This dispatch is from Frank Hardy’s The Unlucky Australians (2006). This book covers the Aboriginal Stockmen’s strike at Wave Hill in the late 1960s and early 70s. This strike lead directly to recognition of Aboriginal land rights. (This was written at the time and published posthumously)
His attitude (Jack Meaney, a war time (WWII) friend of Hardy’s, living at Adelaide River, just over 100km south of Darwin, NT, Australia) to the Aborigines is excellent and he tells many moving stories of their plight, their humour and their culture. He has got into a lot of arguments as a ‘nigger-lover’ which he has more than once settled with the bunch of fives.
“Years ago Jack employed an Aborigine droving. A Welfare Officer came to him and demanded he take out a licence to employ the Aborigine under the Wards Employment Ordinance. Jack replied: “I don’t take out a licence for a man like he was a dog, just because his skin is black. I pay him white men’s wages and treat him as a white man”
One time, during the war, Jack was cook in charge of a CCC Camp and gave hospitality to an Army Officer and his aboriginal batmen. After their first meal together, the officer said he didn’t want to sit at the same meal-table as the Aborigine – bad for discipline. When serving the next meal, Jack sat the Aborigine at the table with himself and his co-workers and put the officer at a box in a corner of the hut. When the officer complained, Jack told him: You said you wanted to sit at a different table to the Aborigine. Well, I fixed it for you.”
His program for the Aborigines: “Trust them, that’s the first thing. And treat them like human beings. give them equal pay and a decent education. They can be the greatest bloody citizens we’ve got.” Then he’d say, “But they won’t give him a go. they think the old abo is an easy mark but they might find out otherwise with this strike at Newcastle Waters (a relatively small Cattle Station, where a strike was underway prior to the main strike at Wave Hill)
We talked about the disgraceful conditions of the Aborigines on the cattle stations which he knew intimately, he said, “And the white pastoral workers don’t exactly live like kings, either. Bad conditions, long hours without proper overtime and the lowest wages of any white worker in Australia”……… “I’ve told them many a time: You blokes’ll never get anywhere while you allow the bosses to treat the Aborigines like dogs. While there’s cheap aboriginal labour available, you’ll work for low pay and bad conditions yourselves.”
“While black men are in chains no white man can be free” I quoted from Karl Marx
“He’s bloody right, too, but you can’t tell these boneheads who work on the cattle stations. I never met one of ‘em yet who ever had a Union ticket. They all fancy themselves as Yankee cowboys. If petrified goat shit was imported from America they’d eat it for lollies”.