THE AGE A true Australian hero By JOHN PILGER 2000-10-20 00:07:41 Charlie Perkins was, in many ways, Australia's Mandela. Indeed, had the Australian racial composition been reversed, as in South Africa, he would have surely fulfilled that role. Instead, he struggled until his death for justice and dignity for his people and to alert the white majority to the truth: that unless they gave back nationhood to the first Australians, they could never claim their own. Charlie became my friend on a blistering hot day in 1969 when he took me home to Alice Springs. Having grown up on Bondi Beach, I was introduced to an Australia I barely knew existed. We picked up Hetti, his mother, who was waiting at the roadside, beneath a magnificent black hat. A queen of the Arrente people, she had given birth to Charlie on a table top in the disused Alice Springs telegraph office in 1936 or 1937; she was never sure which. We drove out into the red desert, heading for the Aboriginal reserve at Jay Creek, run by the Federal Government, where 300 Aboriginal people were corralled in administered squalor, often in 40-degree heat and without water, proper food or housing. The children had distended bellies and suffered from trachoma, which leads to blindness. This was the Australian Gulag. The barbed-wire gate was locked and declared "No Entry" by ministerial order. "What d'you reckon, Mum?" said Charlie. "Do it," said Hetti from the back seat. I reversed the car, revved it and smashed through the gate. "G'day!" said Charlie to the white manager, whose ablutions we had interrupted. "Where's your bloody permit?" "Lost it, mate," said Charlie. "Now how come these children look so bloody sick ...?" It was Charlie who did much to change the conditions at Jay Creek, and begin to right Australia's great wrong by bringing the most basic human rights to Aboriginal people. On behalf of the most discarded minority of any white colonial country, his trailblazing role was momentous, as was his courage. Growing up, he was a mixed-race Aborigine who was "protected" so that he might be "assimilated": the bureaucratic language that masked the suffering of the "Stolen Generation", now recognised as a form of genocide in which children were taken from their mothers and sent to institutions as bonded labor. Charlie remembered his grandmother as only a face behind barbed wire. One of his brothers killed himself, which was common and still is. Charlie himself was never stolen because Hetti never took her eyes off him. "You learned from when you were a kid to stay out of the way of whites," he told me. "Our big treat was being taken to the pictures, sneaking in after the movie had started and leaving before it ended, so that no one would object to us black kids being there. I grew up never knowing if the goodies or baddies won. Very frustrating." He was sent to mission school in Adelaide, where he discovered soccer and, at 16, was spotted by the English first division club Everton, which offered to pay his fare to England. Later Mat Busby invited him to a trial with Manchester United, and Charlie holds the distinction of turning the great man down. "You know, I found a kind of racial dignity in England," he told me. "But I was homesick." He became only the second Aborigine to graduate from an Australian university. In the mid-1960s he led white students on "freedom rides" into the outback of New South Wales. Their objective was much the same as that of the freedom riders who began the desegregation of the Deep South in the United States. Charlie and his white comrades stood at the turnstile of one public swimming pool and demanded that black children be allowed entry. Spat at and assaulted, they were menaced by a growing crowd. "I thought we'd had it," he said. "Then this black woman stepped forward and made a courageous speech in which she pointed to a white man who had gone secretly with black women and fathered black children. `Tell your wives what you've been doing, you bludgers,' she said. `Go on, they're just over there: tell 'em!' "That evening black kids were allowed into the pool for the first time. We had won the first battle." Charlie went on to win and lose many battles. For a time, he served as head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra, but co-option never worked with him. He invariably spoke his mind, eloquently peppered with Aussie epithets, as he pointed a finger at a white society that could never patronise him. Whenever he came to London, he would call me and say, "Get the media out, mate. There's a demo in The Strand outside Australia House that will tell the Poms about an Australia that's just like South Africa." Knowing his reply, I would ask how many were going. "Just me." Even when Sydney University recently gave him an honorary doctorate, he used the occasion to attack the government of John Howard for effectively taking away the common-law rights that the High Court had said belonged to Aborigines: an action the United Nations has condemned as racist. He would have exploded had he heard Howard and Philip Ruddock paying their clenched-teeth tributes to him. Like so many Aborigines, Charlie was burdened by ill health. Most Aborigines can expect to die in their 40s and 50s. "I beat that," he said when I last saw him. He drew lifelong strength from his wife Eileen, herself a remarkable person, and his children Hetti (named after his mother), Rachel and Adam, and his grandchildren. I spoke to him in hospital the day after the Sydney Olympics ended and he was cursing, typically, the absence of a "shaming campaign" in which he had hoped to participate. More than most I can think of, Charlie Perkins was a true Australian hero. John Pilger is an Australian-born, London-based journalist, author and film-maker. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001020/A61296-2000Oct19.html ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
