La Grange Mission, Bidyadanga Aboriginal community, W.A. Freedom Ride
Images National Library of Australia.
FREEDOM RIDE
Australian freedom ride
The University of Sydney's Student Action for Aborigines arranges a 'Freedom Ride' through western New South Wales towns to bring to public attention the inequities and racial prejudice faced by Aboriginal people. The students' action is widely publicised. Charles Perkins, the Aboriginal leader of the Ride, is widely recognised as a direct and forceful Aboriginal spokesman.
The 1965 Freedom Ride exhibition introduces you to the Student Action For Aborigines organisation and explains how students from the University of Sydney drew national and international attention to the poor living conditions of Aboriginal people and the racism that was rife in New South Wales country towns from 12 – 26 February 1965. This event was the beginning of resetting the relationship between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people in contemporary Australia.
The Ride included a survey of Aboriginal living conditions, a direct challenge to a ban against Aboriginal ex-servicemen at the Walgett Returned Services League, and a demonstration against local laws barring Aboriginal children from the Moree and Kempsey swimming pools.
The group ensured their protests were covered by the media, bringing the issue of racial discrimination to national and international press attention, and stirring public debate about the disadvantage and racism facing Aboriginal people across Australia at the time.
The Queensland Aborigines' and Torres Strait Islanders Affairs Act finally removes the barriers prohibiting an 'aboriginal native of Australia or the Islands of the Pacific' from voting. However barriers, for some people, remain. Many of the 110 regulations under the Act continue to override or ignore Aboriginal and Islander human rights.
Introducing the Remembering the Mission Days online exhibition is Dr Lawrence Bamblett, a Wiradjuri man from New South Wales and a Research Fellow at AIATSIS.
The quotes in the Remembering the Mission Days exhibition are taken from newsletters published by the Aborigines Inland Mission of Australia (AIM). The newsletters collected here, Our Aim and Australian Evangel give important insights into the power of classifying people in the act of colonisation. They tell us something about Aboriginal cultural strength, patriotism and resistance.
Written in these pages is an earlier version of the story of Aboriginal inferiority that justified the demand that Aborigines accept a destiny as an imitation of the coloniser. There is an obvious story here that Aborigines are elevated according to how well they adapt to the religion of the coloniser. Of course these newsletters should be read as wrong in assuming that white people’s religion was superior to Aborigines’ religion. That fact is beyond argument.
If we look beyond the racism we find a lot of genealogical information and life stories that may be crucial to people trying to reconnect disrupted families. The newsletters give detailed outsider accounts of one aspect of life within Aboriginal communities. They may be more instructive now than they would have been then for readers who knew little of Aboriginal people.
They also reveal new insights to people with intimate knowledge of the communities where the Aborigines Inland Missions laboured. That means they are a wonderful research tool for individual and group interviews with senior people. We can read much in the language used, the descriptions and the images published. They report on movements of Aboriginal people. Although not stated in these reports, working with the AIM helped Aborigines maintain connects to people and places even during the harshest restrictions of the managerial system employed by government. There is much to mine from the omissions.
These pages, like all documents produced about Indigenous people, tell us at least as much about the people who wrote them as they do the subjects. They do reveal glimpses of Aboriginal responses to colonisation. On their own, as propaganda, the newsletters give a one-sided view of Aboriginal people. Critically analysed today alongside other sources, they tell us something about Aboriginal resistance and patriotism as a foundation to current efforts to regenerate culture.
Do the Aboriginal patriots reveal themselves to you in these pages?
Map of missions from: The encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, society and culture / Dr David Horton, general editor, Canberra : Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1994. This map includes christian missions and government reserves as well as those operated by AIM.
The campaign for equal wages for Aboriginal pastoral workers begins. The North Australian Workers' Union lodges an application for the Cattle Station Industry (Northern Territory) Award to include Aboriginal pastoral workers.
The Australian referendum of 27 May 1967, called by the Holt Government, approved two amendments to the Australian constitution relating to Indigenous Australians. Technically it was a vote on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967, which became law on 10 August 1967 following the results of the referendum.
The Library is open 8.00 to 4.00 Mon-Thurs, 8.00 to 3.30 Fri. We also have a selection of games available to play during recess and lunch. Only games from the Library are to be played.
