a country town in the 1950s. On their return to Sydney, McIlwraith described rigorous segregation—separate church services, separate playgrounds at school, exclusion from hotels, separate seating in the picture theatre and separate living areas. The Anglican vicar, Reverend Hadlow, had tried to have mixed congregations, and had been prevented from doing so by the local whites. Living conditions were appalling: the Gingie mission still had no water supply other than the river, and no decent road into town, while the Namoi camp also had no water supply, no sanitation and no electricity. At Gingie, the station manager visited houses once a week, a much-resented imposition on people’s privacy. The local doctor was unsympathetic; McIlwraith’s report quoted him as saying that ‘they do not want to mix with us and I think the best would be if we had special towns for them, run by themselves, where they would not bother us and we would not bother them’. Walgett Aboriginal people, however, were not to be moved. They had retained something of their political radicalism from the pre-war period and wanted a better deal in town. As Mrs McIlwraith later wrote: ‘All the Aborigines we spoke to [in] Walgett said that what they wanted most was full citizenship rights.’ The two women called a meeting in the church hall on the Saturday evening, which about 40 Aboriginal people attended. They showed a film about the treatment of Aborigines at the Warburton reserve in Western Australia, and played a recorded speech by Bert Groves, a well-known figure in the region. They explained why they had come, and that the fellowship wanted the people of Walgett to know they had outside support. The Reverend Hadlow and Alec Trevallion, the Town Clerk, also spoke, and George Hill spoke on behalf of the Aboriginal people. He said: ‘I live on the Mission and I am an Aborigine. After serving six years with the Australian Army overseas, I came back to Walgett. When I went into the local hotel for a drink, I was rudely ordered out.’ Twenty-two Aboriginal people, along with Trevallion, Hadlow and John Cooper (now eager to distance himself from the comments attributed to him by the Telegraph), signed the fellowship petition requesting a change to the Constitution. When she returned, Irene McIlwraith did everything she could to alert Sydneysiders to the state of affairs in Walgett. Her letter



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in the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 November drew readers’ attention to the ‘appalling conditions in Walgett’, with 400 people living in shanties on the riverbank, without electricity, gas or water, and Aboriginal women kept in a separate ward in the hospital, and men on one side of the male ward. The solution, many whites thought in the 1950s, was to house more Aboriginal people on the board’s stations. That way, they would be under surveillance, and cause less trouble in the towns. Their living conditions would also be better. A Herald editorial two days after McIlwraith’s letter recommended doubling the spending on Aboriginal housing, so that more Aboriginal people could be accommodated on the stations. Yet the funding for Aboriginal housing remained low, and towns like Walgett continued to witness a struggle by the whites to keep the Murris out of town. In 1958, young anthropologist Jeremy Beckett wrote in the Sydneybased discussion magazine, The Observer, that the Aboriginal population was growing and the problem of poor Aboriginal housing and social marginality could only get worse. Aboriginal people wanted to stay together; government policies meant the price they had to pay to do so was shocking housing conditions, and racial dislike and hostility from the whites. He ended his article with the prescient remark: ‘In a few years the country towns of the North and West are going to have a very ugly race problem on their hands.’ Walgett returned to the attention of the Sydney papers in 1960, as part of a Sydney Morning Herald series of feature articles called ‘Survey of Aboriginal Life’. The report on Walgett on 27 October emphasised the large number of Aboriginal child deaths in the area, and quoted the local Presbyterian minister, Reverend A.R. Ewin, who said ‘apathetic Government authorities and the public had shut their eyes to the tragedy’. The Town Clerk, Alec Trevallion, told the Herald ‘the commonwealth government will have to finance local authorities to handle the situation’, for example by funding the employment of ‘male and female social workers to teach the aborigines hygiene’. Some time after this, the riverbank settlement on the north side of the river was declared the Namoi reserve, in an attempt by the board to exert some control over conditions there. (Although gazetting new reserves was by this time against board policy— which was to locate people in houses in town—the refusal of councils to allow Aboriginal housing in town forced the board to create a number of reserves around this time, usually—like this one—comparatively small


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and close to town.) The settlement on the south side, closer to town, had become known as Montkeila Bend. In Walgett, the council-owned swimming pool was open to all at the insistence of Trevallion, who seems to have been relatively sympathetic to Aboriginal people, at least by the standards of the time. But private enterprises like hotels, shops, cafés, cinemas and private clubs were another matter. After its 1957 visit, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship continued to keep a watch on Walgett. One of its members, Barbara Gibbons, wrote to Jack Horner after her visit there in May 1964: ‘In Walgett, George and I noticed something I would like to draw the Fellowship’s attention to. The bar lounge of the “Oasis Hotel-Motel” had a notice on the door in very fancy lettering and incorrect spelling “Aborigines admitted only by invertation”.’ Horner showed the letter to David Tribe, a member of the fellowship who had been the schoolteacher at the Gingie mission school for some years until December 1963. Tribe confirmed the story, and told Horner of other instances of racial discrimination: the refusal of the Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL) Younger Set to admit Aboriginal people, and the exclusion of Aboriginal people from upstairs in the picture theatre. Horner hoped to set up an organising committee of the fellowship in Walgett itself. Meanwhile, he tried to act on the matter of discrimination through a flurry of letters. On 22 June he sent one to Athol White, the manager of the Oasis Hotel-Motel, asking him why the motel had a notice saying Aborigines could enter only by invitation, and another to several Aboriginal residents at the Gingie station, asking whether they wanted any action taken. There is no record of a reply from the latter, but White replied at length: ‘The policy of my hotel,’ he told Horner, ‘is to be of service to the majority of the people of the district, and to maintain a good standard of facilities for their enjoyment.’ Aborigines who behaved decently and who were dressed tidily ‘would be most welcome to enjoy these facilities’. However, the number of Aborigines answering this description ‘is very minute’. The notice, he said, ‘was to save embarrassment to the Aborigines, and also to ourselves, as having to constantly eject them because of their general behaviour and disgusting language is embarrassing to us, our patrons and must also be to them’. Yet, in the end, it was not the appalling housing conditions or racial discrimination in the hotel and the picture theatre that dramatically brought Walgett into public notice the year before the students arrived.



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It was the police and the courts. In June 1964, as the students had learned from speeches made at their meeting and rally in July, two 9-year-old Aboriginal boys were gaoled for two days and two nights in a police cell in Walgett for stealing from the Anglican church hall two table tennis bats and balls and crayons, together worth a total of 30 shillings ($3). The Sydney Sun featured the case as a page 1 story written within the tabloid tradition of ‘exposure journalism’, calling for sympathy with the boys and outrage at the authorities who had put them there. It also drew attention to the poor conditions under which Walgett’s Aboriginal population lived. The Sun story began: ‘Two weeping nineyear-old aboriginal children have been locked up for two days and nights in a police cell at Walgett. They cried continually during the night, prisoners who were in an adjoining cell told me yesterday.’ It went on to report that one white citizen had written to the editor saying: ‘I am ashamed of the society I live in. Townspeople can see the children in gaol with their little arms hanging through the bars.’ The two boys were Roy Hickey and Fred Morgan, who lived on the reserve on the outskirts of Walgett. During discussion with the magistrate the next day, one of the mothers agreed it would be better for the boys to be taken to a boys’ home: ‘We are desperately poor—it is so hard for coloured people to get work around here . . . Fred has no future around Walgett and that’s why I thought he would have a better chance in life if he went to a home for boys. But when I found out he was put in the town lockup I nearly collapsed.’ Jack Horner wrote directly about the matter to the Reverend P.J. Dowe, minister at St Peter’s Church of England, from which the bats and balls had been stolen. Dowe wrote a long letter in reply, worth quoting because he was soon to play an important role in the Freedom Ride story. He had agreed, you may remember, to accommodate the students in this same hall. Dowe had little sympathy for the two boys who had been gaoled for stealing toys from his church hall; indeed, it seems possible that complaints from the church had led to police involvement. He had even less for their mothers, commenting that the mother of one ‘has no concern for the boys at all’. He objected to Horner’s assumption that Aboriginal people in Walgett had a hard time: The dark people here have been well treated in this district (with some exceptions). That is why so many have come to this town. They are


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accepted by most of the whites (again with some exceptions). They have the same opportunities as whites. There is no shortage of work. They are paid as well [as] or better than the whites. There appears to be plenty of money among them. The problems lay not with white racism, but with the Aboriginal people themselves: ‘We still have to tackle the basic problem of how to develop a sense of responsibility and the urge to take the possibilities before them, e.g. to develop skills and to use their money properly.’ Dowe went on: ‘They have had no end of gifts and “hand outs” and they are quite content to take all these, but it has only encouraged them to sit back and take things easy . . . There is a complete apathy and lack of concern to help themselves.’ Yet, if the Reverend Dowe had little sympathy for the boys, many others were moved by this story. Letters poured into the Sun, Charles Leon writing on behalf of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, saying ‘most people will share the indignation of the people of Walgett at the callousness that left two small Aboriginal boys in a police cell for two days and two nights, as part of their punishment for stealing some toys and crayons. The rest of their punishment is to be removed from their families and placed in a children’s home’. Several unions took up the case, writing to government agencies. In early July, a delegation of five men representing three unions visited the town to investigate the gaoling. Two of the five were Aboriginal—Alan Woods (from the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF), and also a member of the AboriginalAustralian Fellowship), and Jack Hassen (from the Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF), and also former boxer—indeed, lightweight champion of Australia). The other three were Dick Prendergast (BLF), Jim Hill (Building Workers’ Industrial Union) and Jack Hartley (WWF). The visit was well publicised, with television and radio reports preceding the arrival of the delegation. The unionists met on 3 July with some local Murri activists who facilitated meetings with the two mothers and liaised between the delegation and the Aboriginal community. Two members of the community are especially important to our story. One was Harry Hall, a Gamilaraay man who in the 1960s lived at Montkeila Bend and was one of the town Aboriginal residents most accepted by white society in Walgett. He had been a shearer, then worked at the Walgett garage, and later for the



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Department of Main Roads. Another was George Rose, one of the few remaining Yuwaaliyaay speakers, who had grown up in Brewarrina, joined the army late in the war, and settled in Walgett in 1949. In the army, where he had been a sergeant, he had experienced and enjoyed racial equality. His wife, Mavis, was also a strong community activist. Like Harry, George was a shearer and a member of the Australian Workers’ Union, and at this point, he was also a member of the Communist Party. The report written as a result of this visit went far beyond the original gaoling incident. It described the tin shanties, and reported first-hand accounts of the brutality and sadism of one particular policeman. Most importantly for our story, the delegation learnt of the exclusion of returned Aboriginal Diggers from the RSL Club, except sometimes on Anzac Day, and the sign ‘Aboriginals by invertation only’ at the Oasis Hotel-Motel. Two of their members interviewed the manager of the RSL Club, Tom Hogan, and an official, T. Quinlan, who agreed that returned Aboriginal Diggers were only admitted to the club on Anzac Day. ‘They denied,’ said the report, ‘that this was racial discrimination and said that they were only following past practices.’ The delegation also reported that ‘perhaps the most important event of our trip was a meeting of 100 Aborigines on the Sunday, who, after listening to our delegation, elected a committee to protect their interests’. This became the Walgett Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), loosely connected to the Aborigines Progressive Association formed by Bert Groves and others in Sydney some months earlier. It involved Harry Hall and George and Mavis Rose, and also Gladys Lake and Ted Fields. Harry Hall now became president of the newly formed APA, and remained so until 1973. There were also, Harry told me in 1991, some white people in the APA, especially Mrs Collins, who was a member for years, and whose son owned the garage that Harry used to work in. Back in Sydney, the New South Wales Labor Council adopted the trade union delegation’s recommendation that it seek a government investigation into the gaoling and the situation in Walgett more generally. A Labor government was in power, led by Jack Renshaw whose own electorate of Castlereagh included Walgett, but this by no means guaranteed government sympathy with the children and their families or a sympathetic hearing of the Labor Council delegation. While the Labor Council waited for an appointment with the Minister for Child Welfare, the Children’s Court in Sydney declared the children wards of the state


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and decided they should go to a foster home. Delegates from the unions and the Labor Council finally met the Minister for Child Welfare in September, and another delegation from the Newcastle Trades Hall Council met him soon afterwards. The request to return the children to their parents was refused, the reason given being ‘bad housing’. The housing situation in Walgett was at crisis point by this time, with the Aboriginal population in Walgett nearing the 1000 mark, many of them living in the shanty town settlements along both sides of the Namoi River. There were different schools of thought on how to deal with the crisis. The Aborigines Welfare Board wanted to build ‘transitional housing’—that is, cheap, low-standard houses—on the Namoi reserve, in order to stretch its budget to supply the need. The shire council, which had been pressed by the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship on the question of housing in mid-1964, strongly opposed the concept, wanting increased government funding for proper housing. Only four days before the students arrived, the council agreed to improve the housing, sanitation, drainage and access road for the Namoi reserve. Aware of only a fraction of this history and these debates, the students arrived in town just before 7.00 p.m. on a hot summer evening on 14 February. They settled into the St Peter’s hall and some went to the service that evening. Alex Mills remembers: ‘I did go to church in the Anglican church on the Sunday night and we actually sang the hymn . . . “Lord Jesus, There is No Room in My Heart for You”.’ Just across from the hall were the basketball courts, and some of the other students had a few games with the local Murri team, the Anglican Fellowship Basketball Team. One of its members was Phillip Hall, Harry’s son, and another was Bob Morgan, later to become a leading figure in Aboriginal education, but then a 14-year-old in Walgett. Bob recalls: ‘We were intrigued, I remember, about why would white fellas be coming—I remember as kids we had games of basketball.’ It must have been that evening, or perhaps it was on the bus trip into Walgett, that we agreed our target would be the RSL Club. A decisionmaking structure was emerging. Decisions over whether to demonstrate or not were made democratically by the whole group. There was also a tour ‘executive’, consisting of Charles, Jim and Pat, which represented the students to outside bodies, and which also was in charge of ‘discipline’— that is, ensuring that students who acted violently would be expelled from the tour. We also agreed that Charles would make all official press



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statements, and in his absence either Jim or Pat would do so. The RSL, the whole group now agreed, was an ideal target for news-making. In a society where ex-servicemen were held in high esteem, and seen as embodying nationhood and national identity, racial discrimination against an ex-serviceman was easily ridiculed and attacked. Charles thought it was important that we had chosen an RSL Club, as he later recalled: To demonstrate outside the RSL, the great sacred cow at that time, you know, nobody criticises the RSL, they can do whatever they like . . . we decided that that would be the prime objective, to fly in the face of the most cherished institution in Australia, because they were very racist, and they were not only that they were arrogant, and they were self-centred and very discriminating and opinionated and everything else. Though the exclusion of Aboriginal ex-servicemen from the Walgett RSL Club was perhaps a small matter compared with the massive problems in housing, health and education confronting Aboriginal people at the time, it had great symbolic importance. For it was in the commemoration of war that Australian popular culture found its most profound sense of nationhood. This was as true in Walgett as everywhere else. From the 1920s, war memorials were erected in practically every country town; in Walgett, the war memorial was at the centre of the town, at the intersection of its two main streets, and the location of practically everything in town could be marked by its relation to the monument. Nationally, the RSL found itself in a contradictory situation in respect to Aboriginal ex-servicemen. On the one hand, it regarded the status of returned soldier as transcending all others, and had successfully pressed for Aboriginal ex-servicemen to be given the right to vote (granted in March 1949 by the Commonwealth Labor government for federal elections). On the other hand, it was a conservative organisation, and remained aloof from campaigns for full citizenship rights for Aboriginal people. It had no policy specifically preventing its clubs from excluding Aboriginal exservicemen from membership, leaving it to local clubs to determine their own policies. The Walgett club was thus free to exclude Aboriginal exservicemen from membership and use of the club, though local Murri activists like Harry Hall, George Rose and Ted Fields had been protesting about its exclusionary practices (and much else) for some years.


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Monday, 15 February 1965: My diary records that the next morning we were up at 7.00 a.m. and ‘heard announcement over radio that we intended to picket RSL at 12.00. All surprised that news had got out.’ The Reverend Dowe was not pleased at what he heard, and told us we couldn’t stay in the church hall if we carried out our plans to demonstrate. What should we do? We held a long and serious meeting. Here was the first chance to put the ideals of passive resistance into action, yet if we demonstrated where would we stay? After much discussion, we decided to go ahead anyway. Diary: Had meeting and decided to acquiesce in police demands only to point where acquiescence would break up demo. Then would passively resist. Also decided that anyone acting violently would be suspended immediately, and later subjected to general meeting at which it would be decided to send the person home or not. In deciding to go ahead, we had also, it seemed, called Dowe’s bluff. Seeing we had nowhere else to stay, Dowe reluctantly agreed that we could remain in the church hall. The Australian reported that ‘plans were being made for them to sleep in abandoned tram cars when they learned they would be allowed in the hall again’. Mr Dowe told the Australian he was strongly opposed to the picket of the club: ‘It is only stirring up racial feelings which don’t exist in the town . . . I thought they were coming to Walgett purely to study Aboriginal conditions.’ Quite a lot of time had been lost in discussion, and the demonstration was to begin at noon. We made placards, a process Jim Spigelman recorded on film. Aidan Foy remembers: ‘Wherever we stayed there was enough space to make all the placards because I do remember doing that.’ At this point, another student joined the bus, bringing our number up to 30—Hall Greenland, a member of the ALP Club, educated first at Fort Street Boys’ High School, now about to enter his third year in an Arts degree at Sydney University. He had been away on holidays on the north coast and caught a train down to join the bus. He later described himself as ‘a scholarship boy from a middle-class background’: his father was a plasterer, his mother a clerk. Some years before, his father had left, and ‘so we were a single-parent family . . . a working mother and three kids. We lived at Summer Hill and I suppose my mother classified herself as a revolutionary, libertarian, non-Stalinist



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Machteld Hali draws the placard asking, ‘Good enough for Tobruk. Why not Walgett?’. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)

socialist.’ Hall had already had some experience of Aboriginal shanty towns, when he visited Dareton, outside Griffith on the Murray River in the south of the state, in the summer of 1962–63 just before starting university. He told me: Being a good left-winger and occasionally seeing Aboriginals when I was on holidays up and down the coast, I knew that there was a certain amount of poverty and degradation about the way they lived. But then when I saw them living in this shanty town outside Griffith—with a single tap and of course their humpies—it did actually really shock me and brought home to me, the two or three months I lived in a country town, what their actual living conditions were like. I can remember going to a public meeting there about the fluoridation of water, and moving an amendment to the resolution at the public meeting in favour of fluoridation, that it be delayed until proper piped water and septic tanks and so on had been installed in the Aboriginal camp. That the municipal money that was going to be spent on fluoridation be redirected to that. And it was like a bloody lynch mob.


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When asked why he joined the bus, he said he had ‘twin objectives’: ‘I was, I suppose, as much interested in the politics of it as in one of the women who was actually going on the bus. So I thought this was a good chance to actually meet her and get close to this particular woman.’ What most of the other students didn’t know was that Hall at the time had a ‘foster brother I suppose—for about five or six years at this time’, an Aboriginal youth from the Northern Territory named Maynard Burmester, who had been living at the factory where Hall’s mother worked, and then became part of the household. After the meeting, we separated out into groups and conducted our survey. Jack Horner ’s letter to Jim Spigelman just weeks before the Freedom Ride left Sydney had summarised the housing situation in Walgett tersely and accurately: ‘Walgett: 1. Reserve six miles out of town, Board houses. 2. Riverbank two miles out of town, bad conditions. 3. Camping grounds in town, shocking conditions.’ We did not have permission to visit the first of these, the Gingie mission with its board manager, where about 150 people lived, as the board still had to meet to consider our application. So one group went to the Namoi reserve while others went into town. I went to the reserve, where over 260 people lived, and we interviewed people for several hours. Diary: Most of the people I spoke to very shy and diffident, and said they were quite happy. Conditions very bad—had to use filthy water, tin shacks with mud floors, overcrowded. Eighteen of the survey forms filled in that day survive. One woman refused to answer questions because, as one of the students noted on the back of the form, ‘previous surveys had humiliated them through newspapers, radio, TV reports . . . and [they] did not see any results from surveys anyway’. This was possibly a reference to the intense media coverage of the previous year. From the others—mainly from women— some consistent themes came through: the desire for houses, perhaps in town, for a better water supply, and better medical services. Mrs Kennedy said Aboriginal people could not buy blocks of land, and mentioned the need for ‘better water instead of river water’, and proper sanitary arrangements. The people consistently reported on examples of racial discrimination in the town—exclusion from the Walgett RSL, the frock shop (Sheen’s, according to Phillip Hall 36 years later), upstairs in the cinema,



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and the Oasis Hotel-Motel lounge. Mrs Fernando mentioned that, at the doctor’s, Aboriginal people were not treated until the Europeans had been seen to. One 16-year-old girl said Aboriginal people could not get jobs, the frock shop barred Aboriginal people, and the police were rough and tough, often putting the young men in gaol. Another group of students interviewed people in the town, both European and Aboriginal. Some Aboriginal people worked there, and some families—like the Peters family—now lived there. Aidan went to the local hospital, and also interviewed the town doctor, ‘who was disappointed because he’d hoped he’d be interviewed by an attractive female medical student and he was upset being confronted with me’. Alex Mills interviewed a young Murri man who worked as an assistant storeman at the shire council. He was willing, he said, to have his name submitted to the Walgett RSL together with other suitable Aboriginal applicants. Alex wrote on the back of the form that his neighbour reported that ‘he and his family are good neighbours’. Wherever we went, the story of racial discrimination was the same. Again and again we heard about the Oasis lounge, the frock shop and the cinema. Diary: Obviously considerable discrimination in the town . . . Aborigines not accepted socially by white community. We checked out the RSL situation for ourselves. Several students interviewed Tom Hogan, the club manager, who told them unequivocally that no Aborigines were members of the club and that if any were nominated for membership, the club would not accept them. A student, probably Jim Spigelman, says on Darce Cassidy’s tape: We had a 20-minute interview with the vice-president and the secretary-manager of the RSL Club. The vice-president, who is on the committee that reads the nominations and decides whether this person who’s sponsored becomes a member, said categorically that he would never agree to have an Aboriginal, even though sponsored, to join the club. We had done our research, and everything tallied. There was plenty of racial discrimination, the RSL most definitely included.


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Helen Gray, Machteld Hali, Norm McKay and Ann Curthoys (far right), holding banners outside Walgett RSL, 15 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)

The demonstration began, as planned, at noon. Most of the students were there, though Alex Mills wandered off to search out his contacts in the Presbyterian church ‘to see what the situation was as far as they were concerned’; he had lunch with their ‘senior layperson’. Derek Molloy and John Gowdie refused to join in, saying they opposed demonstrations. Everyone else participated. Diary: About 12.00 we began to demonstrate outside the RSL. We just stood in a long line outside the RSL holding placards like ‘Acceptance, Not Segregation’ ‘End Colour Bar ’ ‘Bullets did not Discriminate’ ‘Walgett—Australia’s Disgrace’ ‘Why Whites Only’ ‘Educate the Whites’ and so on. Darce Cassidy’s tapes and the Sydney Morning Herald report also mention Machteld’s placard, ‘Good enough for Tobruk—why not Walgett RSL?’. Jim’s film shows us all standing there, in the hot sun. When the students fanned out in front of the club, we were met at first by a moment’s



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Above: Students outside Walgett RSL holding banners (Photo courtesy of the Fairfax Photo Library) and below: RSL worker offering drinks, 15 February 1965.


silence, and then the heckling began. One bystander called out: ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ My diary continues: People gathered round, many jeering, many just watching. The RSL characters offered us cold drinks, but we refused them. At lunchtime many heated discussions broke out. Charlie Perkins spoke terrifically and I think most people listened very attentively.


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Pat Healy recalls that ‘Charlie spoke, very well I thought, contrasting the treatment of the black servicemen who weren’t allowed to use or be members of the Walgett RSL’. On Darce’s tape, Charles says: Well as everybody knows in Walgett and all the Aboriginal people do know, and I think most people throughout New South Wales know, the Walgett RSL does discriminate against Aboriginal people on the basis of colour alone, that’s the criteria used, and we just want to show them we object to this on principle, we don’t think this is a good thing, and we’re doing it in a very passive way. The speeches turned into a public street debate. The report in the Tribune (the CPA newspaper) said: ‘In the beginning, the white people in the crowd were laughing, but they then joined in a long mass discussion on discrimination, with many Aborigines also taking part.’ Colin remembers ‘getting into arguments with townspeople, discussing the rights and wrongs of what we were doing, or the rights and wrongs of Aboriginals going into the hotels’. As time went on, according to my diary, ‘more and more Aborigines joined in the discussions’. Aidan remembers that, in addition to Charles’s speech, some local men spoke too: ‘I’m sure Harry made a speech and George Rose made a speech, I’m fairly sure, just talking about the segregation of the Club.’ Darce recorded one man saying: ‘I reckon if I’m good enough to fight for the country here, save other people’s lives, why shouldn’t I walk in there?’ It seems that it was the Aborigines living in town and on the reserve who were mainly involved; those on the mission were less affected. The RSL was picketed continuously from noon until almost 7.00 p.m. The Tribune estimated the crowd at about 350. Halfway through the afternoon, some of the students went along to the frock shop and held a demonstration there, again captured on Jim’s film and also observed by police. Helen Gray asked to see a frock and, when shown it, called on an Aboriginal woman with her to try it on. The shop manager said she would not, as the police report put it, ‘permit the aborigines to try on the frock because white women would not touch it once it had been handled by blacks. She could buy it and take it away if she so desired, but she would not permit the aborigine woman to put it on and then refuse to buy it.’ The woman managing the shop drew the blinds, locked up and went home, and the students returned to the RSL Club.



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Diary: After five a lot more people came to argue with us and it seemed as if half the town was there. Towards evening, the white community became increasingly hostile, and there was a good deal of verbal abuse directed against the students. For Pat Healy, this was the first occasion on which she ‘realised how heated the white country people were about our presence, and about our image’. She pointed to an important element of this confrontation when she said: I think in a way our image was as enraging as what we were doing. The boys all had long hair and the girls all wore miniskirts or tight jeans. I mean we were just normal—what we regarded as fairly sort of conservatively dressed—certainly more conservatively dressed than we would have been at university. But clearly our whole presence, what we looked like and what we were doing was a great affront. I’ve often thought subsequently that part of the being affronted was that—here were we, relatively privileged university students, who had the wherewithal and the money to sort of take off on a bus trip around New South Wales, and we were aligning ourselves with the blacks in the community. Darce recorded some of these angry townsfolk, who did indeed express the resentment against students and city folk that Pat recognised: Your trouble is, you’re a little small group come up from, you know nothing about it for a start . . . In my opinion they oughta take ’em over to the Imperial Hotel for about three hours, lock ’em in with the Aboriginals, and then when they come out see what they think of them then. I don’t think it’s the aborigines we gotta worry about, I think it’s that motley looking crowd over there we’ve got to worry about . . . You can’t disguise the boys from the girls. There’s one long-haired bloke there . . . Look at ’em. The brains of Australia! God help you if you ever end up under ’em. Have a look at ’em.


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Our training and advice from Bill Ford onwards had emphasised not resisting the police. In fact, there was not much police presence, and those who were there did not trouble us. Walgett’s four police were joined by two from Bourke, Inspector Chalker and Sergeant Glendenning, with Chalker speaking directly to Charles about what the students were doing. The police reported to their superior at Dubbo that the students had behaved well and no complaints had been made. After the demonstration ended around 7.00 p.m., some of the students again went to play basketball against two local teams, matches that were, the police reported, ‘well attended by both black and white residents of Walgett’. Some of the others went for a swim in the Barwon River. Colin remembers a group of about five or six going for a swim with some local shearers. Brian remembers it too: There were these shearers who’d picked us up and I still suspect that they had their eyes on some of the young women. But they took us out to a local swimming hole, whatever the river is that runs through Walgett, it was actually quite a big swimming hole . . . And they had this big utility truck . . . and they took us back to town. They were trying to hang around us, I remember that. Around this time, two white men, Paul Evans and Joey Marshall, were drinking at the Oasis and were overheard making remarks that alerted some Aboriginal people that there might be trouble. While the students were relaxing and unwinding with the locals, the Reverend Dowe unexpectedly contacted the police station and requested police attendance at the Church of England hall, as the students had stayed there the previous night and he did not want them to stay again. At 9.00 p.m. the students, who had by this time largely returned to the church hall, got a shock. Reverend Dowe arrived with three churchwardens and spoke to Jim and Charles, ordering the students to leave the hall within two hours. The reasons given were not the demonstration, but that the students had been noisy, both sexes were sleeping in the same hall, and cans of beer had been found inside. Diary: He reckoned that he didn’t know we were a mixed group (which he did—he saw us when we first arrived), that we had left beer cans in the hall (which was true) and that we had antagonised



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people. Charlie had a real go at him because he obviously disliked us because we demonstrated. Dowe’s hostility to the actions of the Freedom Riders was expressed in a letter published in The Anglican the following month. He wrote that ‘the students came under the guise of conducting a survey on Aboriginal conditions, but, in fact, they made no attempt to understand the position in Walgett—even if that were possible in two or three hours’. The students, he said, took no account at all of the moves that have been made in the town to help Aborigines. There was plenty of work for Aboriginal people, and the baths were open to all. He then made his own position quite clear, in terms very similar to those in his letter to Jack Horner the previous year: Our dark friends are just not like Europeans . . . Anyone who has lived among the coloured people in these towns knows the biggest problem is not the lack of means to improve, but the lack of desire to improve. There is not a shortage of money, but the money is wasted. Most do not want to work. They are content to sit back and live on a white man’s ‘hand-outs’ and the returns of those friends who do work . . . Fortunately, in fact most of the ill-feeling on the part of white and dark has been towards the students and not towards the other race. Dowe was fully aware that the students had made themselves unpopular and were therefore vulnerable to at least some sections of the town. He and his churchwardens now turned them out into the night. The bus driver, Bill Pakenham, was called from his hotel bed, the students packed up their gear, and the bus prepared to leave town. The police stood by while the students put their belongings on the bus. They were joined by Bruce Maxwell, a cadet reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald who had been roaming outback New South Wales, and was now on the spot for a big story. With the students’ permission, he boarded the bus, paying £10 like each of the students for the privilege. Alex Mills could not be found: he had gone visiting the Presbyterians again. It was now after 10.00 p.m. While we were getting ready to leave town, Phillip Hall and some of his friends, sitting on the steps outside the bank opposite the Oasis, saw Paul Evans and Joey Marshall driving around looking for the bus. Suspecting trouble, they thought a convoy of cars to


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see the bus out of town might be a good idea, and began organising people and cars to follow us. Diary: About 200 aborigines and some whites came to see us off. We went off quickly, leaving Alex Mills behind because it was obvious there was considerable hostility in the ranks of the pub leavers. Darce recorded the Aboriginal people singing ‘So long, it’s been good to know you’. As the bus left Walgett, a long line of cars—nearly all friendly, part of the convoy to protect the bus—followed it. Warwick remembers that the police on motorbikes accompanied the bus out of town for some miles, and then turned back. Jim Spigelman’s film, taken from the rear of the bus, shows the car lights in the darkness, an eerie sight. We students, however, had no idea who was following—friend or enemy. Brian recalls this line of cars following the bus, and thought one could have been the shearers, and perhaps some were just caught in the line, while others were unfriendly. About 3 miles (5 kilometres) out of town, we learnt definitely that not all those following were sympathetic. A light green truck driven (as we later learned) by Joey Marshall, the son of a grazier from a large sheep property 40 miles (65 kilometres) from Walgett, pulled out of the line of cars and began to overtake us. John Powles describes what happened then: We went out of town on the bus and we had one friendly truck with Aborigines and so on behind us, and then there was another truck with hostile people behind them. And as we were going out of town, the friendly truck was weaving all over the road to try and stop the hostile truck getting out to sort of do something to the bus . . . finally this hostile vehicle got around the friendly vehicle trying to shepherd them off, and it came hurtling up the side of the bus. Warwick picks up the story: Out of the cars came a big pick-up truck that then proceeded to butt the bus and push us off the road . . . That went on for quite some time with the pick-up going by in front, stopping, braking. Darce reported:



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After waiting at the side of the road, the truck overtook again and swerved suddenly in front of us. But the driver managed to keep the now speeding bus on the road. On the third attempt the truck struck the bus near the driver’s cabin forcing the bus off the elevated road. Warwick: Finally the bus was forced off the road going quite fast, about 60 miles an hour I guess . . . and went down a levee bank and the driver miraculously stopped it from rolling as it went into the scrub. In fact, Bill’s presence of mind in driving the bus off the road at this point saved it from rolling over. Darce remembers: Food and suitcases were thrown all over the bus. But, although shaken, no one was hurt. When the bus came to rest we could see that we were surrounded, four or five sets of headlights pointing at the bus from all directions. It seemed that we were trapped, alone with four or five carloads of hoodlums on a country road. But there were 30 of us on the bus and it looked like the numbers were just about even. At the front of the bus Charles shouted ‘girls to the back, girls to the back’. Pat recalls that: I and a number of other women said, ‘Get stuffed! What are you talking about?’ I think they thought there was going to be rape and mayhem. Which none of us really knew—who all these lights were because all we could see was all these car lights, and if it had been a group of rough neck whites come to beat us up we wouldn’t have had much hope. Some of the students looked for beer bottles to defend themselves, Darce reporting that ‘near me someone was crawling round the floor saying, “Quick, get bottles, get bottles”’. The police reported the event more soberly: ‘About 8 miles east of Walgett the vehicle was forced off the roadway by a green Dodge lorry driven by Joseph James Marshall, 22 years of Boorooma Station, Walgett.’ There was no need to defend ourselves. It turned out that the cars


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surrounding the bus belonged to Aboriginal people checking we were OK. The truck that had hit the bus had driven on. Darce interviewed Charles and the driver, Bill, as soon as the bus stopped and it was clear there was no further danger: Cassidy: What happened, what’d he do? Perkins: In front of us, he nearly killed us. He would’ve killed the whole 30 if there was a ditch here. Isn’t that right, Bill? Bill (driver): Three times this Dodge truck tried to run us off the road. The third time I swerved, I had to run over the bank, otherwise collide severely with the truck. As it is, he slightly damaged us, the bus rolled terrifically as we went over the bank, but no serious damage was done. Cassidy: Do you reckon you were lucky not to roll? Bill: Terribly lucky not to roll. As a matter of fact I didn’t think I’d be able to straighten the bus up to prevent rolling. Cassidy: What’s the drop like into the ditch? Bill: Oh, 3 foot 6 on about a 45 degree angle. We all went back to Walgett. At midnight, the students stood outside the police station while the police took statements from witnesses to the incident—the driver, two students and two other independent witnesses. Many of the students rang their parents to assure them they were unharmed. Bruce Maxwell rang the Sydney Morning Herald with the story. The police noted the green paint marks on the side of the bus and damage to its signalling arm and blinker light, and sent their report to Sydney. Now it was almost midnight on a very hot, still night. Despite the late hour, it wasn’t long before 50 or 60 townspeople were confronting us, and arguments broke out again. Warwick remembers: On the other side of the road there was a mob—the pubs being closed—of young hoons, who were about 18 or 20, wearing singlets and thongs and shorts and shouting abuse. It was a racist abuse, across the road, at the few Aborigines who were around and at us. And it was an extremely touchy situation I guess. Brian said: ‘What was extraordinary was that this huge debate ensued. And this was in the middle of the night in Walgett, shouting and



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screaming going on. I can remember Charlie doing a lot of talking and there were whites saying all sorts of things, you know, why you couldn’t live with Aboriginals.’ As Warwick remembers it, after ‘about 15 minutes or so of this abuse, Charles lost his temper completely and he sort of counted these characters on the other side of the road and he said: “Why don’t we do them? Why don’t we go over there and beat the shit out of them?” But we didn’t because he was probably the only one who could fight.’ (So much for non-violent direct action!) Then came one of the defining moments of the tour, described in Charles’s biography, A Bastard Like Me, and dramatised in his daughter Rachel’s film, Freedom Ride, made in 1993. Some of the Freedom Riders remember it well. Aidan: Various drunken white men abused us, but some of the Aboriginal women present drew these gentlemen’s attention to their own sexual behaviour with Aboriginal women at the time, and that basically was the end of that. Brian: The most extraordinary thing was this Aboriginal woman who just, you know, came out of nowhere . . . but she really gave ’em heaps and she just—she got very angry and she spoke. And she actually went out with local white guys I gather from something she said. And she really tore strips off them. Again I don’t remember the exact words. Just, it’ll be forever with me the impression of this woman, this Aboriginal woman dressed . . . I seem to recall a blue dress. And really made this quite emotional, angry speech in the middle of the night in this street in Walgett. I forget her name. The woman was Pat Walford, a Murri woman in her early twenties. Darce recorded her words on his ever-present tape-recorder. She delivered an angry monologue for about five minutes, pointing to double standards, the secrecy of sexual relations, her attachment to Walgett, and her disgust at the white people in Walgett who were attacking the students. On the tape you can hear constant interjections from male voices, and her angry voice in reply: I’m black and I’m proud of it and I uphold it too . . . I’m not ashamed to walk around the street and what I do I openly do it . . . There’s a lot


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of white fellas that go looking for gins here at night too. I go with white fellas and I keep on going with white fellas . . . If a white fella didn’t want to have anything to do with me when I walked down the street I wouldn’t have anything to do with him . . . She alluded to the segregation at the Oasis Hotel-Motel: You [white people] wouldn’t serve the dark people in the lounge because the white women wouldn’t use the toilets after them. And then to the events that day: You’ve been walking past them [the students] all day, criticising your own colour . . . It hurts you white people in Walgett to see the whites from Sydney up here and do that to you, doesn’t it? Trouble is it’s hurting the whites to see other whites fighting for the blacks . . . Anyhow the colour is only skin deep. Everybody’s the same, black and white . . . It’s a pity some of the whites wouldn’t go and leave the blacks to the town. They can look at me and talk about me as much as they like but they won’t shift me out of Walgett. I intend to die here and I’ll stop here just that long to torment the whites. Charles later recalled: What was important was the Aboriginal people themselves participated in that and particularly the women, they wanted to be part of it you know, and they began to expose everybody—the relationships in the town that were common at the time, you know, white men sneaking around having relationships with Aboriginal women and making out that those relationships didn’t exist and all of that was brought to the surface. In Rachel’s film, the scene goes like this: White men to Freedom Riders: What are you blokes doing here? Get back to where you come from.



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Piss off. We don’t need your advice here. You stirrers. Mongrels. Our blacks were happy before you lot came here. A lot of dingoes. First Murri woman to white town-dwellers: I’m black and I’m proud of it. Anything I’ve got to say I show it. And why can’t we go into your pub and your pools? We’re good enough to sleep with, but we ain’t good enough to swim in your pool are we? White town-dweller: Out of town’s that way (points). First Murri woman: Yeah, you. I seen you down the mission. And you, yeah, hanging around the mission looking for us black gins . . . Second Murri woman: You want to go and ask your father where he used to spend his Friday nights. Down there at the mission with my mother. That’s where he was. Charles Perkins’s voice-over: The white women couldn’t believe it and so they turned on their husbands and they all started arguing. The crowd just disintegrated. After about ten minutes they were all gone, but the message was very clear for everybody to hear. After that discussion, Walgett was finished. It had no answer to racial discrimination. And so, in the middle of the night in Walgett, in an historic moment of confrontational drama, there was a release of the repressed—a naming of behaviours that everyone knew about but no one spoke of. These included sexual contact between white men and Aboriginal women, resulting in mixed-race children living with their mothers, often not acknowledged by their fathers; this was occurring in the same towns as open racism, hostility and widespread segregation. Racism and sexual contact went closely together. The white men who had sexual relations with Aboriginal women were known, in a phrase that now shocks for both its racism and sexism, as ‘gin jockeys’, a term of mockery and abuse, yet a term that could have been applied to a considerable number of white men living in and around this and any similar town. No wonder the actions of an Aboriginal woman named Pat in Walgett on 15 February 1965, threatening publicly to name the ‘gin jockeys’, to disclose that which was known but unspeakable, have become legend among Aboriginal people in that region. No wonder the contradiction between racial


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segregation and high levels of inter-racial sexual contact and procreation made social relations in these small towns so especially bitter. Sexual secrets always just under the surface gave a paranoid psycho-pathological edge to everyday life. Pat Walford finally finished her tirade, though her words were to be remembered long afterwards. It was now 1.00 a.m. We students all got back on the bus, this time with Alex on board, and went on the road to our next targeted town, Moree, which was 136 miles (217 kilometres) away. Though tired and shaken, we wondered whether there would be any media coverage of our protest. We had little to worry about on that score. In running the bus off the road, Joey Marshall ensured the Freedom Ride received the publicity it had always wished to attract. Not all of it was favourable; the conservative radio presenter Eric Baume, for example, made hostile comments. But many urban papers presented the story in a light which was favourable to the students and unfavourable to Walgett. The Bulletin scooped everyone with its report by Sam Lipski, written before the bus left Sydney and not covering events in Walgett, but appearing the day after the bus was run off the road and explaining the motivations of Charles and the other students. I have not been able to trace the journalist for the Australian, but there seems to have been someone on the spot. The paper went to press too early for its first Walgett story on the Tuesday morning to cover the bus being run off the road, but it did report the demonstration outside the RSL Club, the opposition of Reverend Dowe to the students’ protest, and the jocular hostility of the club vice-president: ‘The students all look like beatniks to us.’ The Sydney Morning Herald was lucky to have Bruce Maxwell in town and then on the bus, able to supply some first-hand detailed information, supplemented by other information gathered by a Sydney-based journalist, Bert Castellari. Early editions of the Herald story on 16 February, like that in the Australian, concentrated on the survey and the protests in Walgett during the day, but also included a brief mention of the bus being run off the road. This same report carried a statement made by Premier Renshaw at his Monday press conference that he had been reassured by ‘a very reliable person in Walgett who had done more to assist aborigines than anyone else in the northwest’ that ‘what took place was more or less in the nature of good, light banter between the two groups. Some speeches were made at lunchtime, and subsequently some of the students



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were playing basketball and some were swimming in the swimming pool.’ In later editions, after ‘some frank phone calls’ from Maxwell, the bus being run off the road came to the front of the story, with Maxwell evoking the danger and describing the fear inside the bus itself. Each edition stressed the incident in increasingly graphic terms, one edition referring to the bus having ‘crashed’. Reading one of these Herald accounts the next day, we students liked it very much.

‘Nonsense!’ Of course you want a drink’. Cartoon by Molnar, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 February 1965.

The Daily Mirror was another positive paper. Under its young 33-yearold Australian–Jewish editor, Zell Rabin, who had spent three years as the paper ’s New York correspondent, it had taken up a pro-Aboriginal position for some time, and now responded to the Walgett events with an editorial headed ‘Dixie comes to NSW’, which described racial discrimination as ‘an ugly fact of life in northern NSW’. It continued the analogy with the American South when it said: ‘The reaction of the hillbilly element of Walgett to the peaceful picketing by the students would not have been out of place in Mississippi. It culminated in an act of hooliganism on the road that could have resulted in serious injury or even loss of life. There should be an immediate inquiry into the accident.’ The Mirror defended the students’ right to protest, and suggested that it was the Premier’s responsibility to ensure that these young people were not molested for the rest of the trip. The Sun’s editorial on 16 February hit a


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similar note, widening the comparison to include Britain and South Africa. Headed ‘Walgett Outrage’, it began: Any Australians who have been feeling smug about happenings in Alabama or the British phobia about having a nigger for a neighbour, should now look honestly at Walgett . . . Little Walgett is on its way to joining the big league, and to rank with Little Rock, Selma, Smethwick, Notting Hill Gate and Johannesburg . . . Australia should be shocked at what happened at Walgett yesterday and ashamed of what has been going on there and at places like it for a long time. In Sydney on Tuesday, 16 February, Premier Renshaw was pressed to comment further on the events in Walgett, in the light of the bus having been run off the road. The Australian on Wednesday quoted him as denying that there was any ‘undue discrimination’ against Aborigines at Walgett in the north of the state. He said: ‘Any well-behaved Aboriginal can go into hotels there or use the local swimming pool. And their children attend the local schools. There is also an extensive housing scheme underway through the Welfare Board to assist in their assimilation into the life of the town.’ The Herald on 17 February also reported on Renshaw having said there was no discrimination in Walgett on the ground of colour. It carried a photo of the students standing outside the Walgett RSL in the sun, and another of the RSL Club members carrying cases of soft drink out to the students. The following Tuesday, 22 February, the Australian returned to the Walgett events with an opinion piece by William Olson, strongly critical of the RSL: I suggest the RSL and the RSL clubs should be out there riding with these students, shouting their indignation to the heavens, tearing down the foul tin shanties on the river banks of the west. I suggest the RSL and the RSL clubs should be in the front-line attacking cant and humbug . . . somewhere the RSL lost the track. After recounting the brave deeds of Australians in World War II, he asked: ‘Is the RSL big enough to recognise something of that spirit in the young students riding through North-Western NSW?’ Yet if the urban papers were strongly for the students, their readers were more mixed in their responses. Some letters were against both



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Aboriginal people and the students. One in the Herald, from a Walgett resident, said ‘there is no racial discrimination in Walgett. There may appear to be some in the eyes of people from the city who, like the university students, know nothing about country towns.’ The letter defended the exclusion from the RSL: ‘The [Aborigines] cannot “hold” their liquor and to be drunk and swearing is no way for one to enter any home, most of all an RSL hall founded as a mark of respect.’ Many similar letters were to be written as the Freedom Ride continued on its way. There were, however, at least as many in support. One in the Australian was from noted poet Bruce Dawe, who thought the hostility that had greeted the students at the RSL Club was ‘some indication of the colour prejudice latent in this so-called “egalitarian” land’. He drew attention to the contradictions between Australians’ notion of their own egalitarianism and their continuing racism: ‘Of course we’re democrats—although we draw the line at boorees, boongs, abos, niggers, Chows, Nips, etc.’ Another in the Sydney Sun, from Mrs Joy Tyler who described herself as ‘the daughter of missionaries’ amongst the Aboriginal people of New South Wales and Queensland, expressed admiration for the students, and support for Aboriginal people generally. Outside Sydney, newspaper coverage of the Walgett events varied. The urban newspapers in other states carried stories syndicated from the Sydney papers. The Courier-Mail editorial thought the students had been provocative. The West Australian on 18 February carried a long and detailed profile of Charles Perkins, mentioning his soccer career, marriage to a white woman from Adelaide, and his enrolment in Arts at the University of Sydney. The New South Wales regional and rural press had a largely unsympathetic coverage. The Northern Daily Leader, based in Tamworth, carried a denial by Walgett police that the students had in fact been run off the road. The Spectator, Walgett’s only newspaper, reported in something of an understatement: ‘The general feeling towards the visit is one of adverse publicity for Walgett by a group of students whose visit was pointless and only caused dissatisfaction in some circles of the community.’ The students were far from finished with Walgett, several of them returning there for more desegregation battles throughout the year. And Walgett was far from finished with battles over Aboriginal rights. For the moment, though, Walgett had served its purpose of dramatically drawing attention to white racism. Both shaken and excited, the students pressed on to Moree.


5

Chapter

Moree: Australia’s Little Rock? Towns like Moree in New South Wales have far too much in common with Little Rock in America. Reverend Alan Walker, 11 July 1958

I

f Walgett was tense and dramatic, Moree was confrontational, exciting and threatening. It is the Moree leg of the Freedom Ride which most people now remember, and it was in Moree that so many people now say the Freedom Ride changed race relations forever. It was Moree, too, which attracted international media attention. Moree was a much larger and more prosperous town than Walgett, lying as it did on a flood plain covered with the broken-down basalt and volcanic black soil brought by the Gwydir River (the Moree section of it is known as the Mehi) from the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range. With such rich soil, this was wealthy sheep, cattle and wheat country. Where Walgett had been on the western edge of Kamilaraay country, Moree was established right in the middle of this large and populous Indigenous people. The Kamilaraay past lives on in many of the place names around Moree—Bundarra, Warialda, Pallamallawa, Mungindi, Narrabri and Terry Hie Hie; Cobbadah, Bingara and Boolooroo; Walangulla, Boomi, Collarenebri, Yallaroi, Wongabinda, Boggabilla, and north to Goondiwindi. Because it is further north than Wellington and Walgett, European interest in the area began rather later, starting with Cunningham’s overland exploration in 1827–28, and continuing when Sir Thomas 114


M o r e e : A u s t r a l i a ’s L i t t l e R o c k ?

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Mitchell criss-crossed the region between 1830 and 1832. Mitchell reached the Gwydir not far from the present township of Moree on 10 January 1832, meeting Kamilaraay encampments along the way. The area was declared the Liverpool Plains Pastoral District, and squatting was permitted there from 1836. There was a fierce battle for the land between the squatters and the Kamilaraay from the late 1830s, the most wellknown massacre of Aboriginal people in Australian history occurring in June 1838 at Myall Creek, a tributary of the Gwydir about 82 miles (136 kilometres) southeast of Moree. Fighting between Aboriginal inhabitants and white settlers continued through the 1840s. The settlers urged the government to do more to guarantee their safety. In May 1849, a contingent of Native Police— Aboriginal men hired from distant districts like the Murrumbidgee and thought an effective and cheap way of quelling resistance—arrived led by Commander Walker. By 1852 the area was considered ‘pacified’. By the 1860s, a pastoral economy had successfully supplanted the former hunter and gatherer economy, though some traditional food-getting lasted for many decades afterwards. Aboriginal people were now employed as shepherds, drovers and general labourers in the pastoral industry. Eventually, the advent of road transport, railways, steam tractors and irrigation established the conditions for more intensive agricultural production. Pastoral properties were reduced to more manageable sizes, and wheat farming prospered. The town of Moree started in 1852 with a store on the bank of the Mehi River; a post office opened on 1 May 1853, and the town was surveyed in 1860. Yet, while the district remained one of huge pastoral stations, the town did not grow quickly, reaching a population of only 150 after twenty years. Gradually—and especially with the advent of agriculture and closer settlement—it became the hub of a network of transport and communication in the northwest. Schools, hospitals and churches were all built in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Early in the twentieth century, professional services developed, along with timber-cutting and brick industries. Moree was a railway junction, and linked with other large towns in every direction. The town was also blessed with a plentiful supply of hot mineral water. An artesian bore was sunk in 1895, and within a year baths were constructed so that people could benefit from the water ’s medicinal properties. Moree became a tourist town, with several thousand visitors attracted by the hot artesian


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baths during the winter months each year. More elaborate baths were built in 1913, owned and operated by the Moree Municipal Council. As Moree grew and prospered, Aboriginal people were generally kept out of town, and lived in camps on the pastoral stations nearby. From 1895, several of these pastoral camps were consolidated at the Aborigines Protection Board station at Terry Hie Hie, 24 miles (38 kilometres) southeast of the town. The station became home to many Kamilaraay Murris, including the survivors of the Myall Creek massacre and their descendants. In 1924, after bitter conflict between the station manager and the residents, and demand for access to the land by settlers, the Terry Hie Hie station was broken up and the land leased to white farmers. As was to happen whenever reserves were broken up in this way, the people drifted to the nearby towns. Many Terry Hie Hie people moved to join their relatives at a camp which had existed for about 30 years, on the bank of the Mehi River, on the Bingara Road stock route just east of Moree itself, dramatically swelling its numbers. The bitterness of the Terry Hie Hie people at being forced away from their traditional land led them, according to historian Heather Goodall, to ‘entrench themselves tenaciously’ in their new location. In their desire to stay, they came into conflict with an equally determined white population that wanted them to go. The town council tried throughout the 1920s and early 1930s to drive Kamilaraay people away from the town, resorting to demolishing huts and even gaoling people in an effort to remove them. The struggle, and the gaoling, meant that those living there continued to have a strong emotional attachment to the site for decades afterwards. The council again tried to push them away in 1933 by excluding them from various town services and enforcing a curfew. None of these strategies worked, and the town authorities found not only that they could not drive the people away, but that more camps sprang up along the river. When Aboriginal people drifted in from Boggabilla in the 1930s, they set up a camp beside the Mehi River on the western side of town which became known as ‘Middle Camp’. The original camp became ‘Top Camp’ (or ‘Bingara Road’) and there was now also a ‘Bottom Camp’ on the banks of the Mehi River 2 miles (3 kilometres) west of the town, where in the late 1930s the Aborigines Protection Board built some cottages in an attempt to gain some control of the situation. By the late 1940s, Moree had become a wealthy, hierarchical, class-



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conscious town, with several poverty-stricken Aboriginal settlements along the riverbank. Marie Reay and Grace Sitlington, in their anthropological study of the town in 1948, described its class and race relations. Membership of each (white) social class, they said, ‘is determined by wealth and other possessions, and whether one’s occupation is pastoral, professional, trade or labouring’. Below the working class whites was the Aboriginal population, itself by this time split into a class hierarchy of its own. In the mid-1940s, Aboriginal people could get jobs similar to those of the lower class white community (i.e. labouring occupations). The men could work, in order of status within the Aboriginal community, as railway gangers and fettlers, shearers, Department of Main Roads employees, municipal council employees, station cooks, drovers, station hands, cleaners, gardeners and casual labourers. For the women, possible jobs—also in status order—were taking in washing, hawking, commercial laundry work, general domestic work, hotel laundry and cleaning, and casual domestic work. Women could also work at the McMaster (Aborginal) Ward at the Moree hospital as wardsmaids. Ten years later, Moree had become an even wealthier town, the most important pastoral centre in New South Wales, with a growing Aboriginal population. The white townsfolk made renewed efforts to exclude Aboriginal people from the town altogether and, failing that, from a range of services and entertainments. As the numbers of Aboriginal people in and around the town grew, white attitudes hardened. The Aborigines Welfare Board expanded the ‘Bottom Camp’ reserve into a station, building an additional 27 houses. Managed by E. Morgan, who appears later in the Freedom Ride story as an Aboriginal Welfare Officer in Lismore, the station—or Mehi mission, as it was often known—opened in 1953. A school was built on the mission especially for Aboriginal children, which helped exclude them from the local school. Aboriginal people were also not allowed to use other town facilities, such as the Memorial Hall built in honour of those who served in war, or the artesian baths and associated Olympic pool. Tension over these arrangements started when Russell Watson, a young Baptist lay preacher, arrived in Moree from Tamworth in 1952 as the spare parts manager for a Ford dealer. He made friends with some Aboriginal people, read Elkin’s The Australian Aborigines, helped form a youth club on the Aboriginal station, and conducted services there on Sunday evenings. In 1955, to the horror of the council and the residents of


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Moree, he tried to book the supper room of the Memorial Hall for the wedding reception of his Aboriginal friends, Leo Cutmore and Irene Tighe. Moree’s white residents were even more worried at the prospect of Aboriginal children using the artesian thermal baths and its adjacent swimming pool. The baths especially represented, in the words of Reay and Sitlington, ‘a municipal investment to attract tourists, aid commerce and promote town development’. Thousands of tourists continued to visit the town each winter, and the baths were a key attraction. To ensure that Aboriginal people did not use either the hall or the baths, the council decided to put into effect a resolution it had passed five years earlier, but never enforced. At the council meeting on 6 June 1955, a motion was passed unanimously by those present, including the Mayor, Alf Sadlier, the Deputy Mayor, William Tait, and Aldermen Robinson (the mover), Doyle (the seconder), Hawkins, Gildersleeve, Bullass and Boland. This was a standing resolution excluding Aboriginal people from the municipal thermal baths and the Memorial Hall. So important is the resolution to the Freedom Ride story that it is worth quoting at length: No person, being a full-blooded or half-caste aboriginal native of Australia, or being a person apparently having an admixture of aborginal blood, shall use, or occupy or be present in or upon, or be allowed or permitted or invited to use or occupy or be present in or upon, the premises of the Council known as the Memorial Hall . . . AND THAT no such person as aforesaid shall use or occupy or be present in or upon or be allowed or permitted to use or occupy or be present in or upon, the premises of the council known as the Bore Baths or in or upon any of the Buildings or places enclosed herewith. In defending the resolution, Deputy Mayor Tait said the council would ‘allow coloured returned soldiers to attend the Anzac Day dinner at the hall’, and that ‘the preservation of the thermal baths for the exclusive use of white patrons is vital to this town’s prosperity’. Church leaders protested loudly. The Northwest Champion carried several letters condemning the council, including one from the Methodist minister, the Reverend Roy Bedford, who also spoke against the resolution in church. His sermon showed an unusual recognition of the colonial past: ‘We are here through invasion and aggression,’ he told his congregation.



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‘We not only took their land, we treated them miserably in doing so. At times they were hunted like animals. They were whipped and mercilessly beaten. Their womenfolk were used to satisfy the lusts of miserable men.’ He argued that people had to be judged individually, and whole groups should not be condemned because of the behaviour and habits of some of their members. Canon Ormerod, the vicar of Moree Church of England, also opposed the ban, telling one reporter that ‘to keep people out of the memorial hall merely because of the colour of their skin is barbarous’, as did the Catholic priest Father Richard Shanahan. The story was taken up by the Sydney press, especially the SunHerald on 12 and 19 June. It reported on Aboriginal people being refused service in cafés and on private buses, on them being expected to occupy the front rows in the cinema, and a separate hospital ward. ‘Baths attendants,’ it reported, ‘have become expert in recognising at a glance the minutest trace of “colour ” in patrons.’ Bert Groves pointed out that the Moree council’s segregationism was in direct conflict with the state government’s assimilation policy, and the new manager of the station, Desmond Reynolds, agreed. The council was, said Reynolds, ‘encouraging a policy of racial segregation identical with that of South Africa. It is contrary to the policy of our Government and I foresee grave repercussions.’ Public interest in the case grew, and when Leo Cutmore and Irene Tighe were married at the All Saints’ Church of England in Moree, with Canon Ormerod presiding, he received letters of support from all over the state. So strong was the clerical outcry that a committee of councillors, doctors and ministers, along with the Superintendent of the Aborigines Welfare Board, the Inspector of Schools and police representatives, was formed to discuss the issue. It met on 26 July, and recommended to the council that it rescind its resolution. The council, however, stood firm on the resolution concerning the pool, though it did agree to allow Aboriginal people to use the Memorial Hall and supper room at the council’s discretion. This decision, made at a time when informal segregation was slowly supplanting such formal prohibitions, gave Moree a reputation as a racially segregated town—a reputation which stuck. Two years later, Allan Ashbolt, a creative and politically radical radio broadcaster, made a devastating radio program about race relations in Moree. Ashbolt had already heard that Moree was ‘known as a tough town for Aborigines to live in’ from Murris from the area he had met


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during the war in the North Australia Observer Unit patrolling the far north of the country. He also had Russell Watson, who had recently left the town, as a helpful informant. Ashbolt visited Moree, and interviewed many of the town’s leading citizens and some of its more outspoken Aboriginal residents. Broadcast on 18 June 1957, the program, ‘A Study in Attitudes’, was 45 minutes long, well researched and very hard-hitting. Moree, said Ashbolt, was ‘a rich, fat town’. He went on: ‘There’s money in Moree, money that the droughts can’t dry and the floods can’t drown.’ It was also a tourist town, for, as Ashbolt said, ‘the weather’s nearly always dry and fresh, there’s shooting on the river flats and swamps, and the artesian bore baths are bubbling even in the wintertime’. Some of this wealth trickled down to the Aboriginal population; the Aborigines, said Ashbolt, ‘nearly all earn good money, either as shearers, station hands, railway workers or general labourers’. Yet it was a town marked by racial segregation, which most of the whites Ashbolt interviewed were quite happy to defend. Leo Smith, the president of the Bowling Club, told Ashbolt his club had no Aboriginal members, and the people were happy to be quite separate on the mission station. Mr H.E. Halstead, the president of the Golf Club, asserted to Ashbolt that Aboriginal people shouldn’t be allowed amongst white people. ‘We wouldn’t accept them into the Golf Club, and I don’t think any other clubs in town would accept them either. They really are a problem, but you have to live here, and live here for some time to know just what problems they do create.’ Like all the other whites Ashbolt interviewed, Halstead saw the solution as segregation on to the mission, except when working. ‘They work outside in many fields, especially on the outside in the pastoral area, such as shearing and fencing and that type of thing, and they’re very useful in that regard, but when it comes to their private lives, well it’s a different matter altogether. Segregate them I would say altogether.’ In the same vein, Alf Sadlier, the Mayor, defended the pool resolution passed two years before: The thing died a natural death and as far as Moree is concerned the thing is forgotten . . . the aboriginal question was a local matter and it had nothing to do with anybody else in this Commonwealth. It was our own affair . . . we had a special meeting and from that special meeting I think everybody was quite happy, and as I said before, the



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matter has been dropped. It’s finished with and it’s no good anybody in Australia trying to bring the aboriginal question back in Moree because it’s finished with once and for all. Ashbolt’s program demonstrated clearly that, as the Aboriginal population of Moree continued to rise, so white attitudes towards Aboriginal people became more negative. Both the Catholic priest, Father Shanahan, and John Green, the local Aborigines Welfare Officer, told Ashbolt that hostilities had been increasing for some years as more Aboriginal people came into town. (Green later rose to become the Superintendent of Aborigines’ Welfare and a member of the Welfare Board, a position he held at the time of the Freedom Ride.) Green drew attention to the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the hotels unless they had an exemption certificate (and the fact that, even then, some hotels would not serve them). In addition, Green told Ashbolt: Certain cafés won’t serve them, either, and certain taxis won’t run them. They sit on their own, down in the front stalls at the picture theatre—not because there’s a law or regulation or managerial policy that tells them to, but because the community expects them to. Darce Cassidy had seen this first hand as a teenager: One of my uncles had practised as the solicitor here in the 1950s, and I had come here several times for holidays. It was here that I had my first experience of racial segregation. It was well before television, and a visit to the cinema on Saturday afternoon was a regular occurrence for most kids. At home I went to Hoyt’s at Crows Nest (in Sydney), and my friends and I were allowed ninepence. The cinema cost sixpence downstairs and ninepence upstairs. We all went downstairs and used the remaining threepence for an ice-cream or lollies. When I went to the cinema in Moree with my cousins we went upstairs. When I asked why I was told the Aborigines went downstairs. This annoyed me, not because I was in any way concerned for the Aborigines or opposed to segregation, but because it seemed to be a stupid waste of money. My Moree cousins appeared to have no contact with Aborigines, and I certainly had no contact in the times I stayed there during school holidays.


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Green also told Ashbolt: At the District Hospital, there’s a special ward for Aborigines; it’s separate from the other wards and there are no trained nurses in attendance—only untrained nursing assistants of their own race. An Aboriginal interviewee also told Ashbolt about the hospital: I’ve lived in Armidale and gone to school there . . . In the hospital, you’re in the one hospital right through from upstairs or anywhere, maternity ward—you’re in one hospital with the white people and you get good treatment, but down here in Moree, you’ve just got one separate ward and built away from the white people’s ward on your own. Another told Ashbolt: ‘We both hold our Exemption tickets, but then you can’t go into the pubs to have a beer or anything. And when you do bring it home there’s always the police or someone behind you. You can’t even have a decent drink. You can’t even give a party.’ Segregation continued in the schools, with Aboriginal children confined to the Aboriginal school on the mission. Although one-third of Moree’s Aboriginal population was Catholic, none attended the town’s Catholic schools. The Catholic church was, however, situated just outside the grounds of the Aboriginal mission so that the 100 or so Catholics there could attend. Ashbolt’s program sparked little immediate press comment, but it drew considerable comment directly to the ABC itself, and it seems to have had a lasting influence on educated urban people’s understanding of race relations. Ashbolt received a lot of complimentary mail, especially from academics and anthropologists. Anthropologist Jeremy Beckett described it as ‘brilliant’, and as having exposed to the nation the ‘particularly unpleasant situation in Moree’. He wrote in The Observer, ‘the smug complacency of local dignitaries was a particularly nauseating feature’. Two years later, the poet Roland Robinson referred, in a letter to the Herald, to the ‘infamous and inhuman statements on the aborigines contained in the ABC radio interviews obtained by Allan Ashbolt a few years ago’, and described Moree as ‘this centre of Australian “apartheid”’. Years later, Barrie Pittock and Ian Spalding both remembered the program as ground-breaking and ahead of its time.



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Within three months of Ashbolt’s program going to air, the question of racially segregated towns acquired a dramatic new resonance. In September 1957, the phrase ‘Little Rock’ became famous and in no time at all towns in New South Wales were being judged for their ‘Little Rock’ status. Little Rock, a small town in Arkansas in the United States, became a symbol of small-town racism when mobs of white parents and other segregationists stood outside its Central High School in an attempt to prevent African American students entering, as they were legally entitled to do after a Federal Court ordered the public schools in Arkansas to begin desegregation. The state governor, who sent the National Guard to ensure African American students did not enrol at the school, had supported the parents. President Eisenhower responded by ordering the military to Little Rock to ensure that the law was obeyed; at 5.00 a.m. on 24 September, paratroopers encircled the school with bayonets fixed, and several hours later nine black children were able to enter. With the swimming pool resolution and Ashbolt’s program in the public mind, Moree now became number one candidate for the Australian ‘Little Rock’ title. Reverend Alan Walker, in his National Aborigines Day speech in Sydney on 11 July 1958, spoke strongly of the ways in which Australia was failing Aboriginal people: ‘In the past, white Australians pillaged Aborigines’ land, organised mass killings of Aborigine people, even crucified them on crude crosses. No recompense can undo the past, but action can redeem the present and the future.’ He deplored the fact that the Commonwealth seemed unable to act to ensure a nationwide policy: ‘State rights are coming before human rights.’ He then said: ‘Ugly incidents showing the operation of a colour-bar are all too frequent. The shame of many country towns is the treatment given to the miserably housed Aborigine people on their outskirts.’ Then came the crunch line, as far as Moree was concerned: ‘Towns like Moree in New South Wales have far too much in common with Little Rock in America.’ Within Moree, there was some pressure to rescind or amend the swimming pool resolution. On the urging of a local teacher, a 21-year-old alderman, Bob Brown, moved two years later that the resolution be amended to let Aboriginal kids in school groups into the baths. There was no seconder. In a long interview in 1991, Bob told me he asked some of the aldermen privately why Aboriginal people couldn’t be allowed in the baths. The answer was hygiene; they might spread sexual diseases like syphilis and gonorrhoea. So Bob went to Dr Hollingsworth, the state


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medical officer, and paid for a consultation to ask if you could get sexual diseases from the baths. Hollingsworth said the baths were a strange place to do the things you needed to do to get gonorrhoea—that is, you could only catch it from sexual contact. So Bob went to the next council meeting and said he had asked about getting sexual diseases from the pool and had found out from the doctor that it wasn’t possible. The councillors still weren’t convinced. Bob asked what else could go wrong. Someone (it wasn’t clear who) said, ‘You know how Aboriginal men would love to impregnate white women, well they could ejaculate into the pool and all this semen swimming around would make the women pregnant’. Bob said to us in 1991 that it might sound funny now, but he didn’t know anything then, and went back to Dr Hollingsworth to ask if this could happen. Hollingsworth said no it couldn’t, and anyway there was chlorine in the swimming pool and the hot baths were sexually segregated. Bob went back to the council and told them there was no worry there either. The councillors were unconvinced, however, and Bob lost his place on the council soon afterwards. In an attempt to put an end to the baths issue, the town’s Apex Club built a 25-metre swimming pool at the Mehi mission in 1960, with materials funded by the Welfare Board, local gifts and the club itself. This was a direct and explicit attempt to ensure Aboriginal children did not use the artesian bore baths. Mr Heffron, the state Labor Premier, who commented that his officiating at the ceremony did not signify his approval of segregation, opened both the pool and the new school. Later that year, an unnamed Sydney Morning Herald journalist visited Moree, and wrote a glowing report on the Mehi mission, describing it as a credit to the board and the local citizens, though he did note that the town garbage dump was only half a mile away. Now, he reported: Its 33 gaily painted fibro and timber cottages have an average of 10 inhabitants each. Each cottage has three bedrooms, a combined dining room-kitchen, shower recess and a laundry. Most are kept in perfect condition by the tenants and there is evidence of civic pride in the neat lawns and flower gardens surrounding them. The station also had ‘a recreation hall, a school, a sports oval and tennis courts’, as well as the new swimming pool. The Herald contrasted the mission favourably with ‘Top Camp’ and other shanty towns as places



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where ‘many people are living in pig-sty filth’. The question of racial segregation would not go away. Opponents of the resolution tried again in March 1961. After representations from the local high school headmaster and the Moree council’s own Baths Committee to lift the ban on high school children, an amendment was passed allowing Aboriginal children to use the pool for Wednesday afternoon sport or ‘on special occasions such as carnivals and training sessions’. Aboriginal adults and unsupervised children were still, however, to be kept away. Two months later there was further trouble—this time over the separate Aboriginal McMaster Ward at the local hospital, and the exclusion of Aboriginal people from other wards. The Minister for Health, W.F. Sheahan, announced that the government intended to ban racial segregation in all public hospitals, and that he had already asked the Moree District Hospital to end its segregationist practices. The chairman of the hospital board said any such order would be ignored, though some integration could occur with Aborigines who were ‘good types’. The Mayor of Moree also spoke against the Minister’s request, saying Aborigines did not wish to mix with whites, and that everyone was happy with the present state of affairs. The Minister replied: ‘If we are to take our place among the nations of the world we have to be prepared to recognise the modern concept of the colour question, particularly in its relation to international obligations and treaties . . . there will be no segregation in hospitals built with public money by the government of this state except on medical grounds.’ This was not the view of most of the citizens of Moree. One former citizen, G.L. Hobson, wrote to the Herald two days later about the segregated hospital: ‘What in the world is wrong with this?’ Faith Bandler also took the opportunity to liken Moree to Little Rock in the United States; it was disgraceful, she said, that white nurses there did not wish to care for coloured patients. The secretary of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, Jack Horner, wrote to the Australian Trained Nurses’ Association seeking its view; the association replied that it did not sanction racial discrimination. The situation in Moree continued to attract negative comment in the Sydney press. Bert Groves wrote a letter to the Sun-Herald in June 1963 criticising the growth of racial and colour prejudice in ‘a flourishing town like Moree, where many children are attending high school’. Moree’s racial discrimination was again drawn to urban and national attention


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with Graham Williams’s articles in the Australian in January 1965, the result of his trip with Charles Perkins and Ted Noffs. Williams reported that Moree hospital still had its ‘traditional McMaster Ward for Aboriginal patients’. He also reported that the building of a pool on the mission had not eased Aboriginal people’s resentment at being excluded from the bore baths—indeed quite the opposite; it symbolised their rejection by the white community. Williams asked the Mayor of Moree, by this time Councillor Bill Lloyd, about the colour bar at the pool. Lloyd was still new at the mayoral job; when the Freedom Ride students conducted their survey in February 1965, one Aboriginal respondent told them that ‘the former mayor had not liked “dark people”’, but he ‘did not yet know what the new one was like’. At this point, Lloyd insisted that the manager had the right to refuse anyone who wasn’t clean enough to swim in the pool, but that he couldn’t comment further as ‘I haven’t got the text of the Council resolution before me’. He also told Williams that Moree had too many Aboriginal people: ‘Every town can absorb only so many Aboriginals pro rata. Other towns should help share the burden.’ And indeed the Aboriginal population at Moree was rising, reaching over 1000 in a total population of 7000 by 1965. The Mehi mission population alone had risen steadily from 283 in 1953 to 434 in 1965. Six weeks after this story appeared, the Freedom Ride arrived in Moree. On the way from Walgett, we had stopped in the early hours of the morning at Collarenebri and slept for a few hours in the park, illegally. We got up early, at 6.00 a.m., in the hope police wouldn’t see us, but later found we had been spotted, and furthermore our presence reported on the radio. We continued on to Moree, over a poor road with long unsealed sections, a distance of 130 miles (217 kilometres). The students’ bus arrived about 8.30 a.m., eight-and-a-half hours ahead of schedule thanks to the Reverend Dowe of the Anglican church in Walgett. We settled in at the Methodist church in Frome Street, where Ted Ryan, who had written supportively to Jim Spigelman in January, was the minister. Some of the students had been to Moree before. Not only had Darce visited in school holidays, but also John Butterworth had lived there for a while and had relatives still in Moree. Most of us, though, had never been there, and we had no Aboriginal or Aboriginal rights organisation contacts. The board report in 1960 mentioned an advancement association at Moree, but no other information about such an organisation survives, and there was certainly no effective organisation



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when the Freedom Ride arrived. Neville Kelly, who helped form the Moree Association for the Advancement of Aborigines after the Freedom Ride had left, told a parliamentary committee two years later that ‘we had been talking about a society for two or three years before the students came here. That was the final thing. That kicked it off. We realised we had to do something.’ So, without prior contacts, we would have to get in touch with the local people as best we could. Yet this was not Walgett, with its well-established leadership; in Moree, with its hierarchical and sometimes mutually hostile Aboriginal communities, we were met with suspicion and distrust. A clue to Aboriginal attitudes in the affected towns can be gained from Isabel Flick’s description of the feeling in nearby Collarenebri, where we had camped briefly on our way to Moree. Isabel told Heather Goodall years later: When the Freedom Riders came out, everybody went quiet, you know. Everyone was scared I guess . . . Some of the women just didn’t want to have anything to do with them, they wouldn’t even let them go over to the Reserve if they came there, they said . . . Then the white people started saying to us: you fellas don’t want to get mixed up with them . . . I remember dad saying to me: Well, you don’t know what they are. There’s a mob of them. They reckon there’s a lot of white people on it. If it was black fellas I’d understand, but it’s a lot of white people on there, so that’s what’s got me mixed up. After the excitements of Walgett, the students spent the morning cleaning up, writing letters and sending telegrams to possibly anxious parents. Jim Spigelman, for instance, telegrammed his parents at 10.14 a.m., saying ‘I am all right collect papers’. Charles Perkins got in touch with Ted Noffs, who reported to the Herald that the trip was quite successful, having carried out surveys in ‘Orange, Wellington, Dubbo, Gilgandra and Gulargambone’ without any incident. Bill Pakenham, the driver, rang his boss at Saint’s bus company and was told, as he later said to a Herald reporter, that ‘I was to take every precaution to guard the safety of myself and the bus’. We then held a general meeting. Diary, 16 February: We discussed just what we were doing, and what to do about Derek Molloy and John Gowdie who . . . didn’t really


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agree with our principles. We decided 27:2 with 1 abstention that everyone on the bus would be bound by majority decisions. This means the two who opposed demonstrations would have to join in them, or leave. They still haven’t decided what to do. In fact, Derek did leave the Freedom Ride at this point, but John stayed. He later wrote: I had to decide whether to continue with the group or not. I couldn’t just be an observer . . . My concern was with what the students were doing. There was no doubt—they were stirring up trouble. I did not question their concern for the Aborigines, which I shared . . . I was far from convinced about the confrontational approach of these city students. It was the most difficult time. I could see both sides. I did not agree with them, but I could understand the hostility of many in the white communities . . . Yet justice demanded and humanity demanded that change had to happen. Discrimination was overt. It was institutionalised. Prejudice was ingrained . . . Someone reminded me that Martin Luther King referred to ‘creative tension’ as a necessary element in the change process. Was this creative tension? I agonised and I prayed. To stay with the group or to go home . . . I stayed. We decided to hold a big public meeting in the town the following evening. In the afternoon, the students split into groups to do the survey in the town. Diary: Sue Reeves and I met Mr Brown and he gave us contacts with the very few aborigines employed in the town. This was Bob Brown, the young ex-councillor who had opposed the pool resolution some years earlier, and was at this time managing the family electrical business, which sold ‘TV, Radio, Home Appliances, Furniture’. Given our lack of contacts in the town, he was something of a godsend, though he had known nothing about us and we nothing of him until we arrived. Here was a local white citizen with no links to any existing organisation, whether political, religious or community based. Bob was an unusual character, both very much of the town and yet so different from most of its white residents.



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Bob Brown, Freedom Ride supporter, standing outside his electrical goods store, Moree. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)

When I visited Bob in 1991 (at Port Macquarie, where he had gone to live some years after, and to some degree because of, the events described in this book), he told me he was born in 1936 and grew up in a house across the river from ‘Bottom Camp’, later the Mehi mission, and knew Aboriginal kids in his childhood. He played with them and became friends with some of them. He was the son of a magistrate and businessman, who had been notably lenient towards Aboriginal people brought to court for drunkenness. Bob spoke of having come into a business quite young, and always having enough money and a pretty good life. Somehow (probably on the radio) he heard about the students and their bus arriving that morning, went around to the Methodist hall where we were staying and introduced himself to Charles. He told me: I didn’t think the students would actually do or achieve anything; they would just make a few pretty speeches. I thought I’d see. I only met Charlie Perkins two or three times, I hadn’t met him before this and I never met him again [he did, though, only a year after this interview, when he appeared in Rachel Perkins’s film on the Freedom Ride]. But I was impressed by the way he dressed, he was the first person I ever saw to wear a coat and good shirt with jeans.


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With Bob’s help, we looked for people to interview. Not surprisingly, given Moree’s recent history, the Moree townspeople were reluctant to talk, and we were able to interview only about eight whites and ten Aboriginal people. Charles told reporters that the students had found discrimination at the pool and the school: Aboriginal children from the mission settlement receive half an hour less schooling each day. This is because the bus that picks them up collects European children first, and delivers them to school before going to the mission. In the afternoons, the Aboriginal children are let out 15 minutes early to get the bus home. One of the students, the Australian reported, was told by a housewife to ‘get to hell out of it’, while a shopgirl being interviewed by a student was called away and sent to work in the back of the store by the manager. That night, we felt obliged to attend a film screening put on by the Methodist Youth Fellowship, in whose hall we were staying. Diary: The minister was very good, but then showed us a film . . . about how lovely life is in South Africa. A few of us walked out after about 5 mins in disgust and later learned that nearly all the SAFA group had walked out. Hall Greenland got up afterwards and made a statement about what apartheid meant. The minister agreed with us. We had a drink at a hotel, and then went to bed early, about 10.30 p.m. While we were recovering from our Walgett experiences, and doing our survey, representatives of the media began pouring into the town. The ABC, the Daily Mirror and other media organisations all sent journalists up to Moree to join the tour, and most arrived that Tuesday, or the next day. Journalists and photographers were allowed a place on the bus if they paid £10 per head, and about seven did so. Although they travelled with us, the journalists were banned from most meetings, but were given regular bulletins of decisions. One of the most colourful journalists to arrive that day was Gerald Stone, who had migrated to Australia from the United States three years earlier, and was now working for the sympathetic Daily Mirror. One of the students, Judith Rich, at this point changed her status to become a reporter for the Daily Telegraph on the tour. She was to find, though, that the Telegraph’s attitude to the Freedom



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Ride was much more hostile than her own, and its use of her reports was limited. From this point on, journalists and photographers would accompany every student action, including the survey. Delighted by all the attention, the next morning the students continued their survey at both the Mehi mission and the Bingara Road (‘Top Camp’) reserve. The day before, the manager of the mission, Mr G.G. Ord, had granted the students permission to visit both, though he refused to say if he had been authorised to do so by the Aborigines Welfare Board. In fact, he had; the board had met that day, Tuesday, 16 February, and agreed that the students be granted permission to visit stations and reserves ‘provided the Manager, Supervisor, and/or Welfare Officer is present’. It sent telegrams to the managers and area welfare officers in the towns the students wished to visit. The contrast between the two communities clearly demonstrated the trade-off people made between material conditions and freedom from intervention in their daily lives. Diary: The mission had much better housing etc. than we’d seen anywhere, but there was a manager in control who was apparently very disliked and seemed rather unpleasant. The answers we got were very subdued and the fact that the manager and the press were wandering about didn’t help. Then we stopped off at the Bingara Rd reserve where the conditions were terrible, same as Wellington, Gulargambone and Walgett. The people there were very friendly and spoke out for themselves. Many of them agreed to come to the big meeting we had planned for the night. Pat Healy recalls: ‘It was while we were at the reserve talking to the Aboriginal people about the swimming pool that the idea of picketing the swimming pool had come to the fore.’ Twenty-one of the survey forms for the ‘Aboriginal Questionnaire’ from the town, mission and reserve survive. A concern that comes through in many answers and comments on the forms is the lack of a water supply and sanitation services on the Bingara Road reserve. Gloria Tighe said the people would be ‘quite happy on reserves if they only had water’. The main source of illness, some said, was the river water. Most said Aboriginal people should be able to get houses in town. Gloria Tighe said the former Mayor had stopped houses being put in town by the


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Ann Curthoys and Louise Higham interview unidentified Aboriginal residents at the Aborigines Welfare Board Station, Moree, 17 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)

Welfare Board, and Nancy Tighe, in answer to the question ‘What do you think should be done to help raise the health standards of your people?’, answered ‘Get rid of camps.’ Some of the additional comments related to the issue of social control. One person also reported that the former manager of the mission, Mr Redmond, used to allow parties and dances in the hall at the mission, but he had been removed and sent to Sydney and they now had a new manager who did not. Another respondent commented: ‘Manager in reserve now terrible.’ There were comments on police harassment. Gloria Tighe told her interviewer that ‘they barge in houses without knocking— the men often have had only one or two glasses of beer—then drag them to truck without formally telling them they are being arrested’. The theme of police harassment appears regularly in these survey forms, and it was becoming a major concern for Aboriginal rights groups. Charles Rowley conducted a survey of police treatment of Aboriginal people around this time which showed clearly that arrests and charges of Aborginal people were high; Moree was one of the towns investigated. Police treatment of Aboriginal people was not the kind of issue that the Freedom Ride could act on, however, for it provided no clear symbolic case to which we could easily draw attention.



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The survey and additional comments also showed evidence of discrimination in employment in town, especially female jobs, with one person mentioning that ‘Coles will not employ Aborigines’. Most of the survey respondents reported widespread discrimination in shops, hotels, the picture theatre and the bore baths; the Astoria restaurant was also mentioned several times. The hospital, some reported, used to be segregated but was no longer (the McMaster Ward had recently been closed). Only one respondent advocated some form of political or community action to deal with the situation. When asked how the Aboriginal situation could be helped, Fred (surname illegible) replied: ‘Form committee so the Aborigines and the white people can get together and solve problems when they come up . . . on your own you don’t do nothing.’ The earlier reports of discrimination were thoroughly confirmed by the survey. The Herald reported: ‘The Sydney students, members of the Student Action for Aborigines Council [sic], checked council regulations this morning on the use of the swimming pool.’ They confirmed the continuing existence of the resolution of 1955, excluding Aboriginal children from the pool except for sports afternoons and school carnivals. John Powles asked five Moree doctors to sign a statement saying that the health standard of Aboriginal people in Moree did not warrant their exclusion from public swimming pools. The Town Clerk, Mr O.J. Jones, confirmed to the press that ‘adult aborigines are not allowed into the baths. This has been a council rule for a number of years and I understand it has something to do with hygiene . . . the Aborigines have their own baths at the mission.’ After these visits and interviews, the students went back to the church hall and held a meeting to discuss their plans. There were many competing ideas and suggestions. Diary: It was a very heated meeting with a lot of dissensions and disagreements. But finally we worked it out to (1) Have 1hr picket outside the Council Chambers protesting against the swimming baths discriminatory clause; (2) Go to baths and take 6 aboriginal children in; (3) Hold big meeting in the night. The students invited the Mayor to attend their public meeting that evening, and Lloyd at first agreed. The students printed a notice (perhaps with the help of the Methodist minister), which read:


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TO THE CITIZENS OF MOREE THERE WILL BE A PUBLIC MEETING TO DISCUSS THE ABORIGINAL QUESTION IN MOREE IN THE MEMORIAL HALL AT 8 PM TONIGHT. THERE WILL BE TWO SPEAKERS—ALDERMAN LLOYD, THE MAYOR OF MOREE AND MR CHARLES PERKINS THE LEADER OF THE STUDENT ACTION FOR ABORIGINES BUS TOUR. * * * * * * ALL HUMANS ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL IN DIGNITY AND RIGHTS. (ARTICLE 1 OF THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS) IS THIS SO IN MOREE? Lloyd’s promise to participate was withdrawn after he consulted his fellow aldermen, some of whom he found to be strongly opposed to the idea. He told the Northern Daily Leader that, as a result, ‘it was decided that the civic representatives, as a council, would not attend the meeting’. Aldermen, however, could attend as private citizens. Lloyd said ‘inferences of racial discrimination at Moree had been grossly exaggerated, and were, in fact, far from correct’. He pointed out that the Moree Services Club (the Moree equivalent of the Walgett RSL Club) did not bar Aboriginal applicants. The hospital was no longer segregated, and a young couple from the mission had only recently had their wedding reception in the Memorial Hall. (Indeed, the local Moree paper, the North West Champion, had only a fortnight before reported this reception.) Aboriginal people frequently attended travelling shows in that very same hall. He acknowledged that there was a resolution discriminating against Aboriginal people in relation to the pool, and said the resolution, ‘in his personal opinion, was harsh’. We then embarked on the first of our three planned protests. We went to the Moree Municipal Council Chambers in Balo Street to protest against racial discrimination at the swimming pool. For about an hour, we carried placards saying ‘Hotels and clubs are integrated, but not baths’, ‘Are you proud of your council?’, ‘Color is not contagious’ and ‘Why whites only?’ Unlike in Walgett, where we had the element of surprise, our picket did not attract much interest. Jim’s film shows that there




Moree Council Chambers demonstration, 17 February 1965. (The above photo appeared in the Tribune, 24 February 1965. Both photos courtesy of the Tribune/ Search Foundation)


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was no one but us there, other than a policeman on a motorbike waiting nearby. Diary: We did the picket, but nobody much came around, and we all boiled, it was very hot. The North West Champion reported: ‘A few people watched from the shade of the other side of the street, and only a group of children and an occasional adult stopped to discuss their activities with them.’ Next, it was time to go to the baths and take some Aboriginal children with us. Most of the students went with Bob Brown and a group of six children, probably from Thompson’s Row, to the pool, while Charles went off to the mission to gather more children. Thompson’s Row was a line of seven dwellings in Maud Street, on the fringe of the town, about 300 metres from ‘Top Camp’. The houses were old weatherboard cottages that once belonged to the employees of Thompson’s soap factory, and the area was sometimes called Soapy Row. One of the Aboriginal women, Granny Duncan, had cleaned for Mr Thompson; as the workers moved out when the factory closed, her extended family moved in. Their standard of living was similar to that of the white labouring class, and they generally sought acceptance in the white community. Most of the women had worked as domestics on pastoral properties. Those of us at the pool with the Thompson’s Row children then tried to enter. On Jim’s film you can see Sue Johnston carrying a young Aboriginal child, and the other children waiting to enter. Darce recorded the following exchange at the ticket window: Student: I’ve been waiting for half an hour. Will you serve me please? I want six adults’ and eight children’s tokens. Manager: But I’ll tell you this. If they haven’t got the health regulations, how would they get on? They could bar me from going in if I had sores or anything on me. Brian Aarons: Yes, but that’s not the reason they’re barring them. You go and read the council motion: the law of the council says that no Aboriginal, part-Aboriginal, any person who’s got Aboriginal blood is allowed in the baths . . . Bystander: You’ve come up here, we’re living in peace, we’re living in peace until you come up.



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Wendy Golding: In apathy you mean, in apathy! You just don’t do anything about it. Wendy recalled, when we interviewed her in 1994, that when she heard Darce’s program on the ABC many years later: I remember recognising my own voice on that tape at Moree. And I was screaming furiously, ‘You’re so apathetic! You just don’t care!’ Because I think I thought that that was in fact a lot of the root of the problem, that the racism was very passive in many ways. There was no emotion almost attached to it. It was just sort of ‘That’s the way it was’ and there wasn’t any evaluation as to the rights and wrongs of it, it was just life in the 1960s in small country towns. Darce interviewed Bob Brown, who was at the pool: Darce: Bob, you’ve lived in Moree all your life. How do you think these people here regard the Aborigines? Bob: Definitely not favourably, but the biggest problem here is not disapproval, it’s plain out and out apathy. The thing that we’re trying to fight is that they don’t care . . . We have approached people in the street to sign a petition to have the motion on the council books barring Aborigines removed, and from personal experience, the people who would have signed a petition to open up a dogs’ home or any sort of charitable institution at all are definitely just against Aborigines. Darce also interviewed one of the bystanders: Darce: Do you think everything’s right in Moree, or that something needs to be done? Bystander: I think that the Aborigines will probably be assimilated in time, but at the moment the standards of hygiene and so on are just not good enough to mix with the other people in the town. Diary: The manager refused to let the six aboriginals in and so we held up our posters and signs. The Australian reported the manager, Don Ford, as arguing heatedly with the students’ leaders for almost an hour. The Mayor, four policemen and


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Charles Perkins queues with Aboriginal children at the Moree pool.


Charles Perkins swims with Aboriginal children in Moree pool on Wednesday 17 February (Australian, 19 February 1965, p. 4). The original caption read: ‘Mr Charles Perkins, the part Aboriginal student leader, frolics with children in the swimming pool he helped desegregate. (Photo courtesy of Newspix)



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Matt Munro, a Waterside Workers’ Federation (WWF) organiser up from Sydney, all watched the demonstration, and a crowd of about 100 began to gather at the pool. After some consultation, the Mayor, pool manager and police agreed that the children should be allowed in. At this point, Charles arrived with a busload of over twenty Aboriginal children from the mission, and they too were allowed in. Jim’s film shows Aboriginal children diving and swimming in the pool. The photographer from the Australian took photos of Charles and the children in the pool; one photo has been much reprinted since, an enduring image of desegregation in action. The Mayor and pool manager were emphatic in their statements to the press that they would have been allowed in anyway. Mayor Bill Lloyd in particular was concerned at the image of Moree: ‘I am afraid, with all this ruckus, our actions may be gravely misconstrued by those living outside Moree.’ He went on: ‘In recent years, despite the now-outmoded council regulations, I have never refused permission for an aboriginal child to enter this pool, provided the child was clean and healthy.’ Charles insisted that this was not the case: the children, he said, would have had ‘no chance’ of getting in without student help. Charles also spoke to some white children at the pool, whose attitude, according to my diary, was ‘rather ambivalent’. High on our success in having forced the manager to allow the Aboriginal children in the pool, the student bus took the children back to the mission. Darce recorded some of the singing, featuring, somewhat remarkably it seems to me now, a song ‘Stomping at Maroubra’, with several verses and the chorus: Stomp, stomp, stomping at Maroubra Everybody’s doing the Maroubra stomp. On the tape, you can hear everyone joining in. Diary: A little girl with a fantastic voice led the singing and we sang Beatles songs all the way back. The spirit was tremendous. We all got out of the bus and everyone was running around getting their photo taken, and swapping addresses. In 1991, I met that little girl again. Zona Craigie (now Moore) had grown up in Thompson’s Row, had married a white man and had seven children,


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and now worked at the Commonwealth Employment Service office. She had done a TAFE course for two years, she told me, so that she could get the kind of job she now had. Zona remembered having been on the bus that day, including the singing, and knew there was a tape around with her on it. With the pool visit a great success, the students’ next action was to hold the meeting at the Memorial Hall in the evening. There were about 300 people there, mainly white. One of the Aboriginal people present was 15-year-old Ernie Crighton, then working as a labourer for the shire council. He remembered the meeting well when I interviewed him in 1991. The council workers, he said, were all told that if they went to the meeting they would be sacked. They went anyway, and in the end they weren’t sacked. Jim Spigelman spoke first, explaining (according to my diary) ‘who we were and how we came to be there. Then John Powles, on the survey. Then Charles.’ The meeting was then thrown open for public discussion. At first the atmosphere was very hostile, with lots of jeering and interjections. Hecklers shouted such questions as: ‘Why don’t you mind your own business?’ Some locals said: ‘Aborigines are dirty and lazy people’, and the students retorted: ‘You are just ignorant and prejudiced.’ Diary: The questions were sometimes antagonistic but there were some very sympathetic ones too. The meeting calmed down after some people left the hall in anger. Charles quietened the meeting when he said: ‘I’d like to paint you black and put you in a tin hut and see how you’d make out.’ The atmosphere became quite humorous and friendly, judging from Darce’s tape. Ken Swann, an Aboriginal resident of Thompson’s Row, spoke, saying his own children had been denied entry to the pool. One of the main issues for debate was the sincerity of the students. Bill Forrest, an ex-police sergeant, defended them: I feel very much in sympathy with the reason why these gentlemen have come here today . . . My wife and I have had a lengthy conversation with [two of] them, and I know first hand that there is a vast difference between their purpose and that suspected by quite a lot of people who don’t want to understand.



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In reply to a question as to whether the students were ‘fair dinkum’, Charles said: Now this is a funny sort of question. It’s costing us £800 to come up here and do this tour right around for two weeks. Two weeks of hard labour . . . we’re sleeping in sleeping bags all the time on hard board floors . . . We’re paying for this, we’re paying for this with concerts we’ve had at the University of Sydney, folk concerts etc . . . Nobody’s sponsoring us in any way, so you don’t have to worry about any outside influence. We’re only university students, and that’s all we claim to be. Charles had worked hard to maintain this independence and freedom from outside assistance of any kind. During that day, he had received an offer of help from Matt Munro, the WWF organiser who had arrived by car with Noel Hazzard, the Tribune reporter. Munro had offered Charles a donation of £100 worth of amplification equipment for demonstrations. Anxious to deflect any charges of communist influence, Charles turned down the offer; he told the WWF that the students ‘had no wish to become associated with any particular body or organisation’. At the end of the meeting, Neville Kelly, president of the Moree branch of the ALP and secretary of the Barwon ALP State Electorate Council, moved that the clause in the statute books about segregation in the swimming pool be removed, a motion seconded by Bob Brown. The motion was passed 88 votes to 10, the North West Champion reporting that only about half of those present voted. Alderman Charles Jones was in the audience in a private capacity, and undertook to convey the resolution to the Moree Municipal Council at its next meeting. Diary: We were all thrilled to bits. Then we invited the people to come to the church hall for tea and coffee, which a lot of people did. That was pretty good. Then a lot of people got into all sorts of discussions. In an interview, Charles subsequently said that: Later in a more or less private meeting in a church hall I debated with about 40 young people who wanted to speak to me privately about this whole issue. It was an intense, organised and very good debate on


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every aspect of the Aboriginal situation in Moree. There was a significant change of attitude among quite a number of them. We students were on a high. We had ‘desegregated’ the swimming pool, and had also held a successful public meeting which held out promise of a permanent change in attitude in Moree. Before we left, we arranged that Bob Brown would test the desegregation of the baths by taking another group of children to the pool the next day, this time not only from the mission but also from the Bingara Road shanty town. Charles told the press: ‘If we hear that there is any trouble, we will come straight back to Moree. If necessary, we will picket the baths and the council chambers to try to eliminate discrimination against any aboriginal children, no matter where they come from.’ We didn’t think a return visit would be necessary, however. Believing we had more than achieved our aims, we set off the next morning for the next town. We had done with Moree . . . or so we thought.


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Chapter

Clash at Moree

T

he Freedom Ride was growing more interesting to the media each day. The urban press coverage of our two days in Moree was as extensive and as sympathetic as we could have wished. The Australian’s report on Thursday, the day we left town, was headed ‘Students Crack Pool Color Bar at Moree’. Its editorial was headed ‘Facing Up to Facts’, and was concerned primarily about Australia’s image abroad. The Freedom Ride, it said, was making it clear that ‘there is in Australia widespread discrimination against Aborigines’. This was potentially a matter for some considerable international embarrassment: It is important for us in Australia to be able to hold up our heads before other nations, showing that we do not have any dirty racial practices which we are trying to keep hidden from the rest of the world, where many nations are having to face racial issues squarely and honestly as part of an attempt to grow up. Australian discrimination against, and generally shabby treatment of, Aborigines is becoming increasingly well known and discussed around the world. Any sensitive traveller can report his own experiences on being closely questioned on this matter.

The Australian followed up the next day with another report on the students’ stay in Moree, which included that striking photo of Charles and the children in the pool. 143


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The Sydney Morning Herald featured the Freedom Ride on page 1 on Thursday, 18 February. Its lead story was the survey at the Bingara Road reserve, with a photo of Brian Aarons interviewing an Aboriginal family outside a tin shack. Below that photo was another, of two boys—one white (Gary James) and one black (Richard Brown)—walking to the Moree Public School; it was intended to show that the school, at least, was integrated. When I visited Moree in 1991, Darrell Crighton, who ran a milk bar—one of the very few Aboriginal-run businesses in the town— told me Richard Brown was now a boxer who worked on a property, and Gary James was a member of the council and owned land. That same issue of the Herald also carried an informative story about the demonstration at the baths. The following day, the Herald’s editorial said the residents of Walgett and Moree should welcome, not resent, the Freedom Ride: ‘The students’ mission is commendable evidence that 35 young Australians care sufficiently about the future of aborigines to forsake Sydney’s tempting summer beaches and go into the field in search of answers.’ It approved the students’ refusal, led by Charles, to ‘lend themselves to any log-rolling Left-wing group that seeks to exploit a social problem for its own benefit’ (a clear reference to the Waterside Workers’ Federation, or the Communist Party). The students were finding segregation in action, and the Herald predicted that ‘it will continue, openly or surreptitiously, until a great deal more is done by Governments, local authorities and individuals to diagnose and eradicate the causes and fears which prompt segregation’. Gerald Stone’s first report for the Daily Mirror, on Wednesday, 17 February while we were still in Moree, emphasised the non-violent ethic of the tour, and reported Charles saying that ‘any student freedom rider who tried to hit back if assaulted would be sent home immediately . . . Otherwise our whole plan of passive resistance would be a failure’. His second report was headed ‘Moree Win to Students’; it covered the public meeting and its vote to end the official ban against Aboriginal people at the baths, and ended with Charles’s comment: ‘I think we have accomplished quite a great deal in Moree.’ Interstate papers also covered the demonstration in Moree, often with front-page stories. There was relatively little immediate rural press coverage, as many papers came out only bi-weekly or tri-weekly. What there was, though, was somewhat hostile. The Northern Daily Leader headed its story ‘Racial Discrimination at Moree “Exaggerated”’, a quote from its interview with Mayor Bill Lloyd.


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The broadcast media were slow to cover the Freedom Ride. The promised Seven Days crew had not arrived, and there were no other television crews from either the ABC or the commercial channels. For this reason, the only film footage of the events to be narrated in this chapter comes from Jim Spigelman’s super-8 camera. However, the ABC Four Corners television program contacted the Freedom Riders in Moree and arranged to fly both Charles and the Moree Shire Clerk to Sydney for a televised debate on Friday. And ABC radio, though it had a reporter on the spot in Darce Cassidy, neither used his material nor sent another reporter along. Local radio stations reported the Freedom Ride, though it is difficult now to retrieve any information on their coverage. Meanwhile, the Freedom Ride was pressing on. We left Moree at 9.30 a.m. on Thursday, arriving at our next stop, the tiny town of Boggabilla, in time for lunch. It was a straight journey, with no towns on the way, though there were lots of tracks running off from the highway to the stations and properties. It was rich pastoral country all the way. I remember with unusual clarity the lunch we had that day on the Freedom Ride in a wonderful beer garden shaded by grapevines. Many of the other Freedom Riders recall it too. Pat: ‘I remember a pub in Boggabilla. I was so hot and it had wonderful cold beer, and the beer garden was covered by a grapevine with great huge bunches of grapes hanging down,


The bus stands outside the Hotel Boggabilla, where students rested before interviewing people at the Aboriginal station. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)


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and here we all were, helping ourselves to the grapes.’ And Brian: ‘The main thing I remember about Boggabilla was when we arrived it was lunch time and very hot . . . Grapevine over a pergola in the pub, probably the first light relief we’d had . . . I can remember that being a particularly good fun afternoon.’ I tried to recapture this idyllic moment when I revisited the town in 1991. We found the only pub in town and went in. I wanted to see if it had the grapevines I remembered, or at least the pergola. It had neither. There was an unkempt, unused-looking outdoor beer garden space, guarded by a huge unpleasant black dog. It must have been the same place, but it didn’t match my memory at all. We had a beer there, but it was a very unfriendly white outback pub, with only a few old regulars stuck around the bar, watching a motorcycle race on TV. Back then, after our all-too-brief idyllic moment, we went to the Aborigines Welfare Board station, 9 miles (14 kilometres) out of town, at the junction of the Dumaresq and Macintyre Rivers. We had only the afternoon to spare, as we had to be in Warwick, over the Queensland border, by nightfall. (By travelling interstate, we avoided paying about £250 in road taxes that would have been imposed for a 1400-mile (2240-kilometre) intra-state journey.) The station had been established in 1938 as one of the board’s ‘model’ stations, on 450 acres (180 hectares), with a manager—Norman Clarke—who was, according to Jack Horner, ‘friendly, humane, and endowed with humour and common sense’. Its population was drawn from the people on the old Toomelah station nearby and from the small border town of Texas, about 50 miles (80 kilometres) up the river. By 1965, there were 238 people living there, in crowded and dilapidated conditions. There were weatherboard houses, very often without windows and doors, no gas supply and no electricity. There was no clean water laid on, though river water was piped to taps in the yard. A cyclone had damaged many of the houses the previous year, so there were now leaking roofs, broken windows and corroded fireplaces. An estimate of £14 000 for repairs had been held over by the board due to insufficient funds, and it showed. As in Moree, we now had the media in tow. The manager, a Mr R. Sawtell, appeared to want to use our visit to shame the government into granting the board the held-over funds. After he greeted us, we wandered around and spoke to several people, many of whom invited us into their homes. Warwick Richards recalls the women complaining about the


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shocking living conditions. Alex remembers: ‘We were taken down by the riverbank to see where the water supply had come from.’ Diary: Many of them told us that the manager had told them not to answer our questions, but they intended to do so anyway. The manager and press wandered round authoritatively, making this difficult. Even so the people were the most talkative, cooperative and straightforwardly critical of all the aborigines we’ve met. Beth Hansen has especially strong memories of Boggabilla: Pictures in my mind of the houses at Boggabilla and the manager’s house, with this white fence, shrubs, green lawn, sprinkler going. And then everything else there was like a dustbowl. The school, little infant kids going in or coming out of the door. Quite a way out of town, 7 or 8 or 9 miles [11–14 kilometres] out of town. I’m sure I would recognise the manager’s house again. Diary: We heard some terrible stories such as the fact that the police came in the houses without knocking whenever they liked, to find out who had been drinking. Also they ‘did what they liked with the women’. Warwick Richards also remembers women telling us about the police. He recalls: ‘Most of the girls become domestics, and according to the ones I spoke to the conditions are terrible. The men are usually shearers. Everyone we spoke to agreed that they would rather live in the town than on the reserve.’ There was not much to do there, apart from the surveys. The completed forms that survive confirm my diary account and Freedom Riders’ memories. The pressing issues were felt to be not so much employment or discrimination in shops and hotels as police harassment and the need for better housing, either on the station or in town, and for clean water and sanitation facilities. Yet our main purpose by this time was not so much the survey itself as to take the urban media to a particular settlement and say, ‘Look, isn’t this awful?’ The media obliged, with both the Herald and the Australian reporting the next day that the students had described the Boggabilla station as (in the latter ’s words) ‘the worst


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Government mission we have seen on our trip’. The 25 mission houses containing 240 Aborigines were reported to be in a disgraceful state. The manager, Sawtell, said: ‘I must agree. The houses are badly in need of repair. I made representations to the Aboriginal Welfare Board in Sydney to have the repairs made and as I understand it the request was approved. However, a delay has developed somewhere along the line.’ Warwick recalls: ‘At the end we got them all together and Charlie gave a bit of a speech saying we would try to do something about the houses, and that they should write to the Welfare Board. They were very enthusiastic.’ The visit over, we got back on the bus, cheered by about 50 Aboriginal people on the station, and drove straight to Warwick, just over the Queensland border. We arrived about 9.30 p.m., ate at an allnight café, and then went to yet another Methodist hall to sleep. Our plan the next day was to visit Tabulam, supposedly a model station in Bundjalung country in the far northeast region of the state, travelling on to stay that evening at nearby Lismore, not far from the coast. Events in Moree that same day threatened these plans, however. While we were on our way to Boggabilla, the pool manager, Don Ford, announced that the ban on Aboriginal children from the ‘up-the-river’ shanty town (at Bingara Road) would not be lifted. ‘The people live in dirty tin huts,’ he said, ‘and there are no washing facilities and no proper toilets. There is a good chance some of the people have a disease. That is why nobody from the up-the-river will be admitted to the pool.’ The children who had been allowed in on Wednesday were from Thompson’s Row and the mission and had been judged clean. But anyone from up the river could not come in, ‘no matter what their appearance’. The stage was set for further confrontation. On Thursday, as arranged, Bob Brown tried to take about six Aboriginal children into the pool. Ford and Bob engaged in a heated argument until finally, at 5.30 p.m., Ford closed the baths early (they usually stayed open until 8.00 p.m.). Bob told television reporter Peter Martin, who arrived with the Seven Days team a few days later: I took six small Aboriginal children running from 3 to about 14 to the baths with me. They’re friends of mine. And we were refused admittance. And we stood in the queue to buy a token and we refused to move from the window until we were sold a token. As they wouldn’t sell us a token we wouldn’t leave. And that prevented anybody else


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from buying a token. After half an hour the baths were entirely closed. At 7.00 p.m. the Mayor arrived, fresh from an emergency meeting of council. He ordered Ford to reopen the baths, and to enforce the 10-year-old segregationist statute. He told the press: ‘The council met in extraordinary session and we have now given the baths manager a written statement to guide him.’ The baths were then reopened. By this time, Bob had returned with yet more Aboriginal children, all of whom were turned away. A large crowd gathered, several nasty arguments broke out and police had to clear people from the scene. The next morning, Charles flew from Brisbane to Sydney for the Four Corners television interview; the rest of us travelled on the bus from Warwick to Tabulam. When we arrived in Tenterfield, halfway to Tabulam, we rang Bob Brown and he told us what had happened. We then rang up the Reverend Ryan, who confirmed this news and told us not to come back because we weren’t wanted, and Neville Kelly, who also confirmed Brown’s story. We rang Don Ford, who passed on the call to Bill Lloyd, at the baths at the time, who told us that we would not help our cause by returning. While this was happening, the press also ascertained from the Mayor himself that the report was true. He told the Australian: ‘If the students return they can only cause trouble. It seems the situation in Moree has been set back ten years overnight. I feel we had a very happy community here before the students arrived. Now, families are split on the issue of integration.’ He also said that he had invoked the 1955 ordinance ‘merely to deal with an unruly situation. The council would still consider rescinding the 1955 regulations.’ So there we were in Tenterfield, without Charles and with a critical decision to make. We held a general meeting to decide whether we should return to Moree. We excluded the press, and feelings were quite heated. Wendy remembers a vigorous debate, with a number of impassioned speeches being made: I felt really strongly that we should go back, that it was no good to just be these ivory tower university students flitting in to the town and leaving again and basically leaving them to deal with all the problems that we had probably stirred up and created. And I thought the least we could do was go back and give moral support and by


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going back demonstrate that we really did care and that it was an important issue that should be dealt with. So I remember arguing passionately about going back. We decided, after much discussion, to return to Moree. Alan remembers: ‘We thought, well, we don’t have any choice, we have to go back. Otherwise what’s the point of the whole thing? We have to make it clear that we’ll keep on, which we did . . . We really didn’t have any choice, otherwise we would have turned the whole thing into a farce, so we had to go back and take whatever came.’ We decided to go straight to Inverell, leaving out Tabulam, and reunite with Charles who could arrive by 9.30 a.m. the next day. From there we would all go straight to Moree and take strong action of some kind, such as a 24-hour picket. The decision, my diary tells me, was unanimous. The driver, Bill Pakenham, again rang Mr Saint, his boss, seeking advice. Saint told him to stick it out as long as he could. Pat Healy remembers that we didn’t want to tell any of the press because we didn’t want any publicity about the fact that we were going back to Moree. We wanted to slip in quietly. We pretended until the bus got going that we were still going to Tabulam; the press, Pat remembers, ‘were very irate and talked about kidnapping’ since they hadn’t been told where we were going. They explained we could, and should, have told them what we were doing ‘off the record’; it was not necessary to play games. We stopped at Glen Innes for half an hour, where Robyn Iredale left to catch a train to Sydney to attend to her very ill mother. Robyn recalled: ‘All I remember was worrying about how I’d get on a train, where would I get on a train, because after the bus incident, that’s when I became really concerned that my mother would be really worried about me. I felt that I shouldn’t cause her that sort of anxiety in the state she was in, so it’d just be better to go home.’ While we were on our way back on the Friday, another 40 Aboriginal children again attempted to get into the pool. As Bob Brown told Darce the next day: ‘They were all refused except for one incident when four girls in the one family went up, and two of the sisters were admitted and two other sisters were rejected.’ Mrs R Briggs, from Thompson’s Row, told the press: ‘Yes, two of my daughters were allowed into the pool and two made to stay outside—they said the eldest were too dark.’ Gerald Stone remembered this incident well when interviewed in 1994: ‘One of the


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classic cases I remember from Moree was an Aboriginal woman, partAboriginal woman, with four children of different skin tones and the two lighter ones were allowed into the Moree baths and the two darker ones were not. And that was such a blatant act of discrimination.’ The students arrived at Inverell at about 6.30 p.m. On the radio we heard that we were still going to Tabulam, so the news had not yet leaked out. We rang Charles, who was very enthusiastic about our returning to Moree, and apparently Ted Noffs agreed with him. He told us he had been met at Sydney airport by a flood of pressmen, and also by Bill Ford and Ted Noffs who took him to the Channel 2 television station and briefed him on what had been happening in the city since he’d left. That night, we settled down to sleep on the ground in the park behind the Twin Swans Motel in Inverell. John Powles remembers: getting rather a sense of thrill and excitement because we would listen to the radio and there was this kind of—seemingly no one knew where the bus was—so we were a kind of mystery group travelling through, no one knowing where we were, but there were rumours that we were on our way back. And I remember we slept overnight in a park somewhere and there were just sort of bits on the news of the bus having been sighted here there and everywhere and so on. As we settled in, the reporters finally had a chance to ring in their story. The stage was set for our biggest confrontation yet. Saturday, 20 February 1965. We began the day in the park at Inverell, waking early, covered in burrs from sleeping on the ground. We knew this would be a big day. Mayor Bill Lloyd issued a warning that the students’ return could only cause harm, which we heard on the radio over breakfast. By this time, everyone knew we were on our way back, the newspapers reporting that the students had decided to return to Moree and were due early that day. Our first task was to pick up Charles; Jim’s film shows us all meeting him at the airport with our banner. We then travelled on to Moree, debating tactics in the bus on the way. As Darce recalls: By now these debates had become a feature of the trip, which had become an exercise in travelling direct democracy. The debates happened not only in the towns, but almost continually, including while travelling in the bus using the microphone installed in the bus


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Charles Perkins rejoins the Freedom Ride at Inverell Airport after his interview on ABC Television in Sydney. (Unpublished Mirror photograph. Photo courtesy of Newspix)

for the purpose of the driver describing points of interest to tourists, but in our case for continual discussion of objectives and tactics. We knew this was crunch time. As Jim said in this on-bus debate recorded by Darce: ‘If we break through here it doesn’t matter if it’s only one place, it’s signalled, it’s an example.’ So the stakes were high. Yet it was a dangerous situation. Jim said: ‘I think we’re going to find a lot of hostility on the part of the white people; we’re going to find ourselves more and more in this town aligned mainly and largely and almost completely with the Aboriginal people.’ There were some difficult questions. How long should we stay in Moree? What should we actually do when we got there? Jim emphasised the importance of staying: ‘I’d like to suggest that we don’t just run in now and leave six hours later . . . I think we should go for something like a twelve-hour picket or a 24-hour picket of the pool.’ This, though, would take us into a Saturday night. Charles warned: ‘Saturday night is a very dangerous night in a country town, extremely dangerous, because about midday a lot of people will be pretty drunk and a lot of people will be pretty steamed up.’


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We arrived in Moree about 12.30 p.m. and it was already a hot day, with the temperature to rise to 100º Fahrenheit (38ºC) during the afternoon. We went first to Thompson’s Row, only to find that the people there did not want to support our protest. That morning, Alderman Charles Jones—who was also president of the Moree Swimming Club— had arranged for the Thompson’s Row Aboriginal children to be given swimming club tickets, which meant that they could enter the baths at any time. The children from Bingara Road and the mission were not given tickets, and were refused entry. We were disappointed the Thompson’s Row people did not want to help. Diary: The Thompson’s Row people obviously felt little or no sympathy for the other aborigines and were not prepared to fight for them. A case of ‘divide and rule’, as most of us soon realised. Charles also remarked when interviewed in 1993 that ‘some Aboriginal people were against us doing that [protesting] because we were disturbing everything. They were comfortable even in their disadvantaged and second-class position. At least they knew their place, in that sense, and they were happy with that.’ Our next task was to gather children from the mission and the Bingara Road reserve. Bill drove the bus to the mission gate but refused to go any further, so Charles and Beth walked in. Despite their having permission, the manager wouldn’t let them stay, so they only had time to ask about four or five of the children at the main gates to come along. Charles told Ord, the manager, what he thought: ‘You have,’ he said, ‘revealed your true nature.’ Meanwhile, Bob Brown took Sue Johnston and Chris Page by car to get some children from the Bingara Road shanty town. The rest of us congregated at the shop opposite the baths, at the corner of Anne and Warialda Streets, and very quickly a huge and noisy crowd gathered. Brian remembers us engaged in discussions with the crowd: ‘They were angry that we’d come back and they were angry about what we were on about, but they weren’t, you know, vicious or threatening physical violence at that stage.’ Meanwhile a crowd was gathering at the Victoria Hotel, also across the road from the baths; many of them were shearers in town on a free Saturday afternoon. It was a much bigger crowd than one would normally expect in Moree. When I talked in 1991 to Lyall Munro Snr, he said some of the graziers had given their shearers


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(both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) time off to go to the demonstration, presumably to take part in expressing opposition to the students. He himself had been shearing at Barney Amis’s, and came into town for the demonstration. The railway workers, he told me, had also got time off to participate. We had to wait quite a while for Charles, Beth, Sue, Chris and Bob Brown to arrive. When they did at 2.30 p.m., we all crossed the road and went to the pool. The hotel crowd poured across the road too. According to the Brisbane Sunday Mail, Bob Brown ‘was grabbed by local youths when he arrived at the pool. He was carried bodily to the front of the pool and dumped in a gutter.’ There were nine children altogether, and when Charles sought tickets for them, they were refused. The baths manager offered to admit Charles himself, but he would not enter without the children. We lined up behind the children, continually requesting permission to enter. Brian remembers that: ‘Charlie would say, “I would like to exercise my right as a human being” or whatever the words were “and seek entry to this pool”, but was denied permission.’ Colin remembers Charles also talking to the crowd to a lot of hissing and booing.


Charles Perkins waits with children from Moree Aboriginal Station outside Moree swimming pool, shortly before attempting to enter, 20 February 1965. Daily Mirror, 22 February. (Photo courtesy of Newspix)


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Bill Lloyd then arrived. He told me when I interviewed him in 1991 that he had been at the State Emergency Service, talking to the director and some VIPs, when an urgent message came that there was trouble at the baths. He left the function, and went straight to the baths. ‘You students,’ he told me, ‘were doing your passive resistance, obstructing entry to the baths.’ When he arrived, the crowd was steadily growing in size and hostility. ‘It was a frightening awesome thing,’ he remembered, ‘a crowd out of control.’ Some people in the crowd, he said, were Aboriginal. The crowd continued to build up to about 500, and it was getting ugly. People began shouting ‘Get back to Sydney’, and calling names. A call went out for all available police in Moree and the surrounding towns to come to the baths. About 40 arrived, including a superintendent and inspectors. Charles noted in his book, A Bastard Like Me, in 1975: The police had received instructions by this time from the Labor Party which was in power in New South Wales at that time, to lay off us. ‘Don’t do anything that will cause any controversy with these people. Go with them as far as you can’, seemed to be government advice to the police. With these instructions, the police refused to move the students away from the pool, telling Lloyd it was his problem. Lloyd later told me that he rang two solicitors in town for advice, but they couldn’t help. ‘I was on my own . . . I had only a couple of council employees and the baths manager to help me.’ It is clear from Jim’s film, too, that the police did little, and that it was the Mayor himself, the baths manager and a couple of others who tried to remove the students from the scene. We students didn’t know about this behind-the-scenes conflict at the time, but we did realise that the police were handling us very carefully. Beth remembers that the Mayor and the police ‘very politely asked us to leave and we didn’t so they escorted us away. The police were there but I think it was the Mayor and the council officials who escorted us away.’ And indeed it was. Jim’s film clearly shows the baths manager leading Charles, Paddy, Pat, Wendy, Helen and others, and the Mayor himself leading John Powles, Louise, Beth and Pat (again) away from the pool. Diary: Charlie went to the front of the line and when he refused to move was grabbed and taken away from the line. Then John Powles,


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Above: The students and the crowd outside Moree pool. (Taken by Mirror photographer, Neville Whitmarsh)


Left: Charles Perkins is led away from the pool. Daily Mirror, 22 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of Newspix)

Lou, Beth, Alex, myself and a couple of others were removed by the mayor first asking us if we would move, us saying no (individually) and then they put their hand on our back and took us away from the line. Chris Page sat down and was carried off by the two council employees. Those of us who had been walked off were prevented from rejoining the line as we had intended.


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While this was going on, angry discussion broke out everywhere. Darce recorded some of the abuse: The only good one’s a dead one [referring to Aborigines]. As far as I’m concerned run the lot of them clean out of this swimming pool. Every one of them. Darce: And the university students? They’re the ones who caused the trouble in this town. Run them out of town. Get them out before night. Get out real quick or get out on a stretcher. There’ll be a blue on for sure if it keeps going. All the big rockers will be round. They’ll hunt them out. The police, my diary records, ‘cleared everyone away from the entrance except us, and during all the mess those of us who had been marched off managed to sneak back. The police obviously didn’t know what to do.’ Bill Lloyd left the scene briefly to attend the opening at the courthouse of the Gwydir Valley flood warning radio network. When he returned at about 4.30 p.m., it was clear that the situation was getting worse. Police Inspector Steer told him the students must be got out of town; the hostility was turning from verbal abuse to physical violence. The crowd began to attack the students with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Bill Lloyd told me: ‘I saw respected businessmen there, throwing tomatoes, eggs and other things. I learnt then how awful a crowd out of control could be.


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The whole thing was getting out of hand.’ Brian remembers that ‘the crowd started to turn nasty and started to throw eggs. I can remember being in this line . . . along the building . . . and looking out along this stretch of grass and these eggs would be flying—you know, they’d be thrown quite high to get over the police . . . They were splattering everywhere.’ Beth remembers Bob Gallagher having an egg smashed over his head, and Bob recalls that he ‘got on the front page of the Herald [sic] I got an egg on the back of my head’. As the students continued to try to have the children admitted to the pool, some of the students were physically assaulted. Diary: Jim S was punched and knocked down in the course of an argument. He lay quite dazed on the ground for a few seconds. Gerald Stone reported in the Daily Mirror that Jim was ‘knocked to the ground after being hit in the stomach and on the chin by two youths’. Jim recalled in a 1993 interview being knocked to the ground and said ‘you could really feel the aggression, it was a very violent day’. The Mirror also reported that another student, ‘Mr John Butterworth, 20, of Turella, had his glasses smashed. Other students, including girls, complained they had been burnt with cigarette butts.’ Darce was knocked over, with his tape recorder, and this helps explain why relatively little of this afternoon’s events was recorded on his tape. Four men were arrested, one for trying to damage the camera of Mirror photographer Neville Whitmarsh; he was later charged with offensive behaviour. I wrote in my diary that evening: ‘There were a number of arrests and several fights, especially the one between two women.’ One of the women was Aboriginal and the other white, and the police stopped the fight. My diary went on: ‘The women were particularly hostile and I had several remarks “Who did you sleep with last night?” etc. directed at me.’ John Powles remembered the women ‘spitting at the female students’. I wrote: ‘I have never met such hostile, hate-filled people. The hostility seemed to be directed at us as university student intruders rather than to the aborigines. The aboriginal children told us that they had been called “scabby black —– niggers”. One child had been knocked down. The poor kids were very frightened.’ Most of the students were scared, too. Alan says: ‘I’d have to say that was a pretty scary experience and I think we were all pretty scared, just seeing the hatred of those people.’


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The atmosphere was getting more dangerous by the minute. The police warned the students that if they stayed the violence would get much worse. Bill Lloyd told me: ‘I remember a male blond student [this would have been Paddy Dawson] arguing with the crowd, and being grabbed by the hair . . . It was when this happened that I really started to get worried. I became very concerned.’ The police told the driver to park the bus around the corner from the town baths and to keep it out of sight. The baths were closed at the suggestion of the police, and Lloyd and the pool manager and employees decided to erect a weldmesh fence to enclose the students. As he explained to me in 1991, ‘that meant you were on council property, and the crowd couldn’t get at you. The crowd were all on the other side of the fence.’ John Powles remembers vividly the ‘police putting up fences to separate us from the hostile crowds, and the tension building up’. The Herald reported that ‘when council employees used wire to bind a hastily erected barricade, youths in the crowd began shouting “let’s string them up”’. Ted Haddock, the District Electrical Engineer with the North West County Council, happened to be there with his 16-mm film camera, and filmed the fence being erected. Then—breakthrough! The Mayor came up to us and said he would be prepared to sign a motion to rescind the 1955 statute, and would get two other aldermen to co-sign it. The Mayor and three other aldermen— George Mills, Charles Jones and Perry James—then went into the baths and had a private discussion with Charles, Jim and Pat, our tour executive. While they had their discussion we sat outside singing freedom songs— ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus’, ‘I’m So Glad’, ‘Sinner Man’ and so on. Lloyd recalled: ‘I had some very serious negotiations with the student leaders, mainly Charlie, but also Jim Spigelman, and the girl Healy; she was the daughter [sic] of the communist union leader. I was afraid the crowd would go berserk. I said I would do all I could to get the council to remove the discriminatory resolution. It should never have been there, and was voted by the previous council.’ After twenty minutes of negotiations, Lloyd announced that two of the aldermen had agreed to sign a motion to rescind the resolution. They promised the students they would put notice of motion to the council meeting the following Monday, 22 February, and it would be voted on the following week. They would consider an alternative motion that would have entry based on health criteria only.


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Diary: We took a vote on it and unanimously agreed that this meant that we had won. We decided to leave. It was now 5.30 p.m. and the crowd was becoming very threatening. The police offered to take us through the back gate of the baths, but we refused, so the police escorted us through the crowd to the bus. Lloyd: ‘I arranged for the bus to be driven right up to the baths, and for the students to get on, with police assistance.’ Bill Pakenham, the bus driver, told Gerald Stone that ‘the police told me to pull up in front of the baths, get the students boarded and clear out of town as fast as I could’. Policemen and burly council workers tried to clear a path, but the crowd closed in. Lloyd: ‘We did it as quickly as possible, but there were still missiles thrown, and students were hit.’ Of necessity, we walked in single file, while the crowd threw eggs, tomatoes and stones, and spat at us. The jeering, said the Mirror, ‘rose to a deafening pitch’. John Powles remembers: ‘I think when we finally decided to go, or we were escorted on to the bus or something, it was a very tense departure as I recall. And I had the feeling, you know, of very substantial impending violence which never actually really broke out, but one had the feeling there really that the situation was pretty explosive.’ Brian remembers a funnier side: I still remember Paddy Dawson, who was quite tall and had very long hair, naturally blond hair and somebody threw an egg as he was walking the gauntlet as it were and it landed splat on the top of his head and just sort of went everywhere. And this brought great laughter from the crowd and we all laughed too at it, it was sort of funny in a way. And I seem to remember Paddy thinking it was funny too. Aidan Foy remembers this too: ‘They threw an egg that hit Paddy Dawson on the back of the head. I remember that because he was—poor old Paddy was a good target because he was quite tall and he had . . . shoulder-length blond hair which was quite unacceptable in country town New South Wales, and so of course he copped it.’ The students got on the bus, and the police kept the crowd back. Diary: We bundled into the bus and closed all the windows. Eggs and tomatoes were still thrown.


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Then we all moved off, with a police escort. Some lessons had been learnt from the Walgett experience, and the police stayed with the bus until they were sure it was not being followed. About 30 cars tried to follow, but were turned back by police. ‘Those cars,’ Gerald Stone later reported, ‘were filled with very angry people.’ Lloyd recalled that they ‘blocked all exits from the town, so no one could attack you students’. Traffic police halted cars at the city limits, and examined the credentials of drivers proceeding towards Inverell. The trouble was, not everyone was on board: Sue Johnston, Gerald Mason and the press were still in Moree. Charles told the driver to turn back to collect the missing passengers but, as Bill told Gerald Stone: ‘I refused to turn back . . . there would have been real violence if we had returned to town.’ So the police and Charles returned by car to pick up Sue and Gerald and take them to a spot out on the highway to meet the bus. Diary: About ten miles out of Moree we stopped, to wait for the press, Sue J, Charlie and Gerald Mason. Charlie came back, and made a radio statement while we waited for the others. Finally they all came and we set off again. Darce was not on the bus; he had had to leave to return to the ABC. At this point I had to leave the bus. My leave had expired, and despite the fact that this was a front-page story (indeed an international story), and that I was the only ABC person travelling with the bus, the ABC would not extend my leave. The night of the second pool confrontation I jumped on the North West Mail and headed back to Sydney. Brian remembers: We were not far out of town—I don’t know 5, 10, 15 minutes, when Bill the bus driver came on the microphone, and of course the bus was a touring bus, and he said ‘I have to tell you all that I will not be driving this bus any further, in the interests of your safety, and I am responsible for your safety and I do not believe that I can any longer guarantee that after this incident and therefore I will not be taking the bus any further’.


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This was an enormous blow, but also brought home to us—and to the public when it became known—how potentially dangerous this bus tour had become. We stopped at Gravesend, a small town about 30 miles (48 kilometres) east of Moree, for dinner. The town was the site of a reported massacre in 1837, though none of us knew that then. After dinner we continued along the Gwydir Highway, passing within twelve minutes of the site of the Myall Creek massacre, but we did not know that either. We arrived at the Inverell Twin Swans Motel at about 10.30 p.m. Ever-conscious of the media, I wrote in my diary: ‘We got first place in the 11 o’clock news.’ That same night, and the next, Bob Brown’s shop was pelted with refuse. The next day, Sunday, Aboriginal people were again excluded from the baths. The media response was huge—locally, in Sydney and nationally; there was even international coverage. Moree’s own newspaper, the North West Champion, was angry. After a detailed front-page story about the confrontation, its editorial—headed ‘Severe Setback on Aboriginal Problem’—referred to the students as ‘misguided juveniles’. Rights, it said, must be extended gradually: ‘It has been proved that to allow aborigines full rights all of a sudden only brings trouble . . . Since the students left on Thursday, the town’s progress in handling its aboriginal problem has been set back years.’ The paper urged the council not to rescind the 1955 ordinance. The regional Northern Daily Leader, based in Tamworth—a large town with a much smaller Aboriginal population— took a more pro-Aboriginal and somewhat more pro-student position. Its editorial, after describing the amount of colour discrimination in country towns as ‘negligible’, said the students ‘merit the goodwill of country people’, especially as they had bothered to come to country areas and see for themselves, in contrast to ‘most of the people associated with movements for the welfare of aborigines’. It described the shanty towns as ‘a disgrace’, needing greater government funding. In Sydney, the media coverage was extensive and nearly all sympathetic. Gerald Stone’s story in the Daily Mirror was the first to appear, coming out in a late edition that same Saturday afternoon. The Four Corners program Charles had recorded on Friday, in which he had confronted the Town Clerk of Walgett about the exclusion of Aboriginal ex-servicemen from the RSL Club, screened on ABC television that Saturday night after the news of the Moree confrontation, and made a


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The Daily Mirror’s full-page coverage of the demonstration at Moree pool, 22 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of Newspix)

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huge impression. The Sunday papers—the Sunday Truth, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday Sun—all carried front-page stories of the violent confrontation at the Moree pool. One of the most detailed was Stone’s report in the Sunday Mirror, headed ‘Violence Explodes in Racist Town’. The Sunday Sun and the Brisbane Sunday Mail both carried a story on Charles Perkins, ‘the man who heads our “freedom riders”’, based on separate interviews conducted before the Moree events. Together they signified that in many ways the story was not the Freedom Ride itself, but rather the emergence of an articulate Aboriginal leader. The Mirror continued its strongly sympathetic coverage on Monday, with a story focusing on the driver’s refusal to continue, headed ‘Students in Danger: Freedom Driver Quits’. There was another story on the Moree riot headed ‘Little Dixie’ (the analogy with Dixie seems to have been a Mirror favourite), with photos of Charles, John Powles and Beth Hansen being walked away from the pool, and another of Jim Spigelman over a caption headed ‘Victim’, mentioning his having been knocked over outside the pool. The next day the Mirror carried a series of comments, with very mixed views, from the ‘Under 25s’ in answer to the question ‘Should they (the students) come home?’ The Sun was supportive, with an editorial emphasising the driver’s withdrawal, and fiercely critical of the whites in Walgett and Moree. It said: ‘This is the kind of thing now going on in the southern United States. We haven’t yet reached the Alabama level of violence, but that seems to be on the way up.’ It concluded: If the university students have done nothing else, they have at least focused national attention on the place of the aborigines in Australian society. We must accept the aborigines and accommodate them with decency and freedom in our midst’. The Sydney Morning Herald also had extensive coverage, its front-page story headed: ‘Students in Wild Moree Scenes’, which emphasised the violence of the pool incident. In a separate story, the Herald quoted Ted Noffs: The events in Moree on Saturday, which marked the end of discrimination against aborigines in the local swimming pool, must go down as a milestone in the history of race relations in Australia. The fact that this was accomplished by a small student group must also bring


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judgment to bear on the complacency and apathy of many adult Australians who have done little despite discrimination against aborigines in Australia. It is to be hoped that at Walgett and Moree committees consisting of equal numbers of aborigines and white people will sit down and work out for themselves ways by which an end can be brought to all social divisions that have persisted for so long. Another Herald story focused on an interview with Lloyd, and yet another on the driver having abandoned the students. The Herald editorial thought the students had touched a sensitive nerve, and had acted well. They ‘seem to have acted in accordance with the best democratic traditions of non-violence, although they have themselves been jostled, punched and pelted with refuse’. It thought the Moree council should not have a racially discriminatory resolution on its books, but suggested the problem could not be entirely laid at the feet of towns such as Moree and Walgett. The problem, it said, lay ultimately with the government. Not all Sydney’s papers were sympathetic. The Daily Telegraph’s editorial on 24 February was headed: ‘Wrong way to help our aborigines’, and suggested the students had good intentions but the wrong tactics for achieving them. It could not see what good could come from ‘stirring up passions in country towns’, and then referred to the squalid circumstances in which some Aborigines lived, commenting that it was ‘hardly a matter for wonder that there should be some local reluctance to sharing a swimming-pool with this kind of aborigine’. One letter to the Telegraph from a Moree resident, E.J. Lipsham, referred to the paper as ‘the only one that appears interested in the truth’. It pointed out that there was a pool at the mission and then, revealing a clear sense of white ownership of the town, asked ‘Why would the aboriginal people want to use our pool?’ The Moree events were covered well beyond New South Wales. Nationally, the Australian gave extensive and sympathetic coverage, with the pool confrontation its front-page story on the following Monday, featuring photos of Charles, Beth and John Powles being escorted from the pool by the Mayor, and Bob Gallagher being hit by an egg, together with reports of the decision of the driver to leave the tour, as it was ‘too dangerous’. On Wednesday, the Australian editorialised: ‘The demonstrations by university students from Sydney over the last week have helped us all to see beyond the complacency and lazy indifference of


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our attitudes to Australia’s indigenous people. Will the students’ brave pioneering work become merely another seven days’ wonder?’ The editorial concluded: ‘The great value of the students’ demonstrations has been to draw our attention to the plight of these people.’ Interstate papers—in Brisbane, Adelaide, Hobart, Perth and Melbourne—all covered the Moree confrontation with front-page stories and editorials. The Canberra Times editorial was especially supportive, saying the students had ‘made everyone think and talk about the way we treat our Aborigines and half-castes’. It continued in strong terms: The people of Moree and Walgett are especially angry because they know in their hearts that what the students say is true. There is colour prejudice in these towns and in practice a rough and ready kind of apartheid is the rule . . . Racial prejudice shows itself . . . in a general contempt and disinterest, a damning apathy which is content to regard the Aborigines as an incurable disease which should be kept out of sight as far as possible. They are part of the landscape but not quite part of the community, human beings but not citizens . . . There is no friendship, no sympathy and precious little interest. The West Australian and The Age in Melbourne both thought the students had performed an important public service in (The Age’s words) ‘publicising the shabby treatment that many Aborigines endure’. The Brisbane

Cartoonist Martin Sharp makes a harsh comment on the citizens of Moree, the Australian, 22 February 1965. (Cartoon courtesy of Martin Sharp)


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Courier-Mail, on the other hand, said the Freedom Ride had created bitterness which would probably last a long time; the solution, it said, was not to pour scorn on those white Australians who lived near Aboriginal Australians but for more money to be spent by governments on Aboriginal welfare. A major public debate emerged in the letter columns of the newspapers. On Monday, the Herald published a bundle of letters supporting the students, many written in response to a letter from Mrs B. Booth that had appeared the previous Saturday, accusing the students of barnstorming ‘quickly through the country causing dissatisfaction, even minor violence, and then scuttl(ing) back to their fine comfortable homes’ and leaving ‘the country townspeople to cope with the havoc they have caused’. Mrs Booth had also accused the students of knowing nothing about Aboriginal life, and said they should concentrate on providing scholarships for Aboriginal students. Now G.T. Briot replied, defending the students for ‘bringing forcibly to public attention that the American “deep south” has a counterpart in NSW’. A university student, Miss K. Stanton, reported that the students had done a great deal of preparation before going on the bus tour, attending ‘seminars given by experts on “freedom rides”, local government, social sciences, local health situations, anthropology, etc.’ Several other letters were equally pro-Freedom Ride. The next day, a letter was published from Bill Ford, saying Mrs Booth’s letter reminded him of letters in the United States in 1961 when students rode in buses and trains into Jackson, Mississippi. He pointed out that the leader of the students, Charles Perkins, had come from an Aboriginal settlement himself, and suggested the students were not ‘poor little rich kids who are bored with holidays’ but rather people who had worked hard ‘to get enough money to pay for the hire of the bus and their living expenses’. Perkins’s own support at university, he noted, came from a scholarship whose funding had been raised by Abschol—that is, by university students. This letter itself prompted some personal responses of appreciation sent directly to Ford, and one letter of vituperation from an 84-year-old man who had lived for 30 years in Moree which said, among other things, that ‘the colored people are a totally different breed to whites and it is against nature to mix the two breeds’. The left-wing unions passed motions of support. A stop-work meeting of the Sydney branch of the Seamen’s Union expressed support for the students’ ‘courageous exposure of the oppression and segregation


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levelled against the aborigines in NSW towns’, while a mass meeting at the Chullora Boiler Shop unanimously agreed on Monday to congratulate Charles and the others. Their letter told Charles that they had also appealed to the Premier to let the people in these towns know, through articles in their local papers, of ‘the very bad standing they are putting us in, in the eyes of the world through the United Nations’. One letter to the Australian on Wednesday expressed a similar concern. Headed ‘The Eyes of Asia are on Developments in Moree’, a letter from B.C. Stevens of Toorak expressed the hope ‘that Australians realise the importance of these issues abroad’. In all this public debate, there was a very muted government response. At the local government level, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Harry Jensen, was alone in supporting the students, saying the tour ‘had succeeded in drawing attention to forms of segregation’, and that ‘those communities which have refused to accept the spirit of the government’s desegregation policy deserve to be exposed’. The local MPs in the affected towns, on the other hand, deplored the Freedom Ride. Mr G.R. Crawford, Country Party MLA for Barwon (which included Moree), described the students’ tour as ‘ill-advised’, and said it was ‘tragic’ that the students should ‘stir up trouble on the aboriginal question . . . After stirring up the trouble they will go away and leave it for the local people to solve.’ Later, local

‘It’s not too cold for me—it’s too hot!’ Eyre Jnr cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald, 22 February 1965, satirising the Chief Secretary’s lack of response to the Freedom Ride.


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Members for the towns of Bowraville and Kempsey would make similar comments. The Premier said nothing. The Moree riots led the relevant government minister, Gus Kelly (Chief Secretary and therefore responsible for Aboriginal welfare), finally to comment. He had been reluctant to do so. On Saturday, as we were returning to Moree, the Herald began criticising the government for refusing to comment. Kelly, it said, ‘has declined to be interviewed’; Mr A.G. Kingsmill, chair of the Aborigines Welfare Board, had also refused to say anything; and Mr H.J. Green, the Superintendent of Aboriginal Welfare, was ‘absent in the country’. The reason for such quietness, the Herald accurately suggested, was the concern ‘not to antagonise white voters in country electorates’. A Herald cartoon on Monday, 22 February lampooned Kelly for his silence, showing him standing at the edge of a swimming pool, saying: ‘It’s not too cold for me—it’s too hot!’ The Daily Mirror remarked the same day that Kelly ‘seems to hope that if he does not mention the Freedom Ride, the problem will go away’. Perhaps stung by media commentary, Kelly made a brief statement on Monday, 22 February. He denied there had been any discrimination by the state government against Aborigines, saying ‘they have full rights as citizens of New South Wales under the law’. He refused to say anything further. The only minister to comment on any of the issues raised by the Freedom Ride was the Minister for Health, Mr W.F. Sheahan, warning against racial discrimination in hospitals. Sheahan had spoken out on 18 February, after the Walgett and first Moree visit, warning local hospitals that he might reduce their government subsidy if they segregated Aborigines from other patients. Sheahan went out of his way to stress the policy twice, first while opening a baby health centre and then while laying the foundations for hospital extensions at Lismore. Sheahan seems to have had quite a long-standing concern for Aboriginal health, having instituted regular health inspections at board settlements in 1963, and telling Parliament on 14 October 1964 that: ‘I believe that in Australia we have not given the aborigines enough attention. In fact, to use the democratic term, we have not given them the fair go that they are entitled to . . . We have now reached a position in Australia and throughout the world where colour is no bar to a person receiving the treatment that humanity dictates.’ There was no comment from the Commonwealth government. Yet, if both Commonwealth and state governments were tight-lipped, both


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were also becoming increasingly worried behind the scenes. Both feared more adverse publicity. The state government had an election coming up, and was sensitive to any criticism of its Aboriginal policies, while the Commonwealth government was deeply concerned about Australia’s overseas reputation on racial issues. To the consternation of both, the Freedom Riders seemed to have attracted a lot of favourable publicity at home, and it seemed they were about to attract attention abroad. Both watched rather anxiously as the Freedom Riders now turned eastwards towards the coastal towns to continue their survey and demonstrations.


7

Chapter

‘Stirring up trouble’: The coastal towns

T

he Freedom Ride resumed its planned itinerary, through the coastal and near-coastal towns of Lismore, Bowraville, Kempsey and Taree, taking almost a week to complete the 2300-mile (3700kilometre) loop back to Sydney. This second week repeated many elements of the first: surveys, pickets, rural hostility, urban interest. As some of the news photographs from this leg of the tour clearly show, the students were becoming weary. Yet, as the bus drove on relentlessly eastward then southwards, this second week was not simply more of the same. With the depths of white hostility and the transformative possibilities of direct action now both evident, the political ramifications of the Freedom Ride were intensely debated in the media. Charles Perkins, especially, became the object of intense admiration and interest, and some abuse. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the remaining towns anxiously waited to see what would happen when the Freedom Ride came to them. Through all this, the bus tour rolled on. The first two days—a Sunday and a Monday—following the high drama at Moree were spent in travelling east, and waiting for a replacement driver. Although Bill Pakenham had dramatically announced his intention to withdraw, he drove us on the Sunday through the beautiful green and hilly country from Inverell to Grafton, a journey of 150 miles (240 kilometres) taking about three hours. 171


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Two more students joined the tour at this stage, bringing our number back up to 29. One was Barry Corr, a foundation member of SAFA. By this time there was something of a support organisation in Sydney, run by Ted Noffs, Alan Walker and Bill Ford, which helped keep the Freedom Ride in touch with its supporters, and organised emergency accommodation now that our tour had departed from its itinerary. Ted Noffs was, in fact, in daily contact with Charles throughout the tour. Alan Walker helped Barry—who had been unable to participate to this point as he had had to undertake ‘practice teaching’—join the Freedom Ride. Barry had grown up in a devout Christian family in Penrith, then a country town on the western edge of Sydney. Now, having arrived by train on Saturday, he was billeted with a family in Lismore and waited impatiently for the students to arrive. The other to join around this time was David Pepper (he couldn’t quite remember exactly where he joined when interviewed in 1994). About to enter the second year of his Arts degree, David was from a middle-class family; with his father a solicitor and his mother a housewife, he had grown up an apolitical ‘surfie’ by the beach at Dee Why. He had no political involvements, and said in interview that university, for him, was ‘girls, drugs, beer, talking’. One of the Freedom Riders, Machteld Hali, had written him a letter suggesting he join the tour, and he went ‘to see what was happening with Machteld. And nothing was happening with her.’ His interest in the issues soon became much deeper, however. There was, it seems, another addition to the bus for a short while—Ray Tunks, a Salvation Army officer who now allied himself with SAFA. The Sydney supporters organised for us to stay in yet another Methodist Church hall, this time at South Grafton, on the banks of the Clarence River. After lunch, Charles and Jim investigated getting another bus and managed to hire one at a cost of £240, an extra expense they hoped to meet through a public appeal. The new bus arrived, and we transferred our luggage to it. When Charles rang Mr Saint, owner and manager of our original bus company, Saint told him not to get another bus, as he would find another driver. On hearing we could keep the old bus, we transferred our belongings back again. Bill Pakenham was furious. He felt the company had not stood by him. In an interview with Gerald Stone, he expressed some of his concerns and frustrations, and defended his decision not to continue. ‘I felt that as the driver of a charter bus I was responsible not only for its safety but for the safety of my passengers. What would happen if the bus was wrecked


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Clockwise from bottom left: Charles Perkins, John Powles, Brian Aarons and Gerry Mason wait in Grafton for the replacement bus driver to arrive, Monday 22 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Daily Examiner, Grafton)

or set on fire in an incident?’ He was not against the students, stressing to Stone that they were ‘well behaved and courteous’ throughout the trip. ‘There was no heavy drinking or indecent behaviour. They are nice kids but it was the worst bus trip of my life.’ To the Sydney Morning Herald he said: ‘The second time at Moree was enough for me—I’m going back to Sydney as fast as I can. They still have at least one more trouble spot to visit and I’m not going to take any chances by being there.’ We had now to wait in Grafton until the new driver arrived. This could take some time. Press coverage focused, naturally enough, on the drama of one driver leaving and another arriving. As the Daily Mirror reported on Monday: ‘Attempts to get a replacement driver ran into trouble last night. None of the bus company’s drivers was anxious to face the rest of such a dangerous tour.’ As it turned out, the 30-hour wait for the new driver created a small break, and a much-needed rest for the somewhat shaken students. Grafton was not one of our targeted towns, for its Aboriginal population by this time was relatively small. Fearing the taking of their children, the local people had moved away from the board station at Grafton 40 years earlier, and the reserve had been revoked owing to ‘loss of population’. We were relieved to learn that the olympic


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pool was not segregated, and the local paper, the Daily Examiner, carried a report accompanied by a photograph showing the students going to the pool for a swim. Our task in Grafton was to recover and regroup, ready for the rest of the tour. While waiting in Grafton, we read the reports of the Moree clash in the Sunday and Monday papers, and were gratified by their prominence and frequently sympathetic coverage. We also received many direct expressions of support, and unsolicited donations. Pat remembers receiving bundles of mail addressed simply ‘The Freedom Riders’ or ‘The Student Bus’, and they would be delivered to the student bus in Grafton, Lismore and the other towns. Gloria Phelan, of the Teachers’ Federation, forwarded 7 pounds and 10 shillings ($15) to Jim Spigelman by telegram. Bruce Dawe wrote to Charles: ‘More power to your arm in your struggle for justice for your people! . . . I am pleased to see that not all the lessons we learn from the United States are bad and that, in an age which has exalted the anti-hero, such men as Martin Luther King still think it worthwhile to believe in and fight for things.’ That Sunday evening, I took time to write up my long diary entry on the events in Moree. I also stepped aside from the day-to-day narrative to note some more general aspects of life on the bus, and it seems a good time to do the same here. I wrote: One thing wonderful about this trip is the wonderful group spirit we’ve developed after the first few days. Everything is done very democratically—and in fact our meetings are rather funny, with little points being debated at length until we realise how stupid it is. After the first few days we made our meetings much more formal, so as to get everything decided. Another thing is that the singing has developed as we go along. At first no one was interested in singing but as we’ve gone along the singing has grown. Today on the bus we made up two songs—one to the tune of ‘Green Grow the Rushes—Oh’ which goes like this: I’ll sing you one oh Go where the buses go What is your one oh? One for the bus that carried us through And ever more shall be so.



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Two for the Aboriginals on the bus Upon the freedom ride—oh Three, three, the aldermen of Moree Four for the cops who guarded us Five for the knuckles on his chin Six for the kids we tried to take in Seven for the pressmen who came with us Eight for the eggs upon his head Nine for the nine lives we all have Ten for those dumped in the crowd. We also made up another song, which went something like this, to the tune of ‘Waltzing Matilda’: Once a jolly freedom rider Stood outside a swimming pool Under the shade of a ten foot cop And he sang as he combed the eggshell from his hairy mop Who’ll come a desegregating with me Desegregating . . . etc. Up came a coloured kid to swim at the swimming pool Up jumped the students and grabbed him with glee And so it goes on, I forget the rest. In interview years later, some of the former Freedom Riders remembered other aspects of life on the bus. Wendy Golding recalls that ‘there were often very limited washing facilities and so I remember being in a swimming costume and all there was was a garden tap, and washing ourselves somehow, the bits that you could reach, that weren’t covered by the swimming costume’. In fact, while we were in Grafton, I remember going with two of the other women to a local hotel, walking in, taking a shower and leaving, something I would not normally dream of doing, and an indication of our strong desire for a good shower. Pat Healy remembers how we shopped for food: There was a roster, and everyone had to do the shopping. The money was just kept in this tin. This tin went all over New South Wales with all this money stuffed in it. And in fact it used to sort of roll around the


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floor of the bus . . . And whoever was to do the shopping used to just grab the tin and go off and get the milk for breakfast and things like that . . . At that stage my consciousness of gender differentiation in terms of who did the work was perhaps not as finely honed as it was some five years later, so I don’t really have a large consciousness of the women doing all the work. Maybe they did. I don’t remember. Actually, my diary seems to indicate a good deal of sharing in preparing food, in which everyone, including Gerry Mason, participated. I recorded the following meal roster at the back of my diary: Wednesday 17th Tea: Richard Collins, John Butterworth, Charles Perkins, Sue Reeves, Colin Bradford Thursday 18th Breakfast: John Gowdie, Warwick Richards, Wendy Golding, Jim Spigelman, Paddy Dawson Lunch: Chris Page, Aidan Foy, Beth Hansen, Richard Collins, Brian Aarons Tea: Bob Gallagher, John Powles, Derek Molloy, Michelle Hall, Sue Johnston Friday 19th Breakfast: Darce Cassidy, Colin Bradford, Norm McKay, Louise Higham, Ray Leppik Lunch: Gerry Mason, Helen Gray, Robyn Iredale, John Butterworth, Alan Outhred Tea: Aidan Foy, Hall Greenland, Chris Page, John Gowdie, Charles Perkins Saturday 20th Breakfast: Ann Curthoys, Warwick Richards, Paddy Dawson, Richard Collins, Sue Reeves These two days were a chance to ring home and reassure anxious parents. Hall Greenland remembers his conversations with Maynard, the young Aboriginal man living with his family. I used to ring home occasionally just to chat to the old girl [his mother], and then Maynard would answer the phone and there would



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be an uneasy conversation about what was going on because, you know, I was away fighting his battles in a way. It personalised for me what was a rather difficult political dilemma about privileged white kids fighting the battles of the underclass. So that did worry me at a general and a particular level. It was a source of discomfort. When asked what Maynard’s reaction to the Freedom Ride had been, Hall replied: ‘Well he seemed to be quite supportive. He thought it was a good thing that I was doing, and he was interested in it.’ On Monday morning, we held a general meeting and discussed SAFA’s future policy. It was, my diary records, ‘a pretty heated discussion’. Should we concentrate on raising funds for scholarships for Aboriginal students, rather than intervening in the lives of people in country towns? Hall Greenland moved that Student Action for Aborigines not develop its own scholarship scheme, but rather concentrate on political action. Diary: We rejected the motion which Hall moved, which opposed SAFA scholarships, but all realised that no definitive policy decisions can be made yet. The rest of the day was spent resting, relaxing, swimming, washing clothes and writing letters, insofar as all this was possible with the media following us everywhere. Diary: Today became rather a farce—everything we did was photographed, whether it was eating, walking along the street, having a meeting. We had to clean the residue of eggs and tomatoes from the bus; this was something the television cameras were keen to capture—physical evidence of the violent reaction to us in Moree. My diary continues: ‘Then we all went for a swim, getting photographed all the way . . . We organised a watermelon eating competition, each of about nine of us with a quarter of a watermelon. Charlie had more or less challenged the rest of us to it, but he ended up coming second last.’ Finally, at 6.00 p.m. on Monday, 22 February, the new driver arrived. The Newcastle Morning Herald reported that ‘the new driver is Mr E. Albrecht, of Lugarno, who said he was a “little nervous but not particularly


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Charles Perkins, John Butterworth, Ann Curthoys, Machteld Hali and Rick Collins join in a watermelon-eating competition, while waiting in Grafton for the new driver to arrive.

worried” about making the journey’. Known as Ernie, he was clearly determined to show the students who would be in charge. Diary: He seemed pretty hard to get on with. The first thing he said was ‘Take the sign off the bus’, the second ‘I’m not going into a hornet’s nest’. We took the sign down, and then the bus set off for Lismore, 63 miles (100 kilometres) to the north.

O Lismore presented the Freedom Riders with a different experience from that of any other town. Instead of hostility, we now found welcome. Charles was by now a celebrity, and the Freedom Ride had become a media event. It was a somewhat more sophisticated town, though this was well before it became a favourite rural retreat for professional people tired of urban, especially Sydney, life. By this time, the townsfolk knew quite a lot about the Freedom Ride; as Warwick remembered, ‘they’d had plenty of information about the bus trip, presumably from the newspapers and they were quite willing to talk to us’. Many wanted to show



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us that Lismore was not a racist town. In addition, some of the local Aboriginal (Bundjalung) leaders welcomed us. Respected elder Pastor Frank Roberts had, for example, appealed a week earlier for offers of billets for the female students, as the showground accommodation being provided for the men was thought unsuitable. This generally positive attitude arose in part from specific historical experiences in Lismore. The territory of the Bundjalung people had been the last in New South Wales, about a century earlier, to see the end of frontier conflict and violence. Before World War I, the region was cattle country; the Aboriginal reserves in the area supplied the cattle stations with a cheap labour force—stockmen, labourers and ringbarkers. After the war, the area gradually shifted from cattle to agriculture, and the farmers increasingly used family rather than Aboriginal labour. As in Moree, disputes with reserve managers led a number of families in the 1920s and 1930s to move closer to town. They chose a campsite on a stock route on the border of the Lismore and Gunderimbah Shires. In an attempt to exert some control, the Aborigines Protection Board declared the site, then known as Tuncester, a reserve in the early 1930s. One of the extended families there was led by Pastor Frank Roberts Snr, who led a three-decade long battle to stay on Tuncester, soon reduced in size and renamed Cubawee. By the 1950s, Cubawee had its own one-teacher school, so that the children would not be brought into the schools in town. Vic Brill was the teacher from 1956 to 1959, and in 1991 he described to me the conditions there then—the shanties, the dirt, the diseases. He conducted a medical session each day, and would dress the children’s sores each day before school could start. His teaching concentrated a lot on extending the children’s English vocabulary. An active Parents and Citizens Association developed amongst the community to support the school. Some of the children had gone on to secondary education, and one to university. Although the people had fought hard to stay on Cubawee, it had by this time become a rather unhealthy place. There was no electricity, and the houses were mainly tin shacks. The Courier-Mail reported in 1961 that there were about 120 people in thirteen broken-down huts, drawing their water from cattle-polluted streams, with very primitive sanitation. From the mid-1950s, Lismore saw considerable activity and conflict over Aboriginal land and housing. Under the influence of assimilation policy, the board now wanted to demolish unauthorised shanty towns


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like Cubawee. An energetic attempt to relocate the people in town came when Eddie Morgan became the Area Director in 1956. He called a public meeting at the Lismore Council Chambers to discuss what should be done about Cubawee, at which Professor A.P. Elkin, anthropologist and a member of the board, spoke about Aboriginal people and their culture, and a year later he encouraged the development of a Lismore Aboriginal Advancement League. The assimilationists in Lismore found the Bundjalung people in their area tough customers, demanding land rights and freedom from board and other interference. While they faced many of the same problems as groups elsewhere—land loss and segregation—they had the advantage of a continuing relationship with their traditional lands, and strong cultural and language survival. Certain Aboriginal men like Frank Roberts Snr and his son were strong leaders, who were able and prepared to converse with Europeans. Frank Roberts Jnr was ordained as a Church of Christ preacher in the mid-1950s, and he took over the role of communicating between black and white that his father had performed before him. In 1958 the board tried to buy some blocks of land in town to rehouse the Cubawee group. The council blocked the sale, and a bitter debate raged for several years over the question of Aboriginal housing in town. Bert Groves visited while still president of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, expressing his strong opposition to the idea of assimilation, and arguing that instead the people should have ownership of their land at Cubawee and elsewhere. A local white woman, Tess Brill, made personal contact with the people at Cubawee, and took some of the women to meetings of the newly formed Lismore Aboriginal Advancement League. She also attended, along with Eddie Morgan, the first meeting of FCAA in nearby Armidale. The following year, Frank Roberts Jnr published a statement in the Lismore paper, the Northern Star, demanding that decent services be brought to Cubawee, rather than the people removed from it. In the early 1960s, several newspaper stories described the shocking conditions at Cubawee, and the campaign to remove the people intensified. One of the functions of the reserve was lost when the school closed in 1961 in response to a Teachers’ Federation policy, announced the previous year, of opposition to segregated schools. The Health Department condemned the water there, and the minister, W.F. Sheahan, ordered the board to solve the problem. Dr Hay, Medical Officer of Health in



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Lismore, described the settlement as unfit for human habitation, while the Lismore Aborigines Advancement League president urged that the Cubawee reserve be abolished and replaced by a new reserve closer to town. Mr Doig, a member of the Legislative Assembly, took an interest in Aboriginal settlements generally and raised the question of Cubawee in the Assembly on 6 September 1962. Most of the white residents of Lismore were adamant that the Cubawee people be kept out of town, and those who wanted them included were ostracised. To complicate matters, the Cubawee community itself was divided: while its leader, Pastor Frank Roberts Snr, wanted the people to stay there, the women—increasingly concerned about their children dying from the unhygienic conditions—gradually concluded that a move was inevitable. As a compromise, the Lismore and Gunderimbah Shire Councils jointly offered a solution—land would be allocated for a new Aboriginal settlement in Gunderimbah Shire, just outside the Lismore town boundary but close enough for water, electricity and sewerage services to be provided. Realising nothing would be done to improve conditions at Cubawee, the Cubawee people agreed. The houses were completed and occupied in 1964, the Welfare Board’s annual report proudly carrying a photo of the new houses, contrasted with a photo below it captioned ‘Makeshift Cubawee dwelling which has since been destroyed and replaced with one of the new houses shown at top of page’. Assimilation, it seemed, was proceeding slowly and painfully in Lismore. Lismore was also only 22 miles (35 kilometres) west of the Cabbage Tree Island cooperative. As Heather Goodall points out, the Robertses, through their ‘highly politicised Christianity’, had come into contact with the Reverend Alf Clint, who at this time was spreading the cooperative message amongst Aboriginal people. He saw the cooperative movement as a form of practical socialism guided by ideals of collective endeavour and community, which he thought (quite erroneously) correlated with Indigenous notions of community. The Indigenous societies of Australia did not in fact share this secular notion of community, but rather—as Heather Goodall puts it—‘organised their social, economic and political life around families and individuals who had their most compelling links not to a secular “community” but to the land, and through it, to a transcendent, supra-human Law’. The cooperative ideal was taken up, for a while, by groups as diverse as the Communist Party and the Aborigines Welfare board—the former supporting its socialistic flavour, the latter


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seeing it as a way of encouraging independence and hard work. It also appealed to some Aboriginal groups as a way of retaining or gaining access to land, and of staying together without having to put up with a white manager or board interference in their daily lives. In 1958 the board adopted Clint’s proposal that cooperatives be established at its Cabbage Tree Island, Woodenbong and Tabulam stations. Cabbage Tree Island seemed ideal, since it was already a successful community, with lively social, sporting, religious and economic activities. A cooperative with a retail store and sugar plantation was launched in August 1960, sponsored by the Australian Board of Missions and assisted by a £2000 government loan. A small reserve, it occupied about 25 acres (10 hectares) of the 140-acre (56-hectare) island in the middle of the Richmond River. For a few years, it was a great success, as the land was fertile and the people already had sugar growing and cutting skills. By 1964, about 150 Aboriginal people lived there. An ABC Four Corners program on the north coast cooperatives broadcast in September 1964 saw them as a working alternative to assimilation in the towns. All these developments made the Freedom Riders’ visit to Lismore distinctive. The students’ spokesmen told the press they had heard good


Clarrie Combo, at left, chairman of directors of the Aboriginal Cooperative at Cabbage Tree Island, discusses problems with the sugar cane crop with Mr H. Jeffery, manager of the Cabbage Tree Island Reserve, Tuesday 23 February. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 1965.



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things of Lismore. Jim Spigelman said they had heard much of the cooperative, which he described as ‘evidently a brighter page in the story of Aborigines–whites cooperation and relations generally’, while Charles announced that he did not expect any trouble at Lismore. For their part, both black and white leaders in Lismore made us welcome. The Lismore council and the Advancement Association members were keen to show the Freedom Riders, and through them the media, how much progress had been made in Lismore, and that it was not like the northwestern towns we had just left. When we arrived on Monday night around 9.00 p.m., Pastor Frank Roberts Jnr met the bus and then escorted the male students to the showground. Lou, Pat and I stayed with Vic and Tess Brill. Diary: They were extremely interesting and Mrs Brill particularly knew a lot about the Lismore racial problem. In her diary, Lou noted: ‘In Lismore after spending the night at home of Mr and Mrs Brill. Very nice people with wide understanding of Aboriginal situation.’ The Herald reported Lou as saying ‘sleeping in a nice clean bed for a change seemed like the best rest I’d had in my life’. The next morning—Tuesday, 23 February—the cooperative at Cabbage Tree Island was our first stop. Pastor Frank Roberts Jnr and others met us at the post office, and then the whole party set off for the co-op. We were now quite a large group, accompanied by two ministers of religion, the Reverends Trigger and Stewart, Tess Brill and reporters from the local papers in Lismore and nearby towns like Grafton and Coffs Harbour, as well as the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun and the Mirror. At the co-op, the manager, Mr H.W. Jeffery, welcomed us. Diary: We got some interesting surveys and talked to a lot of the aborigines there. I described Cabbage Tree Island in my diary as ‘very interesting but the reserve was really very much like any other reserve. The cooperative shop was OK and so were some of the houses, but others did not have water or electricity.’ Lou wrote: ‘The houses were better than other reserves but still dilapidated.’ Jeffery told the students that 25 men had gone to Narrabri for the cotton chipping, while six people had gone to Sydney for a three-week cooperative management course at Tranby. He also expressed


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his views on assimilation: ‘There’s no quick solution to the problem of aboriginal assimilation. It will take several more generations.’ We didn’t like Jeffery much. I noted in my diary that ‘the manager seemed to be a real bastard’, while Lou wrote more colourfully in hers that ‘the administrator looks like a type doing his stretch in the colony and he acts like one. Rev. Stewart called him and his kind “social misfits” and generally unsuited for the job . . . The Rev. said he [the manager] had been trembling in his shoes all evening’, presumably knowing that the students, and their now large media entourage, were to visit. In fact, Jeffery seems to have liked the students, and wrote to the board two days later saying we had been ‘very courteous’. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the cooperative scheme was near financial disaster. It quoted the chairman of the cooperative board of directors, Mr Clarrie Combo, who said: ‘I suppose you could say our financial difficulties have been caused by inexperience.’ Charles supported the idea of the cooperative, but noted its difficulties and lack of funds. He told the Daily Telegraph that the people there were ‘bright and very intelligent. If the cooperative stimulates a sort of personal initiative on the part of the aborigines it is a good thing. But it badly needs more funds.’ The Herald also quoted Charles’s perceptive comment: ‘I was a little disappointed when I saw it. However, the important thing about the scheme is that it keeps aborigines together. My people badly need unity, and the cooperative provides that even if its financial affairs are somewhat haphazard.’ After the visit to the reserve, and a stint of interviewing people in the town, civic leaders gave the students a reception. Aidan Foy remembers ‘a big fuss . . . We sort of got a hero’s welcome in Lismore, the local Trades Hall Council organised it, a reception and the Mayor and all sorts of things.’ The Mayor, Clyde Campbell, welcomed us and expressed his admiration for the tour; Warwick Richards wrote in his diary that he told us ‘you can only do good’. This was followed by a free luncheon hosted by the Lismore Workers’ Club, for which we had to improve our standard of dress, and swap our sandals for shoes. It was time, then, to visit the newly opened Gunderimbah settlement, where Pastor Frank Roberts Jnr and his people now lived. Diary: The houses there were by far better than any others, but still too small and overcrowded.



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Beth Hansen, who later came to live in Lismore, remembers ‘going out to visit the Gunderimbah houses and being spun this lovely story about how fantastic the Lismore people were, building all these new houses, and then discovering they were just outside the boundary’. She also remembers that, while we were there, ‘someone from council spoke, probably lined up by Tess. I remember being very cynical, it being on the outskirts of town, symbolic of the do-gooding stuff. Though better physically, the racism was still there.’ Demonstrations seemed inappropriate. Somehow, we were back to where we had been in Wellington and Gulargambone, reduced to conducting our survey. Diary: On the whole a lot of us felt the day had been far too loosely organised and we could have done a lot more if we had organised ourselves better. In a comment that I now find a little mysterious, I also wrote: ‘Also the discipline was getting a bit lax, and Charlie got up in the bus and said we ought to tighten up on discipline.’ Perhaps students were not all doing the survey, and going off for a drink or a swim. There was some publicity in the local papers, the Northern Star quoting Paddy Dawson that the problem seemed to be economic and social, rather than racial. Lismore revealed clearly that the methods of the Freedom Ride were effective only when faced by the most explicit racial segregation. When confronted with evidence of halfway ‘successful’ assimilation policies, the Freedom Riders had little new to offer. In this sense, our visit to Lismore was a non-event, and when interviewed years later, few of the Freedom Riders remembered much about it, many insisting we hadn’t been at all or, if we had, we had done nothing there. Aidan Foy: ‘I don’t recall what we did in Lismore; I don’t think there were any demonstrations or anything. We were all a bit battle weary by then.’ I, too, find my memory of Lismore very slight; of all the events recounted here, I remember only staying at Tess Brill’s welcoming house. That evening, we left the Gunderimbah settlement and resumed our travels south. Bowraville, our next stop, was to prove the antithesis of our Lismore experience. By this time, more political reactions to the Freedom Ride were beginning to be evident. Government response added little to Kelly’s Monday


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statement that Aborigines were equal before the law until A.G. Kingsmill, chair of the Aborigines Welfare Board, made a statement, published as a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, 24 February, and reported also in other papers. He pointed out that the board had a record of protesting against racial discrimination, and that it was the board’s aim to remove the economic and social conditions which gave rise to ‘these misgivings on the part of local communities’. He detailed the board’s works in progress, mainly the building of homes in towns like Moree, Walgett, Lismore and elsewhere. Kingsmill was quoted in the Bathurst Advocate as saying that he had warned the students (Jim and Charles) personally against ‘any ill-advised action . . . which would impair much painstaking effort by the board’s welfare staff over many years . . . both assured me they were as anxious as the board to see that this was done. So, where the chief responsibility lies for the events at Moree and anywhere else, only the reports will ultimately establish.’ Kingsmill also appealed to both townspeople and the students to avoid ‘unseemly disturbances at the remainder of the stopping places on their itinerary’. Liberal and Country Party politicians remained silent. Concerned about the possible effects of a positive statement on their chances in key rural electorates, and a negative statement in urban ones, they did not attempt to use the Freedom Ride to criticise Labor’s record on Aboriginal affairs. Nor did they try to expose the Freedom Ride as a communist plot, even though they knew some communist students were on board. They were probably aware of this in any case, but would have had little doubt on the matter after a telephone conversation between Alex Mills and Jack Beale, a Liberal frontbencher, on 15 February while the Freedom Ride was in Walgett. When Beale asked who some of the students were, Alex says he ‘just sort of reeled off Brian Aarons and Pat Healy and a few other people, and not really realising at that stage of the game that, you know, I was mentioning names that were part of the royal family of communism in Australia’. It is especially interesting, then, that Liberal and Country Party politicians did not pick up on the communist connection. For its part, the Communist Party was delighted by the Freedom Ride, though it had in fact had no direct role in its planning or conduct. That Wednesday, its newspaper—the Tribune—carried a front-page story, and editorialised that this had been a ‘historic ride’, congratulating the students on their political skill and maturity. It thought the ‘resultant wide public discussion in NSW will greatly help the already powerful



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development of a nation-wide movement for full rights for Aborigines’. It drew attention to the party’s own draft program, and concluded that communists would continue to wage ‘a firm and consistent fight in support of the basic struggle of the Aboriginal people themselves’. More generally, public and media debate gathered momentum. One theme of criticism that grew as the days went by was that the students were stirring up trouble and then moving on, leaving the local people with the consequences. In the Sun, Patricia Giffney wrote: ‘By dragging a few bewildered “outcast” aborigines into a swimming pool and then moving on, they’re leaving a trail of resentment behind them—to be borne, more likely than not, by other aborigines who have already been accepted in the general community of the towns.’ In a somewhat similar vein, Bruce Petty’s cartoon in the Australian on 25 February depicted a bus speeding away from a ‘Municipal Swimming Pool’, being waved away by an Aboriginal woman, with small child, at a shanty town. It is clear that some Aboriginal people in the towns feared the Freedom Ride. Charles Rowley pointed out in Outcasts in White Australia a few years later that it was not surprising that some ‘were resentful of having a situation disturbed in what they regard perhaps as a “good town” where there is at least employment, and little tyranny or interference so long as the coloured people “know their place”. They feared that the whites would take a harder attitude when the “freedom riders” had gone.’ The Mirror carried a story on 24 February headed ‘Aboriginal

Bruce Petty cartoon, the Australian, 25 February 1965. (Courtesy of Bruce Petty)


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Attacks Students’, which quoted George Bracken, a former lightweight boxing champion, asking what would happen to the local Aboriginal people after the Freedom Ride. His answer was that the Aboriginal people would be back where they started, with the additional problem of animosity caused by the students. Bracken also saw Perkins as out for publicity for himself. A week later—the day after the students returned to Sydney— the North West Champion printed a story headed ‘Aboriginal Mother Slates Students’. The unnamed woman said: ‘Those students are just a load of troublemakers, I think. They haven’t got to live in this town. They are only one-day visitors. They needn’t come here trying to force us into things we don’t want. We are quite capable of handling our own affairs.’ She had, the Champion reported, ‘been satisfied with the way things were in Moree until the students came along’. A little later, poet Kath Walker (later known as Oodgeroo) said on Seven Days that ‘what worries me is what is going to be left behind, what will happen to the Aborigines of Moree, for instance. How will they fare with the town taking sides? I think that they will suffer for this.’ Yet there was strong support as well. The Australian Council of Churches sent a telegram to Charles, care of the Presbyterian Manse at Taree, on Wednesday, 24 February. Signed by the general secretary of the council, the Reverend H.L. Perkins, and the secretary of the council’s Division of Mission, the Reverend Frank Engel, it read: ‘Your survey of the aboriginal situation and action against discrimination of great importance. Hope it stimulates imaginative Government and community action for aboriginal development and education of white community.’ Here was an important supporter, for Engel was one of the leading advocates of



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Aboriginal rights within the churches, and his telegram was given wide publicity. Support also came from Professor Baxter, the Vice Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, who praised the students for avoiding violence, and for disturbing ‘the apathy of the people’. No similar comment came from the students’ own Vice Chancellor, the historian of white pastoral settlement, Stephen Roberts.

O Our overnight stop was at the Scouts’ Hall in the beautiful coastal town of Coffs Harbour, where we were belatedly joined by the Channel 7 Seven Days team. On Wednesday morning we drove on south. At Bowraville, the last of the students joined the Freedom Ride. This was Gary Williams, and this was his country. Situated on the banks of the Nambucca River in Gumbaynggirr country, Bowraville had a population of about 900 white and 116 Aboriginal residents, the latter nearly all living on the reserve. The main street was wide with wooden buildings, many of which still had the verandah posts of an earlier era, and a wide median strip. Arriving around lunchtime, we were met, as we had been in Lismore, by representatives of the local Aborigines Welfare Committee, who told us of the progress they had made. This was, however, an all-white committee, started in 1958 by Mrs T. Henderson, the wife of a dairy


The students outside the bus at Bowraville. From left to right: Gerry Mason, Pat Healy, Sue Reeves, Charles Perkins, Ray Leppik, Bob Gallagher, Ann Curthoys, John Butterworth, Norm McKay, Alan Outhred, unknown, Colin Bradford and Louise Higham. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)


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farmer about 4 miles (almost 7 kilometres) out of town. The Herald described her as ‘a vital energetic woman with firm convictions about discrimination’. Mrs Henderson opposed racial discrimination in the town, and was especially concerned about housing conditions. If there were Aboriginal activists, as there had been in Walgett and Lismore, we did not meet them. In fact, the people on the Bowraville mission had heard about the Freedom Ride, but most were too fearful of the consequences to meet us. Pat Healy thought that ‘in Bowraville we found economic conditions so bad that all the progressive Aborigines who might have led the people had gone off to get jobs somewhere else. Unemployment was worse there than anywhere else.’ Bowraville was in a timber industry region, but Aboriginal people seem by this time to rarely have been employed as timber getters or cutters. We decided to find out about the situation for ourselves, splitting up to do our surveys and looking around the town to see if there were any examples of racial segregation. We soon decided that Bowraville was a seriously racist town. ‘The area is simply riddled with discrimination,’ Charles Perkins told the Herald. If most of the Freedom Riders now have trouble remembering anything about Lismore, the opposite is true of Bowraville. Many of them remember it with unpleasant clarity. There was something nasty and threatening about Bowraville that I and many other students felt at the time, and still remember. Aidan Foy said years later: ‘In Bowraville there was a sort of brooding kind of menace that I felt was there. I remember feeling that about that place, it was a nasty place. Brutal place.’ Barry Corr commented: ‘Bowraville was discrimination from the cradle to the grave. It was a mongrel of a place. I loathed it, hated it.’ The atmosphere of racial division was palpable. Gerald Stone wrote that ‘almost everywhere we went on the tour—with the painful exception of Bowraville—there were Aboriginals eating, drinking and working with whites’. Jim would later remember the situation in Bowraville in this way: When I asked people in other towns which pubs or cafés discriminated, they would say, ‘We’re not allowed in this place’, or ‘We’re not allowed in that place’. In Bowraville, the Aborigines I asked said, ‘We are allowed in such and such a place’. It was a complete reversal of emphasis.



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Alex Mills remembers that in Bowraville one white man he spoke to ‘made the point to me that if you were friendly with an Aboriginal person you would be looked down upon by other people in the community’. The group I was in went out to the board unmanaged reserve, about one-and-a-half miles (2.5 kilometres) out of town. One of the smaller reserves, its population had fluctuated between 50 and 80 over the last eight years, though this particular year it had jumped to 116, only to fall back to around 80 the following year. While we interviewed the people there, my diary says the press ‘wandered around like flies as usual’. Diary: The conditions were very bad. The houses were weatherboard, very run down, and hadn’t been looked after for 15 years (the houses were 26 years old). Barry Corr remembers: The people lived on an old reserve on a hill out the back of the town. And they reported the police regularly just driving around at night with the headlights on. They’d shoot dogs. As they were driving around if there was a stray dog wandering around, they’d shoot it. And all this is happening during the night . . . the people were living in fear. It was a police state, that’s all it amounted to. The students who conducted the survey in town found the racial discrimination there, as my diary put it, ‘absolutely shocking—by far the worst we’d encountered’. The local barber, Cecil Brown, told the Sydney Morning Herald he had lost white customers because he cut Aboriginal people’s hair: ‘Some white locals drive into Macksville for a haircut rather than come here.’ Warwick Richards remembers that ‘there was a joke in the pub to the effect that when the police wanted wood cut or gardening done they’d arrest a darkie to do a day’s hard labour’. Seven Days reported a story of ‘Aboriginal members of the football team forced to wait outside the clubhouse while their white team mates were presented with their team blazers’. We also discovered that there were a number of segregated cafés and hotels. At the milk bar, Aboriginal customers were not allowed to drink from the reusable metal milkshake cups. Tom Harris, the manager of the milk bar, told the Daily Telegraph ‘the aborigines never get milk shakes here. If I served a milk shake to one of them I would lose the trade of


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Brian Aarons and Gary Williams drinking in Bowraville Hotel. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1965.

20 white people.’ Mrs Eakin, proprietor of another café, told the press that she did not serve Aborigines meals at the tables, because ‘they throw food all over the floor’ and tended to leave without paying. One pub had a ‘dark room’, while another allowed in only a select few Aboriginal drinkers. When some of the students went to the latter, the Herald photographer took a picture of Gary Williams and Brian having a beer. The most striking example, though, was the racial segregation in the picture theatre, the Bowra Theatre. We learnt that ‘there was a partition in the picture theatre separating the aborigines from the whites. The aborigines had to buy their tickets separately and could only enter the theatre after the picture had started.’ Pat remembers: this amazing old theatre in the main street, it sort of stood there in this dusty main street in all its glory. Just like the picture theatre we’d had in my suburb in Newtown where I’d grown up. And the theatre



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actually had a fence, an actual partition inside, and Aboriginal people had to go in a side entrance and sit in front of this partition. And everyone else went in the main entrance and sat behind the partition. Several years earlier, the local Aborigines Welfare Committee had tried unsuccessfully to have the partition removed, and had even approached the Chief Secretary, who had said he had no powers over the matter. When Hall Greenland interviewed the theatre manager, Samuel Raymond, he said he would let no Aboriginal people in the back of the theatre, and that included Charles Perkins. Raymond was happy to explain his position to the Herald as follows: ‘The partition has been there since 1940 and white residents would not tolerate it to be otherwise.’ Gerald Stone’s report quoted him saying of Perkins: ‘If he’s got Abo blood he’s got only one place and that with the other darkies. They all smell, are ignorant, and drink too much. People from the outside just don’t understand what they’re like.’ Raymond told Judith Rich that he would lose white customers if he allowed Aboriginal people into the white section: ‘All the townspeople agree with what I’m doing.’ Diary: At first we weren’t sure where to start—the town was just so bad. In a revealing comment, I wrote that ‘we thought the press could blow up a big story about it, but they refused, obviously instigating us to put on a demonstration’. It seems the journalists were tired of trailing around after us tamely looking at reserves and settlements; they were with us because we could stir up conflict, and that was what they wanted to relay to their audiences. The Seven Days team wanted some action. If the media wanted action, the students were more than happy to provide it. ‘We decided we could not leave without protesting,’ Charles said. With so many examples of discrimination to choose from, we decided to start with the Bowra Theatre. This was the first commercial public facility we had picketed, for the RSL was a private organisation (though with significant government support) and the Moree pool had been publicly owned and controlled. Since New South Wales had failed to follow South Australia’s lead in passing legislation outlawing racial segregation, Raymond could not be charged with any offence. The Chief Secretary, Mr Kelly, said later that same day that under the Theatres and


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Public Halls Act ‘he had no control over admissions to theatres, nor had he any control over where theatre and hall managements seated people’. This was avoiding the issue; when asked if he would recommend legislation to give him the relevant powers, he said no. W.M. Rigby, Labor MLA for Hurstville, a Sydney electorate, took a much stronger stand. Unusual amongst the Members of Parliament on either side of the House, Rigby had joined the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and spoke up on Aboriginal issues from time to time. The Theatre and Public Halls Act should, he said, be amended to give the government power to discipline racially discriminatory owners, and people who barred Aboriginal people from pools, hotels and cinemas should be treated as lawbreakers. The Mirror reported that, while some other Labor backbenchers agreed with Rigby, they did not wish to speak out and embarrass the government on the eve of an election. Along with the press photographers, we went again to see Raymond at his home, but he slammed the door on us. Diary: The press got a photo of him opening the door slightly and shutting it. Then we went to the hotel, but the manager blatantly denied discrimination. At our meeting, we decided—but not unanimously—to stage a stand-in demonstration in the picture theatre that night, and my diary intriguingly notes that ‘this was the first occasion that Charlie had voted with the minority group’. After a barbecue meal near the house of an Aboriginal family, the Flanders, on the reserve (meat supplied by the Channel 7 crew), we returned to town. As soon as the manager of the picture theatre saw the bus approaching, he cancelled the show and put up a small sign—‘No Pictures Tonight’—at the doorway, though in fact the projectionists had already begun preparing for the evening’s show. As it started to get dark, we nevertheless began our picket. Beth remembers: ‘We were there with our signs, and then slowly being joined by Aborigines, in ones or twos, just on dusk.’ Diary: A crowd gathered round, the aborigines keeping a bit distant and quite separate. The white people weren’t on the whole particularly hostile, nothing like Walgett and Moree. They seemed to



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me interested and even sympathetic, but on the whole a fairly apathetic lot. Nearly half the population of the town gathered round. Around 9.00 p.m. the atmosphere changed. Charles announced to the crowd: ‘Well, folks, we have finished. You are free to talk to any of the students if you wish.’ Many people took advantage of the offer, and many intense conversations ensued. The voices, reported the Herald, could be heard two blocks away. Aidan Foy remembers ‘people abusing us and some concern that the police may not have been too keen on helping us if there’d been any real trouble’. He reflected that part of their hostility was the by now significant media presence: They were outraged that their town had suddenly acquired this notoriety. I don’t believe they’d thought twice about the racism. I think they thought theirs was a nice little town that anyone would be proud to come from and a nice country town, you know, with all those Australian outback images. And to have this collection of students to suddenly come up and say, ‘No, you’re a collection of racists who are no better than the people who live in South Africa or Alabama’, they were outraged and shocked and horrified, and a lot of them by that stage were turning quite nasty. Diary: One 16-year-old aboriginal girl called Ann was wonderful—in the discussions which broke out she stood up to the more aggressive whites very well. This was Andrea (Ann) Holten, a 16-year-old high school student who had a few years before won a bursary to attend St Ursula’s at Armidale. Her high school education, she told me in interview in 2002, had given her confidence. Now back in Bowraville, she ignored the warnings of her elders about getting into trouble, and came looking for the Freedom Riders, bringing 10-year-old Martin Ballangarry with her, who kept saying, ‘We’ll get a hiding, Annie’. Having found the white townsfolk arguing loudly with the Freedom Riders in the street, she was appalled to hear them denying the racial segregation that permeated the town. So I found some courage and confidence to start speaking. Everything


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that had been bottled up for several years came out. I remember yelling out, ‘You can’t judge a book by its cover’. Many of the students were struck by the courage of this young woman, younger even than we were, and a few months later Beth recalled the incident in an article, ‘Our Freedom Ride’, in Overland: One woman protested at our being in the town and added defensively: ‘anyhow, what’s wrong with our town? The darkies have been allowed to go to the white school for ages’. We explained that we weren’t complaining about the school and were about to bring back the conversation to the partition when a young Aboriginal girl dramatically interrupted us. She stepped forward into the light and walked directly up to the woman who had spoken. There was a hush as everyone strained to hear her soft voice explaining how just a few years ago her aunt had tried to enrol her cousin at the school and had been refused . . . Just one quietly spoken girl had broken through the hidden intensity of feelings. After half an hour or so of debate on the footpath, we left for Kempsey. The media made a good deal of Bowraville. Pat Healy remembers the picture theatre with its partition and separate doors as summing up the essence of discrimination, and conjectured that the press must have had a similar view, ‘because they certainly publicised this theatre in Bowraville’. The reports in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Australian and other papers were indeed extensive. The local Guardian Gazette, circulating in Macksville, Nambucca Heads and Bowraville, was very hostile, saying of the students: Their juvenile inaccuracies, prejudices against white people, and lack of concern for right or wrong labels them for what they are: a hysterical publicity-seeking band of adolescents, hiding under a guise of false humanitarianism hell-bent on causing trouble and getting out before it descends on them. The nearby Macleay Argus headed its report ‘Best Laugh in Years’, a quote from its interview with the Royal Hotel publican Paul Grant, who also described the students as ‘a bunch of idiots having a good holiday’.



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Despite the extensive media coverage, our efforts in Bowraville had been something of a failure. It is an indication that the Freedom Ride was by this time running out of energy that we did not decide to stay, or return there as we had done at Moree. We had not desegregated the theatre, and we knew it. Raymond, the theatre manager, defiantly told the press the next day that ‘it had always been the theatre policy to segregate the white people from the aborigines and he would continue to enforce it’. We had simply put on a demonstration and left. This time, we truly did leave the question to be resolved by the local people. The next day, some of the Aboriginal people in Bowraville decided to try to desegregate the theatre themselves. Ann Holten told the Newcastle Morning Herald that she planned to lead her friends direct to the white sections and demand seats there. ‘They can’t keep us out of the “white” sections any more,’ she said. In an interview a fortnight later with Seven Days, she reported that they still could not enter the picture theatre, and that the local Aboriginal community had decided instead on a boycott. The picture theatre remained segregated and closed later that year. It was to be another year before some of the students in SAFA returned to Bowraville to continue the fight they had started during the Freedom Ride. A little dispirited by our Bowraville experience, we arrived in Kempsey around 11.30 p.m., and slept in the showground. This was to be our second-last night, and we were tired. We could not, however, give up yet. We still had this one major town to go and we continued to receive donations (£27 during the last three days of the tour) and messages of support. As it turned out, the Kempsey leg of the tour, though rather nasty and unproductive on the surface, was important in the longer term for its extensive media coverage—locally, nationally and internationally—and for later changes in Kempsey itself. Among the media by now was a BBC team, led by Trevor Philpot, producing a program on Australian race relations for the popular Tonight show. Aidan remembers ‘the BBC appearing and being terribly excited because it’d gone international’. Kempsey had a considerable Aboriginal population of at least 600. There was a board station at Burnt Bridge, which at this point had a population of 162, well down on the population of 270 two years earlier. Greenhill—an unmanaged reserve close to town, with four houses built by the Welfare Board, surrounded by a large number of tin shanties—


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housed 200 people, well up on the 46 residents of the previous year. Clearly there had been considerable recent movement from Burnt Bridge to Greenhill. Forty miles (65 kilometres) west another 124 people lived at the Bellbrook unmanaged reserve. Like Moree, Kempsey was at this time well known as a segregationist town. Its council, too, had passed an ordinance excluding Aboriginal children from its swimming pool, except during sports days or carnivals. The Kempsey ordinance had been passed in January 1949 and, like the Moree ordinance seven years later, aroused some opposition at the time. The United Associations of Women, a feminist organisation established by Jessie Street, took up the issue, seeing the segregation of Kempsey’s McElhone Memorial Swimming Pool as violating the UN charter, which affirmed ‘there shall be no discrimination on account of race, colour, creed or sex’. The ban had come to attention in the urban press again when the nearby town of Wauchope opened a new pool, and invited Aboriginal people to use it. Thus Kempsey—like Moree—had a reputation, and as the student bus drew nearer many in the town became apprehensive. Charles had said while we were still in Grafton that the students expected problems in Kempsey, and the Sydney Morning Herald had said ‘more trouble is expected when the students reach Kempsey on the return journey to Sydney. Some members of the group say they have evidence of “blatant discrimination” at Kempsey.’ It was clear from the start that we were not welcome. The day we arrived there was a letter in the local paper, the Macleay Argus, describing the students as ‘a busload of half-baked young men and women, probably unparalleled in their own conceit and impudence’. Supporters of Aboriginal advancement in Kempsey were worried, and spoke to local papers about their achievements to date. A letter from the local Aborigines Welfare Committee the day we arrived emphasised that, although there was prejudice in the town, the situation had recently improved, and expressed the hope that the students would take no aggressive action in Kempsey. J.H. Brown, the Country Party MLA for Raleigh, Kempsey’s electorate, criticised the students and said ‘it is a tragedy that people go around and stir up trouble, then leave it for the local people to solve. My observation as one most interested in the welfare of those of aboriginal descent is that the people of Kempsey and district have done all they could to help the less fortunate in their community. This visit by these illadvised students can only undo the good work that has been done.’



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Brown did indeed have some claims as an Aboriginal supporter. Only four months earlier, when the Macleay Argus carried a story about Aboriginal child deaths in the area, he had drawn the matter to the attention of the Legislative Assembly. The source of the problem seemed to be diseases caught from roundworm and hookworm, their prevalence a product of the poor housing and related amenities at Greenhill and the other settlements. Spurred on by the child deaths, the Save the Children Fund organisation in December had initiated a pre-school for Greenhill, and soon afterwards the Aboriginal Welfare Board had begun an eight-home building project, also at Greenhill. Kempsey differed from Lismore not only in the hostility expressed by white leaders before we, the students, arrived, but also in that there was no organised support from the local Aboriginal community. No Aboriginal leader met us, and it was clear we would have to investigate on our own. Thursday morning was wet and dismal, the first and only rainy day of the entire trip. Yet again, we split into groups to conduct our survey. I went with the group that talked to the Aboriginal people at the Burnt Bridge station. Diary: We all had to wear heavy shoes because of the hookworm. The reserve was a few miles out of town, and was in a gully. It was pouring rain (the first rain we’d had all trip) and the gully was terribly wet—that is apparently why there is so much hookworm . . . Well we all spread out and did our survey as usual. The Welfare Board officer, L.B. Cowley, was under orders from the board to accompany us. ‘It was an impossibility to accompany the students around the Station,’ he complained to the board a few days later, ‘owing to the fact they would split up and go in all directions so as to interview the residents.’ Diary: I went to two houses. The first was a woman whose husband was white, with a job on the railways, and who had three children (small for an aboriginal family). The youngest child had a bursary at school, which was the first instance of this I had come across. Yet, on the whole, we were not impressed by what we saw.


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Diary: The people at the reserve lived in very sub-standard houses as usual—wooden ones, which were generally overcrowded. They had no electricity or gas, I’m not sure whether they had water or not. Beth Hansen remembers the Burnt Bridge reserve, with its ‘incredibly decrepit’ houses, as ‘even worse than Boggabilla’. There was, she recalled, a ‘sense of hopelessness there’. Charles Perkins told the press that living conditions on the reserve were ‘deplorable’. The BBC crew filmed this visit. Barry says: We were doing the questionnaire with some families and there was this film crew filming us doing the interview and I got angry and just told them to go away because they were very obviously upsetting the family that we were interviewing. They just did not want to be filmed. It was that simple. It was hard enough for them to just do the interview, without being filmed, so I think I spoiled the take for the film crew anyway. I just thought, bugger it, what are we here for? Are we here for an English TV show or are we here to actually do something? Meanwhile, one group of four, including Charles, interviewed the Mayor, Alderman R.G. Melville, who had thought we were arriving a day earlier, as did some of the local papers, and had waited all day for us to arrive. He had already expressed his hostility publicly, telling reporters he would be happy to answer the students’ questions and would ask some of his own, such as where they had got the funds for their trip, and why they were focusing on problems in country towns rather than in Sydney. By the time we got to Kempsey, he was in full confrontational mode. Aidan Foy remembers that ‘the Mayor of Kempsey, I’ve forgotten his name but he was a nasty piece of work, he was a nasty man . . . we got no support at all’. When the students requested Melville to sign a motion rescinding the by-law passed by Kempsey council in 1949 banning Aborigines from the pool, he refused and debated with them for an hour, disagreeing strongly that the by-law was a matter of racial discrimination, and arguing that the ban had been in force purely on the ground of hygiene. It would take, he told the Australian, ‘ten years of intensive health and educational efforts before restrictions on Aborigines using public baths could safely be removed’. Yet, as Seven Days reporter Peter Martin pointed out, only the day before there had been a school



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swimming carnival where Aboriginal children had been allowed into the baths, and then at 3.30 p.m. had had to leave. ‘The Cinderellas who once seemed so clean,’ went Martin’s narration on Seven Days, ‘are suddenly transformed into dangerous risks to public health.’ The pool provided us with the clear case of discrimination we needed. When the students rang Jack Lee, manager of the Kempsey picture theatre, to see if he had any objection to their bringing Aboriginal children there, he said he had none. I wrote in my diary: ‘The general picture in Kempsey re discrimination was that everything was fair (a café here and a pub there excepted). On the whole a pretty middling sort of set up comparatively.’ We all returned to the showground for our usual meeting. We agreed that, as in Moree, the clearest case of discrimination we had found was at the swimming pool. Indeed, as Charles noted, discrimination was even harsher than at Moree. ‘Here,’ said Charles, ‘anybody with aboriginal blood in them is barred from the pool outside school hours. Adult aborigines are not admitted at all.’ Indeed, Charles himself had been barred from the pool less than two months earlier, when he went there with Ted Noffs and Graham Williams. Diary: After some discussion we decided to go to Greenhill shanty town and get some aboriginal children and then to go to the swimming pool. We took about ten or fifteen children with us to the pool. They weren’t allowed in and this time neither were Charles nor Gary. The students stood in line across the entrance in an attempt to stop other people entering the baths until Charles and Gary were sold an entry ticket. Gary waited in vain at the head of the queue. The pool manager, Neville Duke, said he was just enforcing council regulations. My diary records a rather sad little occasion: We blocked up the entrances as we had done in Moree but there was no one much to block the entrance to. Then we held up signs, and the press madly took photographs etc. There were very few people around and very little discussion provoked. At 5 o’clock (we had got there at 2 o’clock) we packed up and left. Charlie was very emphatic about the success of it because of the publicity, but most of the rest of us thought it an absolute flop because we had failed to force the issue


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Left: Hostile reporting by the Macleay Argus, 27 February 1965. Below: Charles Perkins is barred from entering the Kempsey swimming pool, Thursday, 25 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Fairfax Photo Library)




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Paddy Dawson, Ann Curthoys, and other students hold placards outside the McElhone Memorial Swimming Pool, Kempsey, on Thursday 25 February 1965. (Photo courtesy of Macleay Argus)

within Kempsey itself. We all realised Kempsey had ignored us, which was precisely what we didn’t want. We came back, some of us dejected, others jubilant that the trip was nearly over. Everyone is by now absolutely exhausted and I don’t think we put much into our efforts at Kempsey. Things were getting rather ragged by this time. We had lost our energy and spirit, and indeed some of our composure. In retrospect, it seems to me that the delayed effects of the confrontation at the Moree pool, a traumatic event, were starting to set in. One of the Macleay Argus reports was headed ‘They Were Rude’, which said the belligerent attitude of the Freedom Riders had shocked all who had observed it. They had been rude


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not only to the Mayor but also to the Argus reporter who had asked what ‘after sales service’ would they offer to the Aboriginal communities they visited. When the Argus reporter complained of Charles Perkins’s rudeness, he offered his apologies, and said that he was ‘at the end of his strength’. This particular journalist had in fact sorely tested Charles and the other students. She had made her antagonism to the students clear early on, and continuously throughout the day. During the pool demonstration, she kept asking the Aboriginal children pointed questions, and in general acted so aggressively that she prodded Charles into asking her to ‘stop intimidating his group’. Gary remembers urging the children not to answer her. Colin remembered this particular reporter years later: The one thing that sticks in my mind at Kempsey is something I’ll never forget, because you don’t often come against pure hatred, really naked hatred, and it wasn’t something you could actually put your finger on and say that’s what it was. But it was a woman from the local newspaper [who had] come out to interview us. And there was Brian, Pat Healy and myself and a couple of others, and this woman literally oozed hatred. I’ve never experienced it like that. Even when we were demonstrating, the people that came up and argued with us and [were] obviously angry, I didn’t get that same feeling as with that woman there, just pure hatred. A very strange sensation to face that. One reason for this particular hatred may have been not only opposition to the students’ criticism of Kempsey, but also her discovery that some of the students may have had communist connections. She suspected a connection between Pat Healy and the communist union leader, Jim Healy, and pursued Pat about her political affiliations. She had discovered that Jim Healy’s daughter was named Patricia, and wondered if the student Patricia Healy was Healy’s daughter. Pat remembers: Charlie being a bit fussed about all of this and not wanting it known that I was involved—came from a communist family . . . I remember they kept trying to keep me away from this woman. So she’d come and ask for interviews and I’d sort of be spirited to the back somewhere. Finally she grabbed hold of me and sort of put to me the question, she’d obviously done her research and found that when he [Jim Healy] died he’d left three sons and a daughter called Patricia—



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my aunt—and so she very pompously put to me this question, ‘Was Jim Healy your father?’, and I said ‘No’. That did take the wind out of her sails somewhat. She was silly enough not to ask me any more. The reporter published an article in the Macleay Argus headed ‘The “Ride” was Red-inspired’, which announced that ‘inquiries made yesterday morning by the Argus point strongly to Communist leadership and support of the Freedom Ride’. A letter signed ‘Video’ in the same issue also dwelt on the fact that some belonged to the Eureka Youth League. It was the kind of coverage Charles and Jim had worked hard to avoid, and it is interesting that neither the conservative parties nor the urban media picked up the story. Overall, the local Kempsey response was antagonistic. The Macleay Argus’s coverage could not have been more hostile. In an editorial headed ‘They Came, They Saw, They Sickened’, it described the survey as ‘an absolute farce’ and the students as ‘a pack of impudent rabble rousers’. Part of the hostility was the publicity; this same editorial referred to the students being accompanied by ‘a string of city reporters and photographers who . . . continued to churn out stories and pictures for the world at large’. A local radio station was sharply critical, describing the students as ‘just a mob of idiots out for a good time’. The local Aborigines Welfare Officer reported that Aboriginal opinion in Kempsey was unfavourable to the students, and indeed it does seem that the Aboriginal leaders there kept their distance from Charles and the Freedom Ride. In contrast, the city coverage continued to be largely supportive. Alongside a photo of the pool manager preventing Charles and a young Aboriginal boy from entering the pool, the Sydney Morning Herald report listed the signs we had held—‘Rescind colour bar resolution’, ‘Allowed with school, why not after school?’ and ‘Equal at school—unequal at pool’. It reported two white girls from Kempsey High School saying most of the pupils were in favour of Aboriginal children being allowed in the pool after school hours. ‘We swim with them anyway,’ said young Julie Harvey, ‘and it’s silly that they have to go home after school hours.’ The Australian reported the presence of the BBC television team, and quoted Trevor Philpot as saying that discrimination at a swimming pool was a minor problem compared with the generally depressed living conditions of Australian Aborigines. ‘But when students stop protesting it is a bad day. I think there is too little protest in Australia.’


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Wendy Golding’s photo of the students posed outside the bus. (Courtesy of Wendy Watson-Ekstein)

The media coverage continued that evening. Diary: While tea was being cooked there was another round of publicity, photograph taking etc.—us throwing boomerangs, us posing in front of the bus and so on and so on and so on. In the end, we were not as isolated from Kempsey Aboriginal opinion as the Macleay Argus wanted its readers to believe. When we left around 8.00 p.m., the Aboriginal families, as Warwick remembers, ‘farewelled us all—they all sort of turned out and you know waved and sent us on our way’.

O We arrived in Taree quite late at night, intending to stay at the showground. Gary had gone home. My diary reveals the sense of getting near the end of the trip by this time. ‘As it was the last night quite a few of us were celebrating and getting merry. When we arrived at the Taree showground, which smelt awful, there were two huts. The drinkers went in one hut and the sleepers in the other. I was a sleeper, being absolutely exhausted.’ The last day of the trip, Friday, 26 February, began with an early start.



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‘He does not drink, hates crowded pools, likes to sit in front at the pictures. How can we desegregate him?’ Cartoon by Molnar, Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 1965.

Originally, we had been going to visit Taree for almost a full day; its board station, Purfleet, had a history of discrimination, but also an interesting history of resistance to the board through a rent strike. With our return to Moree having thrown out our plans, however, we were now well behind schedule and had little time left. The local paper carried a photograph of students lining up for breakfast (baked beans and fried vegetables) at the showground. Diary: We stopped at the Purfleet reserve for half an hour, talking to the people there. The manager of the station, a Mr Robertson, reported this visit to the board. The students, he said, arrived at about 10.15 a.m. and left at 10.45. They walked around the station in small groups, and he as manager addressed the remaining students, including Charles Perkins. Perkins visited one Aboriginal family and the Gillawarra Gift Shop, where he and several others signed the visitors’ book. This gift shop was a local success story, having been established three years earlier after a visit from Victorian Aboriginal leaders Bill Onus and Pastor Doug Nicholls. It was


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now managed by Ella Simon, a local leader of the community, and had become a tourist attraction with visitors from ‘most parts of the world’. Alex, who later came to live and work in Taree, remembers: When we went through Taree we stopped at Purfleet and Charlie got off the bus and talked to this lady there for a bit. I don’t think she was very impressed with the student bus ride. And as I understand it later on it was Ella Simon, whom I got to know very well and helped to promote her book Through My Eyes. When we arrived in Newcastle, my father came to say hello. He was not the only person to do so. Alex Mills remembers: ‘We pulled into the car park at Newcastle near the beach . . . and who should be there at the time but my former school principal from Orange High School, Danny Blakewell . . . He first sort of wakened me to some interest in Aborigines.’ We had lunch and a swim, and then resumed the trip to Sydney. At Hornsby, we stopped to eat and freshen up. The Sydney Morning Herald reported: ‘Girl students tried to comb windblown hair and paint cracked fingernails, but the hectic bus trip had taken its toll.’ We were expecting a large press conference on our return, and became somewhat tense in anticipation.


The Rev. Ted Noffs, of Kings Cross, welcomes back Charles Perkins on Friday night, 26 February 1965. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 February 1965.

Diary: We had a rule about no drinking, so that we wouldn’t turn up to the press conference drunk and smelly. When we arrived at the university in the evening, however, there was Ted Noffs, a few press, some parents, a few supporters, and that was all. My diary records rather wistfully: ‘No aborigines or other supporters.’ We found out later that Ted Noffs had deliberately not told



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anyone where and when we were arriving. Christopher Day in the Sun reported that ‘it was a brief welcome because Mr Noffs had wanted it that way’. Yet if it seemed a let down to us, it was not so to the press. The Sydney Morning Herald recorded our return on its front page the next day, saying ‘when the bus pulled up in front of the University Union building waiting parents broke into a spontaneous burst of clapping’. Even at this point, Charles had a good speech for the press and the parents: ‘I am no leader. I am only an Aboriginal lucky enough to be able to do something I think is right for my people. Without the courage and humility of these students we could have done nothing.’ He also said: This small group of students has created a new dawn of hope for my people. They have provided the impetus for a new era of doing things to help Australian Aborigines. There have been critics of our aims, our actions and our achievements. To my mind the most important feature of the trip was that we laid bare the strong prejudice against Aborigines existing in various country towns and showed that there is a hard core of white residents who seek to perpetuate this attitude. In addition we have stimulated both white Australian and Aboriginal thought so that they will now more closely and constructively consider the problems facing aborigines today. The parents and friends, led by Ted Noffs, gave the students three cheers before they left for home and, as the Sun put it, ‘a welcome bed’. Actually we didn’t go straight home; some of us went to John Powles’s place for a wind-up party. My diary reads: ‘About 10.30 pm I left and went home, thoroughly exhausted’. I had exhausted not only myself, but also my wish and capacity to write a diary. This was my last diary entry, and from here on, when reconstructing ‘what happened next’, I must do without it. The tour was over. Its reverberations, though, had only just begun.


8

Chapter

Impact

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he students succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in putting into practice Martin Luther King’s idea of ‘creative tension’. A lively debate over Aboriginal conditions and rights continued in local, urban, national and even international arenas. Messages of congratulations poured in, alongside growing criticism. Ever since, observers, activists and historians have differed about the impact of the Freedom Ride. For some, it was but a moment, overshadowed by the much larger achievements of the Referendum and the equal wages and land rights campaigns. For others, it was the beginning of a new kind of Aboriginal politics—confident, demanding and instilling in many young Aboriginal people a new belief in the possibility of change. From our twenty-first century vantage point, we can see in it elements of both. Congratulations came, in editorials, letters to newspapers and directly to the students. Many thought they had shown great courage. Ted Noffs spoke of the students’ ‘rare courage that was admired even by police in Moree, where the students faced a mob of 1000 people’. Wilma Apps in the Australian on 4 March said ‘it takes courage to be laughed at and derided. It is with young people such as these, able and willing to criticise and correct, that the future of Australia lies.’ The Teachers’ Federation at its council meeting on Saturday, 7 March carried a resolution paying tribute to the students, which read: We consider that the university students have displayed a high degree

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of civic responsibility in forcing public recognition of the racial discrimination existing in this State; and we pay tribute to the moral and physical courage they have shown in carrying through this undertaking. Trade unions, especially, sent supportive letters to Charles or Jim, saying the tour had ‘brought hope to the Aborigines and shame to many white occupants of their country’, and ensured that ‘world attention will be directed against State and Federal Governments both past and present in their failure and criminal neglect to give justice to the Aboriginal people’. The South Coast Labour Council offered its ‘sincerest congratulations’, and told Charles that the council had written to the Premier protesting against discriminatory practices where public utilities were concerned. Other groups with a record of sympathy on Aboriginal issues also congratulated the students. Some letters came from individuals, who frequently enclosed donations. Support came from some parts of the Australian Labor Party, though not from the Labor state government. Bill Hartley, secretary of the Victorian ALP, wrote warmly of the Freedom Ride in the Melbourne Herald on 6 March. The students, he said, were to be admired for making the trip. They had put up with ‘insults and bitterness’, paid their own way, given up their annual leave, and gone into debt. Their proposal for desegregation clauses in relevant Acts and local government by-laws, he predicted (incorrectly, as it turned out), was likely to win a positive response from the Labor government of New South Wales. Six days later, as Hartley wrote to Charles, the Victorian Central Executive endorsed his article and resolved to applaud and congratulate Charles and the students on their actions. In New South Wales, while the right-wing state ALP organisation continued to keep its distance, local ALP branches sometimes expressed their support. The Asquith branch, for example, wrote to Charles on 13 March, sending ‘hearty congratulations to you and the Student Action Group for Aborigines for their exposure of the discrimination practised in NSW country towns against coloured residents. We all admire the courage and resourcefulness shown by the Freedom Marchers and wish you well.’ Some of the letters of congratulation came from student councils and labour clubs, and new SAFA branches were formed in several universities. Charles spoke to a meeting at the University of New South Wales, from


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which a SAFA branch was formed, its members including Warwick Mosman, Paul Brennan, Pauline Stewart, Lyn and Bill McLean, and Lindsay Wood. The ALP Club at the University of Western Australia announced its intention to organise a Freedom Ride in Western Australia, while Helen Moore commissioned from Jim an article for a new student paper at the ANU called Purge. Interest was especially strong in Queensland, where a group called Student Aboriginal Survey was formed, which organised a student petition to the Minister for Native Affairs and demonstrated outside Parliament House. Student editor Brian Toohey commissioned from Jim an article in Semper Floreat, the university’s student newspaper, which appeared on 1 April. One undoubted effect of the Freedom Ride was that Charles became one of Sydney’s—and indeed Australia’s—best-known Aboriginal leaders. He was invited to speak by many organisations, and often did so. He was a good speaker, and knew how to attract attention. His talk on Sunday, 28 February at Ted Noffs’s invitation at the Wayside Chapel at King’s Cross was the first of many. Newspapers continued to carry endless profiles, and discussed his significance. It was common for a while, both at home and abroad, to compare Charles to Martin Luther King. The NY Herald Tribune said: ‘Perkins has been described as the Martin Luther King of Australia but there are certain obvious differences. He is a tough professional soccer player noted for his quick temper on the playing field, and he made it clear more than once in dealing with mobs that passive resistance does not come easily to him.’ More significant than the congratulations was the serious and extended debate that raged over the next few weeks. Much discussed was the question of whether the Freedom Ride had addressed the important issues. One aspect of the media coverage that shocked people most was the Freedom Ride’s revelation of appalling housing conditions in the shanty towns, a situation that was not much better on the reserves. Many observers, both sympathetic to and critical of the students, said the real problems facing Aboriginal people in New South Wales were not to do with swimming pools and where they could sit in a cinema, but with housing, education and health. In a curious way, the white townsfolk’s repeated response that exclusion of Aborigines from pools and cinemas was a matter of hygiene not race, intended as a defence against charges of racism, served only to highlight the poverty in which many, if not most, Aborigines lived. As the Sun-Herald editorial put it: ‘If aborigines are


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barred from this or that pool, not because of colour, but because they are dirty or disease carrying, it is a damning indictment of the whole State for our failure to sweep away shanty camps and provide adequate medical services.’ In a similar vein, the Bulletin on 6 March described Aboriginal issues as constituting ‘not a race problem but a slum clearance problem’. So who was to blame? A common theme was that the state government, rather than the towns themselves, was to be held responsible. The Sun-Herald suggested Aboriginal welfare was not the responsibility only of a few northern towns, but of the whole state, and the current situation would cost a lot of money to put right: ‘The problem cannot be solved by a short-lived “crash” program. Resettlement, education, instruction in hygiene and the provision of suitable work opportunities must go handin-hand. And we shall have to dig deep into our collective pocket and not count the cost.’ An article in Nation on 6 March, entitled ‘Well Protected’, emphasised the inaction of the New South Wales state government on Aboriginal issues, and another in The Bulletin the same day said what was needed was community and government action to clear up Aboriginal slums. Many in the towns agreed—it was not their fault that Aboriginal people lived in such dire poverty, but rather that of the government. The Northern Daily Leader (at Tamworth) said in its editorial on 4 March that the Freedom Ride had diverted attention to ‘the racial issue’ rather than the ‘social and economic obligations of the people of New South Wales for the welfare of our relatively small residue of aboriginal population’. The problem as a whole, said the Leader, is not to be solved by urban newspaper criticism of country towns like Walgett, Moree and Kempsey; there was a need for ‘a fresh look at the whole problem of assimilation at the Parliamentary level’. Though most attention was directed to the state government, sometimes the Commonwealth government was called upon. The Anglican wrote: ‘This is the time when the Commonwealth government might well call all State Governments into conference to get a unified vigorous programme moving for the benefit of all coloured Australians.’ Some letter writers thought blame lay ultimately with Aboriginal people themselves. ‘Part-Aboriginal people,’ wrote B. McCann of Balgowlah to the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 March, ‘possibly due to the strain of aboriginal blood, find it hard to settle down to the humdrum life of modern civilisation with its emphasis on regular work, conventional standards of living, hygiene, etc.’ R.V. Bateman of Bega, an employer of


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Aboriginal labour and a shire councillor, made a similar point in a long letter in the Herald the same day. Aborigines, he reminded Herald readers, were ‘only four generations removed from the Stone Age man’. What it had taken 50 000 years for Europeans to achieve, Aboriginal people were supposed to achieve in one generation. The Aborigine had, he said, ‘seized the more attractive aspects of modern civilisation, and rejected those aspects which he finds tedious and laborious’. The results were appalling. Sometimes the Welfare Board and employers did provide modern housing for Aborigines, only to find ‘the flooring in the new home burnt for firewood after the first cold night’. Loungeroom fireplaces were used as toilets, children’s hair constantly had lice, and unhygienic conditions meant Aborigines carried diseases. Missions and reserves were not built near places of work, ‘thus forcing aborigines to construct their humpies on public reserves and roads for easy access to work’. Councils, for humanitarian reasons, did not order the demolition of the resultant shanty towns. The solution, Bateman argued somewhat surprisingly, was a national approach and uniform legislation between the states. This letter was warmly praised in a Herald editorial, which drew the conclusion that what was at fault was not white racism but government inaction at both local and state levels—local councils for shutting their eyes to the unhealthy conditions in the shanty towns, and the state government for failing to insist on Aboriginal education. Some letter writers thought the task of reform lay not only with government but also with each local community, and many were appalled at the level of racism the tour had apparently exposed. In a letter to the Australian on 18 March, M.H. Pears congratulated the students, and said each community must now ‘make determined efforts to help its Aboriginal population. Responsible members of each town and city should bring pressure to bear upon their councils to end segregation and discrimination.’ Many townsfolk had been resisting assimilation policies for over a decade; now, after the Freedom Ride, there were many expressions of a desire for assimilation. This usually meant providing housing in town, or a massive program of education in the ways of white society. The Cooma-Monaro Express spoke for many when it said on 24 February that the answer lay in educating Aboriginal people in hygiene, and the way to do this was by taking ‘the younger generation of the aborigines and bringing them up into our way of life. They must be taught to be clean, they must be educated beyond their present level, they must be helped to


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live with us, and above all they must be accepted by us all.’ A few insisted there was no problem at all. A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald from Walgett signed ‘Realist’ on 3 March said Aboriginal people in Walgett ‘mix with the whites on equal terms in all Government and semi-government institutions’. The shops, said the letter, ‘serve them on equal terms . . . some intermarry with white people, some live in town beside white people, dark children play with white children’. It was a shame, said ‘Realist’, that Premier Renshaw’s defence of Walgett had not been heard amidst the huge attention given to the students. The Freedom Ride threw the churches into something of a turmoil, caught between their doctrine of the equality of all human beings in the eyes of God, and the day-to-day reality whereby some clergymen worked with Aboriginal people while others shared the racial attitudes of their white parishioners. The debate was played out in the pages of the journal, The Anglican, during February and March. Given the role of an Anglican minister in putting the students in danger in Walgett, the debate had a particular piquancy, and given the journal’s national reach it involved clergymen and laymen from around the country. On 25 February, The Anglican carried a news item on the tour, which said the students ‘deserve the thanks of the nation for their initiative and for their perseverance in the face of some local hostility’. The item went on to say there was little difference between ‘our treatment of the Aboriginal people and that inflicted in some parts of the United States. The main difference is that our coloured people are much less numerous and that most of them live well away from the cities so that most Australians have no first-hand acquaintance with the problem.’ This was flanked by a supportive ediorial, which took the form of a satire on country people’s negative reactions to both students and Aboriginal people. It caught many of these reactions perfectly: During the past week or so, a collection of mere Sydney University students—irresponsible, overgrown children—have been deliberately stirring up trouble and attempting to overturn the very foundations of society in the North and West of New South Wales . . . These students, like the ivory-tower professors who are supposed to teach them, are a pretty unsavoury crowd, as everyone knows. They all live in ease and idleness for which the taxpayer foots the bill. It is well known that many of them wear long hair and rarely wash.


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The chief target of The Anglican’s satire, though, was not so much country views of the students, as of Aborigines: As everyone in Moree, Walgett and similar cultural centres knows, there is just nothing to be done about Aborigines except make sure they don’t go getting ideas above their lowly station in life to which it has pleased the Lord to call them . . . These students, for example, and their airy-fairy professors have the ridiculous notion that you can do something for the Aborigine by treating him as a human being. Sadly, many letters missed the irony, and indeed it is rather telling that so many readers thought The Anglican could be seriously arguing against the humanity of Aborigines. A letter from Bishop (later Archbishop) Moyes on 4 March, however, did get the irony and concluded: ‘Let us thank the students for their adventurous campaign; and do our utmost to remove discrimination not only from local government documents, but from practice in these areas.’ Moyes also explained the doctrinal basis for opposition to racial discrimination: The basis of the Christian position is the ‘new’ man created in Christ. This New Testament conception is most profound. It does not just refer to those in the Church but to the whole human race as Christ has claimed it for Himself and has given to each and all a new and equal worth by dying for us all without discrimination. So, in this matter of racial discrimination we Christians can have only one attitude. Any discrimination on the grounds of race or sex or class is not merely bad, but impossible without denying the Gospel itself. The same issue, however, contained a quite different response to the Freedom Ride from the Reverend A.J. Gerlach in Brisbane. The issues, he suggested, went much deeper than the question of racial discrimination. Aboriginal people were suffering the effects of ‘civilisation’. In their native state, Aboriginal people had had a very well organised society, with tribal areas, and in which tribal elders administered the law. The effects of white settlement had been to remove the tribal boundaries, language, and the authority of the elders.


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With the disappearance of the tribal religion, personal discipline and morale have come to a very low ebb . . . In handing on our own civilisation we have inadvertently taken from this race not only their former way of life but [also] the religion which regulated it. The answer, therefore, was to provide a religion to replace the one that had been lost. The following week saw four more letters on the Freedom Ride, pondering the large and complex question of human unity and diversity, and its implications for Christian behaviour. Two of them stressed that Aboriginal people were different from Europeans. One we have already seen, from the Reverend Dowe; it not only criticised the students but also argued that ‘our dark friends are just not like Europeans’. The other, from the Reverend John Parten of Brewarrina, said: ‘People forget that Aboriginals are NOT Europeans—they have a completely different outlook on life. They don’t want to become Europeans. They are only interested in being what they are.’ Dowe’s letter drew a response from the Reverend P. McD. Smith, from Kilburn, South Australia: if Aborigines are not like Europeans, he asked, ‘Who then are they like? Are they like human beings?’ The most impassioned letter of all came from E.G. Morgan of Cary Bay, south of Newcastle, who introduced the question of a history of colonisation and land-taking into the debate. He accused Dowe of complacency and smugness, and went on: ‘No-one in this land who is of European descent can escape his share of the collective guilt.’ He argued that Europeans had filched the tribal lands and taken away the Aborigines’ religious beliefs. In his own area, Lancelot Threlkeld had come as a missionary, and found that within sixteen years of his arrival the local Awabakal people ‘had become completely extinct, thereby achieving that final solution to a racial problem that Hitler failed to achieve with all the advantages of modern gas ovens and machine guns’. He returned to the question of guilt: The guilt is in our heritage as white Australians and as Christians and Anglicans. Where we have not murdered, we have degraded, and the Church has helped. Ignorance and good intentions cannot erase or excuse the guilt and shame. By what right do we deny these victims of our past their present human rights? In their own native land, their heritage for thousands of years, they are not citizens. They have no


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voice or vote as their automatic right, as do white Australians . . . They are not free to move about their land as we usurpers are. The students, he concluded, ‘have at least attempted something towards the righting of a national shame’. With an election imminent, it was easier for most to blame government inaction than either white Australian civilisation itself, or the citizens of towns like Walgett and Moree. And this particular government made a good target. Premier Jack Renshaw and Chief Minister Gus Kelly had both tried to defend the government’s record. The only minister not in defensive mode was the Minister for Health, Mr Sheahan, who on 6 March repeated the warning he had first made in Lismore ten days before that hospitals that discriminated against Aborigines might have their subsidies cut or withdrawn. Behind the scenes, though, the Freedom Ride prompted the Aborigines Welfare Board to pay particular attention to the Freedom Ride towns. On 16 February, the day after the students’ visit to Walgett, Mr Alf Thomas, the Welfare Board Area Officer based at Moree, came to Walgett for a seven-day inspection tour. Walgett was immediately declared a separate welfare district with its own welfare officer and R. Snooks was appointed to look after both the Walgett station and reserve, and the Collarenebri reserve. At Boggabilla, houses were soon fitted with electricity, concrete floors, shower recesses and closed-in porches. In an attempt to demonstrate the government’s commitment to Aboriginal welfare, and to reply to the growing swell of criticism, Premier Renshaw agreed to debate the issues with Charles Perkins and Jim Spigelman on television for the Seven Days program screened on 8 March 1965. The 45-minute program was a mix of reportage and discussion. Devoted entirely to the Freedom Ride, it gave major sympathetic publicity to the students, reaching a large television audience. After a screening of scenes taken by Jim Spigelman of students being removed from outside the baths in Moree, it showed interviews by reporter Peter Martin with Bill Lloyd and Bob Brown, and covered the Bowraville and Kempsey visits in some detail. It ended with a studio interview with Renshaw, Perkins, H.J. Green of the Aboriginal Welfare Board and Spigelman. Charles spoke about racial discrimination in the picture theatre at Bowraville, and the baths in Moree and Kempsey, and pointed to the shocking conditions in which many Aboriginal people lived. The people lacked housing,


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education and jobs. He advocated an anti-discrimination law, a six- or seven-fold increase in spending, and an investigation of Aboriginal health. In response, Renshaw demonstrated a good practical knowledge of Aboriginal life in country towns. Not only was he a country man himself, but the Aborigines Welfare Board had also briefed him, after talks with Chief Secretary Gus Kelly about the Freedom Ride on 1 March, three days after the students returned. The board obtained reports from the area officers at Lismore, Kempsey and Taree to complement those it already had, compiled a collection of newspaper clippings, and prepared a report for the Premier on 3 March. The board’s report was fair to the students, noting the wide range of clubs and societies represented on the Freedom Ride, and the fact that students had sought and gained permission to visit stations and reserves for the purposes of the survey. The Premier began the interview by speaking highly of the Aboriginal people he knew in the western towns who were ‘living in the community’—that is, assimilated into the towns. The shearers, he said, earned good money and some had houses in town. The government assisted those who lived in poverty on the edge of town ‘as far as we can’, and spent large amounts on housing. But then he said the problems lay largely with Aborigines themselves. When asked why educational standards were so low, Renshaw—like many others in this debate—attributed it to Aboriginal mobility deriving from their past as hunters: ‘Generations of instinct have been built into them . . . they moved across the country . . . getting them to settle down after any period of time is a very difficult problem.’ He opposed the idea of anti-discrimination laws, saying Aborigines already had equal legal rights. There were, he said, no rules to bar Aboriginal people from belonging to an RSL Club. Local debate on Aboriginal issues was coloured by the knowledge that the Freedom Ride had been reported internationally, in the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Fears of more adverse international publicity for Australia on race issues were soon realised. The story was covered in the New Yorker, and in the NY Herald Tribune Australian journalist Zell Rabin wrote: ‘Church and civil leaders throughout the nation are now calling for immediate action to combat the apparently deep-seated racial prejudice in many walks of Australian life.’ The New York Times on 26 February emphasised the opposition encountered by the students who, it reported, ‘have been pelted with gravel in their trip from small town to small town, heckled and pushed by white crowds, barred from staying in a church


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hall, and locked out of a segregated movie house. Their bus has been forced off the road by angry white autoists.’ In Britain, The Times on 25 February carried a news item on the Bowraville picket, and two days later a general story on Aboriginal issues headed ‘Australians Look at Aborigines’ Life’, which included a very sympathetic account of the Freedom Ride and stressed the supportive coverage given to it in the Australian press. The tour was also widely covered in European papers. The story was, according to two student members of the Democratic Labor Party, picked up in an international youth and student magazine, subsequently translated into Spanish, and distributed to youth and student organisations throughout the world, including those in Latin America and Africa. The Cape Argus, in Cape Town, South Africa, carried a detailed and sympathetic account of the tour on 6 April, profiling Charles Perkins and outlining the hostility of white townsfolk and the state government’s response. ‘These incidents,’ it said, ‘ensured wide publicity for the demonstrating students.’ The article concluded that ‘if Mr Perkins and other young aborigines do develop as leaders of their people the problems of Australia’s aborigines will be much nearer solution’. There was also some coverage in Asian newspapers. In a detailed story headed ‘Discrimination Against Aboriginals in Australia?’, The Working People’s Daily in Rangoon, Burma noted the surprise with which many had reacted to the revelations of racial discrimination. The Morning News in Karachi on 14 March 1965 emphasised Australian sensitivity to Asian opinion: ‘Australians, already deeply conscious of the unfavourable impression their country’s “White Australia Policy” has made in recent years throughout Asia, are now painfully awaiting Asian reaction to “this blot on our national character”—as one Canberra newspaperman described the exposure by the “Freedom Riders” of the plight of Australia’s 100,000 Aboriginals.’ The story ended: ‘Some of Australia’s diplomats in Asian posts may be feeling more than a little uneasy that the students brought the issue so dramatically out into the open.’ And indeed diplomats from around the world were sending press clippings to the Department of External Affairs, warning that Australia’s international reputation in the sphere of race relations, already low, had been further harmed. Both local and overseas reports frequently compared Australia’s racial situation with that in the United States. An External Affairs internal memo of 22 February warned that it was important ‘that the position of the aborigines or part aborigines in Australia be not associated with that


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of the Negroes in the USA. No real comparison, in fact, can be made between the treatment of these two coloured people.’ By this time, though, the comparison was firmly embedded in public consciousness locally, and was picked up in international reports as well. Indeed, it ensured the newsworthiness of the Freedom Ride both locally and abroad. On 4 March the Herald carried an article by ‘John Moses, who last year toured the Deep South’, which carried a photograph of the students lined up outside the picture theatre, and made strong comparisons between the Bowraville picture theatre and the picture theatre in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The NY Herald Tribune story also made the comparison. It read: ‘Sydney: Smug Australians who like to believe that the colour bar is something applied exclusively by White Americans against Negroes have received a rude awakening.’ The Freedom Ride, it went on, had ‘proved it may not be such a long way from Australia to Alabama as some of their countrymen would like to think’. The Freedom Riders, it reported, had ‘found repeated examples of what the Press has called “Dixie-style” segregation in country areas’. At home, meanwhile, public criticism of the Freedom Riders was growing. The Daily Telegraph published at the end of February an article attacking their survey, claiming it contained loaded questions and the student interviewers were biased, reportedly based on information supplied by a disgruntled participant who had left early. Although he was not identified, the students all knew it must have been Derek Molloy. When Helen Seager went to Moree to do a story for Woman’s Day, published on 15 March, she came down firmly on the side of the Moree townsfolk and against the students. She interviewed people who said the students had caused trouble, and made much of the fact that the Aboriginal children at Moree had their own pool at the mission. Moree, she said, was ‘no Little Rock’, and she quoted approvingly Mayor Bill Lloyd’s comment that assimilation had been set back ten years. The critics rarely attacked the Freedom Ride as communist-inspired. Charles always feared they would, for that was the fate at that time of many radical movements. He was right to worry, in the sense that there were some keen observers of communist involvement in Aboriginal affairs. A ‘special correspondent’ for The Bulletin wrote about the question of communism and Aborigines on 27 March, in terms identical to those in an ASIO report written around this time. In a story headed ‘After the Freedom Ride’, the correspondent listed communist members of FCAATSI


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but specifically excluded Charles from any suggestion of communist influence. It warned in more general terms that communists ‘saw the Aborigines not as people but as one of a series of steps to power . . . Of all the political parties it alone has a comprehensive programme for Aborigines.’ Another reason for Charles to worry was the pressure from student political groups anxious to ensure that communists were excluded from SAFA’s activities. Peter Manning, president of the Sydney University DLP Society, and Denis Strangman, federal president of the Australian Young Democratic Labor Association, wrote an open letter to SAFA supporters around this time, enclosing a DLP leaflet on racialist incidents—mainly involving African students—in the Soviet Union and other communist countries, and warning them of communist involvement in Aboriginal politics. These comments seem to have had little effect, as communist students continued to work in SAFA, though in a small minority. Much more serious was the continuing charge that the students had heightened white antagonism to Aborigines, and then left the latter to deal with a highly charged situation. The Sunday Mirror on 28 February quoted Professor Elkin, well-known anthropologist and member of the Aborigines Welfare Board, saying that the students had aroused hostility amongst the whites in the towns, leaving a legacy of hatred for Aboriginal people in those towns to deal with alone. The Freedom Riders, he said, ‘have come home, the Aborigines are still in the towns’. Existing organisations for Aboriginal rights had some similar concerns. Bert Groves of the APA wrote a letter critical of the Freedom Ride which appeared in a number of publications, including The Dawn and the Northwest Champion, in which he defended non-Aboriginal Australians against the charge of racism. Most Europeans, he wrote, were ‘fair-minded’ people who ‘judge individuals on their own merits’. It is the Aborigines ‘with the chip on the shoulder who create the false issue and make Europeans dread them’. It was important for Aborigines to lose any feeling of inferiority, and not to ‘dwell bitterly on the injustices and blind prejudice we have met. Let us not look at our white neighbours with accusing eyes.’ He stressed that these were his own views, and noted that they ‘may not be the views of the three associations that I hold executive positions in’. Also a little wary at first was the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, which agreed on 3 March to congratulate the students, but also arranged its own visit to the Freedom Ride towns to find out for itself the views of Aboriginal


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people there about the tour. Peggy and Charles Leon, two of the organisation’s Aboriginal members, visited Moree and Walgett only a week after the students returned, and reported back that most local Aboriginal people in both towns were in favour of the SAFA visit. At the fellowship’s next monthly meeting, Faith Bandler moved that they welcome the discussion generated by the students’ tour, and noted that ‘all methods have their place if used wisely’. Criticism also came from student bodies. The students’ own national body, the National Union of Australian University Students, debated the Freedom Ride at length at its February council meeting, and so great was the criticism that in the end it was neither supported nor opposed. NUAUS did decide, however, to strengthen its own Aboriginal policies. Keith Crook, a student at the Australian National University, wrote an article critical of SAFA saying that the tour had ‘increased tension in the areas visited and set back the prospects for integration of the aboriginal and white communities’. Crook opposed the notion of creative tension, drew attention to social stratification within Aboriginal communities, and suggested the issues may be social rather than racial. Abschol, a subsidiary of NUAUS, also reacted cautiously. On their return to Sydney, the students each received—individually—a letter from Warwick Mosman, Abschol’s national director, seeking their views on a range of issues. They were asked what they thought about demonstrations and picketing tactics, whether they had ‘pre-conceived opinions’, and whether they thought their actions had hindered the process of ‘integration or assimilation of the aboriginal population’. It also asked the students whether they thought local Aboriginal residents were sincerely in support of SAFA’s aims. Mosman analysed the Freedom Riders’ responses and wrote a favourable report for NUAUS, saying the tour had encouraged much ‘healthy criticism’. At its annual conference in April, Abschol considered its formal response. As Tom Roper later wrote: ‘SAFA had gained an invitation to the conference with almost full rights but hostility was widespread. I was SAFA’s delegate and for one whole day had to combat completely false views on the Ride.’ After a long debate which Roper described as ‘one of the bitterest debates in Abschol’s history’, the following cautiously supportive motion was passed (by nine votes to six): That this conference, while noting that the effects of the SAFA tour of northern NSW towns were not entirely successful in the achievement


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of the stated aims of this tour, nevertheless supports the aims of SAFA and congratulates SAFA on its action and on the achievement of those results which were undoubtedly satisfactory. The critics had a point; there was trouble in the towns. Even before we had arrived back in Sydney, we knew that Bob Brown’s shop had been pelted with eggs and his sister-in-law threatened. When I met Bob Brown in 1991, he told me the day after the baths incident the windows of his shop were smashed in. People would abuse him in his shop, custom fell off, and he ‘got thumped’ in a hotel. Supporting the Aborigines was the ‘kiss of death’ for business. People would drive up and down outside his house at night, yelling threats. He was barred from the baths for years, and barred from hotels by the publicans. He was also, he told me, excluded from the Moree Golf Club, of which he’d been a member. He was constantly called a ‘gin jockey’. Actually, Bob said, he was quite a womaniser in those days, but he never had any contact with Aboriginal girls. Moree was clearly in a state of high tension. The Monday after the students left town, the Mayor called a meeting of the council to discuss the whole issue. Bill Lloyd told me in 1991: We met in a second-storey room, near the Wesley chambers, for security reasons. There were various groups meeting in the town, and other people taking their car registration numbers. It was very divided, some people very very bigoted, anti-Aboriginal, and others the opposite. There was much animosity and ill-feeling. Aborigines then were very much victimised and ostracised in general. It was amazing. The Freedom Ride disclosed how much anti-Aboriginal feeling there was. One of the groups meeting that day was possibly the newly formed Society for the Advancement of Aborigines at Moree. Several whites, including Bill Forrest who had spoken at the public meeting on 17 February called by the students, formed a sub-committee to draw up a constitution, and then called together an all-Aboriginal group. When the Moree council met on 1 March to discuss the pool resolution it decided to delay the rescission motion for another three weeks. Bill Lloyd said the council needed time to frame an alternative resolution, and announced rather defiantly that ‘we will do it in our own good time.


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We will not be forced or intimidated to take action by an irresponsible, juvenile, immature body of students.’ John Butterworth wrote to Lloyd on behalf of SAFA soon afterwards, expressing ‘amazement and disappointment’ at the delay in putting the motion to council. In a letter to Jim Spigelman, Bob Brown explained that the council members felt they had ‘put the students in their place and regard the fact council has not rescinded the motion as some sort of victory’. When the delayed motion came to council three weeks later, on 22 March, it was again deferred on the grounds the council needed to conduct a ‘proper’ survey of the people of Moree to find out their wishes. Again the Mayor refused to be ‘pushed’ into giving an earlier decision. A Moree resident named Philip Hayward wrote to me in 1994 that ‘the aldermen decided that they would not move at that time, not wanting it to be thought that they were being “railroaded” into a decision. So they deliberately withheld their move for a few months.’ In the face of criticism, and the tense situation in Moree, it was especially important to Charles and the other students to know that many Aboriginal people actually welcomed and supported the Freedom Ride. In his many talks and speeches after his return, Charles emphasised this Aboriginal support, and pointed out that Aboriginal criticism came only


Alan Outhred, Louise Higham, Ann Curthoys and Gerry Mason in the Student Action for Aborigines stall at the University of Sydney during Orientation Week, 3 March 1965.


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from that very small minority of Aboriginal people who had something to lose. This was one of his main themes at a large meeting held by SAFA on 3 March in Orientation Week at the University of Sydney. About 350–400 students, mainly first years, attended, and all the speakers—Jim Spigelman, Ted Noffs and Bill Ford, as well as Charles—were listened to intently. Charles took the opportunity to respond to his Aboriginal critics, saying ‘Uncle Toms’ in the Aboriginal community still wanted to cling to the few privileges granted them by the white man. Ted Noffs supported Charles’s criticisms, saying that ‘the students had spoken out for the dispossessed Aborigines, not for the few who had already arrived’. In speeches and interviews from then on, Charles often stressed the high levels of support received from Aboriginal people in the towns—78 per cent, he told Outlook—but also mentioned that there were people who were apprehensive and others who wanted to preserve the status quo, so as to keep the few privileges they had already gained. In an interview in The Methodist, Charles said that ‘what we gave aboriginal people in the towns we visited was hope. We stirred their imagination, their desire for human rights, and we have cultivated a feeling of oneness, of unity among the aboriginal people.’ The same theme emerged in the letters and articles many of the Freedom Riders now wrote about their experiences. Their analyses show how much at least some of them had learnt in a short time. Sue Johnston wrote a letter to the Herald on 8 March answering some of the criticisms made in letters to the editor. She pointed out that the students, far from abandoning Aboriginal people in the towns, had kept in close touch with them since. Sue also pointed out that the students themselves did not use or like the term ‘Freedom Riders’, and did not argue that Australian and American situations were perfectly parallel. Warwick Richards and four other Christian students wrote a long, articulate letter to The Anglican, in reply to the criticisms of the students made by the Reverend Dowe, assuring The Anglican’s readers that SAFA ‘does not see its work as ending on the last night of the bus trip. Contact is being kept with Aboriginal friends made during the trip and the year’s programme is being planned to include sustained visits by students to Aboriginal Settlements with the intention of discussing Aboriginal problems and opportunities with the Aborigines.’ Jim Spigelman, Hall Greenland and Alex Mills all wrote articles in Honi Soit. Jim argued on 1 March that the Freedom Ride had achieved its


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aims—arousing public attention, breaking down discrimination and stimulating the interest of Aboriginal people in resisting discrimination. For him, as for many other Freedom Riders, the most important aspect of the tour was the ‘enthusiastic reception and gestures of support in towns such as Walgett and Moree’. The task now was to ‘keep public debate consistently probing the problems’. SAFA, he thought, had ‘created a place of its own, as an activist organisation’. Its continuing task must be to keep the issues in the public eye. Hall Greenland took up the theme of Aboriginal response and action two weeks later. For him, the key issue was the development of Aboriginal militancy, which in the long run must seek stronger and more natural allies than students could provide, and for Hall this was the labour movement. He was critical of aspects of the Freedom Ride, especially the transitory nature of its visits. Perhaps forgetting his own late arrival in Walgett, he pointed out that the students stayed only a day; they held no meeting on the reserve, and they made no attempt to initiate any organisation. There would have to be longer stays in future (as indeed there were, as we shall shortly see). He was critical of the Cabbage Tree Island cooperative, and the students’ uninformed support for it. It was, he said, ‘a flop’, heavily indebted. The students had clearly returned in an evangelical mood. They wanted to do something more, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that they had all, as Jim Spigelman put it, ‘had an insight into the sheer complexity of the problem’. In the weeks and months following, many students spoke to various groups, especially church organisations and trade unions, on request. I remember going with Warwick Richards to speak to a Christian youth group, and the minister asking why were we trying to get Aborigines into hotels when alcohol was so destructive for them. And there were many others. Louise Higham sent me a copy of her lecture notes for one such talk, which outlined the formation of SAFA, what the students had learned on the tour, Aboriginal reaction and plans for the future (election meetings and continuing pressure). Jim Spigelman was invited to speak on 9 May at a seminar organised by the Australian Institute of Political Science called ‘Aborigines in New South Wales’; his topic was ‘The Student Point of View’. The leftwing magazine Outlook carried an article, ‘The Student Bus’, which was in fact the transcript of an interview conducted by Bill Ford with Jim Spigelman, Pat Healy, Paddy Dawson, John Butterworth and Charles Perkins.


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Yet most of the students felt they had to do more. They were anxious not to rest on their laurels and wanted to work out a new plan of action. SAFA held its Annual General Meeting on 23 March, at which it endorsed a new constitution and elected a new executive. Charles was elected president, John Powles vice-president, Jim Spigelman secretary, Pat Healy assistant secretary, Eric Doldissen treasurer, and Sue Johnston publicity officer. The committee members had all been on the Freedom Ride— Darce Cassidy, Brian Aarons, Paddy Dawson, Aidan Foy, Beth Hansen and Chris Page, with Alex Mills being coopted later. The meeting canvassed all sorts of plans for further action—study groups, new branches on other campuses, demonstrations at election meetings, visiting Aboriginal reserves, encouraging Aborigines to vote. When the committee met a week later, it discussed the future of SAFA at some length. Given this earnest consideration of future action, many of the students were very offended by a skit involving Barry Creyton that appeared on 30 March on the satirical TV show, The Mavis Bramston Show, called ‘Chug Chug Chug off to Moree’. It took up the idea of spoilt middle-class university students having fun in Moree and forgetting about Aboriginal problems in Sydney. I usually spend vacations at Surfers with Eddy Schwartz But this year I went to this rather plush resort I long for something quiet That wouldn’t cause a fuss So I joined some friends on an old government bus, Ha, fun And we went chug, chug, chugging off to Moree And many other towns in the State I took it as a penance To assist the oldest tenants Of our island to assimilate We really started up in every centre And when the Councils moved in for the kill I shot my picket in my pocket And I took off like a rocket To daddy’s little home in Bellevue Hill. ...


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Hello, oh Charles, how are you? Charles, another picket. Well gladly. You know I’d love to help. Such fun. Yes, what’s that Charles, where, Redfern, I’m sorry, Charles, but aren’t you forgetting Redfern is a suburb of Sydney Well I mean, country towns, yes, but I mean, Redfern is just a little bit too close to home Don’t you think? I’m sorry Charles, next year perhaps. Redfern has it tough today But it’s not quite far enough away From daddy’s little mansion in Bellevue Hill. By early April, New South Wales was in election mode; the election date had been set for 1 May. After 27 years in power, Labor was in danger of losing. Despite the fact that Aboriginal policy had rarely, if ever, featured as a significant issue in state elections, it did generate some discussion this time. The Sydney Morning Herald in particular used Aboriginal issues against the Labor government, which (as usual) it opposed. It published its own study of racial discrimination in Sydney on 6 April, showing that while Aboriginal people could use Sydney’s swimming pools and cinemas, and most hotels and clubs, there remained subtle prejudice in many aspects of life—for example, in RSL Clubs, some hotels, white-collar jobs and some accommodation. Charles told the Herald there were hotels in Sydney which imposed bans irregularly against Aborigines at the whim of the licensee, and pointed out that Aboriginal people were often refused jobs on the basis of their colour. It was not easy, said the Herald, to track down the extent of discrimination since, as Ted Noffs and H.J. Green both pointed out, most Aboriginal people were too proud to draw attention to it. As the election drew closer, the Herald continued to criticise the continuing inaction of Gus Kelly as the Minister Responsible for Aboriginal Affairs. Its unidentified ‘political correspondent’ commented on 7 April that Kelly had:


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sought to apply his tried and tested formula of sitting tight and saying nothing to the recent controversy on aboriginal rights stirred up by the bus tour of inland centres made by a group of university students . . . Then, when it was revealed that a strict colour bar applied to admission to the theatre at Bowraville, Mr Kelly, who previously had boasted that the law recognised no distinction in NSW between aborigines and whites, said he had no power to prevent segregation of aborigines in public theatres and halls. Yet he is responsible not only for aboriginal welfare but also for licensing cinemas. His political mishandling of such a delicate issue has cost the government friends among those devoted to equal rights for aborigines, and has left an impression that Mr Kelly lacks the intellectual stature to be entrusted with their protection. Though SAFA was only partially aware of it, the winds of change in Aboriginal affairs were blowing at a national as much as at the state and local levels. The nationwide campaign for constitutional change was gaining momentum. A month after the students returned, Prime Minister Menzies agreed on 1 April to hold a Referendum on whether section 127 of the Constitution (concerning the census) should be repealed, though he refused to do the same for section 51 (concerning Commonwealth ability to legislate specifically for Aborigines). In debate, Kim Beazley Snr argued that the Referendum should also cover section 51. ‘We have,’ he said, ‘almost the worst native policy in the world’; anyone who said the states had been doing a marvellous job was ‘either very blind or very complacent’. A campaign to have the Referendum cover both offending clauses raged over the next six weeks. Abschol circulated a petition, presented to Parliament on 20 May (to all tertiary students), asking the Commonwealth government to abolish section 51. Two days earlier, the tide had turned when Billy Wentworth, a Liberal backbencher, spoke in the House of Representatives in support of a Referendum on both sections. A bipartisan policy now seemed likely to emerge. Although SAFA supported the Referendum campaign and helped to distribute the petition, its focus remained firmly on state issues. During April it campaigned hard to pressure both major parties into adopting a new Aboriginal policy. This was a tough assignment: both major parties supported current assimilation policies, and neither wished to make Aboriginal affairs an election issue. SAFA Talkabout urged members to


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attend both parties’ policy speeches, picket outside and ask questions inside. SAFA produced a leaflet to distribute at election meetings; it was headed ‘Aborigines’, drawing attention to racial discrimination, Aboriginal people’s sub-standard dwellings, and their low levels of education. Picking up on Renshaw’s unfortunate phrase after the Walgett visit—‘there is no undue discrimination in Walgett’—SAFA now argued that the current state government had done little for Aborigines. ‘As for the honourable leader of the Opposition,’ SAFA’s leaflet continued, ‘the usually outspoken Mr Askin has been amazingly silent on this issue.’ The leaflet then demanded the government: • • • • • •

double expenditure; call for action to change the Constitution; implement civil rights clauses in relevant legislation; increase Aboriginal representation on the Welfare Board; set up an all-party parliamentary committee; and delegate state powers to give the federal government full control of Aboriginal affairs.

SAFA members then attended several election meetings. They stood outside a Liberal Party rally in the Sydney Town Hall on 5 April, holding banners asking ‘What is Liberal Party policy on Aboriginal poverty?’ and urging people to ‘vote for the party that will do something for Aborigines’. Some had gained tickets to the rally inside, and heckled the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, when he addressed the 2500 Liberal Party supporters in the hall. Another group of about a dozen students, including Alex Mills, drove to Orange that same day to question the leader of the Country Party, Roden Cutler, at his election opening speech. They staged a mild demonstration, distributed leaflets inside and outside the hall, and listened to Cutler ’s speech quietly in the audience of about 300. When he had finished, they asked the only two questions of the evening. The local newspaper, the Central Western Daily, did not record the questions, but it did report the answers. In answer to the first, Cutler stressed the importance of education, and to the second he said the Country Party would support the establishment of a Select Committee to study the plight of Aborigines. When Labor launched its campaign on 8 April, SAFA members were probably there, handing out leaflets, though I have not found a newspaper


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report which mentions them. Renshaw’s election speech made no mention of Aboriginal policy, except to indicate plans to create a Ministry of Welfare to include Child Welfare, Social Welfare and Aboriginal Welfare which suggests a strengthening of the existing assimilation policy. In his election advertisement for his own electorate in the Walgett Spectator, however, Renshaw did cite in his list of achievements for the area to date the following: ‘Appointed Aborigines Welfare Officer at Walgett. Building 12 homes for Aborigines—£32,000 and has approved £40,000 to further improve Aborigines’ housing.’ SAFA was also ready for the launch of the Liberal Party election campaign on 13 April. Earlier in the day, it held an organising meeting to discuss tactics, with well over 60 students present. A motion to demonstrate wearing KKK clothing was lost 34 to 28, and another to interject at the rally and then stage a walkout was carried. Students heckled Robin Askin’s policy speech; when he had ten minutes to go, one of them called out, ‘Have you got a policy on Aborigines?’ Askin replied that he believed Aborigines were entitled to the same rights and privileges as other Australians. Another student yelled ‘You’re as bad as Renshaw’ and the group then filed out of the meeting. After the students had left, Askin promised to set up a Parliamentary Select Committee to investigate Aboriginal conditions. That same day, 13 April, SAFA held its own public meeting in the Lower Town Hall on ‘The Freedom Ride and You’. Faith Bandler, Ted Noffs and Charles Perkins spoke, and the meeting drew a crowd of 300 people. The Aborigines Welfare Board declined the invitation to be represented on the platform. Each of the speakers stressed his or her own particular concerns. As secretary of FCAATSI, Bandler emphasised the need for the amendment of the federal Constitution and the likelihood of a Referendum that year; Noffs said that legislation was not enough and that attitudes had to change; while Charles Perkins hinted somewhat mysteriously at further student action in the next fortnight. Right in the middle of the election campaign came the Eighth Annual Conference of FCAATSI, always held at Easter, that year on 16–18 April. There were 200 delegates, 70 of them Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, representing 56 organisations. Charles was one of four delegates from SAFA. He now had to face his critics from within the Aboriginal movement, and had good reason to be a little apprehensive after receiving a letter from Stan Davey, the non-Aboriginal federal secretary of


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FCAATSI, which seemed to contain part congratulations, part implicit criticism. It welcomed the attention brought to Aboriginal demands, but was critical of Charles’s lack of prior contact with the Aboriginal communities visited and asked him to prepare a statement ‘as to the preliminary steps taken by SAFA to set up this action? This would be a useful document to have circulated to Conf delegates before they arrive in Canberra—I would hate people to get the idea that all they have to do is get on a bus and charge into any district in which they have heard there is discrimination.’ In particular, Davey wanted Charles to make clear ‘the prior contact with local Aboriginal communities, how they were involved, how SAFA made contact and gained their support’. He also asked Charles to clarify whether there had been ‘any thought given to the follow up necessary and what support can be given to Aboriginal leaders in the various districts who must of consequence face deepened hostility from the minority who were so active in opposing you?’ After outlining SAFA’s aims and achievements in his speech to the conference, Charles said, in reply to Davey’s questions, that ‘the significant feature of the tour was the support, morally and physically, received from the Aboriginal people. Ninety-nine per cent of the people gave us full support. Wherever we went we consulted them first about the situation and whether they wanted our group there or not. The response of the people was justification for our efforts.’ He also returned to Martin Luther King’s notion of ‘creative tension’: ‘We realise that tension has been heightened in some towns but this is inevitable and I believe it is “creative tension”. The problem is out in the open now and is stark reality whereas before it was suppressed and not considered at all.’ In discussion, Charles received support from Bill Forrest, who spoke about developments in Moree—especially the formation of the local association and its very high Aboriginal participation. ‘The protest by Students for Aboriginal Action in February,’ he said, ‘gave many Moree citizens their first opportunity to grapple with such a situation.’ He thought the outside assistance from the students had been essential to get things going. He was critical of ‘those who tend to think that the “Freedom Rides” disturbed a rapturous harmony between 1000 Aborigines deprived of the use of all public utilities and 6000 and 7000 Europeans permitted to use them’, and who thought the students ‘created racial strife where none had existed previously’. Such ‘harmony’, he said, had existed only because Aboriginal people in Moree had not felt sufficiently


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Students hold 100-hour vigil outside Liberal Party and Labor Party NSW headquarters, 27–30 April 1965. (Photos by Bruce Adams, and reproduced courtesy of the Australian Photographic Agency Collection, State Library of New South Wales)

adequate to challenge this outrageous inequality—and had been prepared to ‘keep their place’. Those in the town who were against the ordinance and Image rights unavailable discrimination had been able to do little on a purely local basis: ‘We want all the assistance, particularly moral assistance, we can get.’ Other speakers were also in support of the Freedom Ride. The president of the Armidale Aboriginal Advancement Association reported that the ‘awakening of group identity and individual dignity . . . seems to be a general trend throughout the Commonwealth as the action of a student group of the Sydney University has, in particular, emphasised. The most impressive aspect of this awakening is the re-emergence from their own ranks of a national leader of his own people in the person of Charles Perkins.’ Charles had thus come through the FCAATSI conference rather well. But SAFA felt it was getting nowhere in the state election campaign. In the last days of the campaign, in protest against the failure of both


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parties to make ‘any constructive reference to plans for aborigines’ future’, it held a 100-hour vigil outside the headquarters of both the Labor government and the Liberal Party, which ended at 8.00 p.m. on election day. As expected by many, the 1 May election saw Labor lose and a new Liberal–Country Party coalition come to power, with Robin Askin as Premier and Eric Willis as Chief Secretary. The only change they had committed themselves to—and that not very energetically—was a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry. The situation was not very promising. SAFA had made one useful contact in the new government, however. Carrick, the state secretary of the Liberal Party, was rather impressed with their commitment at their pre-election vigil, staying outside the party’s headquarters even in cold weather, and had had a number of casual conversations with the picketers. He suggested, as he later wrote to Eric Willis, that ‘they might care to call upon me in the post-election period to put their views. They agreed to do so.’ Change was on its way faster than the students had hoped. Three days after the election, despite the hostile reception given to the students by its Mayor, Kempsey became the first town to change its policies as a result of the Freedom Ride. At a council meeting on 4 May, the government medical officer, Dr S.H. Marsh, told the Kempsey council that no health grounds existed for the ban; even though Aborigines were more liable to have hookworm and roundworm than were others, these could not be transmitted at the baths. The council then resolved to lift the ban on Aboriginal use of the McElhone Memorial Swimming Pool. The Town Clerk of Kempsey wrote personally to Jim Spigelman on 11 May to advise him of the change, which was reported in the Sydney papers, the Sun being especially supportive. The situation was also at last changing in Moree. On hearing the news of the second deferral of the rescission motion, Ted Noffs told the press that legal advisers of the students were preparing a report on the council’s action. In Moree itself, those who supported rescission— including the Mayor—also sought legal advice, which was that the 1955 resolution was invalid and illegal under the Local Government Act. This legal opinion seems to have clinched victory in Moree for the opponents of the resolution, and a meeting of council on 3 May agreed that it would be rescinded. On 25 May, Moree council finally removed the offending resolution by a vote of six to one, and replaced it with a ‘hygiene’ motion. Charles described the results of the Freedom Ride as ‘already


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spectacular’—Moree and Kempsey councils had both lifted their ban on Aboriginal use of their swimming pools. While the debates in Moree were still in progress, the SAFA committees at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales held a joint meeting on 12 May to discuss overall policy and planning in the context of the new government. The meeting agreed that, while SAFA supported the campaign for the Commonwealth government to assume responsibility, state governments had a moral and legal responsibility to legislate for the welfare of Aboriginal people in their state. SAFA’s demands on the new state government would include: abolition of reserves and stations; provision by the state’s Housing Commission of housing for Aboriginal people; provision by schools of extra study facilities for those children who did not have them at home; and the inclusion of anti-discriminatory clauses in all relevant state Acts. These demands were not only SAFA demands; they were becoming the focal point of Aboriginal politics in New South Wales generally, and were to remain so until the end of the decade. It was also agreed that SAFA’s tactics would include working with Sydney activists, visits to country towns and production of a SAFA magazine. A list of fifteen students, including Charles, Pat, Sue Johnston, John Butterworth and Sue Reeves from the Freedom Ride, signed on for the Sydney activities. The reference to working with Sydney activists is especially interesting. SAFA was nothing if not responsive to criticism. Founded in response to critical comment of a demonstration for African American civil rights, it now tried to respond to criticisms that students had ignored the situation in their own backyard—Sydney. Charles himself was already deeply involved in a new wave of Sydney-based Aboriginal radicalism, centred loosely on the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and the Aborigines Progressive Association. He joined a protest organised by Ken Brindle, a leading Redfern figure, at the Burlington Hotel in Haymarket, which did not allow Aborigines into its lounge. On 21 March, three weeks after the students’ return to Sydney, up to 40 Aboriginal people walked into the Burlington and staged a sit-in demonstration. As it turned out, they were served without incident, and the Sun-Herald carried a photo of Clarrie Cook, Ken Brindle, Geoff Holton and George Jackson drinking in the lounge. The other students wanted to get more involved with Sydney issues too. A letter to members from assistant secretary Sue Johnston in mid-


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March had said SAFA was now ‘turning its searching eye on Sydney and aboriginal conditions, specifically the rent situation and the anomalies in the Welfare Board Elections’. A joint SU–UNSW group decided that a good Sydney-based action would be, as Pat Healy later wrote, to ‘try to interest an Aborigine in standing for council elections’. This idea was preferred to other suggestions, such as a door-knock campaign to meet Aborigines and inform them of voting rights and social services provisions. Yet SAFA’s attempt to do something in Sydney was frustrating. Pat later wrote: We contacted APA, AAF and the Foundation and had a meeting with delegates from these organisations to discuss the matter. Delegates seemed fairly enthusiastic and agreed to report back to their own organisations and try to find a candidate. This scheme unfortunately lapsed for lack of a suitable candidate . . . Tom [sic] Leon offered as candidate but felt he was too old and not suitable. By May, SAFA was struggling to find new directions, and some of its former energy seemed to be dissipating, or turning elsewhere. There were plans to produce a magazine, called Sundown, but they came to nothing when SAFA realised it didn’t have the funds for such a project. Some of the Freedom Riders were becoming deeply involved in the movement opposing Australian participation in the American war in Vietnam, announced on 29 April 1965, the day before the New South Wales election. The Labour Club and ALP Club students in particular were turning to the growing anti-war movement. Some of us attended the Australian Student Labour Federation conference in Canberra on 26–27 May 1965, and while there were arrested in a demonstration against Australian troops being sent to Vietnam. Of the twelve arrested, five—Bob Gallagher, Brian Aarons, Paddy Dawson, Alan Outhred and myself—were SAFA members. In mid-year, some of the more thoughtful media commentators began to ask, now that some time had passed, what the Freedom Ride had so far achieved. A journalist and a journal editor in different ways attempted to provide some answers. Bruce Maxwell, the Herald journalist who had travelled with the Freedom Ride, did a follow-up story. It was the first in a genre that continued for years afterwards and indeed continues today. In his article ‘Following the Freedom Riders’, published on 16 June, he


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investigated what was happening in the towns. His story emphasised the positive effects that had already flowed from the Freedom Ride. First Kempsey and then Moree had lifted their respective bans on Aboriginal use of council swimming pools. The local Aboriginal people were getting organised in Walgett. Houses at the Boggabilla reserve had been renovated, and the board had promised to remove the open sanitary pit beside houses at Gulargambone reserve. One of the most thoughtful and far-reaching of all the assessments came from Ian Spalding, editor of a newsletter of information and discussion, On Aboriginal Affairs. Although, as we’ve seen, he had originally been a little suspicious of the plans for the Freedom Ride, he had since become very supportive. His analysis of the Freedom Ride appeared as a ‘guest editorial’ in the Students’ Christian Movement journal, Crux, in June–July 1965. He began by noting the wide debate the students had generated. ‘Reasonable questions,’ he wrote, ‘can be asked about the wisdom or efficacy of projecting outsiders into those local situations where social class and colour are tied inextricably. Certainly city students of either the long- or short-haired variety would rarely constitute the ideal group for such a purpose.’ Nevertheless, the Freedom Ride constituted ‘a stinging challenge to the whole country’; it was ‘bigger than those who participated in it’. ‘It was a direct and rude blow at the genteel silence that has clothed injustices with respectability, a side-swipe at the self-righteousness that has allowed Australians to warm themselves championing the causes of the Bantu at Sharpeville or the Negro parents at Little Rock.’ The students, Spalding wrote, ‘rode out headlong to identify with Aboriginal poverty and humiliation, nation wide and generations deep’. He called for a greater understanding of Aboriginal history and the history of colonisation, and gave a considered historical account of first contact, the brutal practices of colonisation and the impact on Aboriginal people. He also drew attention to the fact that it was Aboriginal memory of a deep historical wrong that affected current relationships. Finally, in language that seems to belong more clearly to the 1990s than the 1960s, he wrote: ‘Many young Australians seem to be recognising that the representatives of two peoples, not one, are the occupants of this land. The “freedom riders” belong to such a company.’ He called on the churches to change their own attitudes. ‘The churches,’ he wrote, had ‘had less and less to say to the nation.’ The Statement on Aboriginal Policy issued by the National Missionary Council of


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Australia in 1963 had recognised distinct Aboriginal rights, the importance of Aboriginal initiative and consent, and ‘that Aborigines have just claims for assistance based upon their prior occupation of this land’. It was time these policies were digested by the Australian Council of Churches. Spalding hoped that one day Christian citizens in congregations across the country would stop talking about assimilation and start talking about the rights of Aboriginal people to justice and compensation. In retrospect, it seems that the Freedom Ride, limited though the students’ understanding of the issues and ideas about the future may have been, placed the question of ‘rights’ more firmly on the public agenda than it had been before. It created a social tension on Aboriginal issues which had mixed short-term consequences, but which did indeed make possible the emergence of something new. It insisted that Aboriginal conditions and demands raise moral and economic questions which white Australians had, at last, to face. And it stimulated a new kind of Aboriginal politics, with far-reaching consequences.


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uring the years I was collecting material for this book, I would often come across people who said they had been on the Freedom Ride, or people who said a friend or relative had been on the Freedom Ride, and whom I knew had not. Everyone wants to have been in on the action, I thought. I also noticed that many people referred to the Freedom Rides in the plural. Gradually I realised the importance of the ‘follow-up trips’ to Walgett, Bowraville and other towns. Many people—Aboriginal activists and non-Aboriginal students—had been involved in these events, and they have a great significance in popular memory. For some, they are more important than the original Freedom Ride. While they did not attract the enormous publicity of that first tour, they did signify the emergence of a new kind of politics. In Walgett especially, SAFA achieved its ideal of cooperating with and supporting the self-directed actions of local Aboriginal people. The story of these later Freedom Rides has not yet really been told, partly because existing historical accounts tend to be focused on Charles Perkins, and Charles was only slightly involved. Other Aboriginal leaders, like Harry Hall and Ted Fields in Walgett, and Chicka Dickson in Sydney, came to the fore. Amongst the students, the initiative gradually shifted from Charles and Jim Spigelman to Darce Cassidy, Aidan Foy, Wendy Golding, Barry Corr, Sue Johnston and others, and to some newer SAFA members like Sue-Ann Loftus. Charles’s April promise to the FCAATSI conference that the students would follow up their action in the towns was formally endorsed at a 240


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SAFA meeting in May. Some of the towns the students visited over the next year or two were the original Freedom Ride towns—Wellington, Boggabilla, Bowraville and of course Walgett—while others were new to SAFA, like Bega and Griffith in the south of the state. These visits were SAFA’s sustained reply to the charge of having ‘stirred up trouble’ and then left the local communities to cope with the backlash, and involved cooperation with local and Sydney-based Aboriginal people on a much wider scale than the original Freedom Ride. The relationships which developed between the students and some of these local Aboriginal activists became quite strong—especially in Walgett—as they learnt something about each other’s lives through sharing housing, food and conversation. In some cases, they still keep in touch through Christmas cards and the like, and they still remember each other with warmth and affection today. The follow-up visits began during the May vacation. Charles and Paddy Dawson had moved at a committee meeting on 30 March that the students return shortly to Kempsey, Charles calling for volunteers and Paddy moving they go there by bus the following Sunday. The motion was lost—no one was up to going anywhere just then. However, by early May the mood had changed, with a SAFA meeting on 4 May agreeing on the May vacation visits with the following aims: • to establish contact with and support organisation amongst the white and Aboriginal people; • to complete a log of claims and complaints from each town to present to the Aborigines Welfare Board; • to encourage Aborigines to register as voters. At another meeting a week later, there were nine people ready to go to various towns over the following two weeks—two to Bega, one to Boggabilla and six to Walgett. There seems to be no surviving report of Bill Kitchener’s visit to Boggabilla, but Howard Foley did write a report on Bega, a town on the far south coast of New South Wales, which gives some idea of the kinds of information the students sought and brought back. There were, he reported, 60–80 Aboriginal people, rising to 200 in the picking season, in a town of 4000 whites. He described the poor housing several miles out of town, and the presence of Aboriginal people on the surrounding farming properties, tolerated by the growers ‘because


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they constitute a pool of picking labour’. Foley also reported on Aboriginal unemployment and reliance on social services, though some worked at the local sawmill and with the Department of Main Roads. He listed those people who might be of some help—a journalist on the local paper, a local Salvation Army man and a woman, Patricia Morlton, who contacted the SAFA delegates and also unsuccessfully urged the Mayor to form an advancement league. The students could find little Aboriginal organisation, and no further visits to Bega seem to have been made. Walgett presented a very different story. The Aborigines Progressive Association was now very active, with Harry Hall as president and Ted Fields as vice-president. On 19 May, a group of six students arrived, three male and three female, including Aidan Foy, Barry Corr, Sue-Ann Loftus and Wendy Golding. Barry remembers going up to Walgett by train and arriving there at some unearthly hour: Anyway we camped in a park and someone had this huge—it could have been a tent, or a huge ground sheet. All of this was winter too, so it was freezing cold, so the four of us in our sleeping bags—one, two, three, four—on this ground sheet tent. Anyway the coppers found us around about six in the morning or something like that. Obviously they were looking for us and they wanted to know—so they were,


Members of SAFA (Barry Corr and Wendy Golding) visit Walgett in May and August 1965. (Photos courtesy of Darce Cassidy)


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you know, ‘Who are you? Where’re you from? What are you doing?’ They were just looking for any excuse to bag us, and anyway so it came out that Wendy was still under 18. ‘Oh, do your parents know that you’re here? Look, I think I’m going to take you down the police station because you’re under 18, your parents are not here, you’re sleeping with these guys in the park. I’m going to charge you with exposure to moral danger.’ No charges were actually laid. The next morning, Barry recalls: We went off to the post office to collect the voter registration forms. And sitting in the post office going, ‘Oh this is what the voter registration form looks like?’ And this Aboriginal man was in there. He’d been following us around . . . to find out what we were up to. And like a lot of Aboriginal people they were going to suss us out before they reacted. So he followed us around and we walked out into the bright sunshine of Walgett and said, ‘What do we do now?’ and he just introduced himself and he took us off to meet people and we ended up staying at Harry Hall’s place. Barry remembers staying with Harry Hall:


They were on the riverbank at Walgett . . . [Harry’s house] was a typical humpy you know, bits of flattened out corrugated iron and earth

Above: Harry Hall’s place. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)

Right: Members of Harry Hall’s family with two SAFA students, Walgett 1965. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)



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floor and stuff like that. And just additions, additions, it was a maze of little rooms and stuff like that. But it was so clean, it was so warm and friendly, it blew me away. Funny cultural things. They put us in a room. We were just sleeping in our sleeping bags on the floor and they gave us a Tilly lamp, and I turned it off to go to sleep. They didn’t bother explaining to me or any of us how to turn off a Tilly lamp because they knew how to turn off a Tilly lamp because they used it all the time. But what I didn’t realise was that you had to turn off the fuel as well as turn off the lamp. So the thing flooded. You know, how dumb. Technology. I’d never used a Tilly lamp, I was used to just flicking off the electric light switch. That hit me. Well, obviously there was no bathroom. But what Harry used to do, he used to take his kids out to a bore. We hopped in his Ute and we went out to this bore. This bore could have been half an hour or an hour out of town or something like that. And the bore was a tank . . . about six-foot square, concrete, flat, bit of scrub. And I remember standing, and it was warm, in this concrete bore having to wash. He used to bring his kids out there every night to wash the kids you know, before—for school. But it just blew me away. And when you talk to Aboriginal families, particularly during that Welfare Board protection era, the drive for cleanliness—because you know you were constantly being watched by white people, and you know you had to be whiter than white, you had to be cleaner than clean. And I don’t think white people ever really understood the extent that Aboriginal people went to to ensure that they met white standards, you know, to prevent the criticism. Also, most importantly to prevent the kids being taken away, because the kids were still being taken away at that stage. To this date the Association had been unable to hire the RSL hall for meetings, but now it was made available. The students twice visited Mr R. Snooks, the Walgett Aborigines Welfare Officer, the day after they arrived, two seeing him at his office and the other four at the reserve. Snooks was quite impressed, as they carried out no demonstrations and spent most of their time inquiring about Aboriginal conditions in the town, on the reserve, at the station and among a small number of white residents. The Town Clerk, Alec Trevallion, took the students to view the ‘transitional housing’ then under construction on the reserve— what Snooks called ‘purely experimental temporary homes’. The board


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had decided to build 40 cheap ‘transitional’ houses in Walgett on 16 February, the day after the Freedom Ride had been in town, and Snooks as a board man supported the program while Trevallion for the council opposed it. Though the students seem to have been unaware of it, Snooks feared that Trevallion wanted to get the students involved in the council’s campaign against the transitional housing program. If this was indeed Trevallion’s aim, he was successful. Barry Corr remembers: The council took us out to see some houses that were being built— I can’t remember where they were exactly in Walgett, but I know they were showing us these tin boxes as examples of what they were doing. You know, ‘We are addressing the Aboriginal problem, so don’t pick on us’ . . . You know they’re out there on the bloody river bank, they’ve got no toilets, they’ve got no electricity, they’ve got no water, they couldn’t cope with a modern house could they? So we really need a transition for them. So these places really, these places are good because it’s a step . . . And they built these things out of what must have been good intention. Two-roomed, corrugated iron roof, I think they were fibro walls, no insulation, cold water, cold-water shower. I think there was a septic toilet out the back. There was a porcelain hand basin for the kitchen, but only a cold-water tap . . . There was electric light, there was cold water, and there was the sewer put on. We were just horrified by these houses, but they were really instructive as to the thought processes. At an APA meeting in town later that day (20 May), attended by 67 Aboriginal people, opposition was expressed to the board’s transitional housing program and it was recommended instead that twelve ‘first-class’ houses be built in town, their occupants to be chosen by ballot. The APA was developing a strong local agenda; the meeting also passed a motion seeking a bus service to the mission, agreed that Harry Hall should stand as an Aboriginal candidate at the next council elections, and supported the nomination of Eric Thorne for membership of the Walgett RSL Club. For their part, the students addressed the meeting about the need to register as voters, and gave out registration forms. The students contacted every Aboriginal household in Walgett in a massive voter registration drive. Wendy remembers: ‘We basically did the odd door knock, house to house, encouraging people to register so that


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they could vote at the next election—explaining to them the importance of that. I seem to remember getting a mainly positive attitude.’ She also reflected on the particular kind of cultural contact these follow-up trips represented: It must have seemed so strange to them if I sort of look back retrospectively to see these white rather hippy looking, terribly middle-class, freshly scrubbed university students trying to tell them what to do with their lives. They were remarkably tolerant of us, really . . . There were nights where we sat down and chatted or went in and had cups of tea, and we told them what we were doing and they told us a bit about their lives. Yes . . . I think they were actually very tolerant and welcoming . . . I think they appreciated that we had the best of intentions even if we were a bit naive in our methods.


The Luxury Theatre, Walgett, 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)

After the students left town, the APA decided that its next move was to break the colour bar in the lounge of the local cinema, the Luxury Theatre. This had been an issue for years, and the students had learned of it during the Freedom Ride. A plan was hatched for another SAFA group to visit later, to help desegregate the cinema. Charles seems to have been in Walgett briefly around this time, and he and Harry talked to James Conomos, who with his brother owned the cinema. Conomos was adamant he would retain the ban on Aboriginal people in the upstairs section. Charles told the Tribune in early June that when he asked Conomos to


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allow Aboriginal people to sit upstairs, ‘he said this would mean he would lose money, but if I liked to compensate him he would lift the ban’. Determined to break the ban, Harry visited Sydney in July and sought another SAFA visit in the August vacation. The students did come back, on 6–7 August, but Charles was not with them. A lot had changed in the ten weeks since their visit in May. One of the changes was in policy at Commonwealth and state levels. Desperate to deflect international criticism of its racial policies, and beginning to succumb to the pressure for more involvement, the Commonwealth government increasingly sought to coordinate and influence Aboriginal policy. On 22 July, a conference of relevant Commonwealth and state ministers in Adelaide, chaired by the newly elected South Australian Attorney-General and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Don Dunstan, reaffirmed the assimilation policy. It also, however, modified the policy to emphasise that assimilation depended on Aboriginal choice ‘to attain a similar manner and standard of living to that of other Australians and live as members of a single Australian community—enjoying the same rights and privileges’. The new wording also deleted the phrases referring to Aboriginal people ‘observing the same customs and being influenced by the same beliefs as other Australians’, in order to remove the implication that assimilation policy sought the destruction of Aboriginal culture. These changes in Commonwealth thinking were paralleled by developments in Victoria and South Australia. It did not seem at first that New South Wales would follow suit; the new Liberal–Country Party coalition government was conservative, uninterested in following the path being taken in South Australia by Dunstan, who announced in August that he was drafting legislation to make it an offence to practise race discrimination in any sphere. Yet the coalition government wanted to ensure that, on the Aboriginal issue, it did not provide the media with a stick with which to beat it as its Labor predecessors had done. Soon after its election, the government increased the allocation for Aboriginal housing for the 1965/66 financial year by over 60 per cent, from £104 000 to £270 000. By August, new houses were being built everywhere, and on 7 September 1965 Chief Secretary Willis was speaking of a ‘new deal for the aborigines’. The government had promised to conduct a Committee of Inquiry into Aboriginal Conditions, and now both the AAF and SAFA pressed it to deliver. SAFA now had something of a personal connection with the state


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Liberal Party secretary, J.L. Carrick, who had warmed to them during their pre-election vigil outside Liberal Party headquarters. On 7 July, as promised during the vigil, he met a delegation of five SAFA members— Charles, Tom Roper, Beth Hansen, Alex Mills and Warwick Mosman. They had a long and interesting discussion, Carrick later describing the students in a letter to Willis as ‘extremely pleasant and eager university students who are seized with a crusading spirit on this matter ’. The students emphasised the Liberal Party’s promise to set up a committee of inquiry. ‘I must confess,’ wrote Carrick to Willis, ‘that this point had escaped me.’ The students presented Carrick with a document they had written headed ‘Suggested Terms of Reference for an Enquiry into Aboriginal Conditions in New South Wales’; it was a long and detailed document, remarkable not least because its suggestions were very close to those of the inquiry that was eventually established. It proposed a full investigation of the conditions of life of Aboriginal people, the functioning of the Aborigines Welfare Board, land rights, the role of police, the refusal of town councils to make land in town available for board homes and ‘the need to insert civil rights clauses in relevant Acts of Parliament’. On Carrick’s suggestion, and having received the students’ suggestions for the inquiry, Willis himself met a formal delegation of five students on 5 August. There was some discussion as to who should chair the Committee, on the need for more trained social workers, and of the importance of greater employment opportunities for Aboriginal people in country towns. Jim and Charles criticised the board for not involving Aboriginal people sufficiently in decision-making, and emphasised the need for sociologists and representatives like Faith Bandler and Jack Horner on the board. The students also raised the question of racial discrimination—for example, in picture theatres. At the end of the meeting, the students had reason to feel pleased that they had presented their case and been heard. This cosy association with government, however, was soon to be disturbed by further events in Walgett. Another change between May and August influenced the nature of SAFA’s August visit to Walgett. Charles was moving on to a wider stage, and becoming less involved in SAFA itself. He was by now involved in a large number of organisations, especially the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs and the Aborigines Progressive Association, and could give SAFA only limited attention. Some of his activities, however, were still in the name of SAFA. On 5 June, as the president of SAFA, he, Faith Bandler


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and Jack Horner issued a leaflet entitled ‘Is this Good Enough?’, which was distributed by twenty or more Aboriginal and other people to Sydney Film Festival viewers, criticising the Commonwealth government’s documentary The Aborigines of Australia. It was a sign of his changing priorities that he resigned as chair of meetings at a SAFA meeting on 29 June, though not as president of SAFA itself. Charles was now to be seen everywhere speaking for Aboriginal rights. He was involved, as he had been the year before, in the National Aborigines Day ceremony in Martin Place on 8 July, and addressed the Central Methodist Mission Pleasant Sunday Afternoon meeting in the State Theatre on 11 July, at which he angrily criticised the attitude of the churches. In early August, Charles got involved in a case that highlighted Australia’s racist immigration policies. Peter Read describes it well in his biography. Nancy Prasad was a 7-year-old Fijian–Indian girl living with her elder sister and her sister’s husband in Australia, after her parents had been deported to Fiji. The sister applied to adopt Nancy but was unsuccessful, and the Immigration Department insisted Nancy herself be deported. Only a few days before, the Labor Party had finally dropped the ‘White Australia’ policy from its platform, and the Commonwealth Immigration Minister, Hubert Opperman, had said there was no such policy in force. An hour before Nancy’s plane was due to leave for Fiji on Friday, 6 August, 100 students (including me) demonstrated at Sydney airport to draw attention to the continued operation of the ‘White Australia’ policy. Then, in full view of media cameras, Charles snatched Nancy from her brother-in-law, and he and another Freedom Rider (Louise Higham) drove her away. She was soon returned to her family, and deported the following day, but the students’ protest had achieved its object—huge media coverage. The ‘White Australia’ policy had taken a heavy media beating. Meanwhile, in Walgett, Harry Hall waited anxiously for the student delegation to arrive. The same day as many SAFA students were demonstrating at the airport against Nancy Prasad’s deportation, four students arrived in Walgett to help Harry and the others desegregate the picture theatre. To Harry’s great disappointment, Charles was not among them. Those who did come were Aidan Foy, David Pepper, Owen Westcott and David’s girlfriend, Christine Jones. Aidan and David had been on the Freedom Ride, but Owen and Christine were new, and neither was actually a member of SAFA. Christine came along with David, and Owen,


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in the second year of his Arts degree, had joined in on Aidan’s invitation. He had gone to the same school as Aidan—Christian Brothers at Chatswood—and had recently moved into a house ‘divided up into awful little flatettes’, occupying the flatette adjoining Aidan’s. Owen had the sort of confidence and the insouciance common to many upper-class rebels. His father, he told me, was a lawyer of conservative politics, while his mother was from an upper-class Catholic background, who had ‘learnt how to run a household of servants and how to make lace and things like that’, but who also encouraged her six children ‘to be concerned about issues like social justice and to question the social order that we saw all around us’. In the late afternoon that Friday, the students and Harry Hall immediately called on Snooks. They told him they had arrived in Walgett for the week and that a further carload of students was due to arrive. (It never did, presumably as a result of the Prasad events back in Sydney.) In return, Snooks told them the Conomos brothers had only the previous day agreed that before the end of the year they would start quietly admitting to the upstairs section of the cinema Aboriginal people of ‘good standards and behaviour’, two or three families at a time. (Realising there could be trouble if Aboriginal people continued to be excluded from the upstairs of the cinema, Snooks had been gently twisting Jim Conomos’s arm behind the scenes.) Jim Conomos, Snooks wrote to the board soon afterwards, spent some time the next day, Saturday, ‘looking for an adult daughter to the Peters family [Aboriginal] in Walgett to advise her that henceforward she could go upstairs. He couldn’t find her.’ Harry and the students were unconvinced by these promises, and decided to go on with the demonstration. Owen, David, Christine and Aidan stayed with the Halls that evening, as Barry and Wendy had done in May. Owen remembers it in terms very like Barry’s: We lived with the family; we ate with them and shared their life in every way. I mean that was part of the excitement and the interest of it for me and for all of us I think . . . I’d never slept in a house made out of kerosene tins and hessian bags before. So it was a real eye opener. I knew about this stuff but I didn’t really know about it. My most vivid memories are just the house, the physical conditions in which the family lived.


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The Halls were the leaders of the growing Aboriginal militancy in Walgett. As Owen remarked: They weren’t in any way downtrodden . . . this was a family that was prepared to expose themselves to whatever the consequences were, so they were obviously very courageous. Harry was unusual in a number of ways. He was one of the very few men in the whole camp that had a job . . . and there was some talk of him being able to get a house in town later on. So in a way he had prospects that many of the other families living in that camp didn’t have. Images of life in Walgett have stayed with the students ever since. Aidan remembered games at the levee bank: One of the things at Walgett was the levee bank around the town. You get about 20 people in a ute, sitting in the back and what you do is you drive over as fast as it will go and it’s great fun. As you go over the levee bank, which is like a hump backed bridge, everybody takes off and there’s much squealing and giggling and falling over. While there was time for talk and play, the main task ahead was a political one. It soon became clear that Snooks and Conomos had failed in their attempt to forestall the demonstrations. Harry gathered together a group of young Aboriginal women to go to the cinema with the students—his daughter, Pattie, his niece, Lorna Hall, and 18-year-old Marie Peters (the ‘adult daughter’ Conomos was looking for). His 10-year-old daughter, Mary, came as well. That Saturday evening, Harry and Image rights unavailable Ted Fields, together with Pattie, Lorna and Marie, went along with the four students to seek admittance to the white upstairs section of the theatre. The movie was Solomon and Sheba, a 6Marie Peters, Pattie Hall and Lorna Hall. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy) year-old Hollywood biblical


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Harry Hall with his daughter Pattie Hall and niece Lorna Hall, Walgett 1965. (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search Foundation)

movie of lust, licentiousness and power starring Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida. Owen remembers that ‘we made up a set of couples, black and white couples, so that the three male students all had a black woman to accompany to the theatre and Christine had an Aboriginal man to be her partner’. David Pepper remembers the scene clearly: What was interesting to me was the different cultures in action there. We invited these girls to go to the movies, and here we were scruffy students with our old jeans on and t-shirts and the girls had their hair done, wore fantastic gear, and looked fantastic . . . So the scruffy students were permitted to go in but these girls who were dressed up to the nines and looking fantastic weren’t allowed to go in . . . And these people came from the humpies out of town and their dresses were ironed, you know and starched, stuff like that, it was amazing. The group then went to the ticket window and asked for upstairs tickets. They expected to be refused. As Owen remembers: ‘We didn’t say, you know, we’re going to take four Aboriginal people in with us or anything, but we were all there standing there, so it should have been apparent to the person in the window.’ The group was sold the tickets, and started to go upstairs. Jim Conomos then refused to admit them, telling Harry Hall he could not go upstairs even though he had a ticket.


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When the group insisted on its right to go upstairs, Conomos called the police, Constables Rowe, Gleeson and Marsh—Walgett’s entire force on duty that night. Aidan remembers: ‘The police told us to move and we refused. Owen waved his ticket and claimed it constituted a contract. The police then began to push us downstairs. We all asked them if we were being arrested. They made no reply.’ Owen says the police told them they had to leave the theatre, and ‘we sort of argued with them about their rights to make us leave the theatre and our rights to be in the theatre because we had tickets’. By now it was 8.30 p.m., and the police began making arrests. Owen, not having been through the ‘non-violent direct action’ training of the original Freedom Ride, resisted. ‘I was the first person to be forcibly removed from the theatre. And I resisted being removed; they had to carry me down the stairs and with me making that as difficult as possible for them.’ Aidan wrote, probably for the ensuing trial: When I looked round Owen had fallen against the banister and was being hustled downstairs by constables Marsh and Rowe. At the bottom of the stairs they carried him out and as he went through the door he grabbed hold of the frame. One of the policemen punched his biceps until he let go. He was then dragged into the street. He was charged with assaulting Constable Robert Marsh, resisting arrest and behaving offensively, and taken into custody at the local gaol. The rest of the group stayed on the cinema staircase, except for Harry, who left with his 10-year-old daughter, Mary. After an hour, during which they refused to move, Aidan, David, Christine, Ted and Marie were arrested and charged with obstructing James Conomos’s free passage on the stairway of the Luxury Theatre. The two Hall girls were kept in gaol for about four hours, but then—being under 18—were released into the custody of their fathers. Marie remembers that she and Christine were held in a cell together. Aidan recalls: ‘They charged us with obstruction, and let us go on the next morning. We spent the night in the cells and I think the girls were pretty brave about that because being locked up in the cells was pretty traumatic for them.’ The next day Owen returned to Sydney, and approached the Council for Civil Liberties for assistance. Charles Perkins suggested that this was the first time that Aboriginal people had been arrested for participating in an organised civil rights


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action and several journalists said the same. The demonstrations were reported locally in the Sydney Morning Herald, interstate and overseas. Then FCAATSI got involved. A meeting of NSW affiliates was held at Charles Perkins’s home in Sydney on Monday, 9 August, with Aboriginal representatives including Ray Peckham, Joyce Mercy (APA vice-president and assistant secretary of the fellowship), Isabelle McCallum (secretary of the APA) and Lester Bostock (Tranby College). Paddy Dawson, Alex Mills and several other students, along with representatives from a left-wing immigrant organisation, the New Settlers’ Federation, were also there. The cinema demonstration highlighted the lack of anti-discrimination legislation, and the group agreed to send telegrams of protest. Accordingly, telegrams reading ‘Protest against racial discrimination in Walgett demand civil rights law’ were sent to the Premier from SAFA, the APA and the New Settlers’ Federation. The meeting also agreed the group should seek a deputation to the Premier requesting civil rights legislation (this proved unsuccessful). Most importantly, the meeting agreed to send a delegation led by Aboriginal people to Walgett. The Aboriginal activists in Walgett waited excitedly for this next delegation to arrive. On Tuesday, Inspector Chalker arrived with police reinforcements from Bourke, and seemed to be under instructions to support the APA campaign to desegregate the theatre, consistent as it was with the government’s recently reformulated policy of assimilation. However, since there was no relevant legislation, the police tried negotiation. Sergeant Gleeson chaired a meeting on 11 August of Jim Conomos and Walgett APA representatives Ted Fields and George Rose to discuss the situation. The meeting agreed—and the theatre management later issued a statement to this effect—that 1 September would be the deadline after which Aboriginal people would be admitted to all parts of the theatre; in return, Ted Fields and George Rose agreed that there would be no demonstration at the cinema that evening. There was, however, a long list of stipulations for admission, and the manager said he reserved the right to refuse entry to anyone. Harry Hall had not been at the meeting, and thought the rule excluding Aboriginal people had been completely and immediately dropped. Under this misunderstanding, he went with three Aboriginal young women to the cinema again that evening. He was shocked to find that this time the young women were admitted but he was turned away. For the moment, though, there was to be no demonstration, since this


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had been agreed. As the Herald reported, ‘a crowd of about 200 waited silently outside the theatre, but there was no demonstration’. The next day, Thursday, an APA meeting was held in the RSL hall to discuss what to do next. Aidan Foy spoke, his ‘inflammatory language’ and ‘aggressive pacing and gesticulations’ causing consternation to the observing Snooks. We can only imagine, now, what Aidan said. Driven by long-time white supporter Helen Hambly, the all-Aboriginal delegation arrived in Walgett two days later, on Friday, 13 August. It included Ray Peckham, Eric Woods from the Sydney APA and Louise West from the Union of Australian Women. Harry welcomed them and explained that he and Ted Fields were determined to break the colour bar at the Luxury Theatre. With Harry and Ted, the delegation visited the main Aboriginal localities around Walgett and concluded that the arrests had strengthened the people’s determination. Some SAFA students, including Darce Cassidy, Wendy Golding and Paddy Dawson, also went up to Walgett that weekend. The stage was now set for a major confrontation. On the Saturday night, a crowd of several hundred people and a number of police gathered outside the theatre to see whether Harry and Ted would be admitted to the Theatre Lounge this time, and what would happen if they were not. The Image rights unavailable excitement in the street was palpable. As the Tribune reported: ‘Walgett was a town of tension, Aborigines stood in small groups in the street, some business people stood in shop doorways and watched. Everyone knew that Harry Hall would try to buy a ticket for the “luxury” section of the Luxury Theatre that night and they were all waiting on the Ted Fields buys his ticket to go upstairs in the Luxury Theatre, 14 August 1965. outcome.’ Sergeant Gleeson an- (Photo courtesy of the Tribune/Search nounced that if Hall were refused, Foundation)


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he would instruct the theatre management to admit him. Hall and Fields approached the cinema. They reached the window, and tendered their money. This time, both Harry and Ted received their tickets, and defiantly walked up the carpeted stairs to take their seats in the ‘whites only’ section. The ban had finally been broken. Many other Aboriginal people then queued up for admission; several were sold tickets without incident and joined them, while others were refused for ‘various reasons’. The crowd gathered in ‘surging groups’, vigorously debating the colour bar. As Snooks wrote to his superiors, ‘many animated and loud discussions could be heard’. One of the topics of discussion was whether the demonstrations would lead to people losing their jobs, some employers having already warned their workers against any involvement. Harry Hall addressed the crowd in victory. He thanked the police for their protection and cooperation, the university students for their unfailing efforts to reveal the colour bar to the public, the delegates from Sydney for coming so far to give moral support, and the people in the crowd. Referring to the threats of job loss, he asked: ‘Must we and our children live all our lives being told what we can do by our employers? They need our labour as much as we need employment, and for our children’s sake, we must change things now.’ So lively were things out in the street that at interval the crowd was joined by many theatre patrons ‘who considered it more interesting outside than the entertainment inside’ (which was, incidentally, the 7-year-old movie The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis as brothers in a feud for both power and love). The APA leaders called a meeting on Sunday morning, 15 August at George and Mavis Rose’s home to review the previous night’s events. With the cinema now effectively desegregated, attention shifted to the Oasis and the town’s other hotel, the Imperial. Unfazed by Jack Horner’s letters of the previous year, the Oasis’s licensee, Athol White, still required Aboriginal people, on entering the hotel, to present themselves to White or his wife, who would decide whether they were sufficiently well-attired to enter either the lounge or the bar. In the preceding weeks, Harry Hall had started to challenge this practice, as a matter of principle rather than out of any desire to use the hotel (he was a teetotaller). Throughout the previous day, the visitors had pointedly conducted Aboriginal people to all parts of the hotel. Darce Cassidy saw White refuse service to Harry Hall, though Harry was well dressed and sober. He also saw another Aboriginal


More Freedom Rides Walgett community members and students pose together in August 1965. Darce Cassidy is in the front right. In the back row, Harry Hall is third from the right, Tom Lake is fourth from the right and Gladys Lake is fifth from the right. (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)

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man, Arthur Murray, who may have been acting belligerently, physically thrown out. Snooks reported to the board that he had heard that at approximately 10.00 p.m. (closing time), White called out ‘All Aborigines outside; whites can go into the lounge’. In an increasingly defiant mood, White instituted a policy of allowing Aboriginal people into any part of the hotel if they signed a statement saying ‘there is no discrimination in Walgett’ and that ‘recent disturbances have been the work of Communists and troublemakers’. SAFA and the Sydney APA took up the hotel campaign, just as they had the cinema issue. Darce spoke at a meeting of the AboriginalAustralian Fellowship in Sydney on 18 August, giving what its minutetaker described as ‘a vivid account of SAFA activities in Walgett since February last’. At a meeting of the Sydney APA a week later, Harry asked leading Aboriginal people to visit Walgett a second time to assist the local APA to break the hotel colour bar. Accordingly, a second all-Aboriginal delegation was brought together for a trip to Walgett on the weekend of 27–29 August. This time, Charles came as president of SAFA—indeed, it was one of his last SAFA-identified actions. Other members of the delegation were Isabelle McCallum, Erica and Allan Woods, Ray Peckham, Charles (Chicka) Dixon, Jack Hassen, Tony Williams, Kevin Kelly and Harry Jard, the last five from the Waterside Workers’ Federation Aboriginal Committee. Some SAFA people went as well—Darce, Paddy and Ray Tunks, a Salvation Army officer who had allied himself with the students. When this second delegation arrived, many of the same events that had occurred over the cinema were repeated. The delegation contacted


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Harry and Ted, and then went to see Athol White. They talked with him for about an hour, in the presence of the Police Inspector, two Crown Sergeants and Snooks. Members of the delegation then talked to many people in and around town, including Mr L. Ridgeway, the newly appointed Aboriginal manager of the station (later to become a welfare officer for the board), and many Aboriginal people in the various settlements. Next they visited both the Imperial Hotel and the Oasis. At the Imperial, the licensee refused to serve former Australian lightweight boxing champion Jack Hassen with a glass of beer in the lounge. At the Oasis, a barmaid served Charles and two other Aboriginal people with one glass of beer, but Athol White told them they would get no more and ordered Charles, Harry and Ted from the lounge. When asked why he had refused them, White replied: ‘Perkins and Hall don’t drink and Fields is a very moderate drinker. They’re trying to prove a point, and I’m proving a point that I’ve got certain rights.’ The Walgett APA and the Sydney delegation called a well-attended public meeting at 3.00 p.m. on Saturday, 28 August at the RSL hall. It was lively, with many interjections. Ted and Harry spoke, then Charles called for all Walgett Aboriginal people to support their APA leaders. Isabelle McCallum spoke on the importance of Aboriginal people uniting to support all efforts towards integration, and Ray Peckham referred to the Walgett and Australian Aboriginal people being part of ‘the movement of coloured people throughout the world, demanding equality with all other people’. Not everyone supported the APA; a resolution of no confidence in the APA was moved by an (unidentified) Aboriginal person but gained only four votes. The meeting agreed that the Oasis licensee be told that if he continued to refuse service, legal action would be taken against him. The meeting also agreed to request that the Premier, Mr Askin, introduce civil rights legislation in New South Wales. Afterwards, Charles and Harry went again to the Oasis lounge where, in the presence of a police officer, White again refused them service. Charles was furious, and he was to refer to this refusal many times later in his life. It was for him the ultimate direct proof of racial discrimination, uncomplicated by any issues of hygiene, dress standards or the like. He told the Sydney Morning Herald he intended to sue, and that it would be the first legal action by an Aboriginal person attempting to break down the colour bar. On his return to Sydney, still very angry, he rang the Chief Minister’s office and asked to speak to the minister. He


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reported that he and two other Aboriginals, ‘respectably attired’, had been refused a drink in the lounge of the Oasis and requested that the minister ‘institute proceedings against the proprietor of this hotel’. Charles was advised to put his complaints in writing, but there is no record of a written complaint and it seems that he never did sue, possibly because by this time he was preparing for his final exams, and soon afterwards took on much greater responsibilities when he became manager of the Foundation. The excitement at Walgett, however, was far from over. The charges against Joey Marshall, who had driven the students’ bus off the road in February, were finally heard. Though the Walgett police had reported Marshall to the Police Traffic Superintendent for dangerous and negligent driving the very next day, almost two months passed before the Commissioner of Police agreed Marshall should be charged, and it was many more months before his case was heard. On 2 September, Marshall was found guilty of driving in a manner dangerous to the public, given a fourmonth suspended gaol sentence, a fine of £80, a twelve-month good behaviour bond, ordered to pay court and witnesses’ costs, and lost his driver’s licence for seven days. If this sounds like a defeat for Marshall, it was not seen this way in Walgett amongst the whites. Marshall was something of a hero there by now, and his younger brother—a classmate of young Jack Waterford (years later to become editor of the Canberra Times)—‘basked in the glory of his brother’s deed’. Then, the following month, the case against those who had demonstrated at the cinema was heard. The Council for Civil Liberties provided the students and two Aboriginal demonstrators with barristers Gordon Samuels QC and Malcolm Hardwick, instructed by Michael Kirby. As Aidan remembers it: ‘Of course, to appear on a charge of obstruction with a barrister was a bit of overkill, but it all was part of stirring the pot . . . The facts were very clear: we had sat on the stairs and they had arrested us and put us in gaol and bailed us the next morning. And we weren’t even contesting the facts, in fact; we wanted to be found guilty and we were all prepared to go to gaol.’ The magistrate ruled that for all charges, except those against Westcott, there was indeed no case to answer. When Westcott’s case was resumed the following year, the magistrate dismissed the charge of offensive behaviour, but found him guilty of the offences of obstruction and resisting arrest. No convictions were recorded.


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There was yet another SAFA visit to Walgett later that year, this time to campaign for Harry’s election to council at the 4 December elections. Aidan recalls ‘the time we went up when Harry Hall ran for council’. In the final count, Harry was unsuccessful, with 78 of a total of 1031 votes in ‘C Riding’ in the Shire of Walgett. With this visit, SAFA’s engagement with Walgett was largely over, though some students did visit again in 1966. The persistence and sincerity of students like Darce, Wendy, Aidan, Barry, Owen, David, Sue, Paddy and Christine can hardly be doubted. Yet, in the end, it was true that they did not live in Walgett, and it was the people who did who carried out the long fight for change, and who suffered the consequences of heightened white hostilities. The experience had been an ordeal for Marie Peters. As a young woman in one of the very few Aboriginal families in town, she felt the odium of arrest and imprisonment keenly. Her white neighbour turned hostile, telling her she ought to go and live in the camps like the rest of the blacks, leading her mother to tell the neighbour to leave her kids alone. She felt very much alone in the following months, and still feels that her role in the cinema demonstration has not been fully recognised. And indeed it hasn’t. As one of the first Aboriginal people to be arrested in a political demonstration, she deserves a great deal of credit. To my mind, the real heroes of the story told in this chapter are Marie Peters, Pattie and Lorna Hall, Ted Fields, George and Mavis Rose and, above all, Harry Hall—that tenacious home-grown political activist who took on racism where it bites deepest. The battle in the Walgett microcosm was an indication of the significant changes on the way in the larger context. The government began to move on the Committee of Inquiry, Premier Askin informing SAFA and the APA that it would be established ‘as soon as practicable’. The Aborigines Welfare Board was coming under criticism, as the pattern of policy and administration that had been in place for decades began to break up. The board’s first discussion of SAFA and the Freedom Ride took place on 21 September, when Snooks reported on the recent activities in Walgett. Although the board decided not to make any public statement on the activities of SAFA, it did, significantly, instruct area officers to bring to its notice instances of recent or long-standing discrimination in hotels, places of public entertainment and swimming pools. A week later, Jim Morgan, its ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal member, criticised the board publicly, saying it


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was ‘distrusted by Aborigines’, helping only the ‘better-class Aborigine, the man who has helped himself ’. It also, he said, ‘keeps a file on every Aborigine in the state and its welfare officers are like secret police agents’. The board later subjected Morgan to what it called a ‘brief discussion’ and Morgan called a ‘third degree method of questioning’. Morgan later said in a letter of protest to the board: ‘I am descended from a poor but proud people. I want to be their representative, not a puppet.’ Further attacks on the board came at a conference organised by the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship on 16–17 October in Sydney, involving about 100 people of whom 70 were Aboriginal. The fellowship had gone to great lengths to assist Aboriginal people in country areas to attend, and those present included many leading Aboriginal activists of the day— Charles Perkins, Harry Hall, Pearl Gibbs, Kath Walker, Charles Leon, Bert Groves, Ken Brindle, Joyce Mercy, Ray Peckham, Lester Bostock, Clarrie Combo and many others. The only SAFA member apart from Charles seems to have been John Powles. The conference called for equal representation of Aboriginal people on the board, to be elected on a regional basis, and sought the establishment of voluntary elected committees of Aboriginal people on every station and reserve, to be trained and developed eventually to manage the stations or reserves themselves. Furthermore, the conference requested that the government honour its election promise to establish a Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on Aboriginal Conditions, and to include two Aboriginal members. Eventually a committee was appointed, though it did not have Aboriginal representation. On 8 December, the government announced a Joint Parliamentary Committee to inquire into the conditions of Aboriginal people in New South Wales, and to recommend on ‘the legislative or other proposals necessary to assist Aborigines to attain an improved standard of living’. Here was an opportunity for SAFA to put its by now considerable knowledge of conditions in towns and reserves in New South Wales to good use. A few days after the committee was announced, the students received the February survey material back from Ted Noffs, and were a little taken aback to find that nothing at all had been done by way of analysis. The Annual General Meeting of SAFA on 13 December was told that Professor Brennan would advise on the ‘attitudes’ surveys (it seems he never did), while the students would process the other elements themselves after their exams. While no survey report as such


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ever eventuated, and most of the survey forms seem now to have been lost, the results were used in SAFA’s submission to the Committee of Inquiry. On 25 January 1966, a SAFA meeting discussed its submission in detail, and students were asked to bring with them full reports of their activities and the conditions in any towns they had visited. It would take the students, principally Sue Johnston and Alex Mills, six months to write the submission. For most SAFA members, however, their main involvement continued to be visits to country towns. One student visit to a country town at this time—though this was not a formal SAFA visit—was a disaster, Pat Healy describing it in her notes on the history of SAFA as ‘a farce’. Owen told the story in detail to Inara, my research assistant. On his return from his visit to Walgett in late August, Owen’s car broke down in Coonamble. He caught a train to Sydney, consulted with a car mechanic, and returned a few weeks later, on 11 September, with spare parts and tools to fix and retrieve his car. He met two men on the train, one of them Polish in origin, who were talking about their plans to conduct a demonstration in Coonamble. When they arrived in Coonamble, Owen and the other two men made contact with the Aboriginal people with the aim of desegregating the picture theatre, as had been done in Walgett. Coonamble was another of these northwestern New South Wales towns with a ‘Little Rock’ reputation. Here, as in many other towns, the council had continually refused to allow the Welfare Board to purchase land within the town boundaries for Aboriginal housing. The target was the Plaza Cinema. According to Owen, when the demonstrators arrived in the main street, ‘the whole town was out. There were cars cruising up and down. There was a crowd congregated outside the theatre and literally there were people hanging out windows.’ According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a crowd of more than 300 residents gathered outside to witness the test of strength with the cinema management. The demonstration achieved its ends in the short term: ‘About 10 Aborigines were allowed in the upstairs section, where they are not usually admitted, and 30 watched the show from downstairs, their usual position.’ Then, on the pavement in full view of the crowd, Owen was assaulted: I woke up on the pavement covered in blood . . . The Polish guy . . . took me to the local doctor who stitched me up in the most painful way possible and told me that we didn’t want your kind around here.


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My Polish friend put me up for the night in the local flea house. The next morning I went down to retrieve my car—I’d got it all ready and it was fixed and ready to go, and I found it’d been like totally trashed, it’d been demolished with an axe. It was like totally destroyed. The Herald mentioned the assault, and reported the proprietor of the Plaza, Mr T.L. Wall, as refusing to say whether Aboriginal people would continue to be allowed in the upstairs section in the future. Charles Perkins commented to the Herald that ‘he hoped Mr Wall had not allowed Aborigines in the upstairs section of his cinema for one night only’. Despite the attack on Owen, SAFA remained committed to visiting country towns. A general meeting on 12 October agreed on a series of summer visits, during which the students would research the situation in the town, encourage the formation of Aboriginal organisations and conduct active demonstrations, ‘preferably with Aborigines’. By this time contact with Aboriginal organisations was quite considerable; the AAF and the APA provided lists of contacts, and the APA constitution was suggested as a model for other towns. A SAFA newsletter outlined the plans and listed the targeted towns—Bowraville, Wellington, Boggabilla, Collarenebri, Brewarrina, Gulargambone, Narrabri, Lismore—as well as larger regions such as the Riverina and the South Coast. Those leading the visits were Darce, Barry Corr, Alan Outhred, Tom Roper, Warwick Richards, Chris Page, Paddy Dawson, and Lyn and Bill McLean from the UNSW branch of SAFA. Having by this time graduated and become manager of the Foundation, Charles was no longer a member. These summer trips increased SAFA’s knowledge and understanding of conditions in the towns, but received very little publicity. Colin Bradford remembers going with Alan Outhred and Sandra Levy on the trip to the Riverina, to the towns of Griffith and Leeton, and also Gundagai and Brungle: ‘We made contact first of all with a family in Griffith; they were a white family and they were active in the church and they were also activists for the Aborigines, trying to do things. And we stayed with them for a couple of days, and just went round to the reserves and talked to people there.’ Tom Roper remembers the visit to Wellington with Sue Johnston: I can remember one very signal interview we had with the school principal, who told us how there were quite a number of Aboriginal kids


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that were good at sport but none were good at school. I can remember us having an argument with him about that because it did turn out that one of the Aboriginal kids, despite all the difficulties, had done comparatively well, but I mean the stereotype was such that they could run fast but they couldn’t do anything else . . . We reported back and that certainly encouraged me and I think encouraged others to get more heavily involved in the education side . . . how they could be assisted through tutoring and through having adequate places to study. Barry, Darce and Wendy, and perhaps Sue-Ann, did a very long trip during the first week of February through Coonamble, Walgett, Wee Waa, Moree, Narrabri and Bowraville. Barry: ‘We also did a lot of driving around and we went to Wee Waa, we went to Narrabri, because we were looking at work and a whole range of issues . . . All these funny images of Imperial, Railway and Telegraph Hotels and Astoria Cafés stick in my mind.’ The most significant town visited that summer was probably Bowraville. The Freedom Riders remembered it as a particularly racist town from their first visit, and indeed this impression remained in all subsequent encounters. The group that went there in February 1966 had exactly the same impression. Darce later wrote that there were children on the reserve with chicken pox, the houses were far too small for the large Aboriginal families that lived in them, and the two hotels, the picture show and the cemetery remained racially segregated. Barry Corr: The discrimination went down to the bloody cemetery. You know, you had the Church of England there, you had the Presbyterians, you had the Catholics, you had the Methodists and down the bottom you had the blackfellas. And so the Aboriginal cemetery was down the bottom. And of course all up the hill with the white people, that was all tombstones and nicely looked after graves, and the Aboriginal graves—I can’t forget some of the kids’ graves because they had sea shells as a border around them, no grave stones or anything like that. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know . . . But that was bloody Bowraville. SAFA now decided on a major visit to Bowraville on the weekend of 12–13 March 1966, with the support of the APA, and accompanied by


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Aboriginal activists from Sydney. Accompanied by Herald and ABC TV reporters, 27 students and three Aboriginal activists—Charles, Harold Jard and Chicka Dickson—went there by car. Their target this time was the hotels; Bowraville had two, the Royal and the Bowra. In Darce Cassidy’s words in an article written soon after, the ‘Royal, tiled, clean and antiseptic, is patronised by farmers and their surfie sons. The Bowra, large, rambling and grimy, is frequented by workers and rockers—or rather some of the workers and rockers, for about half of Bowraville’s working class is barred from this hotel.’ Aboriginal people never drank at the Royal, the cockies’ hotel, but they had always been able to drink in the ‘dark room’ at the Bowra. Recently, however, the ‘dark room’ had been closed by order of the police sergeant, and now Aboriginal people could not drink there either. The people in Bowraville, having heard that between six and eight carloads of students were due to arrive that Saturday, were out in the main street waiting. Some cafés were closed. The visitors arrived in nearby Macksville at 9.45 a.m., and an hour later the first car set off for Bowraville. At 12.45 p.m. the rest of the cars set off, followed, as they got closer to town, by a convoy of police cars almost as large. The visitors split up. When Harold Jard went with Paddy Dawson to the Royal Hotel, they were met with hisses, catcalls and abuse from the crowd in the bar and on the hotel verandah, but being accompanied by reporters they were allowed in. The crowd in the bar parted to let the two enter, where they were served a glass of beer and Image rights unavailable photographed. Harold and Paddy debated with the other hotel patrons for about an hour. Another group went to the Bowra Hotel to challenge its exclusion of Aboriginal people, but with so much urban press interest the colour bar was ‘off ’ that day. Then a café was tested: ‘A local Aboriginal A young Aboriginal man addresses a meeting near the Aboriginal reserve, child was taken to a café where a Bowraville, 12 March 1966. milkshake was ordered. Service was (Photo courtesy of Darce Cassidy)


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refused.’ One group then went to the reserve, just out of town on the cemetery road, while ‘about one hundred teenage and sub-teenage children in George Street’ surrounded another group. Charles was ‘pinned down by reporters, including those representing Sydney newspapers and ABC TV’. Subsequently, another group of Aboriginal people went to the Royal Hotel, and again all were admitted. By this time there were 400–500 people in the street—high drama in itself for a population of between 1200 and 1300. The crowd was noisy and somewhat hostile, jeering loudly at the students. The visiting group withdrew for a meeting at the showground, then in the evening held a meeting at the reserve—well, not quite at the reserve; the Aboriginal men, women and children left the reserve, walked across the road and sat on the red clay bank, ready for the meeting, while police lined the side of the road to ensure there was no trouble. Not far off, said the Guardian News, was ‘an old Kiparra ground, meeting place for the elders, where once carved trees stood and the sacred rites were performed’. Darce spoke, and then Wendy. One of the students said: ‘We will return as often as it is necessary to see you have a fair deal.’ It was an angry meeting. David Pepper remembers that ‘a lot of young blokes got up and roundly told the sergeant off . . . the big issue was the local sergeant there was controlling the local people by handing out government cheques to people who’d been good. So that if you were in his bad books you wouldn’t get your dole payment or whatever.’ Some dissension within the Aboriginal community became evident. When Gerry Walker, a young Aboriginal, said ‘I mightn’t get a job. They wouldn’t trust me because I am black . . . They bag black blokes because they are a blot on the world’, 20-year-old Bernadette Ballangarry criticised Aboriginal people like Gerry: You haven’t got to live like this. Through your drinking you are dragging everyone else down. You have only yourselves to blame. If you would wake up to yourselves, it wouldn’t be too bad. We are all pulled down because you stagger round the streets. I have been offered a job in town. Gerry has had plenty of jobs but he gets drunk. It’s his own fault he is out of work. The SAFA and APA visit was reported at length and quite sympathetically in the local paper, the Guardian News, and more modestly in other


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papers. Even the Aborigines Welfare Board took notice. When the local Area Welfare Officer reported to the board that there was no discrimination at Bowraville, the board rejected his advice. One of the most important challenges made by SAFA to existing regulations was somewhat accidental. Two weeks after the Bowraville demonstration, Darce and Sue-Ann Loftus returned. They were invited by some of the Aboriginal people to the reserve and were standing in front of one of the cottages when two police came by and charged them with entering the reserve without permission. The police pressed the case, even though Green, the board superintendent, had recently made it clear in the board magazine The Dawn that ‘Aborigines on Reserves should be allowed to invite friends to their homes, and believed this restriction should be removed’. When the case came to court on 13 July 1966, the Council for Civil Liberties again sponsored the defence. The case was dismissed, not on the principles at issue, but on the technical grounds that since Image rights unavailable no survey had ever been conducted to establish the boundaries of the reserve, the police could not be certain that the house in question was actually on the reserve. That same day, SAFA members demonstrated outside Parliament House in Sydney, with Sue Johnston (now secretary) burning copies of the Aborigines Protection Act. Despite all this activity, no local organisation seems to have emerged at this Sue Johnston, Secretary of SAFA, time in Bowraville as it did in Walgett. burns the Aborigines Protection Act, While these confrontations at under which Loftus and Cassidy Bowraville were going on, the Joint were charged, outside Parliament House during a protest against the Committee was gathering submissions, Act on Wednesday 13 July 1966. interviewing witnesses in Sydney and (Photo courtesy of Honi Soit)


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country towns, and visiting stations and reserves throughout the state. Many of the submissions and interviews were well publicised; the AAF’s proposal for land rights for Aboriginal people in New South Wales, for example, merited the headline ‘Aborigines ask for land rights’ in the Australian on 14 March 1966. The SAFA submission, presented in June 1966, was long and detailed. It covered in its first three sections the same issues as the original Freedom Ride survey—health (using the Health Questionnaires filled in by eight medical practitioners), employment and incomes (using the responses from 58 male and 22 female Aboriginal people surveyed), and education (based on SAFA interviews with a ‘small number’ of teachers). It recommended increased spending on housing and health, a program of health education, the return of ‘land capable of development’ to Aboriginal people, housing of Aboriginal people in town, the development of rural cooperatives, and spending on education at all levels. The fourth section, headed ‘Education of the Public’, gave a history of the positive steps that had been taken to improve community awareness, while the fifth, ‘Analysis’, was highly critical of the Aborigines Welfare Board, and recommended proper training for the welfare officers hired by the board. It is not quite clear, on my reading, just what the SAFA submission envisaged for the future of the board. There were, however, clear recommendations for a statutory body operating under new legislation to deal with racial discrimination. SAFA advised the committee to investigate legal activity in this area in the United States, Britain and, after Don Dunstan’s initiative, South Australia. Charles Perkins submitted on behalf of the Foundation, and made similar recommendations concerning antidiscrimination legislation. He had also led a deputation on 6 May to the Chief Secretary, seeking constitutional change to protect people from racial discrimination. SAFA seemed indefatigable. By August, the students were planning a Freedom Ride in Queensland for February 1967. Three SAFA members— Chris Page, Darce Cassidy and Jenny (Jean) Buckley—went to Queensland to conduct a preliminary investigation. The aim was to concentrate on the northern part of Queensland where discrimination was most thorough, in hotels, a picture theatre and elsewhere. A leaflet headed ‘Plans for Action’ reported the various ideas under discussion— encouraging voting (Aboriginal people had just won state voting rights) and demonstrations to expose discrimination. The plan was for about 30 students to meet in Townsville, hire a bus and visit various northern


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towns. They would also look at Palm Island, off Townsville, where about 1000 Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders lived. Palm Island was something of a prison: there were reports of bans on interracial dancing, Aboriginal girls caught with white men being detained in the mission compound, the exclusion of Aboriginal people from the main street, and a roll call at which anyone late had to do free work for the mission. It was important to get FCAATSI support for the proposed Freedom Ride. Sue Johnston and Chris Page attended a FCAATSI meeting in Glebe on 15–16 October, outlining their plans. Executive members put forward various suggestions, and expressed a willingness to be involved, as long as the local Aboriginal communities were consulted and included and FCAATSI itself kept informed. Faith Bandler and Joe McGinnis, executive members of the council, were appointed as the liaison officers. As the consultations with the Queensland Aboriginal leaders continued, however, the plans gradually came unstuck. Queensland SAFA said February was not the right time for a Freedom Ride in North Queensland; monsoonal weather would prevent a bus travelling on unsealed roads. More time was needed, in any case, to organise the campaign and to do preliminary survey work, so the target date was set back to May. The Indigenous community in North Queensland began to split over the proposal, with some leading community members turning against the idea. Darce remembers that ‘both Margaret Valadian and Neville Bonner were against it, and it looked like it would have been painted as outside interference from the south, with little local support’. The Courier-Mail had reported in September that the president of the One People of Australia League, Mr J. Hamilton, had said he would welcome any group prepared to work for the betterment of Aboriginal people, but ‘would not welcome anyone concerned with “destructive criticism”’. The local students were not in support either; one of them who was, Elena Bardsley, wrote to Chris Page that the Townsville University Union Council had met on 16 September 1966 and had dissociated itself completely from SAFA and its plans. While there was support from some Aboriginal people like John Newfong, Darce remembers that there was not a lot of other local support. In February 1967 there was another investigative trip to Queensland. But the lack of support from the Queensland organisations meant there never was a Freedom Ride in Queensland.


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While the New South Wales Joint Parliamentary Committee was in progress, the national situation changed rapidly. Harold Holt succeeded Menzies as Prime Minister in January 1966, and he was more sympathetic to the proposals for Commonwealth involvement than Menzies had been. A Referendum on section 127 (concerning the census) was agreed to in February 1966 and was originally to be held in May that year, but was then delayed while the question of section 51 (xxvi) was further debated. Parliament finally agreed in February 1967 to a Referendum on both sections. When the referendum was held in May that year, the proposals for change were supported by 90.77 per cent of voters. Public opinion in the cities, especially, had swung round to the assimilationist notion that Aboriginal people should be treated equally, and that a racially discriminatory constitution was unfair and damaging to Australia’s international reputation. With that, a whole new set of governing relationships and principles and sources of funding was inaugurated. In the short term, a three-man Council of Aboriginal Affairs was formed to advise the Commonwealth government. Dr H.C. Coombs was appointed director, and Barrie Dexter and Bill Stanner as the other two members. None of these three had worked under the old regime in the states, and they brought a whole new approach to the issues. By this time, the baton of student Aboriginal politics was passing from SAFA to Abschol. During 1965, Abschol had grown in size and scope, holding a conference at the University of Sydney on 5 June. In 1966 and 1967, many SAFA students drifted into Abschol, bringing to it a much more militant style and radical politics. Tom Roper was one of them. Active in SAFA throughout 1965, he became very active in Abschol during 1966, when we were both completing our History Honours year. Years later he described SAFA as ‘one of those organisations that kind of flowered if you like, but rather than dying it changed what various other organisations were doing’. It changed Abschol ‘into a different organisation, and a much more active organisation’. The memberships of SAFA and Abschol, he said, ‘tended to become more similar and eventually they in fact virtually became the same’. One of the reasons for the shift, Tom suggested, was that Abschol was connected to NUAUS, and therefore had access to continuing funds, which SAFA did not. The drift of SAFA students and ideas into Abschol had a marked effect on NUAUS Aboriginal policy more broadly. Whereas NUAUS had in March 1965 refused to support or congratulate the Freedom Ride, only a


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year later it passed resolutions commending Charles Perkins ‘for his active leadership in efforts to counter racial and social discrimination in Australia’. It noted the ‘efforts of SAFA to follow up their tour of Northern NSW towns’, and expressed support for the aims of SAFA and congratulations on its action. Now it was agreed that: ‘NUAUS supports in principle the concept of student protest with the aim of improving Aboriginal conditions, but urge[s] that the protesters be confident and assured that their actions are supported by the Aboriginal community involved.’ This same meeting approved in principle the appointment of a full-time National Abschol Officer to pull the organisation together, and to organise a campaign favouring a Referendum on section 51. In early 1967, NUAUS agreed to regard Aboriginal affairs as a priority issue, and appointed Tom Roper full-time director in order to strengthen the links between Abschol on various campuses and create a strong national organisation. There was one last follow-up trip before SAFA finally dissolved, and this time I was involved. On 5 July 1967, SAFA asked for volunteers to go to Dareton on the Murray River on 14–16 July. In Dareton, the SAFA newsletter said, thirteen Aboriginal families lived on the rubbish dump under impossible conditions. They had in fact been living there for almost twenty years, having moved there when the AWB mission at Menindee was moved to Murrin Bridge in 1948. In early 1967, the Senior Welfare Officer of the board undertook a detailed survey at Dareton and recommended two standard townhouses be built ‘for the families considered suitable for standard housing’ and that ‘transitional housing’ be built for the others. With the Joint Parliamentary Committee still to report, however, and the board’s notion of ‘transitional housing’ under severe criticism from several quarters, the building plans remained on hold and the shanty town remained at the tip. When Pastor Doug Nicholls visited it in March 1967, he described it as a ‘national disgrace’. Now, in July, the aim of a SAFA trip was to find out more about the actual conditions. Sue Johnston went, along with her boyfriend Kim Sweeney—now a major figure in what remained of SAFA—and doctoral student and later well-known sociologist Bob Connell. Now sharing a house with Sue, I came too. I was by this time doing my Diploma of Education, while she was working on her Master’s thesis on the history of New South Wales government policy towards Aboriginal people.


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We visited people in the shanty town, and also some Aboriginal people in town. The latter were extremely friendly and helpful, and the former told us they needed houses, decent water and other necessary amenities. This Dareton visit was a defining experience for me. The shanty town dwellers had thought we were able to get something for them, and I felt that we had nothing to offer. I came home feeling that without Aboriginal activists to work with, our own activism could be nothing but the do-gooding of which SAFA had so often been accused. Feeling very uncomfortable, it was some time before I could find a way to support Aboriginal campaigns and actions again. I was probably wrong, though, in my thinking that our Dareton visit had been useless. It seems to have had more effect than I realised at the time. Soon afterwards a petition was presented to the Legislative Assembly from 1147 university students, requesting an Automobile Tuberculosis Unit be sent to Dareton to prevent the disease from spreading, and that the Aboriginal families there be moved ‘from their present situation near this rubbish tip outside Dareton’. In December, the Aborigines Welfare Board approached the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission to set aside an area on the southern boundary of the Coomealla Irrigation Area for an Aboriginal reserve, and by mid-1968 twelve new cottages were being erected there. When the Joint Parliamentary Committee’s final report was tabled on 13 September 1967, it had some elements that SAFA would have liked, and others it would have strongly opposed. The former included proposals to provide more housing in the towns, and more education at all levels from pre-school upwards. It would probably also have supported the recommendation to abolish the Aborigines Welfare Board, with Aboriginal services henceforth being provided through the existing agencies of the state, such as the Housing Commission, the Department of Child Welfare and the Department of Social Welfare, though coordinated by a Director of Aboriginal Affairs. It would have liked the recommendation for the director to be advised by an elected board made up of Aboriginal people. SAFA would have been less impressed by the report’s strongly assimilationist tone and purpose, and the committee’s decision not to recommend an Anti-Discrimination Act. Adopting an attitude of ‘wait and see’ in the context of rapid policy change at the Commonwealth level, the New South Wales government took fourteen months to translate the committee’s recommendations into


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legislative form. As the months passed, some Aboriginal organisations in New South Wales became increasingly impatient at the lack of action at the state level. After much discussion and Aboriginal protest, legislation was finally brought forward on 7 November 1968; it was passed in February 1969, and came into effect on 2 June 1969. A new era in policy and administration had begun. By this time, however, SAFA had disappeared from the political scene and the Freedom Rides were finally over.


10

Chapter

Memory and meaning

A

s in a film or a novel, the only thing harder than the beginning of a history is the end. I could have ended with the last of the SAFA visits to country towns, but this would leave unexplored the Freedom Ride’s long-term impact on Australian political culture. The Freedom Ride did not end with the demise of SAFA, but lives on in our memory and continues to inform expectations and debate on Aboriginal issues. So let’s explore the changing ways in which the Freedom Ride has been remembered and understood, look at its effects on the subsequent history of the towns, and ponder its significance for the present. Knowledge of the Freedom Ride has been kept alive first by the prominence of Charles Perkins himself, both in life and in his passing. Charles never tired of telling his Freedom Ride story in speeches and interviews. There were many profiles in print and on television current affairs programs over the years, and many mentioned his role in the Freedom Ride, and briefly explained what it was. Especially important in this process was Charles’s own autobiography, A Bastard Like Me, which provided the first extended historical evocation. ‘The Freedom Ride,’ Charles began, ‘was probably the greatest and most exciting event that I have ever been involved in with Aboriginal affairs.’ He provided some general description of the preparations for the trip and the confrontation at Walgett, and ended with a telling description of the clash outside the Moree swimming pool. The Freedom Ride is well remembered in both Walgett and Moree. 274


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However, memories have gradually changed over the years. When the Joint Parliamentary Committee reached Moree in May 1966, only fifteen months after the original Freedom Ride, it found that attitudes to it had already softened. Albert Thomas, the Moree Area Welfare Officer, acknowledged that the Freedom Riders had ‘certainly brought the baths before the attention of the public, though many Aborigines had not liked their methods’. Neville Kelly told the committee the Moree Association for the Advancement of Aborigines had been formed directly as a result of the Freedom Ride. The students, he said, ‘really made some of us think a little deeper than we had previously about this problem hence the establishment of the society for the Advancement of Aborigines in Moree . . . It was a harsh awakening.’ When asked about the effects of the Freedom Ride, even the Mayor, Bill Lloyd, replied: ‘They undoubtedly did some good, in this respect, that they brought to light this resolution that was on the books of council.’ In Walgett, where there had been more Freedom Rides than anywhere else, their memory sustained and informed a good deal of subsequent political action. The Walgett activists found that persistence was essential. If the pools in Moree and Kempsey had been desegregated relatively quickly, the Walgett RSL Club proved a much tougher nut to crack. Three ex-servicemen—Tom Lake, Sye Morgan and Eric Thorne—made sustained efforts to join, but it was another six years before Aboriginal ex-servicemen were admitted to the Walgett RSL Club. The RSL leadership refused to intervene. FCAATSI took up their case, resolving at its annual conference in April 1969 to condemn RSL branches refusing membership, and urging that the matter be discussed and made public at the RSL Congress. Pressure increased when the National Aborigines Day Organising Committee arranged a march and wreath-laying ceremony by Aboriginal ex-servicemen at the Cenotaph in Sydney on National Aborigines Day two months later, on 11 July 1969. The Walgett RSL Club held out for another two years, but finally succumbed in 1971 when Tom Lake, who had served with the army in the 39/52nd unit in New Guinea, was finally admitted, an event covered by ABC television in a Four Corners program. The memory and influence of the Freedom Ride was also kept alive in Walgett through a close association with the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs in Sydney. Walgett activists wanting a community centre on the Sydney model established a branch of the Foundation in September 1968, obtained land, and raised money in a local appeal (backed by a grant from


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the Sydney-based foundation of $10 for every $1 raised). A few months after Charles moved to Canberra to take up a position as research officer with the newly formed Council for Aboriginal Affairs in April 1969, a high-level team from the council, led by Nugget Coombs, visited Walgett and met with the local Foundation committee. After further financial assistance, work started in February 1971 on the building, which was opened to much fanfare eight months later. The foundation served as an effective community centre under Harry Hall’s management for some years, but was eventually forced to close for lack of finances. All was not lost, however, as the building took on a new and important function. When the foundation closed, the Walgett Aboriginal Legal Service took over. Like the other legal and medical services appearing in country towns during the 1970s, it was a product of the Whitlam government’s policy of making funding available for community-based service organisations. These services, too, owed something to the Freedom Ride. Many of the professional lawyers and doctors who staffed them had as students a few years earlier made their first contacts with rural Aboriginal communities during Abschol visits patterned on the Freedom Ride model of survey and practical action. After the Freedom Ride, the Sydney media maintained an interest in race relations in rural New South Wales. Journalists in all media kept memories of the Freedom Ride alive by the occasional visit to the Freedom Ride towns, to see how they were getting on. These return visits started with Bruce Maxwell’s visit in June 1965, and have occurred from time to time ever since. This has happened mainly in Walgett and Moree, and to a lesser extent Bowraville and Kempsey. Wellington, Gulargambone, Boggabilla and Lismore have rarely been remembered in this way. One of these return visits was the subject of a segment of the ABC current affairs program, This Day Tonight, called ‘Moree—Racism Now and Ten Years Ago’, screened on 12 June 1975. Some idea of its content can be gained from its shot list: ‘library footage of freedom riders travelling on bus and commentary and music, voiceover of Bob Brown, shots of Moree and riots, library footage interview with mayor William Lloyd back in 1965, Mayor today speaking, Charles Perkins interview, various shots of Moree—entering and shots of township, library footage of Aboriginal camps, camp today and old mission site’. Three years later in 1978, Paul Rea, a journalist with the Newcastle Morning Herald, visited the Freedom Ride towns for his four-part series


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called ‘In the Steps of the Freedom Riders’. His article on Moree, published on 4 January 1979, began: Fifteen years ago the Sydney Sunday Press described Moree as Australia’s ‘Little Rock’, after the race-torn town in the Deep South of the United States. Amongst the whites feelings had changed from amusement to resentment to anger. Inevitably there was a showdown and the students were punched, spat upon, and pelted with fruit and eggs by white residents. The bus left town under police escort but the students had achieved their objective: to expose white racism. Lyall Munro Snr, a leading figure in Moree’s Aboriginal community, told Rea the Freedom Ride had effects that were ‘both good and bad’. He went on: ‘For a time the visit of the Freedom Riders polarised the black and white communities and resentments ran pretty deep. But on the positive side it made the black people stand up and be counted and do something to help themselves.’ Rea did what many journalists were to do in subsequent years—he visited the reserves and settlements, interviewed a few people and gave his own judgment of Aboriginal living conditions and relations between black and white in the Freedom Ride towns. By the late 1970s, some of the hope evident amongst Aboriginal people in these towns in the early years of the decade had gone, and the tone of these journalists’ reports was generally negative. Rea reported that housing conditions in Moree were still poor. Stanley Village, newly built in the years after the Freedom Ride to relocate the people at Bingara Road, was by now in a state of neglect—‘wall panels and windows are broken and some fences are down’—while the village is ‘badly littered with rubbish and broken bottles’. Conditions at Mehi, said Rea, were no better. The swimming pool ‘is abandoned, empty, and vandalised’. Lyall Munro Snr told Rea that, while many Aboriginal people had moved on to the reserves or to town, what had not changed was the ‘vicious cycle facing the young Aborigine’—no job prospects, so doesn’t do well at school, no education, cannot get a job. While some individuals were able to make good, the Aboriginal people in general ‘are still on the bottom of the pile’. He thought the result of assimilation policies had ‘been the gradual loss of aboriginal identity and self-assurance’. The result was frustration, which ‘often gives rise to violence but rarely against white people. It is usually


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vented against other blacks, against property, and against themselves. A lot of people, young and old, are killing themselves with grog . . . It is a slow suicide.’ Journalists’ stories about Walgett in these years were similar. When journalist Lenore Nicklin of the Sydney Morning Herald visited in June 1978, along with the federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ian Viner, she described the Gingie reserve as ‘grim’, and noted that ‘children who should be at school play among the rusting cars. There are dogs everywhere.’ Nicklin found that there was widespread resentment among the whites at the social service benefits Aborigines received. ‘All they spend it on is booze and the TAB,’ said the taxi driver. Her account of Boggabilla was very similar. When Paul Rea arrived in Walgett six months later, he interviewed a Walgett Aboriginal man, George Fernando, who said ‘the older generation white man did not like talking to the Aborigines but the younger kids mix all right now. They get to know each other.’ Overall, though, Rea’s report on race relations in Walgett was negative. There were serious health problems in the Aboriginal community, related to poor housing and overcrowding, with more than 60 per cent of the children at Dewhurst camping area and Gingie reserve suffering ear disease and hearing loss. He also found racial hostility alive and well: ‘When I asked a group of white men for directions to Gingie reserve they made obscene remarks about black women.’ Aboriginal people were still being asked not to drink at a certain bar of one hotel. Rea moved on to Bowraville. There he learned that, four years earlier, a pre-school had been built, funded by grants from the state and federal governments and from the Van Leer Foundation, and opened to ‘joyful celebrations’. The building by 1979 was empty and abandoned, its windows smashed and most of its fixtures removed: ‘Built by blacks, it was disfigured by blacks.’ John Ballangarry explained to Rea that the people wanted ‘a place where aboriginal mothers could take their kids and teach them’, but the government ‘wanted it to be like white pre-schools and wanted to bring in white teachers from outside to do the teaching’. The people tried for a while to run it without government funding, but gave up. ‘Then it got all smashed up because people were having grog sessions up there.’ Rea concluded: In its present condition the pre-school is a tragic monument to lost hopes and very few people I spoke to, white or black, believed that


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either the State or Federal government would venture money for a second chance. Worse, the state of the building is cited by many whites to vindicate one of the most enduring negative attitudes towards Aborigines: that is, that they are incapable of doing things for themselves. The drinking problem was huge. While Rea was there, he found ‘many were drinking at either the “bottom pub” or in a shed behind the Royal Hotel’. The main meeting place of the children and young Aborigines was a café run by Val Walker. Val told Rea: Bowraville is still a very racist town. I have tried to organise dances for the kids but when the white parents find out that Aborigines will be there they keep their children away. It’s the adults who are racist. I have heard white mothers tell their children not to come into my shop because it is dirty. From around this time, race relations in Moree were coming under strain, as trouble brewed between black and white young men in Moree’s hotels. The young Aboriginal men began to challenge the right of publicans to bar them from entry to hotels for alleged misbehaviour. One of these angry young Aboriginal men was Lyall Munro Jnr, who now worked in the Aboriginal Legal Service of New South Wales, based in Sydney, was active in the land rights campaign, and regularly returned to Moree. There seemed to be a major racial incident starting in the hotels about every two years or so. In 1976 there was an incident called the ‘Moree rampage’, and in 1978 a hotel was bombed. Two years later, Moree and its race relations were back in the news. On 3 December 1980 there was a major hotel fight between police and Aborigines, and Ben Sandilands went up there to report for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald. It was not just a report on events in a country town, but also another opportunity to compare Moree at the time of the Freedom Ride with now. His report for the Sydney Morning Herald began: ‘Things have changed in Moree since 1965 when Charles Perkins and his “freedom riders” broke through the racial barriers which kept Aborigines out of the town’s mineral baths.’ He then reported on the changes—Aborigines using the bars, clubs, baths and stores, and playing a major role in every sporting activity. When a Channel 10 news crew took some Aboriginal people into the Victoria


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Hotel, they were readily served. In the Sun-Herald, Sandilands reported that people seemed to mix freely across racial barriers, laughing, talking and carrying on ‘with a natural friendliness that Sydney hasn’t achieved’. He also reported that one of the twelve people charged for the recent pub brawl was Lyall Munro Jnr. For his part in the fighting, Munro was banned from the town for five years. Sandilands explored some of the more general problems facing Moree. ‘The town that burned itself into the Australian conscience in the ’sixties,’ he wrote, ‘still has problems, including its past history of racial discrimination. Its wheat crop has failed, the drought has ruined its cattlemen, and on the day after the pub fight the local abattoir closed with the loss of 94 jobs—half of them held by Aborigines.’ Lyall Munro Snr pointed out the disused and damaged swimming pool at Mehi village: ‘I’m really ashamed of that . . . It was built with help from the local Apex club and there were days when black children and white children went there for swimming carnivals. Then . . . there was anger in the village. It got wrecked. Things went wrong. Things don’t always go right.’ Lyall Munro Jnr stressed the importance of identity. ‘More of us,’ he said, ‘want a right to practise our religion and culture. We want compensation for the lands stolen from us; we want land rights and protection for our reservations and sacred sites.’ Sandilands reported ‘an almost universal resentment among Moree’s whites at the alleged affluence of Aborigines “living on handouts” with pockets “stuffed full of bank notes” while the rest of the town was feeling the economic pinch’. The visits from Sydney journalists continued. Malcolm Brown, also for the Sydney Morning Herald, went there in November 1982, after incidents at a Moree hotel that ended in a fatal shootout. A young Aboriginal man, Ronald McIntosh, was gunned down by white youths from a car after a brawl between whites and blacks in the Imperial Hotel’s Ned Kelly Bar. In the days after the shooting, hundreds of Aboriginal people stormed around the town in a fury. Brown’s story mentioned the Freedom Ride and its influence on Lyall Munro Jnr, by now the administrator of the Aboriginal Legal Service of New South Wales and in 1984 to become its chair. Brown attributed the problems of Moree’s Aboriginal people to chronic unemployment and low morale. Petty theft was rife; there was also a growing drug problem. He also noticed a proliferation of racist jokes amongst the whites. ‘The white community,’ said Brown, ‘is heartily sick of the Aboriginal problem. They wish it would go away.’


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Author Roger Millis, in town doing research for his book on the Myall Creek and other massacres, was also struck by the persistence of racial prejudice among the whites. For their part, members of the Aboriginal community were both angry and distressed at the killing, with 1200 mourners turning up for McIntosh’s funeral. Father Dick Buchhorn, the Catholic parish priest at Boggabilla, gave a remarkable oration at the graveside, printed in full in Roger Millis’s book. He saw the killing as the result of Aboriginal people fighting for their rights, in the tradition of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Hector Peterson in Soweto and Gibber, an Aboriginal leader of the Kamilaraay tribe, on the Macintyre River 133 years before. ‘I have a dream,’ he said, ‘that one day even this town of Moree, a town sweltering in the heat of racial tension, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.’ Two years further on and yet another journalist, Frank Walker, wrote a piece in the National Times which began: ‘With the long summer, social tensions are again rising in Moree, the NSW country town which has become the barometer of race relations in eastern Australia.’ Moree was still smarting, he said, from the headlines it had received over the pub brawl and shooting in 1982, and now pub fighting and other incidents such as cars being pelted with stones had in recent weeks broken out again. Lyall Munro Jnr was described by Walker as the enfant terrible of Moree. His ban for the disturbances in 1980 was over, and many saw him as the cause of the present trouble. The state National Party MP, Wal Murray, said the fights were the work of black power activists seeking publicity for land rights. Many whites said Aborigines were treated far more leniently than whites: ‘The thinking that the Aborigines are getting something for nothing and then doing nothing with it is very strong.’ Many blamed welfare payments: ‘We have to go out and work for our money while they just sit there and let it come to them.’ While the urban papers were presenting this pessimistic picture of the Freedom Ride towns, the Freedom Ride was developing quite a different image on ABC radio. Darce Cassidy’s tapes, recorded during the Freedom Ride, sat in his bottom drawer for thirteen years, though Malcolm Long used a small excerpt for a program he made in 1972 on Moree, following up on Allan Ashbolt’s 1957 radio documentary. By 1978, however, Darce was Supervisor of the Talks Department of the ABC in Melbourne. In the course of an interview for an ABC program, Lyall Munro Jnr heard of Darce’s tapes and expressed interest, revealing he had been one of the


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children at the Moree pool. In response, a program using the tapes was finally broadcast on 20 February 1978, exactly thirteen years after the original clash at the baths. It is a stunning piece of radio, juxtaposing the voices of angry Aboriginal people and whites in the streets of the towns with those of some of the students including Charles himself, all linked together by Darce’s calm connecting narrative. By the late 1980s, references to the Freedom Ride in the media were becoming rare. Charles Perkins was in trouble as the head and then ex-head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and the story of the Freedom Ride was gradually fading from public life. However, John Mulvaney, a historian and archaeologist with a particular interest in heritage, drew timely attention to it in his book, Encounters in Place (1989), which gave the histories of a number of places thought to be important in Australian history and regarded as worth protecting and memorialising in some way. The Moree pool, he suggested, was one such place. He used newspaper sources to provide a brief account of the Freedom Ride at Moree, and argued that, although new brick buildings had replaced the old wooden ones in 1977, the Australian Heritage Commission’s Register of the National Estate should include the site of the clash. The buildings had acquired national symbolic significance: ‘Through the Freedom Ride incidents they symbolise a positive action in the civil rights struggle for Aborigines; and by Aborigines, for the leader of the bus tour was an Aborigine, and his message got through to other young Aborigines.’ Mulvaney’s campaign was successful; the baths were registered on 15 May 1990. The Heritage Commission’s Statement of Significance reads: ‘The Moree Baths have historic and social significance as the focus of the 1965 Freedom Ride, when Charles Perkins successfully challenged racial discrimination in Moree, in particular bans on Aboriginal people using the Spa Baths.’ In 1991, as part of the preparation for this book, I retraced the itinerary of the Freedom Ride towns with my husband, John Docker. I wanted partly to talk to people about the past, and partly to see how the towns were doing now. I did not realise at the time just how much I was one of a long line of people who had made the same trip, asking the same people the same questions. When we visited Wellington on 31 March, we saw the shanty town, which was still there with tin shacks, washing on the line and people around. It struck me just how beautiful the countryside was, rolling


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down to the river with willows and other vegetation all along. Its colonial past seemed to hang in the air, just out of sight. When we visited the Wellington Museum, a large and interesting place, we saw a tribute to the white pioneer settlers. A volunteer guide told us that many people, when they saw the display concerning the children at the mission in 1832, said to her that it was wrong for the missionary, Watson, to have taken Aboriginal children from their parents. Personally, she said, she thought the children were lucky and Watson had done his best. We also visited Gulargambone, though not the old reserve, which we couldn’t find. It was still a small and very depressed town, with no new buildings, no tourist office, and few people around except some Aboriginal teenagers and children. There was an Aboriginal arts and crafts shop called Narko Uluru, funded under the Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the only shop open in the town apart from the garage. It had started only two weeks before, and sold t-shirts, framed woodcuts, Aboriginal paintings on board, earrings, brooches, spears, wooden snakes and emu eggs. In Walgett we met Harry Hall, George Rose, Phillip Hall and Gladys Lake, the activists of the 1960s and since. In 1991, Walgett had two Aboriginal community centres. One was the Barwon Aboriginal Community Centre, run by George Rose, its vice-president, in the old Foundation building. George told me that at first he hadn’t supported the Freedom Ride and thought it was the Aboriginal people in the town who did the real work of bringing about change. He showed us around the Aboriginal medical centre, in a new impressive building a few blocks away, proudly emphasising that 20 to 30 per cent of its patients were white. We also visited the other Barwon Aboriginal Community Centre, where Phillip Hall worked, having returned to Walgett only twelve months before after leaving a senior position in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs following Charles’s departure. There we met Harry Hall, who came down from Lightning Ridge to meet us. At that time he was aged about 60 to 65 with grey hair; he was a very dignified man, a very impressive person, thoroughly politically committed. He hadn’t given up, and I thought he probably never would. He was now in a group called the Independent Aboriginal Council, which was gathering together 21 handpicked people in Dubbo on 14 April of that year. Harry said the whites led the town by day and the blacks by night. It seemed to us pretty true—the whites had indeed abandoned


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the streets at night, though Aboriginal people were quite evident in the daytime too. The problem, he said, was alcohol, and the police no longer tried to control it; there could be 200 to 300 Aborigines on the street, and the police would just turn right away from it all. They could no longer do what they used to do—march everyone into the paddy wagon when they got drunk and the situation was out of control. The only solution to the policing problem, Harry thought, was to have mixed police, half white, half black, to handle disturbances. But there were few Aboriginal police in New South Wales at that time, and none in Walgett because an Aboriginal policeman would get too much flak from his own people. When we arrived in Moree, Bill Lloyd—by this time in his early eighties—gave me quite a different story about Moree from that told by journalists over the years. The emancipation of Aborigines in the town since 1965 had, he told me, been truly remarkable. There were several successful Aboriginal families, like the Jenkinses, the Duncans, the Tighes, the Craigies and the Binns, who were important in sport and in other ways. While Aboriginal employment had suffered with the closing of the abattoirs, the cotton-growing industry employed many Aboriginal people and had, in effect, saved the town. Bob Brown’s brother was complaining—quite rightly, Lloyd thought—about the health risks of spraying the cotton. I also had a long conversation with Lyall Munro Snr, who stressed how well things were going ahead in Moree—Aboriginal people owned some businesses, were on the board of the bowling club, owned racehorses, were on the board of directors of the hospital and controlled the Police Boys’ Club. Alcohol and drugs were the biggest problem, but this was a problem they shared with the whites in the town. Lyall recalled a recent conversation in which he and other Murris in Moree had been discussing whether the old days or now were best. On the credit side for the 1960s had been more employment, less alcoholism, more kinship, no vandalism, no drugs, marriages lasted better, good mission schools. On the debit side was the fact that life was so controlled by the managers and the police and the law. The Freedom Ride, he said, had given a lot of people a big shock, an enormous cultural shock. The biggest was that the white supporters of Charles Perkins (the students) were educated people, people who were going to be powerful. After talking to Bill and Lyall, I visited the pool and artesian baths. While the latter were used mainly by middle-aged Europeans, children—both Aboriginal and white—were using the pool. As I swam around, I thought:


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‘This really has changed, and perhaps these kids are there as a result of the actions we took so long ago.’ In Lismore we met Tess and Vic Brill, who talked about the Aboriginal Advancement League days, and took us to Gunderimbah, which now had new houses and where we met some of the local Aboriginal people. Then we went on to Bowraville, which seemed to have the same intense, brooding, racist flavour it had had in 1965. Yet things had in fact changed. We went to a large concert and barbecue called ‘Building the Bridges’, organised by a combination of black and white organisations and described by the Guardian News as ‘a sincere attempt by both parties to promote greater friendship and understanding between Aboriginal and white people in the Nambucca Valley’. There were Aboriginal people there of all ages, and a lot of counter-cultural middle-class whites. The hall was decorated with red, black and yellow balloons, and everything was very warm and lively. When we went outside after the concert there were people all over the street, including on the centre strip, talking, drinking, having fun. In my diary the next morning, I asked myself: ‘Which was the real Bowraville, the tense racist town we had entered that day, or the town hosting the “Building the Bridges” concert that night, where black and white enjoyed themselves together, and where the Aborigines took the initiative and took over the town?’ During the 1990s, while I was researching this book, the Freedom Ride gradually returned to public consciousness. Peter Read’s biography of Charles Perkins appeared in 1990, and its lively and detailed account informed a new generation about the events of 1965. Rachel Perkins and Ned Landers’ film, ‘Freedom Ride’, was first screened on SBS in July 1993 and was a revelation for many. Charles’s return to public life after the charges of maladministration of the DAA were quashed also helped the fortunes of the Freedom Ride in public memory. Then, on the Freedom Ride’s thirtieth anniversary in February 1995, Jim Spigelman and Brian Aarons organised a reunion in Sydney. A barrage of media, including ABC radio, the 7.30 Report from ABC television, and teams from A Current Affair and SBS, came along. Charles spoke about the significance of the Freedom Ride—how we couldn’t do that particular thing again, but it was important at the time. Phillip Hall spoke, saying it changed his life; after that, Aboriginal people like himself could get into the bureaucracy and try to bring about change. Harry Hall was there, but refused to speak. Media coverage was substantial. ABC Radio broadcast Speaking Out on


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26 February 1995, which traced the history of the Freedom Ride and interviewed Charles and George Rose. George said the Freedom Ride was one of the best things that ever happened, but in the end nothing came of it and there was still no consultation with Aboriginal people in Walgett. There were several more radio programs in the ‘retracing’ genre that year. One was by Lorena Allam, of Radio National’s Indigenous culture program Awaye—the first made by an Aboriginal person, as far as I can tell. She interviewed Lyall Munro Snr, Bob Brown and many other Aboriginal residents of Moree. Lorena suggested that, while racial segregation had gone in Moree and other towns, the social and health problems remained. When Ginny Stein made a program for regional ABC radio that same year on what had happened since the Freedom Ride, she encountered some weariness with the whole subject. George Rose refused to be interviewed, as he was ‘sick of being interviewed about things that never changed’. Darce Cassidy’s program was re-broadcast by the Awaye program, and was aired again in 1997 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Referendum. The Freedom Ride began to be taught in schools at the upper primary level in 1997, in a unit entitled ‘People Power’ in the Discovering Democracy series. The unit investigated three popular movements in which citizens’ actions had achieved civil rights (the other two were the Eight-hour Day and the Equal Pay for Women campaigns). Placement of civil rights—and especially the Freedom Ride—on the curriculum, in the context of a push to expand the teaching of Civics in senior primary schools, stimulated a new interest in and knowledge of the event. Teachers were looking for accessible material, and I willingly accepted an invitation from Judy Aulich in March 1998 to speak to Grade 6 pupils at the local primary school, Lyneham Public School. I was extremely moved by their interest in what I had to say, and their questions, such as whether I had been scared, and how many girls were on the Freedom Ride. The teacher showed the Rachel Perkins film on video, and I had to point out which one of the students on the bus was me. I also read out sections of my diary. The entire class wrote letters to me afterwards, telling me how much they had enjoyed the talk and what they had learnt. Common themes were the fact there ‘were more boys than girls on the Freedom Ride’, ‘I never knew that Charles Perkins was a soccer player’, ‘I learned about Aborigines’ rights and everyone has the right to feel safe and go to the pool when they want’. One wrote: ‘I reckon that getting the confidence


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and then going out on a Freedom Ride is a pretty cool thing to do.’ Many commented on seeing me on the video. One girl wrote: ‘I enjoyed guessing who you were on the video then finding out who you were’, and another said: ‘I enjoyed seeing who you were on the video. I would have never known that that was you because you look so different to what you look like now.’ Many said they enjoyed ‘the part when I read the diary’. One girl wrote that she hoped ‘anyone who discriminates against Aboriginals gets what is coming to them!’ and that the main thing she had learnt was ‘that no matter how big the problem it can always be solved by people who care’. I wrote to the class thanking them for their wonderful letters. Journalists still use the Freedom Ride as a touchstone for reporting Aboriginal conditions in country towns, notably Moree. After a van was turned over and set alight in the southern part of town, and a crowd of about 200 pelted police and firemen with rocks and other missiles in January 1998, Malcolm Brown went there again for the Sydney Morning Herald, as he had done sixteen years earlier, to investigate. Some white residents were saying there had been too much latitude in law enforcement, while others thought ‘lawlessness among sections of the Aboriginal community has been stirred up by the aftermath of the Wik and Mabo High Court decisions’. Brown noted: The Moree spa baths, with water at 41 degrees bubbling from the bowels of the earth, have provoked other bubblings in the past, including an ugly confrontation when the Aboriginal-oriented ‘Freedom Riders’ came to Moree in early 1965, highlighting issues of racial discrimination in pool use. Now, although Aborigines have long been allowed into the pool, there is still bubbling discontent because so many Aboriginal children have been banned for varying periods from the pool, and move on to far less suitable waters . . . The Aborginal children go to the nearby Mehi River, a stream of varying depths littered with rocks, broken glass, abandoned shopping trolleys and tree roots. Yet there are many in Moree who regard its present and history a little differently. Aboriginal memory in Moree aims to stress both the extent of change and the seriousness of the problems that remain, and there are whites who do retain hope for the future. For example, Dick Estens, a


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cotton grower who chaired the Gwydir Valley Cotton Growers’ Aboriginal Employment Strategy that found many jobs for Aboriginal people in the area, is a member of the board of directors of ‘Reconciliation Australia’. The town held a commemoration of the Freedom Ride 35 years later, in February 2000. The Mayor of Moree Plains Shire Council, Mike Montgomery, welcomed Charles Perkins to the celebration, saying: ‘Stories can be told today, and we can listen and acknowledge history, the troubled times then and now and accept we’ve come a long way.’ Longtime Aboriginal residents Lyall Munro Snr and Mrs Pearl French also spoke, remembering a time when Aboriginal people were segregated on to missions and reserves on the edge of town, and excluded from the footpaths, shops, cafés, pubs, public toilets, the high school and the whites-only sections of the cinema. One of the Freedom Riders, Rick Collins, was there, joking that he would never forgive Charles for getting him into the Freedom Ride. Bill Ford was invited to the celebrations, and was deeply moved by the whole event. The former Freedom Riders in later years came to evaluate the Ride’s importance in a number of different ways. More than anything, it had drawn attention to the situation of Aborigines. When asked by the Joint Parliamentary Committee in June 1966 about the effects of the Freedom Ride, Charles had replied: The main objective of the trip was to create or stimulate awareness among the Australian public as to the actual situation concerning aboriginal people, or of the fact that there was discrimination existing in society. We wanted to help stimulate both the aborigine and the Europeans in respective towns to rethink the situation in which they are living. This is our objective, and I think that we did achieve this success . . . it was sensational, and it had its effect. Nine years later, his book had the same message, and fifteen years further on he told Stuart Rintoul: ‘I think it was a major turning-point, a catalyst in black–white relations in this country.’ The other Freedom Riders agree. Gary Williams thought it ‘upset the apple-cart’ for those who had been in power over Aboriginal people— the police, town councillors, the Welfare Board. Hall Greenland thought ‘the political effects were that it helped put race relations in this country on the map . . . What the Freedom Ride did was to remind us that there


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were problems here as well, and reminded us and reminded the whole society. So it did raise the profile of Aboriginal problems.’ Jim Spigelman said: ‘I think it was the first time that Aborigines were consistently frontpage news ever in Australia. So it did have the effect of dramatising the issues to a wider public. And that was its political effect.’ John Powles believed ‘it was an enormous publicity success, I mean I think it put Aboriginal affairs and the conditions of fringe dwellers in country towns on the front pages for some days and I recall it did force some kind of political response . . . I think our effort was one of the things that helped to push Aboriginal affairs to the forefront of political debate and discussion.’ For Wendy Golding: ‘My very strong feeling is that what the Freedom Ride did was put the whole matter—the whole Aboriginal issue—on the agenda. Up until then it just simply wasn’t an issue. People did not think about it—it was irrelevant.’ As Pat Healy put it: ‘Black civil rights in Australia—the Aboriginal people—were not front-page news. The Freedom Ride put it on the front page . . . The message that came across to ordinary suburban Australia was that we had rampant racism in 1965 in country New South Wales—of a form that I think most people didn’t realise was there.’ Some felt it had contributed to the success of the 1967 Referendum. Charles pulled no punches, as always, when he said: ‘The Referendum in 1967 was successful because of the Freedom Ride. That’s what gave the Referendum real meaning and influenced the number of people who voted in a positive way.’ John Powles: ‘It helped to create the climate that led on to the Referendum.’ Jim said: ‘I’m not saying there wouldn’t have been a Referendum without it, but it was one of the things which created the circumstances in which the Referendum was successful, and that obviously has ongoing effects.’ Barry Corr: ‘I still think that what we did contributed to the high percentage of the vote in the Referendum. If we did something to change the attitudes of white Anglo-Celtic Australians of that time, I’d be very content.’ Colin Bradford drew a similar conclusion: ‘The people that were on the Freedom Ride would have also been amongst those actively pushing for the Constitution to be changed and campaigning for that. I know I was and I think most of the others were too, so I guess the fact that we were enthusiastic in our compassion and we were protagonists for the Aboriginals probably influenced other people to do the same, and maybe it had an influence on the way that constitutional reform went.’


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Many felt that its main effect was to stimulate Aboriginal political activism. Charles told Stuart Rintoul: ‘I think it changed the psychology of Aboriginal people. They realised, hey, we don’t have to cop this shit. That was the biggest thing.’ Gary Williams thought the Freedom Ride ‘gave people a little glimmer of something different. Even if it did frighten some people, it widened things.’ Bob Gallagher said: ‘I think it has provided a spark and a bit of stimulus and so on so that Aborigines will go and do it for themselves . . . It’s got to be their commitment, they have to take it into their own hands, it has to be their reforms . . . So I think myself, that’s its place in history.’ Hall thought that ‘here and there, [it] encouraged local Aboriginal organisers and campaigners to keep going and to keep organising. So I think it was a positive event and a positive initiative that was taken.’ Darce Cassidy quoted Lyall Munro Jnr as saying ‘it gave hope and encouragement to those engaged in the often lonely daily grind.’ Darce went on: The bus trip itself was largely symbolic, but the follow-up work from SAFA activists, and more particularly from Aboriginal communities throughout the country, made significant advances. While the SAFA organisation fairly quickly faded, the struggle of the Aboriginal people escalated in the following years. The Freedom Ride helped generally in the development of a mature Aboriginal leadership. In 1965 white liberals dominated many organisations, but over the next few years the leadership changed. This of course was the result of a number of factors other than the bus trip, and there were leaders other than Charles developing around this time—both at the local level with people like Harry Hall and Ted Fields in Walgett, Lyall Munro in Moree and Chicka Dixon in Sydney. Brian Aarons agreed: ‘It was an event that wouldn’t happen in that way after about 1972, because from then on it was the Aboriginal people themselves acting on their own behalf and whites were very much there as assistants and so forth.’ For several of the Freedom Riders, it was not only Aboriginal activism generally, but the prominence it gave to Charles Perkins in particular, that made the Freedom Ride important. Jim remarked that the Freedom Ride ‘was of considerable significance in launching Charles’s career in the entire area. That may have been one of the more significant influences. He went


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on to do all sorts of things with all kinds of hats in the Aboriginal affairs area.’ Robyn Iredale retained her very high regard for Charles Perkins: ‘I felt very privileged to have been associated with the Ride I suppose afterwards, when I realised what I’d actually been involved in, and I was really pleased to have been able to have come in contact with Charlie and seen what he was like and the sort of things that drove him.’ Darce suggests that the Freedom Ride provided a model for political activism on other issues. He writes: The concept of a bus trip as a political strategy, and the use of the travelling direct democracy aspect as a way of building unity among a diverse group, and of coming up with appropriate reactions to developing situations was used in a number of other situations. Nine years later the Campaign Against Foreign Military Bases in Australia held the Long March and the Quick March to the US Naval Communications Base at North West Cape in Western Australia. Political scientist Sean Scalmer develops this argument: ‘The Freedom Ride had important consequences for the history of collective action in Australia. It demonstrated to local activists that dramatic actions used overseas—sit-ins, pickets, bus rides, colourful protests—could be equally successful when applied to Australian problems . . . In the aftermath of the SAFA tour, other actors began to take up these new, now lessunfamiliar political techniques.’ And indeed the notion of a Freedom Ride remains very much alive in Australian political culture. In protest against the detention of asylum seekers, a Freedom Ride was conducted to the Woomera Detention Centre on 21 September 2001. The leaflet advertising the ensuing public meeting was headed ‘FREEDOM RIDE’, and the text read in part: ‘In the tradition of the Freedom Rides of the 1960s there will be a solidarity tour travelling from Melbourne on September 21 to the Woomera Immigration Detention Centre in South Australia to protest against the imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers.’ Further Freedom Rides to Woomera were held in 2002. Yet some Freedom Riders felt that the impact was relatively limited. Aidan Foy thought: ‘All it did was put it on the agenda. It didn’t actually achieve anything lasting in itself.’ A number stressed that the effects of the Freedom Ride were, as Colin put it, ‘probably in the long term only minimal’. For Norm Mackay, it was a small event indeed. Compared with


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‘what happened in Montgomery, Alabama . . . our attempt was a bit Mickey Mouse really’. It brought ‘no earth-quaking changes’. He went on: ‘So as a part of Australian history it should be a comma or a semi-colon, not a chapter. If Ann’s getting a book out of this, well she’s getting it easy.’ So what do I think? I think a number of things. I think the Freedom Ride was a brief episode in a long history of Aboriginal people fighting for their rights, and there are many profound issues it did not address, though its existence sometimes helped prompt others to do so. These included issues such as land rights, native title, child removal, sovereignty and a treaty, to name a few that have created so much anxiety over recent years. It had no clear position on the rights and wrongs of assimilation, being on the one hand supportive of Aboriginal initiative and freedom of choice, and on the other concentrating its attention on Aboriginal admission to the benefits of white society. It by no means brought an end to the problems facing Aboriginal people; indeed, this retelling of the Freedom Ride story reminds us of their longevity, persistence and depth. I also think that the Freedom Ride was nevertheless, as Charles suggested, a turning point in race relations in Australia. It was one of those transitional moments in Australian history when one era fades and another takes its place. More clearly than any other event, the Freedom Ride signified the shift from the Cold War to the ‘Sixties’. This was the beginning of the end of the Cold War period in Australian political culture, with its predominant certainties about the virtues of Australian society as a member of the ‘free world’ and its small critical Left operating cautiously and quietly in a hostile environment. With their willingness to confront authorities in mayoral offices, election meetings, swimming pools and elsewhere, the SAFA students were a harbinger of the New Left and the student revolts of the second half of the 1960s. They brought to Australia a sense of politics as informed by folk songs, visual displays and theatricality. There was something very modern and media-savvy about the Freedom Ride, so conscious were the students from the beginning of the power and importance of the mass media. For them the media were not all-powerful, but something to be captured and used for public good. With this media awareness came a self-consciousness about recording their actions; between them, the students produced some enduring film images, recorded sound and written accounts of their own. The Freedom Ride was both a local and an international event. Some


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aspects were distinctly Australian. The students’ focus on swimming pools in Moree and Kempsey and picture theatres and hotels in Walgett and Bowraville bespoke an interest in the democratic egalitarianism of public leisure spaces, and a genuine immersion in the easy enjoyment of life that such spaces promised. In developing the ideas of non-violent direct action, and adopting ideas of confrontation from the American civil rights movement, the students also brought something new to Australian politics. They listened to and learned from the American civil rights movement, especially Martin Luther King’s idea of ‘creative tension’, and adapted what they found to their specific situation. With their ethic of non-violence and passive resistance, they created a space that was enabling for the women as well as the men, a space that was lost in the following years when so many radical activists came to favour violent confrontation and had then to be regained and enlarged by a revitalised feminism. Above all, the students’ actions—and especially Charles’s leadership of those actions—became a symbol of protest for Aboriginal people, and a benchmark against which to measure Aboriginal hopes and realities. The Freedom Ride held out the promise that nothing could be quite the same again.


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Without exception, all of us white students, all at that time aged about 19 or 20, learnt an awful lot. I mean it was the sort of thing that I think you can count yourself lucky for having been through, an experience that most people wouldn’t have had . . . It’s the sort of thing that I think stays with you in a variety of tangible and intangible ways, and sort of affects and influences you. Brian Aarons, interview 1994

W

hat happened to all these people? How did the Freedom Ride influence them in later life? How did the Aboriginal activists get on and to what extent did the students and their supporters remain interested in the question of Aboriginal rights? Let’s have a brief peek into their later lives. Charles went on to the national stage of Aboriginal politics and policy, and there is space to mention only a few of his achievements here. His story has been well told by Peter Read in Charles Perkins: A Biography. After his graduation in 1966, he worked for several years as the manager of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. During this period he turned to the ideas of Black Power, began quoting not so much Martin Luther King as Malcolm X, and warned of the dangers of violence if bodies like the Foundation did not succeed. He also became much more fervently anticommunist than before, and fought what he considered was the undue 294


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influence of communists in FCAATSI. In 1969, he left Sydney for a position at the Council of Aboriginal Affairs, and joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs when it was created in 1973. He became its deputy secretary in 1979, before resigning in 1980 to take up the position of chair of the newly created Aboriginal Development Commission. He returned to the Department in 1984, now as its secretary, the highest-ranking position achieved by an Aboriginal person. In all these positions, Charles retained the role of public commentator and conscience on Aboriginal issues, and at times got into trouble for publicly criticising superior departmental officers and ministers. A charge of maladministration (later quashed) led to his resignation from the public service in 1988. After this bruising experience, he returned to his birthplace in Central Australia, where he was initiated. He continued to speak publicly on Aboriginal issues, becoming chair of the Arrernte Council of Central Australia (1991–94), and being nominated by the National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee as Aboriginal of the Year in 1993. He was elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Commissioner for the Northern Territory–Central in late 1993, and its deputy chair in 1994. He left it in 1995 to become a consultant to the Australian Sports Commission, mentoring Aboriginal athletes, but returned in 1999 as ATSIC Commissioner for Sydney. During the 1990s Charles became very bitter about many of the people and directions in Aboriginal politics, attacking the federal government’s Council for Reconciliation as irrelevant, a ‘sell out’ and a product of the ‘lunatic Left’ when it was announced in 1991. His oratorical skills failed him in a television confrontation with Pauline Hanson in September 1996 in which he came over as abusive and unconvincing. His call to Aborigines to protest during the Olympics in 2000, with the words ‘burn, baby, burn’, was widely condemned, and out of touch with most Aboriginal sentiment, which favoured support for Cathy Freeman and other Aboriginal athletes at the Olympics. When he died on 18 October 2000, after years of ill-health following kidney failure in 1969 and a kidney transplant in 1972, there was a mixture of fulsome praise and some critical comment. The Australian’s editorial, although headed ‘Perkins’s Fight Enriches Us All’ and praising his role in the Freedom Rides, said he had lost much of his political savvy in recent years and lost his status as an Aboriginal leader. It mentioned that ‘the most damaging claims involved allegations that he brokered deals with mining companies then


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took a slice of the resulting Aboriginal profits. Some condemned him for using his position within the Aboriginal community to advance his personal business dealings.’ On the whole, though, the praise far outweighed the criticism. A state funeral was held in his honour, a ceremony normally reserved for governors, premiers and ministers. Charles’s death made headlines around the country. The Sydney Morning Herald’s front-page story was headed ‘A Freedom Rider’s Journey Ends’. Inside was a full-page life history in which the Freedom Ride was prominent. The obituaries and public comments revealed strong appreciation of Charles’s originality, dedication and achievement. Many of them focused on the Freedom Ride. Bob Carr, the Premier of New South Wales, said: When he stood up in country towns in 1965 and said: ‘Aboriginal people are being discriminated against’, it was a relatively lonely cause . . . let’s acknowledge the Charlie Perkins, the young man, the footballer who went to university . . . [who] took a stand for the rights of Australian Aborigines before the cause had gathered much momentum. Evelyn Scott, chairperson of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, said ‘the Freedom Ride changed Australia’s comfortable self-image and played a part in building the pressure to hold the historic 1967 Referendum’. Isobelle Coe, of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, said the Freedom Rides were still important to many young Aboriginal people. Some made direct comparisons, as they had always done, with Martin Luther King. Gatjil Djerrkura, former ATSIC chairman, commented: ‘His greatest legacy I would see somewhat similar to Martin Luther King, I would say in comparison. Because I think, that what his legacy was all about was a freedom fighter.’ John Pilger, in the Guardian in the United Kingdom, drew a different analogy, calling him ‘Australia’s Mandela’. The state funeral was held at Sydney Town Hall at 11.00 a.m. on Wednesday, 25 October, a gigantic Aboriginal flag draping the stage. The city’s flags flew at half-mast as about 2500 people packed the Town Hall and more than 1000 listened outside. Mourners included, the Herald reported, ‘the Governor General, Sir William Deane, two Federal ministers, Senator Herron and Mr Ruddock, the Federal Opposition leader, Mr Beazley, numerous state parliamentarians, eight Federal MPs—and


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another Aboriginal hero, Cathy Freeman’. Indigenous leaders attending included Geoff Clark, Evelyn Scott, Lowitja O’Donoghue, Tony Mundine and Aden Ridgeway. At least eight of the Freedom Riders attended—Alan Outhred, Alex Mills, Bob Gallagher, Brian Aarons, Hall Greenland, Jim Spigelman, Pat Healy and Warwick Richards. Jim gave a moving tribute, recalling the Freedom Ride and describing it as ‘the emergence for the first time in our history of an Aborigine with a clear leadership role’. The Freedom Ride, he said, was the event ‘which first brought him to the forefront of national attention, a prominence which by force of his character, capacity and achievements, he would never relinquish. There were numerous occasions on the Freedom Ride when Charlie displayed the intelligence, the debating skill, the determination, the passion and the anger which would mark his life.’ The family invited mourners to join a public walk to a wake to be held at Bennelong Point, and 2000 people did so. Many carried pictures of Charles Perkins as they followed his coffin to the Opera House, and many hands reached out to touch the hearse. I was not there; my mother had died after a heart-wrenching six-month illness less than four weeks before, and an old friend had died suddenly nine days after that. I could not face another funeral just then. But my thoughts were with Charles that day, and his death did lead me to reflect on the Freedom Ride in a new way. I realised how well it was now remembered, and how important it had been for the growth of Aboriginal leadership, initially in the figure of Charles himself, later joined by others. Soon afterwards I wrote an obituary for the journal Aboriginal History, in which I said that ‘Charles Perkins had a full and active life fighting for Aboriginal rights, and with his passing we have lost one of the most courageous and forthright Aboriginal activists this country has so far seen. I am glad to have known him, and very sad that he is no longer around to provoke, irritate, and inspire us all.’ A year after Charles’s death, the first Charles Perkins Memorial Oration was held at the University of Sydney, the speaker Aboriginal lawyer and leader Noel Pearson, who argued for zero tolerance of alcohol and drug abuse in Aboriginal communities and the dismantling of the ‘passive welfare paradigm’. Gary Williams abandoned his studies but not his political activism. He continued to live in Sydney for some years, participating in the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service, and the Tent Embassy. He worked for some years as a


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judge’s tipstaff in Sydney, and in the late seventies as a driver at Papunya in the Northern Territory, and then for the newly formed Central Australian Lands Council. In the 1990s he returned home. ‘I realised,’ he told me, ‘how my thought patterns are still in the Nambucca Valley.’ Through the Community Development Employment Project scheme, he teaches the Gumbayggirr language to children and adults. He also helped establish the Goori Broadcasters of Radio Nambucca, and broadcasts a program called Goori Time, which plays music and news for about two hours each Friday. He seems to have found a nice balance between local commitment and involvement, and those connections to a wider world that began when he moved to Sydney as a 17-year-old almost 40 years earlier. Jim Spigelman became just as well known as Charles. He was Gough Whitlam’s principal private secretary when Whitlam was Prime Minister between 1972 and 1975, and then head of the short-lived Department of the Media in 1975. When the Whitlam government fell, he went overseas for several years, and wrote a book jointly with Peter Pringle on nuclear energy, called The Nuclear Barons, published in New York in 1981. He married and returned to the law in 1979. When he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1998, newspaper profiles of him frequently mentioned his Freedom Ride participation. A later profile by Bernard Lagan on 17 June 2000 did too, also noting that Jim had participated in the walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Jim told the students at Sydney Grammar School, in an address in 1998, that he still considered his involvement in the Freedom Ride at the age of 19 to be the most important thing he had ever done. Tom Roper was one of those who remained heavily involved in Aboriginal issues. He was state director of FCAATSI for a while in the late 1960s, and became an adviser to Gordon Bryant as Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Whitlam government. In that role, he strongly advocated the introduction of bilingual education in the Northern Territory: ‘In that three months we held the first meeting of Aboriginal elders to actually tell the Northern Territory administration what they wanted for their kids, rather than what this very Anglo-Saxon administration wanted . . . We funded for the first time, or first significant time, health and education programs by the states.’ Later, he entered politics himself, becoming Aboriginal Affairs Minister in the Victorian Labor government from 1987


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until he became Treasurer in 1989. He kept an interest in Aboriginal issues, and as a member of the Labor Party in Victoria tried to persuade the Commonwealth government ‘before during and after Mabo that in terms of Aboriginal communities like here, you needed national Aboriginal land rights legislation, that Mabo would not be adequate for the kind of dispossessed communities that we saw in New South Wales in the 1960s and continue to exist all over the country.’ Following his retirement, after 21 years in the Victorian Parliament, half as a minister, Tom focused on environmental issues, especially climate change, and lived for several years in Ottawa and London. Three of the Freedom Riders—Chris Page, Aidan Foy and John Powles—became doctors. Aidan was involved in the establishment of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Newcastle and also gave evidence to an inquest in Wilcannia concerning Aboriginal deaths, and to the Black Deaths in Custody Royal Commission. He became a specialist on alcohol addiction, and director of Drug and Alcohol Services at the Royal Newcastle Hospital. In 1994, he remained both supportive of and concerned by some of the changes in Aboriginal leadership: There’s still reluctance on the part of some Aboriginal leaders to accept responsibility where they need to, and I find that frustrating. I’m probably one of the few people in the country who is expert in the medical management of alcoholism and that is a significant problem for Aboriginal people, but they need to tell me if they want my help what it is they want. If Charlie were to say to me, ‘Aidan, we need this and this and this, and we would like you to do this’, I would do it. But I’m not hearing that and that upsets me . . . there are groups who hold on to their injustice as if they don’t want to let go of it. They’re almost addicted to their sense of injustice that they wish to express rather than look at the way we can fix this together. We can. Aidan thought the positive sides of change since 1965 had outweighed the negative ones. ‘There’s been some fantastic things happen,’ he remarked. The Mabo legislation, he thought in 1994, was ‘just light years ahead of the sort of issues we were dealing with 30 years ago’. He also welcomed the fact that ‘relations between the two communities, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, have actually improved; after all, I’ve got Aboriginal colleagues now, I didn’t have them before and that sort of thing has


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got much better’. Finally, says Aidan, ‘I’ve gone back to where I started in the sort of Catholic social justice movement. I subscribe to Eureka Street. I sort of take a politically radical but socially conservative view of the world, which is probably pretty much as I did at the beginning.’ John Powles, like many of the others, was active in the anti-war movement, protesting against Australian involvement in the American war in Vietnam. ‘I remember I was one of the people who disrupted the visit of LBJ to Sydney. I was the person whom the Premier said to: “Drive over the bastard.” We ran out on the road between the motorcade— between the motorcycles and the first car, which included the Premier and the police chief. So that was my second arrest for a demonstration.’ He finished his degree in Medicine, and then in 1968 when he was a junior resident doctor at Canterbury Memorial District Hospital in the western suburbs of Sydney he was involved in a demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1969 he went to the University of New South Wales to study Sociology, and a year later married and went to England, where he lived for four years until he returned to Australia, to teach at the Department of Preventive Medicine at Monash Medical School for the next sixteen years. During the 1980s, when Tom Roper was Minister of Health in the Victorian Labor government, John was his adviser, ‘and we did a number of things in the area of food and nutrition policy and general prevention policy’. In 1990, he left Australia again, and took up an academic position at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge, as well as working in the National Health Service in Britain and also in a European Community-funded project in Bulgaria. Throughout this full and varied career, John continued to care a lot about racial issues. Interviewed in 1994, he said: ‘I was very affected by the changes in South Africa this year. That really affected me a lot emotionally.’ Louise Higham dropped out of her medical degree and transferred to Arts. After graduation, she went to England, and then Spain, where she married and had two children. By the late 1990s, she was working as director of arts and literature programs in a cultural organisation in Spain. She now feels rather out of touch with life in Australia. ‘Changes in Australia and Spain,’ she writes, ‘although of different natures, have been equally profound in both countries, but I haven’t been there to live through and witness them day by day, so to that degree I am a foreigner. One inevitably pays more attention to what is happening on one’s own


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doorstep—the repairs of the British nuclear submarine in Gibraltar Bay, ETA assassinations and threats and the coming Basque elections—or nearby—Israeli/Palestinian confrontation in the occupied territories— than day-to-day events further away.’ Several of the Freedom Riders were studying to be teachers. Beth Hansen took up her first teaching job at Chester Hill High School, and became involved not only in Vietnam demonstrations, but also in the Teachers’ Federation, being elected to its council for a couple of years. She married Eric Earley and travelled through Asia for a year, followed by two years of suburbia in Homebush, ‘feeling very lonely and isolated’. In 1974 Beth and Eric went up to Papua New Guinea with two small children. They lived for two years in Goroka, had another baby and then lived for another two years at ‘a little isolated rural place called Palmalmal, on East New Britain, about an hour’s flight south from Rabaul, no road access’. The school was on an old coconut plantation. ‘We had to feed them, clear the jungle, and clear part of the plantation which had all sorts of war debris on it, put in gardens . . . They had a school council that ran that school in Pidgin English. These were bushies, and they knew what education was about, they knew what they wanted for their kids. It was just a fantastic experience, the whole four years, but especially the last two.’ When Beth went to live in Lismore in 1979, she became involved in adult education. She regained contact with Aboriginal issues when she was appointed to the council of the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education in 1981. Hall Greenland was editor of Honi Soit in 1966, graduated from university, went to Europe and returned to Australia in the late 1960s. He worked as a schoolteacher for six or seven years and on and off as a journalist after that. He remained politically active, becoming involved with the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, and remained in the Labor Party until 1984. He was involved in Green politics for a while, went on land rights support demonstrations for Aborigines, and was especially involved in inner city local politics. He wrote Red Hot, a lively and readable book about one of his mentors, Nick Origlass, in 1998. We last saw Robyn Iredale leaving the Freedom Ride after Moree, to attend to her very ill mother. Her mother died two months later. She finished her Honours year, writing her Geography thesis on Aboriginal rural–urban migration, and completed her Diploma of Education. Later, she married and taught at Cheltenham Girls’ High School where she


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wrote the first Asian Social Studies syllabus for use in schools in New South Wales. She went overseas, first travelling for a year and then teaching in Canada for three years. Robyn’s life underwent a major change when she enrolled in a Master’s degree in Population and Development at Macquarie University, separated from her husband and completed her Master ’s thesis on occupational adjustment of IndoChinese in the Australian labour market. ‘I’d sort of decided by then that I couldn’t work in Aboriginal research because I basically felt you had to be an Aborigine.’ She enrolled in a PhD in the School of Economic and Financial Studies, also at Macquarie, and completed a thesis on the recognition of overseas qualifications. She became a policy officer in employment at the New South Wales Ethnic Affairs Commission and later worked on the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, supervising research projects or policy documents on a variety of issues: ‘We did the National Inquiry into Racist Violence while I was there.’ Robyn moved to Wollongong in 1990, to take up a research position at the university’s Centre for Multicultural Studies. Another of the Freedom Riders to become a teacher, and one of the few to remain in teaching, was Alex Mills. He abandoned his theological studies, did a Diploma of Education instead and in the middle of 1967 started as a teacher-librarian at Taree High School, where he has been ever since. He married in 1972. ‘After a couple of years I started getting involved with the Aboriginal scene in Taree and had an involvement in that for about fifteen to twenty years’. Alex worked with Ella Simon and others in the Purfleet community, for example taking up the issue of inservice courses for teachers and teacher-librarians relating to Aboriginal education. He also worked with a Catholic priest, Barry Tunks, in a group called ‘Black and White Unity’, which met every month for a while. ‘My involvement’s just sort of been bits and pieces that crop up along the way,’ he said in 1994. ‘. . . the awareness of it came from that bus ride . . . I haven’t really been involved with things for quite a few years now. I’ve got involved in other things since then, because the Aboriginal people are involved and they’re doing things the way they’d like to see things happen.’ Barry Corr taught for two years at Fairfield Boys’ High School and for three at Ashcroft High in Green Valley. ‘From there I got married, got divorced, went to Strathfield South, left there in ’78, went to Bidwell in ’79 which is in Mount Druitt.’ It was there that he got ‘re-involved’


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in Aboriginal issues: ‘Aboriginal education was the specific area I got involved in and I’ve been involved with that ever since.’ In 1990, Barry became the Aboriginal education Consultant for the mid-west Region. His role was ‘everything to do with Aboriginal education in the mid-west region. It’s the education of Aboriginal children and it’s also Aboriginal education in the sense of Aboriginal studies and Aboriginal perspectives. So I develop resources for schools, I go to an awful lot of conferences, I’m responsible for the development of teachers—all teachers, I’m responsible for the professional development of Aboriginal staff in the region, and for a committee which advises on Aboriginal education in the region.’ Since the Freedom Ride, he reflected in 1994, ‘I think this has been, you know, professionally it’s been the happiest time of my life, you know, makes me feel I’m doing something. Doing what I want to do, where I belong.’ Colin Bradford was one of several Freedom Riders who became deeply involved in the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, becoming a member of the steering committee of the Vietnam Action Campaign and being one of the first to burn his draft card. When he graduated, he married at the age of 20 and settled down into suburban life with four children. He became a Maths teacher, and has remained one ever since in the Parramatta region of Sydney. The big change in Colin’s life was his conversion to Christianity, influenced by his wife Cathy. Cathy died from a heart attack, and he later remarried. Colin told me that ‘apart from being involved as a Teachers’ Federation representative at my school for a few years, I haven’t had any sort of political involvement at all since then . . . I still have a compassion for the Aboriginal people. In fact at the moment I’m organising with a Pastor Bill Bird, who’s an Aboriginal pastor, to bring a group of Aboriginals to our church as part of the Reconciliation process.’ He reflects that ‘what led me into left-wing politics was compassion for people, particularly the underprivileged, the outcasts of society, and that still comes out in my life as a Christian. I go into Parramatta Prison to talk to people there, so I’m still involved at a different level with the outcasts of society . . . I’m still a political activist in a sense, but I don’t see it through political parties now but through offering Jesus Christ to people as a way of changing within.’ Warwick Richards took almost the reverse trajectory. He had been involved in the Students’ Christian Movement, but after the Freedom Ride his politics turned more to the Left: ‘I got called up in 1967 and through that experience I became involved in the anti-war movement,


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I was a conscientious objector, went to court and involved in a whole lot of anti-war activity.’ He joined the Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament, and became a member of its committee for a number of years. After he graduated with a BA DipEd in 1967, he was sent for his first teaching job to Dapto High School, becoming involved in the Teachers’ Federation and the Labor Party. After a few years, he gave up teaching, returned to university and studied Government and Economics. He married and became the father of triplets, all girls, and he now manages a small consultancy business from Austinmer near Wollongong. Machteld Hali became a printmaker. She practised woodblock printing on fabric in the 1960s, and subsequently followed a career as a studio potter, systems analyst, librarian, and teacher of Art, Drama and English. She eventually became a leading printmaker in the vibrant artistic community on the New South Wales south coast, known especially for her use of the collograph process. She has had solo and group exhibitions, locally and overseas, and conducts printmaking classes in her studio as well as popular weekend workshops. In her work, she has been reclaiming both the Indonesian and Dutch parts of her heritage, somewhat subdued in the assimilationist atmosphere in which she grew up. Owen Westcott did not stay in teaching either. He finished his Bachelor of Arts degree and became an English teacher for a while, until he too developed new interests. He returned to university, gained a Science degree, and worked for ten years in scientific research. In the late 1980s, he ‘got involved in the AIDS epidemic, by way of working in a needle exchange’ and when interviewed in 1994 was running one of the largest of Sydney’s needle exchanges. As he put it, ‘the moral fervour is still there. See it’s the Catholic effect, you can’t get away from it.’ The program he managed covered the central Sydney health area, including Redfern, and he was responsible for ensuring that AIDS prevention services like the needle exchange program were readily accessible to Aboriginal residents. ‘So personally it means that it’s sort of like coming full circle. Well, I’m having much more to do with Aboriginal people than I ever did in those days. My involvement then was you know really very fleeting.’ Owen’s work led him back into contact with Marie Peters, who had been arrested with him in Walgett at the cinema demonstration in August 1965. As he remembers it, ‘one of the agencies that we were dealing with was called the Aboriginal Health Service which is in George St, Redfern’. His name was written on


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the health service’s white board, and was seen by Marie, a teacher’s aide working at Redfern Primary School across the road: She recognised me as the person that she’d gone to the pictures with 25 years previously . . . This was the big lesson for me though. Because of that connection being made, she then told the people there what had happened in 1965 and the sort of cooperation we then got from this agency was totally different from anything we ever got from anyone else . . . one of the lessons I’ve learnt from working with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal organisations, is that it takes a lot of time to develop that sort of trust and acceptance and of course why wouldn’t it be when you think about everything that’s happened. This was like an incredible circuit breaker. It brought twenty years of history into our relationship and enabled us to develop something that’s turned out since to be very constructive. And I never would have guessed that what I was doing in 1965 was going to help me in 1989. Pat Healy was yet another Freedom Rider to become involved in health services. She completed her degree, worked in health education, married Brian Aarons and had two children. She also remained a political activist: I joined the Communist Party not long after I returned from the Freedom Ride. And I think it certainly strengthened my resolve to become politically active, and I’ve been politically active ever since. Some time after that in the Aboriginal movement, but subsequently in a number of other movements, including the anti-war movement and support for the Gurindji land rights campaign—after the late ’60s the women’s movement particularly. Then when I had my kids becoming involved in local politics, school politics. You sort of do things closer to home when you’ve got kids. She remained in the Communist Party until it ceased to exist in 1991. She has continued to work in the health area—particularly in occupational health and safety and on consumer health issues. In the late 1990s she started a PhD thesis in Sociology at ANU. After graduation at the end of 1965, Sue Johnston went on to complete an MA in Aboriginal history, one of the first people to do so. Her


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thesis focused on government policy in New South Wales 1880–1909, and is still valuable today. In the early 1970s, she travelled extensively in Asia, Europe and Africa. On her return to Australia she became involved in Buddhism, ‘Tibetans particularly’; she also returned to historical research, becoming the Research Librarian at the Royal Australian Historical Society in Sydney. She wrote a couple of history textbooks, which were in fact collections of historical documents for school and university use, including We Came to Australia in 1980, on immigration, and Aboriginal Civilisation in 1981. From the mid-1980s, she was the Local Studies Librarian at Hornsby Public Library. The Science students went their different ways too. Alan Outhred became very involved in left-wing politics after the Freedom Ride. He became a leading figure in the Sydney University Vietnam Action Committee, formed in January 1966. He also: joined the Aboriginal land rights movements, particularly the uprising at Wave Hill with the Gurindjis. We had campaigns around the supermarkets for all the products of Vesteys’ various multi-national companies—like going into the supermarket and taking all their things off the shelves and putting them into trolleys and wheeling them up to the checkout and leaving them there, saying, ‘I don’t actually want any of this thank you very much’. So that created a bit of disturbance, again drawing public attention to the Gurindjis—that what was once their land had been just taken over by this British baron. He joined the Labor Party for a while and later the Communist Party, ‘of which I was a member up until not long before its demise’. Alan completed a PhD in Cosmic Ray Physics at the University of Sydney in 1972. Somewhat disillusioned with the value and objectivity of physics, and feeling that he’d ‘spent more than ten years at university and seen all my friends go off on their trips around the world and go and work in other countries and see a bit of the world’, he left Australia to do something new. He was appointed a lecturer at the Haile Selassi I University in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, arriving just as Emperor Haile Selassi I was being overthrown. The university was closed down fifteen months after he arrived, and he returned to Australia. By the 1990s, he was back in the Labor Party, in the Summer Hill branch, though ‘I can’t say I’m politically active now’. He drifted into the computing arena and at the time of inter-


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view in 1994 worked for the Southern Sydney Area Health Service as their computer manager. Norm McKay finished his degree in Biology and he too went on to complete a PhD, in his case in Biology at the University of Sydney. His interests shifted strongly to environmental issues, and he took up a research position looking at heavy metal pollution in fish ‘because I’d been appalled by what happened at Mitamata in Japan where people started to suffer mercury poisoning by eating fish polluted with mercury’. He was involved in a battle to save the rainforest at Terania Creek near Lismore, and has remained an interested bystander on Aboriginal issues: I feel diffident about being involved because I think that what’s happened over the last decade or so is that there’s been a new generation of young Aboriginal leaders spawned and they’re highly skilled orators—as we’ve seen over Mabo for example. They’ve been able to articulate what Aboriginal needs are . . . we really have to let Aboriginal people get their own act together and facilitate it by simply voting for or lobbying with politicians who seem to be doing the right sort of thing. Brian Aarons completed his Honours degree in Physics, taught Physics at university, then switched to Sociology, starting a PhD. He continued to be involved in social movements around Aboriginal rights (including the Save the Gurindji Campaign), environmental issues, and against the Vietnam War, and was active in the Communist Party. He married Pat Healy and travelled with her for eight months through South-East Asia and Europe. Returning to Australia in November 1975 in the midst of ‘the Dismissal’ events, he was asked to work for the Communist Party during the election campaign. Shortly after, he decided to abandon the PhD and work outside the university as a publicist, writer and organiser for social causes—among other things, writing and editing for Australian Left Review and the Communist Party’s weekly paper, the Tribune. In the early 1970s Brian became interested in environmental issues, working with Green Bans leader Jack Mundey and getting involved in the Movement Against Uranium Mining of the late 1970s and early 1980s. By then he was arguing that the Left needed new forms of organisation and to rethink its ideas. ‘I gave a paper to the CPA Executive in 1981 advocating that the party change its name, which didn’t get majority support, I have to say’—


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though later it did. In 1993 Brian and Pat moved to Canberra where Brian worked as the Communications Director for the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation until its work ended in December 2000. He continues to work for its successor body, Reconciliation Australia. Another Freedom Rider to change direction was Bob Gallagher, who graduated in Engineering in 1967. After working for a year in Australia as an engineer, he married Ashley Leyden, whom he’d met through the Labour Club, and in 1969 they went to England, where Bob worked as an engineer for a year or two then completed a Master’s degree in Business Administration at City University in London. In 1972 they returned to Australia and joined Ashley’s family’s business, Peter Leyden Publishing, which they later owned after Peter Leyden died in 1978. Bob explained that it was an educational business specialising in primary school teaching resources. Some of the publications have been in Aboriginal Studies, such as a series of flash cards on ‘Aboriginal Australia A to Z’, which involved negotiating with Aboriginal advisers on the cultural perspective, who wanted particular things, such as ‘I for invasion’. Wendy Golding finished university, and then travelled overseas and lived in Canada. When she returned she ‘got into the advertising industry more or less by accident’. In the early 1990s, she set up a committee on women in advertising, which, she said in 1994, ‘will be the first time that women’s views will have had a chance to express themselves officially in a formal way through the advertising industry, and looking at issues like portrayal of women in advertising and also the glass ceiling, which is fairly conspicuously present in the advertising industry’. She also set up an informal group of people who were interested in ethics in the advertising industry. She did not continue her involvement with Aboriginal rights, except that she became close friends with Fred Hollows and his family. ‘There were always Aborigines at Fred’s place. And so we had contact with Aborigines there, I mean just on an ordinary social level, not so much on a political level . . . Gary Foley used to go there regularly . . . Good people, very active.’ Darce Cassidy was transferred to Melbourne by the ABC in September 1966, and enrolled at Monash University in 1967. He became editor of Print, the Monash Labour Club’s duplicated newsletter (motto: ‘Power grows out of the barrel of a gestetner’). He had some contact with Bruce McGuinness and others at the Aborigines Advancement League, but was most preoccupied with the anti-war movement. After a year in


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Canberra, he returned to Melbourne, where he became involved in a range of Left and liberal activities, many of them concerned with the media. He was also involved in the Worker–Student Alliance in Victoria in the 1970s and the Campaign Against Foreign Military Bases in the 1980s. After an incident in the 1970s in which he was described in the Senate by Vince Gair and Frank McManus as a ‘terrorist’ working for the ABC, Darce spent much of the 1970s in ‘the ABC version of Siberia’. Following the changes to the ABC board in 1983 he was admitted back into ABC ‘polite society’, becoming state manager in South Australia between 1989 and 1997. When he turned 55 in 1997, he left the ABC and worked as a consultant on computer communications. Though Darce was one of SAFA’s most active members during the two years after the Freedom Ride, he has not remained quite as involved in Aboriginal issues as some of the others. ‘Apart from writing a few articles, giving a few papers, and a few guest lectures (I still do one on the Freedom Ride for Rob Foster at the Adelaide University History Department each year),’ he wrote to me, ‘I have had no further direct involvement in Aboriginal affairs, apart from the normal things of signing the Sorry Book and taking part in some of the Reconciliation walks.’ Judith Rich went on to a career in journalism and public relations. On her return from the Freedom Ride, the Daily Telegraph hired her as a regular reporter. Later, she worked as a journalist in London for five years, before returning to Australia and working as a promotions manager for Harry M. Miller. A spiritual quest led her to the Himalayas and elsewhere in Asia before settling down in the United States for sixteen years. There, in addition to working in journalism and public relations, she became very involved in the Tibetan cause. On her return to Australia, where she worked in public relations for the Australian Tourist Commission, the Film Finance Corporation and Greenpeace, she assisted the Dalai Lama’s visits to Australia in 1992 and 1996. She returned to her early interest in Aboriginal issues, this time trying to come to terms with Indigenous spirituality. She has, she says, ‘been impressed by what Aboriginal people have had to teach us, and the way they have been opening up their spiritual knowledge to us’. Some of the Freedom Riders did not retain any particular interest in Aboriginal issues. David Pepper finished university, went travelling, and didn’t return to Australia for ten years, until he was in his thirties. He lived in Laos in South-East Asia during the Vietnam War, and when he


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came back found there had been quite a revolution in ideas and attitudes. He settled down, had a family, and for some years managed a hardware store in Annandale in Sydney. Derek Molloy finished his Arts degree and a Law degree, went overseas for a few years, including to Africa, and then returned to Australia, where he has practised as a lawyer ever since. And what of some of the other people in this story? Harry Hall remained president of the Aborigines Progressive Association from 1965 to 1973, and was the first Walgett member of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council. He continued to be a leading figure in Aboriginal activism in the town and region, highly respected by Aboriginal people and others. Lyall Munro Snr became a Regional Chair of ATSIC and continues to be a leading figure in Moree. Lyall Munro Jnr became director of the Metropolitan Lands Council in Sydney. Ted Fields remains in Walgett and has been closely involved in its local languagemaintenance program. Chicka Dixon became a leader in Aboriginal politics in Sydney in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was in the forefront of the Tent Embassy of 1972, and became an active and effective chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board. Ann Holten, now known as Andrea Douglas, had three children, her first when she was 17, a year or so after the Freedom Ride. She was pleased, she told me in 2002, that when she first held him in her arms, they were in the ordinary part of the hospital, and not confined to the verandah any more. After her marriage she moved to Kempsey, and dedicated her life for some years to her children. The family lived on the mission and she sent her children to the Catholic school, where she worked as a cleaner to help pay the school fees. She taught her children not to feel intimidated, and helped them to build self-esteem. All three have become or are studying to be teachers. She now coordinates the Early Childhood Centre in Kempsey, and as I finish this book is in her final year of a Bachelor of Teaching (Early Childhood) at Macquarie University. She is, she says, ‘completing a dream’. Bill Lloyd became quite friendly with Charles, who came to Moree on DAA business several times. Lloyd told me in 1991: ‘When I heard Charlie was very ill with kidney problems, I rang him, and later Charlie thanked me warmly and said he really appreciated it.’ A year or two after the Freedom Ride, Bob Brown married, had children and some years later left Moree for Port Macquarie. He never received much credit for his role in the Freedom Ride, until he figured in Rachel Perkins and Ned Landers’s


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film made in 1993, in a memorable scene at the end where he and Charles sit by the pool, and Bob says, ‘They even let me in now’. Bill Ford continued as an academic at the University of New South Wales until his retirement. He has remained in contact with his American friend Bob Singleton, the Freedom Rider, ever since. Ted Noffs continued to run the Wayside Chapel, known especially for its support for drug rehabilitation, until he became ill in 1986 (he died in 1995). He remained a friend of Charles’s all his life. Peter Westerway became general secretary of the Labor Party in New South Wales from 1969 to 1974, and then a senior public servant in the Department of the Media. After his retirement, he worked as a consultant for ATSIC on its Aboriginal policy. He also began to investigate his family history, when he learned he had some Aboriginal ancestry of his own. His father, he said, ‘had all the normal prejudices of Australian whites about Aborigines although his own mother was I think half Aboriginal. They concealed the fact; they never mentioned he was Aboriginal. It was only after his death that I’ve discovered that that was the case and that the contemporaries who lived with him in Glen Innes spoke of the family as being Aboriginal. I discovered it by doing a genealogy, tracing it back, finding people.’ Gerald Stone’s performance as a journalist covering the Freedom Ride enhanced his reputation. He left the Daily Mirror in 1967 for the ABC, where he became, along with Sam Lipski—The Bulletin’s reporter on the Freedom Ride—a founding reporter on the landmark current affairs program This Day Tonight. Stone stayed in television journalism thereafter, and is best known for his years as executive producer of the Australian Sixty Minutes; in 2000 he became director of Australia’s multicultural television service, SBS. David Ellyard, the active SAFA member who did not actually go on the Freedom Ride, went on to become a well-known science communicator. He has written ten books on weather, astronomy and current developments in science and technology, as well as an awardwinning biography of Australian physicist Sir Mark Oliphant. Michael Kirby went on to become a judge in the High Court, known and respected for his involvement in international human rights organisations and his liberal stance on many issues. Gordon Samuels continued his distinguished career, becoming a judge in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, Chair of the New South Wales Law Reform Commission, and Governor of New


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South Wales. Kevin Martin went on to become a senior public servant, working with Charles at the Office of Aboriginal Affairs in the late 1960s. As for me, what can I say? After the Freedom Ride, I wrote a PhD on the history of race relations in New South Wales in the mid-nineteenth century, comparing the opposition to Chinese immigration with the attitudes to Aboriginal people at the same time. I became deeply involved in the women’s movement from 1970, and for many years my writing revolved around feminist theory and history. Like most of the others, I married, went overseas for a year, travelling through Asia and then living in London, and returned in mid-1974. After the birth of my son in November 1974, I established the Women’s Studies program at the Australian National University in 1976, returning to Sydney in 1978 to take up a position at the then New South Wales Institute of Technology. For many years I taught History and Social Theory there, and developed a strong interest in television history, popular culture and the history of journalism. In the mid-1980s I became very interested in the public uses of history, and worked with several others to establish graduate programs in Applied History. In 1988 I became Dean of its Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; this was a testing three years, as the Institute acquired university status in 1990 and amalgamated with several other academic institutions to become a large, diverse, modern university, the University of Technology, Sydney. I took up the Chair of History at the Australian National University in 1995, which became the Manning Clark Chair of History a year later. I teach courses in Australian history, including a specialist course on Aboriginal history. Finally, in 2001, I cleared a space in my life to write this book. And so our journey ends, at least for now.


Select bibliography Books Attwood, Bain and Markus, Andrew, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A documentary history, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999 Buckley, Ken, Offensive and Obscene: A Civil Liberties Casebook, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1970 Goodall, Heather, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1992, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996 Horner, Jack, Bill Ferguson: Fighter for Aboriginal Freedom, Australia and New Zealand Book Company, Sydney, 1974 Jarratt, Phil, Ted Noffs: Man of the Cross, Macmillan, Sydney, 1997 Lake, Marilyn, Faith, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2002 Levy, Peter, The Civil Rights Movement, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1998 Middleton, Hannah, But Now We Want the Land Back, New Age Publishers, Sydney, 1977 Miller, J., Koori: A Will to Win, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1985 Millis, Roger, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales, McPhee-Gribble, Ringwood, 1992 Mulvaney, John, Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606–1985, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1989 O’Donnell, Penny and Simons, Lynette, Australians Against Racism: Testimonies from the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Australia, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1995 313


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Parbury, N., Survival: A History of Aboriginal Life in New South Wales, Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs (NSW), Sydney, 1986 Peck, Jim, Freedom Ride, Grove Press, New York, 1962 Perkins, Charles, A Bastard Like Me, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1975 Peters-Little, Frances, The Community Game: Aboriginal Self-Definition at the Local Level, AIATSIS Research Discussion Paper no. 10, AIATSIS, Canberra, 2000 Raymond, Robert, Out of the Box: An Inside View of the Coming of Current Affairs, Seaview Press, Adelaide, 1999 Read, Peter, Charles Perkins: A Biography, Penguin, Ringwood, 2001 (first edition 1990) Rowley, C.D., Outcasts in White Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, 1972 (first edition 1970) Rowley, C.D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Penguin, Ringwood, 1970 Scalmer, Sean, Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002 Weisbrot, Robert, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement, Norton, New York, 1990

Journal articles and chapters in books Boughton, Bob, ‘The Communist Party of Australia’s Involvement in the Struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People’s Rights, 1920–1970’, in Ray Markey, ed., Labour and Community: Historical Essays, University of Wollongong Press, Wollongong, 2001, pp. 263–94 Clark, Jennifer, ‘The Winds of Change’, International History Review, vol. XX, no. 1, March 1998, pp. 89–117 Curthoys, Ann, ‘The personal is historical’, in Ann Curthoys, and Ann McGrath, eds, Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration, Monash Publications, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 75–81 Curthoys, Ann, ‘Freedom Ride’, in Sylvia Kleinert and Margo Neale, eds, The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 589–90 Curthoys, Ann, ‘National narratives, war commemoration, and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case’, in T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper, eds, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp. 128–44


Select bibliography

315

Curthoys, Ann, ‘Sex and Racism: Australia in the 1960s’, in Jane Long, Jan Gothard and Helen Brasch, eds, Forging Identities: Bodies, Gender and Feminist History, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1997, pp. 11–28 Golding, Wendy, ‘Freedom Riders in Australia’, The Bridge, May 1965, pp. 17–19 Hauser (Hansen), Beth, ‘Our Freedom Ride’, Overland, no. 32, August 1965 Read, Peter, ‘Darce Cassidy’s Freedom Ride’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1988, pp. 40–4 Reay, Marie, ‘A Half Caste Aboriginal Community in North Western New South Wales’, Oceania, vol. 15, no. 3, June 1945 Reay, Marie and Sitlington, Grace, ‘Class and Status in a Mixed-blood Community (Moree, NSW)’, Oceania, vol. 17, no. 3, March 1948, pp. 179–207 Rootes, C.A., ‘The Development of Radical Student Movements and their Sequelae’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 34, 1968, pp. 367–78. Scalmer, Sean, ‘Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of Collective Action’, Alternatives, no. 25, 2000, pp. 419–514 Spigelman, Jim, ‘Reactions to the SAFA Tour’, Dissent, no. 14, Winter 1965, pp. 44–9 Spigelman, Jim, ‘Student Action for Aborigines’, Vestes, vol. 8, no. 2, June 1965, pp. 116–18 Spigelman, Jim, Honi Soit, 1 March 1965 Spigelman, Jim et al., ‘The Student Bus’, Outlook, April 1965

Unpublished theses Flack, Kylie, Creative Tension or Creating Trouble? The Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA) ‘Freedom Ride’, 1965, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1993 Johnston, Susan, The New South Wales Government Policy Towards Aborigines 1880–1909, MA thesis, University of Sydney, 1970 Russell, Lani, Today the Students, Tomorrow the Workers! Radical Student Politics and the Australian Labour Movement 1960–1972, PhD thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 1999 Silverman, Sondra, Political Movements: Three Case Studies in Protest, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1966


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Taffe, Sue, Attitudes to Aboriginal Australians: Signs of Change, 1957–1963, MA thesis, Monash University, 1995

Radio and television Cassidy, Darce, ‘Freedom Ride’, ABC radio, first broadcast 20 February 1978, rebroadcast several times since Perkins, Rachel and Landers, Ned, ‘Freedom Ride’, first screened on SBS, Tuesday, 13 July 1993

Footnotes See http://arts.anu.edu.au/history/curthoys/endnotes.htm


A note on sources This note is a guide to the primary sources used in this book. The (extensive) endnotes are available electronically on the author’s home page, at http://arts.anu.edu.au/history/curthoys

Interviews Interviewed by Inara Walden Hall Greenland, 18 October 1993 Pat Healy, 21 November 1993 Norm McKay, 21 November 1993 Brian Aarons, 22 November 1993 Warwick Richards, 24 November 1993 David Pepper, 5 January 1994 Wendy Watson-Ekstein (Golding), 8 January 1994 Bob Gallagher, 25 January 1994 Gerald Stone, 7 February 1994 Barry Corr, 14 March 1994 Owen Westcott, 14 April 1994 Alex Mills, 15 April 1994 Derek Molloy, 28 April 1994 Alan Outhred, 1 May 1994 Aidan Foy, 7 May 1994 Bob Morgan, 10 May 1994 317


318

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Colin Bradford, 10 May 1994 Robyn Iredale, 12 July 1994 Jim Spigelman, 16 August 1994 Alan Duncan, 4 October 1994 John Powles, 21 October 1994 Charles Perkins, 4 November 1994

Interviewed by Lani Russell Bill Ford, 23 December 1998

Interviewed by Ann Curthoys Harry Hall, 3 April 1991 Gladys Lake, 3 April 1991 Phillip Hall, 3 April 1991 Bill Lloyd, 5 April 1991 Lyall Munro Snr, 6 April 1991 Ernie Crighton, 7 April 1991 Zona Moore, 7 April 1991 Beth Hansen, 8 April 1991 Vic Brill, 8 April 1991 Tess Brill, 9 April 1991 Bob Brown, 12 April 1991 Peter Westerway, 11 April 2001 Darce Cassidy, between 2 and 18 May 2001 Louise Higham, mid-October 2001 Marie Cohen (Marie Peters), early November 2001 Andrea Douglas (Ann Holten), 28 March 2002 Judith Rich, 28 March 2002 Gary Williams, 29 March 2002

Newspapers consulted Adelaide Advertiser, Australian, Canberra Times, Courier-Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Macleay Argus (Kempsey), Newcastle Morning Herald, North West Champion (Moree), Northern Daily Leader (Tamworth), Northern Star (Lismore), Sydney Morning Herald, Spectator (Walgett), Sun-Herald, Sun (Sydney), Age (Melbourne) and the West Australian.


A note on sources

319

Student newspapers and journals Honi Soit, Left Forum, Wednesday Commentary, Semper Floreat, Farrago

Journals and magazines Churinga, AAF Bulletin, Comment, Dawn, New Dawn, Dissent, Identity, Outlook, Overland, The Bulletin, The Observer

Government printed records Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, NSW Parliamentary Papers, NSW Parliamentary Debates

Manuscripts and archives AWB records, New South Wales Record Office; Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship papers, Mitchell Library; Gordon Bryant Papers, NLA; National Archives of Australia; University of Sydney Archives; Communist Party records, Mitchell Library; Charles Rowley files, AIATSIS library; Union and ACTU records, Noel Butlin Archives, ANU Private papers of Darce Cassidy, Jim Spigelman, Warwick Richards, Pat Healy, Robert Gallagher, Aidan Foy, Louise Higham, Wendy Golding (now Watson-Ekstein) and Ann Curthoys Diaries used include my own, and diary excerpts from Louise Higham and Warwick Richards


Index Aarons, Brian, 3–4, 8, 28, 31, 33, 136, 144, 173, 176, 186, 192, 228, 237, 285, 290, 294, 297, 305, 307 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), 4, 36, 66, 122, 130, 137, 145, 161–2, 182–3, 265, 266, 275–6, 281, 285–6, 308–9, 311 Aboriginal ex-servicemen, 93, 162, 275 Aboriginal–Australian Fellowship, 12–13, 23, 37, 41, 48, 50, 55–6, 59–60, 85, 88, 90, 92, 125, 180, 194, 222, 237, 247, 257, 261, 263, 268 Aborigines Progressive Association, 12, 48, 76–7, 84, 91, 222, 236–7, 242, 245–6, 248, 254–8, 260, 263–4, 266, 310 Aborigines Protection Act 1909, 53, 59, 267 Aborigines Protection Board, 53, 76, 84, 116, 179 Aborigines Welfare Board, 12, 21, 28, 53, 71, 92, 117, 119, 131, 132,

146, 148, 169, 186, 199, 218–19, 222, 232, 241, 248, 260, 267, 268, 272 Abschol, 17, 18, 23, 29, 67, 167, 223, 230, 270, 271, 276 Adelaide, 10–11, 19, 24, 32, 37, 113, 166, 247, 309 Alabama, 30–31, 43, 112, 164, 195, 221, 292 Albrecht, Ernie 177 alcohol, 12, 59, 227, 284, 297, 299 ALP Club (University of Sydney), 5, 7, 21, 23, 31, 51, 65, 94, 212, 237 Anderson, Betty 18, 38 Andrews, Shirley, 15, 38 Anglican, 23, 24, 39, 67, 74, 86, 89, 92, 103, 126, 213, 215, 216, 226 Anzac Day, 91, 118 apartheid, 1, 2, 5, 122, 130, 166 Area Welfare Officers, 54, 70, 85, 121, 131, 205, 218, 232, 244, 258, 261, 267–8, 275 Armidale, 50, 76, 122, 180, 195, 234 Ashbolt, Allan 119, 122, 281


Index

‘A Study in Attitudes’ (radio program), 120 ASIO, 14, 221 Askin, Robin, 232, 235 assimilation, 14, 22, 42, 48, 49, 50, 53, 71, 75, 112, 119, 179, 180, 182, 184, 185, 213, 214, 221, 223, 230, 232, 239, 247, 254, 277, 292 Association for Immigration Reform, 17 Australian Board of Missions, 24, 182 Australian Constitution, 13, 14, 18, 22, 24, 27, 38, 44, 86, 230, 231, 232, 289 Section 127, 13, 14, 230, 270 Section 51, 13, 27 Australian Council of Churches, 10, 188, 239 Australian Council of Trade Unions, 15 Australian Labor Party, 5, 16, 31, 67, 155, 211, 220, 235, 249, 299, 301, 304, 306, 311 Australian National University, 45, 223, 312 Australian (newspaper), 40–1, 50–1, 94, 110, 112–3, 126, 130, 137–9, 143, 147, 149, 165–6, 168, 187, 196, 200, 205, 210, 214, 268, 295 Australian Student Labour Federation, 22, 237 Ballangarry, Bernadette, 266 Ballangarry, John, 278 Ballangarry, Martin, 195 Bandler, Faith, 12, 13, 125, 223, 232, 248, 269 Barwon River, 83, 102, 141, 168, 283 Bateman, RV, 213 BBC, 4, 197, 200, 205 Beale, Jack 186

321

Beasley, Pam, 40, 48 Beatles, 37, 139 Beazley, Kim Snr, 14, 15, 230 Beckett, Jeremy, 87, 122 Bennett, Mary, 13 Bingara Road (Moree), 114, 116, 131, 142, 144, 148, 153, 277 Birmingham, Alabama, 2, 4, 30, 43, 44, 45 Boggabilla, 50, 60, 114, 116, 145, 146, 147, 148, 200, 218, 238, 241, 263, 276, 278, 281 Bowra Theatre, 192, 193 Bowraville, 50, 60, 62, 169, 171, 185, 189–97, 218, 230, 240–1, 263–5, 267, 276, 278–9, 285, 293 Bracken, George, 188 Bradford, Colin, 31, 39, 51, 176, 190, 263, 289, 303 Brennan, Tom, 52 Brill, Tess, 180, 183, 185 Brill, Vic, 179, 285 Brindle, Ken, 21, 236, 261 Brink, John, 2 Brisbane, 16, 17, 37, 149, 154, 164, 166, 216 Brown, Bob, 123, 128, 130, 136–7, 141–2, 148–50, 153–4, 162, 218, 224–5, 276, 284, 286, 310 Brown, JH, 198 Bryant, Gordon, 21, 298 Buckley, Ken, 8, 28, 48 Builders’ Labourers Federation, 90 Bundjalung, 18, 148, 179–80 Burmester, Maynard, 96 Burnt Bridge, 197–200 Burra Bee Dee, 76 Butterworth, John, 48, 63, 67, 126, 158, 176, 178, 190, 225, 227, 236 Cabbage Tree Island, 181–3, 227


322

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Calwell, Arthur, 16, 24 Campbell, Clyde (Mayor of Lismore) 184 Carrick, J.L., 235, 248 Cassidy, Darce, 5, 17, 36, 63, 65–6, 69, 73–4, 77, 81, 97–8, 100–1, 104–7, 121, 126, 130, 136–7, 139–40, 145, 150–2, 157–8, 161, 176, 228, 240, 243–4, 251, 255–7, 260, 263–9, 281–2, 286, 290–1, 308–9 Castellari, Bert 110 Catholic, 36, 67, 119, 121, 122, 250, 281, 300, 302, 304, 310 Central Methodist Mission, 19–20 Central Western Daily, 231 Ceylon Observer, 8 Chalker, Inspector, 102, 254 Channel 7, 6, 28, 32, 60, 189, 194 Channel 9, 4 Christophers, Barry 38 civil rights, 1–8, 10, 21, 27, 33, 42–3, 45–6, 65, 231, 236, 248, 253–4, 258, 282, 286, 289, 293 Clint, Reverend Alf, 23–4, 181 Coffs Harbour, 183, 189 Cold War, 37, 292 Collins, Rick, 67, 69, 136, 176, 178, 191, 288 Combo, Clarrie, 182, 184, 261 Commem Day, 5, 8, 18, 29 Commonwealth government, 10, 13–14, 18, 27, 93, 120, 123, 140, 169–70, 213, 230, 234, 236, 247, 249, 270, 272, 299 Commonwealth Parliamentary Select Committee to Enquire into Aboriginal Voting Rights, 14 Communist Party of Austalia, 11–12, 15, 63–5, 91,100, 144, 181, 186, 305–7

communists, 6, 14, 23, 28, 37–8, 141, 159, 204, 221–2, 294 Congress of Racial Equality, 30, 32, 45 Connor, T. Eugene ‘Bull’, 2–3 Cooma-Monaro Express, 214 Coonabarabran, 76 Cooper, John, 85, 86 cooperative movement, 24, 147, 181, 182–4, 227 Corr, Barry 67, 172, 190–1, 240, 242–3, 245, 263–4, 289, 302 Council for Civil Liberties, 8, 28, 60, 223, 253, 259, 267 Country Party, 47, 168, 186, 198, 231, 235, 247 Courier-Mail, 113, 167, 179, 269 Craigie, Zona, 139 Crawford, GR, 168 Crew, Jennifer 17 Crighton, Ernie, 140 Crux, 238 Cubawee, 179–81 Cutler, Roden, 231 Daily Examiner, 173, 174 Daily Mirror, 160, 164, 183 Daily Mirror, 3, 40, 111, 130, 144, 154, 156, 158, 162, 163, 169, 173, 311 Daily Telegraph, 6, 7, 130, 165, 184, 186, 191, 221, 309 Dareton, 95, 271, 272 Dawe, Bruce, 113, 174 Dawson, Paddy, 65, 159, 160, 176, 185, 203, 227–8, 237, 241, 254–5, 263, 265 Deep South, 5, 20, 46, 221, 277 Doldissen, Eric, 31–2, 39, 228 Dowe, Reverend PJ, 58, 89–90, 94, 102–3, 110, 126, 217, 226 Dubbo, 50, 54, 56, 70, 75–7, 102, 127, 283


Index

Duguid, Charles, 10, 32, 76 Duncan, Alan, 28, 38, 48, 49, 56 Elkin, AP, 10, 117, 180, 222 Ellyard, David, 39, 51, 311 Engel, Reverend Frank, 10, 188 Eureka Youth League, 4, 63–5, 205 Evans, Paul, 102–3 Eyre, Harry, 168 Fabian Society, 65 Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA), 13, 15, 19, 22–4, 180 Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), 38, 221, 232–4, 240, 254, 269, 275, 295, 298 Federated Engine Drivers’ and Firemen’s Association, 52 Ferguson, Bill, 76, 84 Fields, Ted, 91, 93, 240, 242, 251, 254–5, 260, 290, 310 film, 17, 32, 35, 73, 77, 86, 94, 98, 100, 104, 107–8, 129–30, 134, 136, 139, 145, 151, 155, 159, 200, 274, 285–6, 292, 311 Fitzpatrick, Brian 10 Flanders family, Bowraville, 194 Flick, Isabel, 127 Flint, Noel, 60 Ford, Bill, 17, 31–3, 45–6, 102, 151, 167, 172, 226–7, 288, 311 Ford, Don, 137, 148–9 Forrest, Bill, 140, 224, 233 Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, 21, 28–9, 40, 46, 48, 50, 58, 132, 172, 236–7, 248, 252, 255, 259, 263, 268, 275, 294, 297 Four Corners, 4, 145, 149, 162, 182, 275

323

Foy, Aidan, 35, 36, 43, 52, 60, 65, 74, 94, 160, 176, 184–5, 190, 195, 200, 228, 240, 242, 249, 255, 291, 299

Gallagher, Bob, 31, 51, 52, 67, 158, 165, 176, 190, 237, 290, 297, 308 Gamilaraay, 83, 90 Gandhi, 46 Geddes, Bill, 21, 28 Gibbons, Barbara, 88 Gibbs, Pearl, 11–12, 56, 76, 261 Giffney, Patricia, 187 Gilgandra, 60, 77, 127 Gingie (station and mission), 83–4, 86, 88, 96, 278 Glen Innes, 150, 311 Glendenning, Sergeant, 102 Go Tell it on the Mountain stage company, 36 Golding, Wendy, 66, 137, 175–6, 240, 242–3, 255, 289, 308 Goodall, Heather 84, 116, 127, 181 Gowdie, John, 62, 67, 77, 98, 127, 176 Grafton, 171–5, 178, 183, 198 Gray, Helen 67, 98, 100, 176 Green, H.J. (John), 121, 169, 218, 229 Greenhill (Kempsey), 197–9, 201 Greenland, Hall, 22–3, 65, 67, 94, 130, 176–7, 193, 226–7, 288, 297, 301 Griffith, 95, 241, 263 Groves, Bert 12, 48, 86, 91, 119, 125, 180, 222, 261 Guardian Gazette, 196 Gulargambone, 50, 60, 77–82, 127, 131, 185, 238, 263, 276, 283 Gumbaynggirr, 189 Haddock, Ted, 159 Hadlow, Reverend, 86


324

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Hali, Machteld (Michelle Hall), 66, 95, 98, 172, 176, 178, 304 Hall, Harry, 90, 91, 93, 240, 242–5, 249–57, 260–1, 276, 283, 285, 290, 310 Hall, Lorna, 251–3 Hall, Pattie, 251–3 Hall, Phillip, 92 Hancock, Ron, 23–4 Hansen, Beth, 31–2, 36, 39, 44, 57–8, 66, 147, 164, 176, 185, 200, 228, 248, 301 Hartley, Bill, 211 Hassen, Jack, 90, 257, 258 Hazzard, Noel, 141 Healy, Jim, 6, 204–5 Healy, Pat, 6, 33, 39, 50, 57–8, 67, 71, 79, 101, 131, 150, 175, 186, 190, 196, 204, 227–8, 237, 262, 289, 297, 305, 307 Higham, Louise, 23, 63, 132, 176, 225, 227, 249, 300 Hill, George, 86 Hobart Mercury, 41 Hogan, Tom, 91, 97 Holding, Clyde, 21, 22 Holten, Ann, 195, 197, 310 Honi Soit, 8–9, 26, 40, 42, 226, 267, 301 Horner, Jack, 41, 50, 55–6, 88–9, 96, 103, 125, 146, 248–9, 256 House of Representatives, 16, 230 Humanist Society (University of Sydney), 7, 23, 31, 66 Hyde Park, Sydney, 23–4, 27, 65 Inglis, Ken, 10 Inter-Departmental Committee on Racial Discrimination, 15 International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 107, 15

Inverell, 150–2, 161–2, 171 Iredale, Robyn, 67, 79–80, 150, 176, 291, 301 Jackson, Mississippi, 30, 32, 167 Jamaica, 30 James, Gary, 144 Jeffery, HW, 182–4 Jensen, Harry 21, 168 Jewish, Jews, 23, 33, 39, 66–7, 111 Johnson, President Lyndon, 4 Johnston, Sue, 66, 136, 153, 161, 176, 226, 228, 236, 240, 262–3, 267, 269, 271, 305 Kamilaraay, 83, 114–6, 281 Kawambarai, 77 Kelly, Gus (Chief Secretary), 169, 193, 218–9, 229 Kelly, Neville, 127, 141, 149, 275 Kempsey, 50, 55, 57–8, 60, 169, 171, 196, 197–206, 213, 218–9, 235–6, 238, 241, 275–6, 293, 310 Kinchela, Jack, 84 King, Martin Luther, 2–4, 43–4, 55, 128, 174, 210, 212, 233, 281, 293, 294, 296 Kingsmill, AG, 54–5, 169, 186 Kirby, Michael 7, 27, 259, 311 Ku Klux Klan, 44 Labour Club, 22–3, 28, 31, 33, 39, 51–2, 63–5, 237, 308 Lake, Gladys, 91, 257, 283 Lake Tyers, 21 Legislative Assembly of NSW, 181, 199, 272 Leppik, Ray, 67, 176, 190 Levy, Sandra, 263 Lewis, Jeannie, 22–3, 57


Index

Liberal Party of NSW, 76, 231–2, 235, 248 Life Magazine, 9 Lipski, Sam, 46, 50–1, 62, 65, 110, 311 Liquor and Allied Trades Union, 59 Lismore, 19, 50–60, 117, 148, 169–90, 199, 218–9, 263, 276, 285, 301, 307 Little Rock, 112, 114–41, 221, 238, 262, 277 Little, Jimmy, 18 Lloyd, Bill, 126, 139–59, 218, 221, 224, 275, 284, 310 Macksville, 191, 196, 265 Macleay Argus, 196, 198–9, 202–6, 220 Malaysia, 26 Manning, Peter, 222 Marshall, Joey, 102–5, 110, 259 Martin, Kevin, 29, 312 Martin, Peter, 29, 148, 200, 218 Mason, Gerald (or Gerry), 35, 161, 176, 225 Maxwell, Bruce, 103, 106, 110, 237, 276 May 1964 demonstration, 2, 21–2 McDonald, Robert, 21 McElhone Memorial Swimming Pool, 198, 203, 235 McIlwraith, Irene, 85–7 McKay, Norm, 63, 78, 98, 176, 190, 291, 307 McLean, Bill, 212, 263 McLean, Lyn, 212, 263 media, 28–9, 31, 40, 51, 53, 71, 82–3, 96, 110, 114, 130, 143–7, 162, 169–71, 177–8, 183–7, 193–7, 205–6, 212, 237, 247, 249, 276, 282, 285, 292, 309 Melbourne, 2, 11, 16–17, 21–2, 28, 37, 42, 166, 211, 281, 291, 308

325

Melville, RG, Mayor of Kempsey, 200 Menzies, Robert Gordon, 2, 16, 230–1, 270 Methodist, 19–20, 58, 67, 75, 78, 118, 126, 129, 130, 133, 148, 172, 226, 249 Mills, Alex, 47, 58, 67, 75, 92, 97–8, 103–4, 186, 191, 208, 226, 228, 231, 248, 254, 262, 297, 302 Molloy, Derek, 67, 98, 127, 176, 221, 310 Molnar, George, cartoonist, 111, 207 Monash University, 2, 16, 17, 300, 308 Moree, 27, 36, 50–60, 63, 110, 113–75, 177–9, 186–8, 193–8, 201–10, 213–8, 233–8, 264, 274–7, 279–82, 284, 286–8, 290, 293, 301, 310 Apex Club, 124 artesian baths, 27, 115–8, 120, 124, 284 Church of England, 119 Council resolution, 15, 95, 118–20, 123–8, 133–4, 141, 159, 165, 205, 210, 224, 235, 258, 275 hospital, 117, 125–6, 133 Jones, OJ, Town Clerk, 133 Mehi mission, 117, 124, 126, 129, 131 Memorial Hall, 117–19, 134, 140 Morgan, Bob, 92 Morgan, Eddie, 180 Morgan, EG, 217 Morning News, Karachi, 220 Mosman, Warwick, 212, 223, 248 Moyes, Bishop (later Archbishop), 216 Munro, Lyall Jnr, 279–81, 290, 310 Munro, Lyall Snr, 153, 277, 280–8, 310 Munro, Matt, 139, 141 Murphy, Lionel, 23


326

Freedom Ride

Murris, 77, 83–5, 87, 90, 92–3, 97, 107–9, 116, 119, 284 Myall Creek, 115–6, 162, 281 Nambucca Heads, 19, 196 Namoi River, 83–4 Nanima, 69, 76 Nation, 213 National Aborigines Week, 22, 28, 123, 249, 275 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 45 National Union of Australian University Students (NUAUS), 2, 17–8, 21, 22, 38, 223, 270–1 Nazi Germany, 86 New Left, 37, 292 New York Times, 9, 48, 219 New Yorker, 219 New Zealand, 10, 21, 26, 37, 66 Newcastle, 17, 60, 63, 92, 177, 197, 208, 217, 276, 299 Newcastle Trades Hall Aboriginal Advancement Committee, 63 Newman Society, 23 Nicholls, Pastor Doug, 21, 207, 271 Noffs, Ted, 19–21, 36, 40, 50–8, 126–7, 151, 164, 172, 201, 208–12, 226, 229, 232, 235, 261, 311 North West Champion, 118, 134, 136, 141, 162, 222 Northern Daily Leader, 113, 134, 144, 162, 213 Northern Star, 180, 185 Northern Territory, 12, 14–5, 19, 22, 96, 295, 298 Nowra, 50 O’Shane, Gladys, 11 Oasis Hotel-Motel (Walgett), 56, 88, 91, 97, 108

On Aboriginal Affairs, 11, 41, 238 Onus, Bill, 207 Orange, 47, 63, 67, 127, 208, 231 Ord, GG, 153 Orientation Week, 50, 225, 226 Our Struggle, 43, 55 Outhred, Alan, 52, 79, 176, 190, 225, 237, 263, 297, 306 Overland, 196 Page, Chris, 39, 57, 60, 63, 153, 156, 176, 228, 263, 268–9, 299 Pakenham, Bill, 103, 127, 150, 160, 171–2 Palm Island, 28, 269 Papua New Guinea, 24, 67, 301 Parliament House, Sydney, 22, 24, 26, 212, 267 Patten, Jack, 76 Peck, Jim, 45 Pepper, David, 67, 172, 249, 252, 266, 309 Perkins, Charles, 18–20, 26–31, 35, 39–41, 47–8, 50–1, 54–6, 58, 62, 64–5, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 75, 77–8, 81, 90, 92–3, 100, 102, 105–10, 113, 126–7, 129–30, 132, 136, 138–45, 149–56, 159, 161–2, 164–5, 167–8, 171–4, 176, 178, 183–4, 186–8, 190, 193, 195, 198, 200–2, 204–5, 207–9, 211–2, 218, 220–3, 225–9, 232–6, 240–9, 253–4, 257–9, 261, 263, 265–6, 268, 271, 274, 276, 279, 282–6, 288–98, 310–12 A Bastard Like Me, 19, 107, 155, 274 Peters family, Walgett, 47, 84, 97, 250–1, 260, 304 Peters, Marie, 251–3, 260 Peters-Little, Frances, 84


Index

327

Queensland, 2, 12, 14–8, 23, 27–9, 50, 54, 62, 83, 113, 146, 148, 212, 268–9 Quinlan, T, 91

Richards, Warwick, 33, 39, 47, 58, 66, 69, 146–7, 176, 184, 191, 226–7, 263, 297, 303 Rigby, WM, 194 Rivett, Ken, 17 Roberts, Frank Jnr, 180, 183, 184 Roberts, Frank Snr, 179–81 Robeson, Paul, 37, 66 Robinson, Roland, 122 Rolling Stones, 37 Rose, George, 91, 93, 100, 254, 283, 286 Rowley, Charles, 69–70, 75, 132, 187 Ruskin, John, 76 Ryan, Reverend Ted, 58, 126, 149

Rabin, Zell, 111, 219 Raymond, Samuel, 193 Reay, Marie, 85, 117 Redfern, 60, 229, 236, 304–5 Reeves, Sue, 67, 128, 176, 190, 236 Referendum campaign, 13, 15–6, 18, 38, 210, 230, 232, 270–1, 286, 289, 296 Renshaw, Jack (Premier), 91, 102–3 110, 112–3, 155, 162, 215, 218–9, 231–2 reserves, 12, 19–21, 27, 35, 48, 53–6, 69, 71–3, 76–80, 84–9, 92, 96, 100, 116–7, 131–2, 144, 147, 153, 173, 179–84, 189, 191, 193–4, 197–200, 207, 212, 214, 218–9, 227–8, 236, 238, 244, 261, 263–8, 272, 277–8, 283, 288 Returned Servicemen’s League (RSL), 88, 91–100, 110, 112–3, 134, 162, 193, 219, 229, 24–5, 255, 258, 275 Rich, Judith, 67, 130, 193, 309

Sadlier, Alf 118, 120 Salvation Army, 73, 172, 242, 257 Save the Children Fund, 199 Sawtell, Michael, 28 Sawtell, R, 146 Seager, Helen, 221 Seamen’s Union, 167 Seven Days, 28–9, 30, 145, 148, 188–9, 191, 193, 197, 200–1, 218 shanty towns, 53–4, 95, 124, 162, 179, 212, 214 Sharp, Martin, 166 Sharpeville shootings, 1, 238 Sheahan, WF, 125, 169, 180, 218 Shearston, Gary, 24, 57 Sheetmetal Workers Union, 12 Silverman, Sondra, 45 Simon, Ella, 57, 208, 302 Singleton, 32, 311 Sitlington, Grace, 117 Snooks, R, 218, 244 Social Theory I, 20, 47, 312 South Africa, 2, 20, 26, 112, 119, 130, 195, 220, 300

Petty, Bruce, 187 Phelan, Gloria, 59, 174 Philpot, Trevor, 197, 205 Pittock, Barrie 10, 122 Powles, John, 7, 22, 31, 39, 48, 50, 52, 63, 66, 74, 104, 133, 140, 151, 155, 158–60, 164–5, 173, 176, 209, 228, 261, 289–9, 300 Presbyterian, 10, 47, 58, 67, 76, 87, 98, 188 Purfleet, 63, 207–8, 302


328

Freedom Ride

South Australia, 12, 35, 62, 193, 217, 247, 268, 291, 309 Soviet Union, 14, 222, 300 Spalding, 11, 41, 122, 238 Spigelman, Jim, 31–2, 39–40, 42, 44, 50, 52, 58, 60, 65–6, 75, 96–7, 104, 126–7, 140, 145, 159, 164, 174, 176, 183, 218, 225–8, 235, 240, 285, 289, 297–8 spirit beings, 80 St Peter’s Church of England, 58–9, 92 Stanner, Bill, 1, 270 Stone, Gerald, 130, 144, 150, 158, 160–2, 172, 190, 193, 311 Street, Jessie, 13, 198 Strehlow, TGH, 10 Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA), 35, 38–66, 130, 133, 172, 177, 197, 211–2, 22–37, 240–4, 246–9, 25–5, 257, 260–74, 290–2, 309, 311 SAFA Talkabout, 48, 51, 60, 162, 230 Student Action, 16, 38 Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 42, 45 Students Representative Council, 1, 7, 17, 23, 29 Students’ Christian Movement, 23, 33, 66, 238, 303 Sun (Sydney), 3, 4, 40, 89, 90, 111, 113, 119, 125, 164, 183, 187, 209, 212–3, 235–6, 279–80 Sunday Mail, 154, 164 Sunday Mirror, 164, 222 Sunday Telegraph, 40, 85, 164 Sunday Truth, 164 Sun-Herald, 3 Survey, 51, 70, 72, 87, 131, 212 Swann, Ken, 140 Sweeney, Christopher, 22 Sydney Morning Herald, 1, 4, 9, 31,

48–9, 87, 98, 103, 106, 110–1, 119, 122, 124–5, 127, 133, 144, 147, 158–9, 164–5, 167–9, 173, 177, 182–6, 190–8, 205, 20–15, 219, 221, 226, 229, 236–7, 254–5, 258, 262–5, 276–80, 287, 296 Sydney Town Hall, 37, 231, 296 Sydney University Organising Committee for Action on Aboriginal Rights, 22 Tabulam, 50, 60, 148–51, 182 Tait, William, 118 Tamworth, 113, 117, 162, 213 Taree, 50, 57, 60, 63, 171, 188, 206–8, 219, 302 Tasmania, 41, 62 Teachers’ Federation of NSW, 48, 59, 174, 180, 210, 301, 303–4 Tenterfield, 149 Terry Hie Hie, 114, 116 The Anglican, 215, 226 The Bridge, 67 The Bulletin, 46, 64, 110, 213, 221, 311 The Dawn, 222, 267 The Mavis Bramston Show, 228 The Observer, 87, 122 The Working People’s Daily, 220 Thomas, Alf, 218 Thompson, Donald, 10 Thompson’s Row, 136, 139–40, 148, 150, 153 Tighe, Gloria, 131, 132 Tighe, Nancy, 132 Townsville, 11, 17, 268–69 Tranby College, 23, 254 Trevallion, Alec, 86–7, 244 Tribe, David, 88 Tribune, 11, 100, 132, 135, 141, 186, 212, 219, 221, 246, 252, 255, 307


Index

Tunks, Ray, 172, 257 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 15 Union of Australian Women, 11, 63, 255 United Associations of Women, 198 United Nations, 2, 12–15, 22, 168, 198 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, 12–13, 15 United States, 2–5, 8–10, 20, 23, 26, 30, 32–3, 42, 45–6, 123, 125, 130, 164, 167, 174, 215, 219, 220–1, 268, 277, 309 University of Melbourne, 16–7 University of New England, 76 University of New South Wales, 17, 26, 32, 189, 211, 236, 300, 311 University of Sydney, 1, 5, 8, 17–8, 21–2, 28, 35, 62, 113, 141, 225–6, 236, 270, 297, 306–7 Uralarai, 83 US Consulate, 5, 45 US Freedom Rides, 30–1, 44–5 Valadian, Margaret, 18, 38, 269 Victoria, 12, 15, 21, 41, 62, 67, 153, 247, 279, 299, 309 Victorian Aborigines Advancement League, 21 Walford, Pat, 107, 110 Walgett, 24, 26–7, 50, 54–6, 58, 60, 65, 83–114, 126–7, 130–31, 134, 144, 161–2, 164–6, 169, 186,

329

190, 194, 213, 215–6, 218, 223, 227, 231–2, 238, 240–67, 274–6, 278, 283–4, 286, 290, 293, 304, 310 bus forced off the road, 105 frock shop, 96–7, 100 Walker, Alan, 114, 123, 172 Walker, Kath (Oodgenroo), 24, 188, 261 Walsh, Richard, 8 Warburton ranges, 86 Waterside Workers’ Federation, 6, 12, 90, 139, 144, 257 Watson, Russell, 117, 120 Wellington, 50, 54, 60, 67, 69–77, 114, 127, 131, 185, 241, 263, 276, 282–3 Wentworth, WC, 230 West Australian, 113, 166 Western Australia, 12, 14, 15, 27, 86, 212, 291 Westerway, Peter, 28–30, 32, 311 White Australia Policy, 16–7, 38, 220, 249 Whitmarsh, Neville, 156, 158 Wilcannia, 19, 50, 299 Williams, Gary, 18, 20, 26, 35, 48, 62, 189, 192, 288, 290, 297 Williams, Graham, 50, 126, 201 Willis, Eric, 235 Wiradjuri, 68, 77 Woods, Alan 90 Wright, Tom, 12 Yuwaaliyaay, 83, 91

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