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Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s pp 149–179Cite as

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Wider Horizons: Indigenous Australians Abroad and the Limits of Global Activism

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Abstract

Indigenous Australians were central to Australia’s experience of the 1960s. As Australia’s “Third World” or colonised peoples, indigenous activists began to feel a part of global struggles around decolonisation and race during the period, by engaging with and translating anti-colonial and Black Power thought, and seeking to experience these overseas causes for educational and propagandistic purposes. Significantly contributing to a growing literature on the transnational dimension of Black Power and Third World movements, this chapter particularly focuses on activists who journeyed to a Black Power conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1970 and two groups who ventured to “Red” China in 1972 and 1974. These activists experienced both the ideas and practice of black or Third World liberation struggles, translating complex understandings, and lessons for the growing land rights and liberation movements, as well as birthing inevitable conflicts and encounters with the limitations of transnational politics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kath Walker, “Flight into Tunis,” Identity 2, No. 4 (August 1975): 6–8.

  2. 2.

    Sam Watson, Oodgeroo: Bloodline to Country (Brisbane: Playlab Press, 2009).

  3. 3.

    Fanon Che Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960–1965,” Journal of African American History 92, No. 4 (Fall 2007): 469.

  4. 4.

    “Wider Horizons,” Smoke Signals 8, No. 3 (March 1970): 5; Bruce McGuinness quoted in Ravi de Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 97.

  5. 5.

    Roberta Sykes, “Open Letter to the Planning Conference of the Secretariat of the Sixth Pan African Congress,” 1 February 1973, in Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229, National Archives of Australia, Canberra; for smug and elitist nature of this stream of thought see Roberta Sykes, “Blacks will get blacker this year,” Nation Review, 5 January 1973.

  6. 6.

    Sykes, “Open Letter,” in Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229.

  7. 7.

    Debate around Sykes’ memoirs, and their employment of Aboriginal tribal imagery, is summarised in Corey China, “Allegations, Secrets, and Silence: Perspectives on the Controversy of Roberta Sykes and the Snake Dreaming series,” in James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux, CULTURE + THE STATE 2: Disability Studies and Indigenous Studies (Alberta, CA: CRC Humanities Studio Publishers, 2003): 108–123.

  8. 8.

    Sykes, “Blacks will get blacker this year.”

  9. 9.

    Sykes, “Open letter,” in Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229.

  10. 10.

    Russell McGregor, “Another Nation: Aboriginal Activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s,” Australian Historical Studies 40, No. 3 (2009): 345, 350.

  11. 11.

    Peter Read is one who adopts this later perspective, arguing that Black Power—and particularly the Easter 1970 conference of FCAATSI that saw a split in the organisation over black control—was “the point, unrecognised at the time, when the demand for civil rights passed to the demand for indigenous rights.” Peter Read, “Cheeky, Insolent and Anti-White: The Split in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders—Easter 1970,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 36, No. 1 (1990): 81.

  12. 12.

    Gary Foley, “Black Power in Redfern 1968–1972” (BA Honours Thesis, The University of Melbourne, 2001). Available at http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html.

  13. 13.

    Kathleen Lothian, “‘A Blackwards step is a forwards step’: Australian Aborigines and Black Power, 1969–1972” (Masters Thesis, Monash University, 2002), 42.

  14. 14.

    Sue Taffe, Black and White Together: FCAATSI: The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 1958–1973 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005), 261.

  15. 15.

    Jennifer Clark, Aborigines and activism: race, aborigines and the coming of the 1960s to Australia (Crawley, WA: UWA Press, 2008), 214.

  16. 16.

    Foley, “Black Power in Redfern.”

  17. 17.

    Kathy Lothian, “Seizing the Time: Australian Aborigines and the influence of the Black Panther Party, 1969–1972,” Journal of Black Studies 35, No. 4 (2005): 184.

  18. 18.

    Lothian, “Seizing the Time,” 183–4; de Costa, A Higher Authority, 98–9.

  19. 19.

    Lothian, “Seizing the Time,” 183.

  20. 20.

    Editorial, “International contact forces thinking on ‘Black Power,’” AAL Newsletter, October 1969, 2. For original Sartre quote Jean Paul Sartre, introduction to The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), 7.

  21. 21.

    Scholars in the USA have also begun fruitfully understanding the US civil rights movement “as an integral piece of the Age of Decolonization.” Gary Helm Darden, “The New Empire in the ‘New South’: Jim Crow in the Global Frontier of High Imperialism and Decolonization,” Southern Quarterly 46, No. 3 (Spring 2009): 8.

  22. 22.

    Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 7.

  23. 23.

    de Costa, A Higher Authority, 3.

  24. 24.

    Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: A.M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012), xv.

  25. 25.

    Sykes, “Open Letter.”

  26. 26.

    John Maynard, “‘In the interests of our people’: The influence of Garveyism on the rise of Australian Aboriginal political activism,” Aboriginal History 29 (2005): 11

  27. 27.

    Ibid, 17.

  28. 28.

    Lothian, “A Blackwards step,” 8.

  29. 29.

    On the fluidity of meanings see Ann Turner, ed, Black Power in Australia: Bobbi Sykes vs. Senator Neville T. Bonner (South Yarra, Vic.: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1975).

  30. 30.

    Kathie Cockrane and Judith Wright, Oodgeroo (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 77.

  31. 31.

    Oodgeroo Noonucaal quoted in Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 20.

  32. 32.

    Kath Walker, “Political Rights for Aborigines,” Paper presented at the 1969 Easter Conference of the FCAATSI, Oodgeroo Noonuccal Papers, 1920–1993, UQFL84, Box 30, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland.

  33. 33.

    Kath Walker, “Report to the Australian Council of Churches on the World Council of Churches ‘Consultation on Racism’ held in London 19th May 1969,” Oodgeroo Noonuccal Papers, UQFL84, Box 30.

  34. 34.

    Ibid.

  35. 35.

    Len Fox, “Black Power in Australia,” Outlook 13, No. 5 (October 1969): 11.

  36. 36.

    Walker, “Report to the Australian Council of Churches,” Oodgeroo Noonuccal Papers, UQFL84, Box 30.

  37. 37.

    Kath Walker, “Black Australians: A speech given to the Sydney Journalists Club on the 16th of September 1969,” Oodgeroo Noonuccal Papers, UQFL84, Box 30.

  38. 38.

    For more on Atlanta’s important place in the long civil rights movement see Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

  39. 39.

    K. Komozi Woodard, “The Making of the New Ark: Imanu Imiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), the Newark Congress of African People and the Modern Black Convention Movement. A History of the Black Revolt and the New Nationalism, 1966–1976” (PhD Thesis, The University of Pennsylvania, 1991): 232. For a more recent take on the CAP, see Robeson Taj P. Frasier, “The Congress of African People: Baraka, Brother Mao and the year of ’74,” Souls 8, No. 3 (2006), 142–159.

  40. 40.

    Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 146.

  41. 41.

    Ibid, 146.

  42. 42.

    Abschol fundraising letter, undated, in Aborigines Visit the US: Report on trip by Five Aborigines to Congress of African People and United Nations, np (Melbourne: ASCHOL, 1971).

  43. 43.

    Bob Maza, ‘Tuesday 24th August, 1969’, National Koorier, 1969, 7.

  44. 44.

    For example, “Black Power,” Outlook 10 No. 4 (1966): 18–19.

  45. 45.

    For these figures see Alan Knight,” Ratbags, revolutionaries and free speech: The Queensland radical press in 1968,” Pacific Journalism Review 10, No. 1 (2004): 153–170.

  46. 46.

    Mark Rubbo, “Black Power,” Farrago, 3 May 1968, 4. For more on Perkins’ uptake of Black Power see Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 42–3.

  47. 47.

    “Roosevelt Brown meets the Press,” Smoke Signals 8, No. 2 (September 1969): 4–11.

  48. 48.

    Ibid, 8.

  49. 49.

    Bob Maza, “The Koorie’s Dissilusionment,” Smoke Signals 8, No. 1 (April-June 1969): 3; Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 59, 61.

  50. 50.

    A. Barrie Pittock, “Easter 1970 and the origins of the National Tribal Council” (Unpublished Manuscript, 1970), 4, available at http://indigenousrights.net.au/files/f102.pdf, accessed 4 April 2013

  51. 51.

    Ibid, 8–9.

  52. 52.

    “Birds both black and beautiful,” Identity, November 1972, reproduced in Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229.

  53. 53.

    Pat Kruger, “A year in the revolutionary education,” in Aborigines Visit the US, 31.

  54. 54.

    Jack Davis and Keith Chesson, Jack Davis: a life-story (Melbourne: DENT, 1988), 145.

  55. 55.

    Bruce McGuinness, “Report by Bruce B. McGuiness Director Administrative Officer A.A.L.,” in Aborigines visit the US, 7.

  56. 56.

    On SNCC, see Wilkins, “The Making of Black Internationalists.” For other examples of this focus on the global lives of well-known spokespeople and organisations see Sarah Seidmen, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, No. 2 (2012): 1–25 and Michael L Clemons and Charles E Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, 20–39 (New York: Routledge, 2001).

  57. 57.

    Kevin Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973), 111.

  58. 58.

    Bob Maza quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 117.

  59. 59.

    McGuinness, “Report,” 8.

  60. 60.

    Ibid, 7.

  61. 61.

    Ibid, 7.

  62. 62.

    Woodard, “The Making of the New Ark,” 228–30.

  63. 63.

    McGuinness, “Report,” 15.

  64. 64.

    Kruger, “A year,” 31.

  65. 65.

    Davis and Chesson, Jack Davis, 148; Thomas A Johnson, “World Unity of Blacks Sought at Parley,” New York Times, 4 September 1970, 42.

  66. 66.

    For another report on the Indigenous Australians in American newspapers see “Third World Seeks Unity,” Origin (reprint from New York Times), 30 October 1970, 8–9. For the petitions presented to the UN, see Aborigines in the USA, 19–23.

  67. 67.

    McGuinness, “Report,” 15. These streets now carry alternative names of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Malcolm X Boulevard, respectively.

  68. 68.

    Ibid, 14. For more on the Black Panther Party in Australia and its connections in the US see Alyssa L. Trometter, “‘The Fire in the Belly’: Aboriginal Black Power and the rise of the Australian Black Panther Party, 1967–1972” (PhD Thesis, The University of Melbourne, 2013).

  69. 69.

    Lothian, “A Blackwards Step,” 149–51.

  70. 70.

    Kruger, “A year,” 31.

  71. 71.

    Trometter, “‘The Fire in the Belly’.

  72. 72.

    Bob Maza quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 113.

  73. 73.

    Bob Bellear quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 115.

  74. 74.

    Aborigines in the USA, i. ABSCHOL launched a large fundraising campaign to reimburse the money.

  75. 75.

    Davis and Chesson, Jack Davis, 149–50.

  76. 76.

    Woodard, “The making of the New Ark,” 234.

  77. 77.

    Bob Bellear quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 115.

  78. 78.

    Aborigines in the USA, i.

  79. 79.

    Kruger, “A year,” 31.

  80. 80.

    Lothian, “A Blackwards step,” 150.

  81. 81.

    Read, “Cheeky, insolent and anti-white,” 80.

  82. 82.

    Quoted in Clark, Aborigines and activism, 210.

  83. 83.

    de Costa mentions the trips in passing, de Costa, A Higher Authority, 101. For more on the place of China in the Australian radical imaginary see Jon Piccini, “‘Light from the East: Travel to China and Australian activism in the ‘long 1960s,’” The 1960s 6, No. 1 (July 2013), 25–44.

  84. 84.

    For more on Comintern policy during the period, focusing on the relatable example of African Americans and the national question, see Oscar Berland, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ in America: 1919–1931, Part 1,” Science and Society 63, No. 4 (Winter 1999–2000): 411–423, Oscar Berland, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the ‘Negro Question’ in America: 1919–1931, Part 2,” Science and Society 64, No. 2 (Summer 2000): 194–217 and Oscar Berland, “Nasanov and the Comintern’s American Negro Problem,” Science and Society 65, No. 2 (Summer 2001): 226–8.

  85. 85.

    Douglas Jordon, “Conflict in the Unions: The Communist Party of Australia, Politics and the Trade Union Movement, 1945–1960” (PhD Thesis, Victoria University, 2011), 248–51

  86. 86.

    Ibid, 254–5, 277.

  87. 87.

    Ann Curthoys, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002), 47. Robeson’s American passport was confiscated between 1950 and 1958.

  88. 88.

    For more on Malone see Jackie Hartley, “Black, White…and Red? The Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club in the early 1960s,” Labour History 83 (November 2002): 165. See Malone’s ASIO file for this comment, transcribed by an agent. “Valentine Edward Maloney aka Monty Maloney,” 21 November 1961, Valentine Edward “Monty” Moloney/Maloney Volume 1, A6119 2834, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  89. 89.

    On Maoism’s importance to Third World and decolonising struggles see Alexander C. Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in A Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek, 288–312 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  90. 90.

    For copies of these two statements see Fred Ho and Bill Mullen, eds, Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 91–96.

  91. 91.

    On the importance of Maoism in American ‘Black Power’ politics see, for example, Frazier, “The Congress of African People,” 143–4 and Robeson Taj P. Frasier, “Thunder in the East: China, Exiled Crusaders and the unevenness of Black Internationalism,” American Quarterly 63, No. 4 (December 2011): 929–953 and Robeson Taj P. Frazier, “‘The Assault of the Monkey King on the Hosts of Heaven’: The Black Freedom Struggle and China—The New Centre of Revolution,” in African Americans in Global Affairs: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Michael L Clemons, 313–344. (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern University Press, 2010).

  92. 92.

    Elaine Brown and Huey Newton quoted in Robin D.G. Kelly and Betsy Esche, “Black like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, No. 4 (1999): 7–8.

  93. 93.

    Ibid, 7.

  94. 94.

    On the Australian Black Panther Party, see Kathy Lothian, “Seize the Time: Australian Aborigines and the Influence of the Black Panther Party, 1969–1972,” Journal of Black Studies 35, No. 4 (March 2005): 179–200.

  95. 95.

    “Chinese Papers Attack Australia,” The Age, 24 July 1972, 4.

  96. 96.

    See “CPA (M/L)—interest in Aborigines,” Dixon, Charles Volume 1, A6119 3646, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  97. 97.

    Eric Walsh, “Aborigines invited to China,” National Times, 14 February 1972, in Dixon, Charles Volume 1, A6119 3646.

  98. 98.

    “Aborigines hope for Peking talks”, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February 1972, in Dixon, Charles Volume 1, A6119 3646.

  99. 99.

    Charles ‘Chicka’ Dixon quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 115.

  100. 100.

    Chicka Dixon interviewed by Gary Foley, 5 and 12 of May 1995, TRC 3282, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

  101. 101.

    “Aboriginals Progress Association,” 7 October 1965, Dixon, Charles Volume 1, A6119 3646. “Aborigines tour of China: October/November 1972,” Dixon, Charles Volume 2, A6119 3647, National Archives of Australia, Canberra; “INWARD MESSAGE: Aboriginal visit to Communist China,” Dixon, Charles Volume 1, A6119 3646.

  102. 102.

    Undated, untitled (censored) report, Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229; David McKnight, Australia’s spies and their secrets (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 231.

  103. 103.

    “Aborigines tell China of ‘racism,’” The Age, October 31 1972, 1.

  104. 104.

    “Film of ‘embassy’ in Peking,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 October 1972, 10.

  105. 105.

    “China visit,” Identity 1, No. 7 (July 1973): 28.

  106. 106.

    Worker-Student Alliance leaflet, Melbourne University, 1973, Dixon, Charles Volume 2, A6119 3647.

  107. 107.

    Margaret Jones, “Aborigines in China look at Communes,” Sydney Morning Herald, 28 January 1974, 1.

  108. 108.

    Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 116.

  109. 109.

    Jones, “Aborigines in China,” 1.

  110. 110.

    Gary Foley, “An Aboriginal in the People’s Republic of China,” Identity 2 No. 1 (July 1974): 39.

  111. 111.

    “Money from China,” News Weekly, 22 February 1974.

  112. 112.

    “Fishing in troubled waters,” News Weekly, 25 February 1972.

  113. 113.

    “BLACK POWER WARNING: Support for Aboriginals,” Daily Telegraph, 12 February 1973; “China Visit,” 28.

  114. 114.

    William Griffiths, “Barbarians in the Middle Kingdom: Whitlam talks with China, 1971” (BA Honours Thesis, University of Sydney, 2011), 43. China was in fact beginning to reconsider its foreign policy orientation, with Mao announcing the “Theory of Three Worlds” in 1974, which placed powers like Australia as a second world of oppressed developed nations. For more on these changes at the level of foreign policy see Kuisong Yang and Yafeng Xia, “Vacillating between Revolution and Détente: Mao’s Changing Psyche and Policy Toward the United States, 1969–1976,” Diplomatic History 34, No. 2 (April 2010): 395–423.

  115. 115.

    Agneiszka Sobocinska, “Australian Fellow Travellers to China: Devotion and Deceit in the People’s Republic,” Journal of Australian Studies 32, No. 3 (September 2008): 331.

  116. 116.

    “China Visit,” 28.

  117. 117.

    “China trip by Aborigines, Canberra Times, 14 February 1972 and “Chinese Aid for Blacks,” Canberra Times, 17 March 1972. Cuttings in Newfong, John Archibald Volume 1, A6119 3434, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  118. 118.

    “China Trip”, 29.

  119. 119.

    Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge: Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003), 2.

  120. 120.

    Transcript of “AM”, 31 January 1974, Foley, Gary Volume 1, A6119 3871, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  121. 121.

    Paul Coe quoted in Gilbert, Because a white man’ll never do it, 111.

  122. 122.

    Ibid, 111.

  123. 123.

    Fred Maynard, “Transcultural/transnational interaction and influences on Aboriginal Australia,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, eds. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, 208 (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005).

  124. 124.

    On the decline of Third Worldism see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007). On this transition of the CAP see Frazier, “The Congress of African People.”

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    Jon Piccini

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Piccini, J. (2016). Wider Horizons: Indigenous Australians Abroad and the Limits of Global Activism. In: Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52914-5_6

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