Seeing the first Aboriginal

If Not Now, When? 1987, 98 x 242cm, Collection of Obiri, Darwin.

By ROD MOSS

Chapter 2 of his series about his life in Alice Springs as an artist, writer and teacher.

I remember about that time a handful of Torres Strait Islanders visiting school. They painted up and danced before our assembly.

For weeks afterwards dozens of boys stripped to the waist and whooped and hollered, brandishing homemade boomerangs and clubs in the uncleared scrubby school ground. Though shamed by the flagpole in front of the school assembly, ranged beneath the Australian flag and having the weaponry confiscated, fresh tools appeared each day.

I remember in the late 1950s, father detouring a few minutes from our regular Maroondah Dam picnics to an abandoned building and memorial to William Barak. He gave no explanation.

This modest Coranderrk plot, once nearly 5000 acres, had been a successful Wurundjeri farming community since the 1860s, but was closed in the 1924 and divided into lots for returned soldiers. Of these facts, my father, mother and siblings were ignorant.

I remember 1962 high school maths teacher Stan Davey, bringing Pastor Doug Nicholls to school. Most of our pale skinned 500 had never seen an Aboriginal.

Certainly I had no idea that people like Nicholls were prior occupants of the land on which we stood, our excursion to Coranderrk notwithstanding. We weren’t aware of Davey and Nicholl’s alliance which led to the formation of the Aboriginal Advancement League in 1957, nor that Davey was the most prominent non-indigenous activist for First Australian citizenship and Rights.

I remember being rewarded in the final year of high school with Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia for editing the school magazine and designing its cover.

Herbert’s pages were my first encounter with racial issues in the Deep North. Its publication was deliberately affixed to the January 26th sesquicentenary as an Aboriginal Day of Mourning. Its echo resounds in the contentious Australian Day celebrations recast as Invasion Day.

I remember Arrernte man, Charlie Perkins’s 1965 Freedom Rides. The following year, media covered the walk off by Gurindji stockmen at Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. Apparently,Stan Davey helped organise their protest for improved conditions.

Soon he would assist fellow non-indigenous activist, Doug McLeod at Strelley school, teaching English to striking Nyangumarta families in the Pilbara. These events, coupled with massive civil rights movement in the USA, helped build empathy for First Nations people.

To be continued.