Ray Peckham, a working-class Aboriginal hero
The legendary Aboriginal activist and Wiradjuri man Ray Peckham, sadly, died on 6 June, aged 96. For decades, Peckham was a leading fighter for the rights of his people and someone who sought to bring the struggle for Aboriginal rights together with the workers’ movement and the socialist left. He started this fight at a time when support for Aboriginal rights was much more marginalised and maligned than it is today.
Peckham was born in Bunyip, Victoria, in 1929, one of the thirteen children of Tom and Linda Peckham. Issues of racism and working-class oppression were deeply intertwined for him from an early age. His father Tom got involved in the Dubbo branch of the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, which was initiated by Communist Party activists in 1931, and convinced them to take up issues of anti-Aboriginal discrimination. In Dubbo, Tom found a community of working-class Aboriginal activists around William Ferguson and his Aborigines’ Progressive Association. This was the community in which Peckham grew up.
In 1950, Peckham moved to Sydney, where he was introduced to the hurly-burly world of strikes, pickets and protests by the veteran activist Pearl Gibbs. Peckham recalled in an interview that Gibbs told him “the first thing we’ve got to do is take you down and introduce you to the Trade and Labour Council in Sussex Street”.
Peckham attracted national attention in 1951 when he was elected as a delegate to the Berlin World Youth Festival along with fellow activist Faith Bandler. Complications arose when Peckham was frustrated in his attempts to get a passport in preparation for the trip. In response, the maritime and seamen’s unions threatened to “tie up every ship that’s important around the shores of Australia”. A few hours later, the government reluctantly released the passport.
Unbeknownst to them, as Peckham and Bandler boarded the ship to Europe, agents from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation were covertly filming them. Thus began the extensive security surveillance of Peckham that would ultimately result in one of the largest ASIO files in Australian history.
On his return from Europe, Peckham became more involved in activism. He became a builders’ labourer and joined the Newtown branch of the Communist Party. He enjoyed selling Tribune, the party’s newspaper, and attending the party educational school in Minto.
Peckham started visiting Aboriginal communities across New South Wales, trying to connect the different campaigns they were involved in and publicise their efforts within trade union and left-wing circles. This was helped by the Builders’ Labourers Federation which, at various points, raised money for Peckham to leave work temporarily.
At the start of 1961, the New South Wales Labor government took court action to have Horace Saunders, an Aboriginal man, evicted from Purfleet Mission Station in Taree. A campaign was launched to defend Saunders, Peckham playing a leading role. He toured the South Coast speaking at workplace meetings of coal miners, steelworkers and wharfies to spread news of the court action. “At every meeting, I was given a very enthusiastic reception”, he recalled in Tribune. “The white workers’ moral and financial support for the struggles of Aboriginal people are becoming a source of strength and courage.”
Reflecting on the tour later for Tribune, Peckham concluded that the “strength of the working people can help us Aborigines crack through the curse of the colour bar in Australia”. And Peckham wasn’t deluding himself. In May 1961, the courts ruled in favour of Saunders, humiliating the Aborigines Welfare Board and greatly undermining its authority. Peckham said that it “was probably the first time in New South Wales that the Aboriginal people had taken on the Aboriginal Protection Board and won”.
This perspective drove Peckham to campaign throughout rural New South Wales in the early 1960s. He protested alongside the Top Camp Aboriginal community in Moree against their exclusion from the local hospital, raised a fuss when fourteen new homes for the Aboriginal community in Armidale were built next to a rubbish dump, joined a team to investigate the conditions of Aboriginal pea pickers on the South Coast and collected thousands of signatures from unionised workers to help ensure that Aboriginal housing was built in Coonamble and Nambucca Heads in the face of racist opposition. During the 1967 referendum, Peckham again played a prominent role in enlisting support for the Aboriginal cause.
This is just a small sample of the struggles Peckham was involved in during these years. Everywhere he went, he sought to build up local, statewide and national organisations involving Aboriginal people themselves in fighting for their rights, while also building links of these campaigns and groups with the wider workers’ movement and the socialist left to ensure they could bring as much pressure as possible to bear on racist governments and bosses. “In that mounting tide of progressive struggle, the working-class movement”, Peckham reflected in Tribune, “lies the future for the Aboriginal people”.
Peckham also saw the struggles of Aboriginal people as part of the global fight against injustice. In the 1960s, he spoke at protests against the war in Vietnam, the attacks on democratic rights in the dictatorships of Spain and Greece, the apartheid regime in South Africa and segregation in the United States.
Peckham was nothing short of a working-class Aboriginal hero. The groundbreaking activism he engaged in laid the basis for the land rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and the decades of anti-racist activism since.
In 1983, he returned to Dubbo, where he lived for the rest of his long life, working with community organisations. During the last years of his life, he helped organise for a statue of his father’s old friend and activist William Ferguson to be placed in Dubbo’s town centre—a reminder of the struggles of the past and the need to keep fighting into the future.
Rest in power, Ray Peckham.
