Bicentennial

The 26th January 1788, when the British fleet arrived with its cargo of settlers to invade the country, was a Day of Mourning for Aboriginal people, as William Cooper, Pearl Gibbs, Jack Patten and Bill Ferguson had made clear in their meeting in 1938. Aboriginal people have continued to be under colonial rule despite never ceding their lands to settlers.

So planning began early for 1988, when the Australian and NSW governments planned a celebration of this settler nation, in the Bicentennial of British rule. In August 1986, three organisations met at Tranby: the Committee to Defend Black Rights, the Women Against Racism group and Tranby Aboriginal Co-operative itself. They circulated a leaflet asking: The Bicentennial: What’s there to Celebrate?

→ Flyer: The Bicentennial: What’s there to Celebrate? [JPG 39KB]

Aboriginal people all over the country were working on how they could best mark this day. The Rev Charles Harris, a Murri from Ingham in Queensland and a Uniting Church minister, first had the idea for a march of Indigenous people from Uluru to Sydney to demand recognition and justice to Indigenous people. Harris, as President of the Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, and Anne Patel-Grey, a South Australian Indigenous woman from the World Council of Churches, drew together a network of support from across the country and in particular with the Federation of Land Councils, with which the independent NSW Aboriginal Land Council had been in close contact since 1977. The idea of the Long March was developed in this way, with, as Patrick Dodson, then living in Alice Springs, has pointed out, full confidence that the Sydney end would be coordinated through Tranby.

As Dodson explained in an interview in 1999 with Kevin Cook:

Charlie Harris, the minister, wanted the great march, from Uluru to Sydney. He was a good man, Charlie. He had no concept of where the money was going to come from but he had his heart very much in the right place. He had a vision. But he didn’t have any idea of the distance! Now we weren’t walking from here, I’ll give you the drum! No-one was going to march! We said, ‘Let’s get on a truck! We’re coming down here, but we’re not going to march, no way in the world’.

What was needed was confidence that things in Sydney would be arranged – and more importantly, that the many people coming from other places would be welcomed. This was made possible by the networks already set up through the Federation of Land Councils and through Kevin’s role at Tranby. Patrick had explained earlier in the interview, the Federation contacts had opened the way to feel comfortable about coming to Sydney, opening a path in protocol so that people felt welcomed. He explained the decisions to come to Sydney for the Bicentennial demonstration in the same terms.

You don’t do things unless you have trust in the people who are asking you to do something or that you believe you have a sense of obligation to them, and then you’ll do it. Or you’ll approach them first and say: ‘Do you want a hand? What’s going on? Can we do something?’ But you won’t do that unless you have some sense of it and unless the interaction is there.

We thought: ‘Ring up Tranby, find Cookie!’ or if we needed to talk to trade unions, ‘Ring Tranby, Ring Cookie!’

We were coming down to see Cookie. We’d have found Cookie if he was on the other side of the world, but all the same, we weren’t walking for it!...

So it really was a significant link. And then when we came here in ’88, when all the mob came in and you guys had got the market gardeners and whoever else to put a feed together for everyone and got the hostels. And then the convoys rocked in with all this other mob from the Territory – again making sure the people were looked after properly in that situation.

So they had the confidence that the welcome was going to happening, and that wouldn’t have been there, if it hadn’t been preceded by these earlier encounters. There’s no way in the world you would’ve got the mob coming together under any other sort of arrangement, they’d feel very uneasy about it.

- Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall, 2013: Making Change Happen, p 337.

The Bicentennial Protest Committee in Sydney – meeting at Tranby – held a planning ‘Action Day’ in November 1986, attended by ‘Church groups, unions, women’s groups and Aboriginal organisations’. They produced an ‘Action Kit’ which outlined the many different types of activity which supporters could plan and hold in the lead up to the Bicentennial, on Australia Day, 26 January 1988. The kit suggested working with schools, through the media and in unions to explain the grounds for Indigenous protests and to work towards a protest against the settler nationalist Bicentennial and instead to create a broader and more inclusive idea of an Australia founded on justice.

→ Action Kit from FEDFA Archives Noel Butlin Archive of Business and Labour [PDF 818KB]

Karen Flick, Judy Chester and Kevin Cook remembered the planning from the Sydney end:

Karen: So when we were planning for 1988, you just sort of jumped in and, got involved with it and did whatever you could, from making tea to organise international interviews with this one that one or the other, whatever else. Even the planning for that, it was just so – HUGE! You thought, Oh this is just impossible!! And then slowly you had those regular meetings, and, suddenly there was a bit of a ground swell and, and, it just went from there, people out there were all sort of connecting! Saying ‘Yeah, we’re coming down for it!’ and ‘We’re going to to be there!’ And suddenly all these buses were coming from all over the place! And then we had to run around and try and find accommodation and you had to feed people you had to accommodate them! And that was through the Coalition, but we were working closely with the churches on some of that as well, and then just about everyone else I suppose.

Kevin: The South Australian people played a really good part, because they pulled in the people from the territory, Western Australia as they come through, fed them! Yeah, amazing wasn’t it, and every state had their own little coalition, you know it was raising funds and you know organising their own mob, just amazing people! And then of course there was the support from the migrants. The rest of them out here, and, Frank Panucci and, couple of others and, there’s a whole…

Judy: Every nationality, you know the Jewish people were, the Palestinian people, they worked very closely together on that, it’s really good to see. Italians, Greek, Yugoslav. We had them all! You had Migrants for Aboriginal Rights, which is just about everyone. And then you had little break-aways, you know Chileans for Aboriginal Rights, South Americans for Aboriginal Rights, and they all their own little banners you know it was just, and they were amazing.

There were many different ideas about what should happen on January 26th. Karen Flick explained:

There was a lot of people trying to, you know, hijack it and we were all getting really upset. And Kevin says, ‘Look, everybody’s not going to do what we want them to do. As long as we get ’em here that’s all that matters! People are all going to have their own agenda and they’re going to do their own little thing. Let’s just have the tent where the boats are coming in or something like that, that’ll be right.’

And once we adopted that attitude, we felt much better for it you know. And that’s one of the qualities I think Cookie needs to be acknowledged for, he’s one of those peace makers, able to diffuse a situation, able to get to the bottom of what’s the real issue here!

Planning continued with many events through 1987, but there was a backlash from nationalist extremists (identified as the ‘Neo-Nazi’ group led by Jim Saleem) who attacked the building at Tranby as a symbol of the Aboriginal challenge to the Government’s celebratory Bicentennial.

The momentum built until in early 1988, there was a flurry of support, with Union statements of solidarity and support from musicians and artists all over the country, who came together for the Building Bridges Concert to welcome the convoys bringing Aboriginal people from all over Australia.

→ Union Press Release [PDF 181KB]

→ Building Bridges flyer [PNG 830KB]

These buses, trucks and cars which had all travelled so many miles, arrived in Sydney in the days before the march. As each pulled up at La Perouse, there were many people there to welcome them into their country. Jack Ah Kit, from the Northern Land Council in the Northern Territory, has described the feeling as the convoy vehicles came rolling in:

I was down earlier as sort of head of the advance party getting accommodation and food, which Tranby helped with, shopping at a co-operative.

To be in touch with that convoy when they were coming through Liverpool, and then to see this convoy drive into La Per was something that I’ll never forget.

It was sprinkling with rain and to see all these Aboriginal people – countrymen – down here waiting and cheering as the convoy started to drive in. People were crying with happiness. And to see grown men crying with happiness – it brought tears to me eyes also because it was such a wonderful feeling. People’s hair stood up... There was goose bumps everywhere. The rain was sprinkling... and if you mentioned it to a few blokes... you might say ‘Touching isn’t it?’ ‘No, no’, they’d say, ‘it’s the rain. I’m not crying. I’m not crying!’

It was just so wonderful. Everyone was so emotional – so proud to see this convoy coming in. They had travelled all this distance to be together. It was magnificent.

Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall, 2013: Making Change Happen, p 350

As Karen, Judy and Kevin in Sydney remembered it:

Karen: And when all those buses arrived! Cause we kept on getting reports, yeah, they’re at Mildura, they’re here, they’re there, you know, or this other mob were coming from down the coast! And when that big mob arrived out at La Perouse, it just rained. It poured down in the middle of that and that was a big sign, you know that’s not anything else…

Kevin: We were all crying, you couldn’t tell if it was tears or raindrops, it was just emotional wasn’t it.

Judy: Yeah, people you didn’t know would come and you’re crying because they’re coming, and all them people are coming up and cuddling you and you never seen them before in your life! All these black people!! It was just amazing.

Karen: It was so spiritual, you know there was a lot of stuff there.

Kevin: But they had business to do, you know? They didn’t come down here to get on the piss, they had a job to do and they even put it in their dances and stuff, and they said this will go forever!

Judy: Yeah, that’s right, they took their dance back home.

Karen: They took all them dances and all them stories back home with them to their mob and that, it was just amazing, I’m glad I never missed that.

On January 26th, Australia Day, the Aboriginal marchers from all over the country gathered in Redfern to march towards the city.

They were led by people from Central Australia, dancing the songs of that country to link them down to the people of Sydney.

Pat Anderson, a First Nations woman from the Northern Territory but at that time living in Melbourne and working for the Victorian Teachers’ Federation, has described that scene as the protest marchers from Redfern marched into the Prince Alfred Park to gather with the thousands of non-Indigenous Australians (Jack Ah Kit thought there were 50,000) who were waiting there to march with them into the City:

That feeling just sort of tapped in, like, with all those people waiting for us at the park... but there were people all along, all along. And then when we got almost to the end, like there was a Teachers’ Union, I remember just along the side of the road waiting for us, and there must’ve been about a couple of hundred of them. It was really impressive – they were waiting, just waiting, for all of us to come!

I think it gave people a lot of confidence, and it reaffirmed who everybody was: politically, emotionally and – the other missing ingredient – spiritually as well. It was a very emotional time, but I think people were doing a lot of things from their heart. They knew it intellectually... they knew it in their head that it was politically important, but then when it came, we went into another space and it just sort of evolved. It sort of just happened!

We turned it around, so as it wasn’t ‘them and us’. We said, ‘You are doing that but what we are doing – despite everything that’s happened to us – we are still here’.

I remember that it was a conscious decision not to make it just a protest, but rather to make it a celebration of who we are, and that we’re here.

And that was a conscious political decision to turn it around.

I think our lobbying against 1988 was one of the most positive things we’ve done because it really did take all the oomph out of that ‘celebration of the nation’ that they were planning. There were non-Indigenous Australians really stumbling on the word ‘celebrate’!

In the end, we were the ones using the word ‘celebrations’, because it came to be a bit more difficult for them, than they first thought. So it did take a lot of that oomph out of the big party, the big bang kind of things. And I think it’s made them... at that time at least, a little bit more thoughtful.

Kevin Cook and Heather Goodall, 2013: Making Change Happen, pp 358-9

In the evening, many people gathered at Kurnell, where James Cook had landed, to go back, as people said, to the place where the invasion had begun. Karen Flick remembered it this way:

Karen: 1988 was a very powerful spiritual gathering, because we had the ceremony over at Kurnell. You had a whole lot of people from all over the place who came representing a whole lot of other people, but underneath it all they were representing their country. And they were standing for one particular issue and this was ‘We have survived!’ but it’s about, ‘We’re still here. We’re challenging, you know, we still own this country!’

One of the things that my father said when he was given one of the Tranby awards was he doesn’t worry too much about land rights as such, ‘Because as long as you’re feet are still on the ground, you’re still walking on Aboriginal land!’ He said: ‘I’m still on my country!’

Big campfires were lit, and all night, the dancers from Central and Northern Australia danced around these fires. They danced to bring the songs of their country down to Botany Bay, to Kamay, to link the country back together again and to defy the claims of the British.

Wenten Rubuntja, an Arrente man from Alice Springs, explained this way:

‘When the English people found our country and Aboriginal people, they put their cities and their culture all over our country. But underneath this, all the time, Aboriginal culture and laws stay alive.

‘In Central Australia... our culture, our laws and the song in the land has a voice – the Walpiri voice, the Arrernte, the Luritja, the Pitjantjatjara, Gurindji – many voices....

‘The Aboriginal people living along the coast where the white people took over first, they might not know their language any more, but the emu story and the snake story goes all over Australia.... When they see us dance we can celebrate that we all belong to the songs that go across the whole of this country.’

- Land Rights News, 2[6] January 1988

The crowd of people there, black and white, saw the dawn break through their vision of a country where the future could be built on justice.