William Cooper, Gentle Warrior

Miller’s moving historical account fills in missing gaps in the story of Indigenous activism within Australia, including her own participation in the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, the book adds a significant new dimension to our understandings of indigenous politics on a global scale both pre and post World War Two. And perhaps most importantly, as discussed below, the account points to the intersections between Australia’s Indigenous and immigration policies or, to put it another way, its internal and external racial strategies. As Miller suggests, these issues are deeply connected. This insight underscores the book’s current relevance in thinking about problems on both internal and external fronts facing Australia – and other countries – in the early decades of the 21st century.

William Cooper was a stoic fighter and determined to speak out against the discriminations of his own people. Despite his family suffering enormous deprivation under white Australia’s colonial policies that included explicit directives of genocide, protectionism and assimilation, Cooper set out at an early age to bring attention to the plight of Australian Aborigines. Born in 1860 in Yorta Yorta country near Echuca on the Murray River, Cooper spent parts of his childhood on Daniel Mathews’ missionary station at Maloga where he was influenced by the churchman’s championing of Aboriginal rights. As a young man he lived at a government run station called Cummeragunga, usually abbreviated to ‘Cummera’.

In his later years, at the age of 72, he was forced to leave Cummera and moved to a modest house in Footscray where he emerged as a leader amongst the urban disenfranchised Aboriginal community. There Cooper became increasingly involved in local organisations and political activism fighting for black equality in a white world.As a founding member of the Australian Aborigines League in 1934, Cooper sought political representation of blacks in state and federal parliament (Attwood and Markus 2004). Acutely aware that Maoris in New Zealand had been granted political representation in parliament since 1867, Cooper demanded that Australian Aborigines be given similar political representation in what was coined a ‘New Deal’. Drafting a petition to the King of England, Cooper managed to obtain nearly 2,000 Aboriginal signatures by 1935 supporting the demand ‘to prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race’. This was a miraculous accomplishment given his limited financial resources and that signatures were obtained from remote communities across the country (p. 45). This petition also evidenced a growing ‘pan-Aboriginal consciousness’ that spoke of native unity in the face of severe adversity.

Unfortunately, the looming war helped defeat Cooper’s effort to have Britain grant political representation to native peoples, or at least provided the excuse not to pursue it. In 1938 Cooper turned his attention to domestic politics and demanded citizenship rights for blacks. He heavily campaigned against the 150th celebrations of Australia Day, calling the event a Day of Mourning. Cooper, along with fellow activists such as Jack Patten, Doug Nicholls and Bill Ferguson, formed a delegation and presented a petition outlining a 10 point plan to Prime Minister Lyons in Parliament House, Canberra. The government, however, denied the petition on the basis that native peoples were not subjects of Australia but of Britain pursuant to section 51 of the Constitution hence outside the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister. As Miller writes, ‘the Commonwealth Government had no authority to pass legislation at all for Aborigines. It could not therefore pass legislation giving them representation in Federal Parliament’ (p. 61). This point must have been exceptionally hard for Cooper to stomach given that his son had died in World War One fighting with the Australian forces yet could never be recognised as an Australian citizen.

The petition’s failure in 1938 to be even considered by the Australian government underlined the political reality at the time. Under the Constitution native peoples could not be considered citizens of the land they had occupied for thousands of years, unlike the British, Irish, and other immigrants who had been coming across the seas for the past 150 years.1 This explicit denial of legal recognition of Aboriginal peoples correlated with the country’s white Australia policy which sought to keep Australia ‘an outpost of the British race’ as expressed by Prime Minister John Curtin during World War Two. The denial of citizenship rights was a terrible blow to Cooper and the burgeoning pan-Aboriginal movement.

Despite this setback, or perhaps because of this setback, Cooper aggressively protested Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, which occurred in Germany in November 1938 and left approximately 30,000 Jews incarcerated, over 1,000 synagogues destroyed, and at least 90 people dead. William Cooper led a delegation of the Australian Aborigines League to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the ‘cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany, and asks that this persecution be brought to an end’. On 7 December 1938, The Argus newspaper reported that the Consulate refused the delegation admission.

What inspired Cooper to speak out in defense of Jewish refugees? Why, despite decades of setbacks in terms of fighting for Aboriginal rights, did Cooper rally the energy to speak out on behalf of European minorities? An answer is offered in Cooper’s letter to the Minister of the Interior, written nine days after being refused admission at the German Consulate:

‘We feel that while we are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered…I would like to emphasis that what we are asking for the aboriginal born in Australia is already available to Chinese, Japanese, or other alien(s) if they happen to be born here’ (cited p. 212).

In other words, Cooper saw parallels between black and white racial oppression that others could or would not see and in desperation sought to broadcast his observation.2 It should be noted that Cooper’s public denunciation stands in stark contrast to the outcome of the Evian conference in July earlier that year. At this international meeting, Australian representative Mr TW White made it clear that Australia would not respond to the German crisis and accept Jewish refugees stating that ‘As we [Australia] have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one…’ (cited p. 184).

Barbara Miller’s account of William Cooper and these turbulent years of emerging Aboriginal activism in the 1920s and 1930s is truly fascinating and offers what I see as three important insights. First, apart from reminding the reader of the commitment and agency of Indigenous leaders dedicated to fighting the deeply racist policies of the period, Miller’s narrative is a welcome reminder that black activism started well before the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. In short, contrary to popular belief, the Australian black movement did not start with the 1962 amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, 1967 Referendum, or 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and related black mobilisation centered in Sydney’s suburb of Redfern. Rather, the civil rights movement in Australia was prefigured by earlier campaigns and protests that had long historical connections to British and United States anti-slavery movements.

As Miller notes, William Cooper grew up on the Maloga mission in the 1870s to the sound of negro spirituals and the abolition rhetoric of Daniel Mathews. Moreover, the grandson of William Wilberforce, who is largely credited with ending slavery in Britain, spent some time living in Australia in the 1880s and is presumed to have had a relationship with Cooper’s mother and fathered some of his siblings (p. 25, 29, 69). Miller’s account brings to light elements of these startling overlapping histories of racial oppression and minority resistance within British settler societies.

Secondly, William Cooper Gentle Warrior underscores the global influences on domestic Indigenous politics in Australia. While the book is ostensibly about Cooper’s activism prior to his death in 1941, equal time is spent on Indigenous politics in the post World War Two era. In this period Miller points to the increasing international pressures that were brought to bear through such organisations and activists as the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and the South African anti-Apartheid movement that together helped to dismantle the white Australia policy. For instance, the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) launched a huge media campaign to seek constitutional reform in the 1960s that would allow the federal government to legislate on behalf of Aborigines. In a FCAA meeting in Canberra in 1964 there were many Aboriginal delegates present as well as over 40 observers from the embassies of the United States, Canada, Soviet Union, Indonesia, Brazil, Burma and the Irish Republic (p. 93). The FCAA, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the United States, had learnt to aggressively seek international oversight over oppressive national policies. Specifically, these organisations turned to the laws of other countries as well as the collective authority of the United Nations as leverage for domestic legislative reform (see Darian-Smith 2012).

Thirdly, and this is what I see as truly innovative in this historical account, are the parallels and connections William Cooper made over 80 years ago between Australia’s policies toward immigrant refugees and its policies toward its domestic native communities. As Miller provocatively notes, ‘The White Australia Policy is usually thought of in terms of immigration but it also affected policy towards Aborigines. Why go to all that trouble to keep “coloured” races out of Australia and then have a growing group of mixed race within your own borders?’ (p. 150). This line of argument resists conventional sensibilities and offers an insightful historical lesson. So often indigenous politics – and indigenous studies in general – are contained within national borders and classified as domestic issues. But as I have argued elsewhere, a country’s policies toward its native peoples, and the place of those native peoples within the national polity, are constantly refracted through that country’s larger relationship with the rest of the world (Darian-Smith 2013). No nation-state operates as an island, no matter how often and determinedly the island rhetoric is mobilised. Hence immigration policies, and the acceptance of refugees into Australia (ie German Jews in the 1930s, Vietnamese in the 1970s, or ‘boat people’ in the 2010s) cannot be disentangled from domestic histories of anxiety about Aborigines and their relationship to mainstream society. However, analysts and academics of both indigenous and immigrant issues seem curiously determined to keep these arenas separated.

Barbara Miller’s William Cooper Gentle Warrior is a brave and wonderful book that should be read by all those interested in Australia’s recent history. It leaves me asking many questions about the past and future of Indigenous politics and more tangentially the interrelationship between native and immigrant laws and policies. Today in Australia, the island rhetoric has become a mantra that plays to a conservative political agenda and xenophobic sentiments. Perhaps not coincidently, the rising hysteria about ‘boat people’ comes at a time when one fifth of Australia is under Aboriginal ownership, and more and more Indigenous communities are capitalising on their mineral resources in what Marcia Langton has called a ‘quiet revolution’ (Langton 2013). A troubling question raised in my mind is the possible connection between on the one hand the heavy-handed militarisation of the Northern Territory Intervention that clamps down on Aboriginal rights, and on the other hand the increasingly shrill demands for patrolling the nation’s island borders and incarcerating its refugees. Both internal and external policies reinforce white paternalism and racial superiority, and underscore white elites’ inability to fully embrace cultural and religious diversity.

Eve Darian-Smith, PhD LLB,
Professor and Departmental Chair Global & International Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara California, USA

Link to Review on ANU

Dr Esme Bamblett
CEO, Victorian Aborigines Advancement League,
Melbourne, October 2012

Josie Lacey OAM
Life Member of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry Sydney,
October 23, 2012

Colleen Marion
Founder/CEO
Gathering Place Health Service Ltd,
October 2012,
Maidstone, Victoria

John Blacket
Khesed Indigenous Ministries, Khesed Education and Khesed Productions, Jan 2013

Foreword

As the proud grandson of Uncle William Cooper, I am honoured to have been asked by my friend Barbara Miller to write a few words in a Foreword to this publication you are now holding.

Pastors Norman and Barbara Miller have demonstrated continuous support in putting the name of my grandfather, William Cooper, out there in the world. I appreciate that Pastors Norman and Barbara specially flew back to Israel in December 2010 to support the legacy of my grandfather when he was honoured at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

On reading the draft of this book, I am pleased that Barbara has so carefully researched and painstakingly recorded so many details of my grandfather’s life, and not just his political activism. She has also given you an appreciation of his personal side – what the man was really like with whom I lived from when I was a baby growing up to be a 9-year-old boy. My recollections of Grandfather was he was a quiet man until it came to the plight of his people – then he would speak up, their plight was constantly on his mind and he wouldn’t talk much about anything else except the injustices his people suffered, and constantly endured.
Grandfathers’ activism helped me realise that there is a greater purpose for us than just to exist for one’s own life: a just and righteous act of unselfishness, a continuing fight against oppression and that he enacted one of Australia’s greatest examples of living for that greater purpose.

In 1938, he was still very frustrated with the way in which things were progressing about the rights of his people, but once again this quiet man found time for others. He focused his attention on something that sickened him deeply and was very much at the heart of the matter of his own people and their persecution.
Grandfather had followed the constant newspaper reports about Germany under the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party since 1933, but after the reports of the Krystallnacht atrocities in November 1938 – he could see that the singling out of the Jewish people in Europe for extermination was clearly Hitler’s intent.
Grandfather could sadly recognise that same affliction of fear, desperation, bewilderment and a sense of hopelessness which the Jewish people now faced in Europe. Jewish leaders called on the world to do something to stop the atrocities.

When many countries around the world would not act … he did. After waiting a few weeks, when there was still no serious reaction from world leaders, Grandfather organised and led a delegation himself to protest at the German Consulate in Melbourne.

On December 6th 1938, walking from his Footscray home, they marched on the Consulate in South Melbourne, together with other Aboriginal people, to convey a Resolution “condemning the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany” and asking “for this persecution to be brought to an end”.

I am proud to be the grandson of William Cooper, of this wonderful man and have tried to follow in his footsteps in the pursuit of a fair-go. He was much loved, especially by his family and it is my hope that this book inspires you, the reader, as much as his family continues to be inspired and motivated by his legacy.

Uncle Boydie (Alfred Turner)
Mooroopna, Victoria
October 2012

Foreword #2

I have had both the honor and the privilege of walking with the Millers(Norman and Barbara) for over a decade now. But it was in the year 2010 when I first heard of the discovery that Barbara had made in finding a thin thread connecting not only an Aboriginal leader but an Australian with the Jewish people at a time when they were experiencing their worst nightmare – the Holocaust (1939 – 1945).In the words of Prophet Jeremiah it appears that “seventy – years are over” (Jeremiah 29 : 10) and now, only now also we have a document that bears testimony of the courageous acts of a certain man – an Aboriginal man, from the far – side of the globe, who acted on his conscience and his convictions. And so in 1938, one man armed with nothing else but his conscience and his convictions, more than seventy years ago decides to confront the evil of his day and time – racism.

“Racism” in the late 1930’s and in the early 1940’s took a very different form and forces of darkness began to surround and target one particular people group more than others – the Jews. Others too were targeted like the Gypsies etc but they were in the minority. Though the Jews have been persecuted throughout the centuries, what was happening in Christian Europe during this era was not only unthinkable but downright unacceptable. History maintains that when the toll was tallied in 1945 some six million Jews, including 1.5 million children had been systematically murdered by those who were from the Third Reich, Germany – a crusade led by one man Adolf Hitler. History calls this cruelest atrocity of all time the Holocaust.

Using unfounded false theories that the Jews had originated from “an inferior race” and armed with a vision to repopulate Europe first and eventually the world with “Aryans” – a superior race, all of Germany came against the Jewish people, not just in Poland but all of Europe. At a time when the media cannot report what is happening on the one side of the world (West) to the other side of the world (East), unlike CNN and BBC today, still somehow as this evil news from one continent called Europe reached the shores of yet another continent – Australia, an Aboriginal man aged 77 decides to let his stand be known and his voice be heard.

Perhaps as someone born with the Aboriginal community in Australia he readily understood and recognized this evil force called “Anti – Semitism” (racism) that parades in different names during different times. He too must have felt the pain of what it is like to be discriminated and derogated to a status less than human. The mistreatment of his own people prepared him for this moment.

The Holy Bible tells us of yet another “Gentle Warrior” who appears in the pages of 1 Samuel 17 whose name was David. Standing before King Saul he recounts how he had successfully vanquished a lion and a bear and that now he is ready to take on something bigger – Goliath standing nine – feet tall. So too was William Cooper – having taken on that same evil head on in the land he was born and raised, he then takes on a battle on the international stage. And so the story goes on to say that on 6 December 1938, William Cooper walked up to the German Consulate in Melbourne, Australia and registered his demand.

At a time when men were afraid to let their voices be heard and to be seen publicly, a lone voice coming from the far end of the earth was not only credible but hero-worthy.

His role in 1938 forever connects his people with the Jewish people and his nation with the Jewish nation – Israel. Israel’s Yad Vashem made his act of courage public in December 2010.

Rev. Dr. George Annadorai
SHALOM ISRAEL (ASIA – PACIFIC),
October 22, 2012 Singapore