This Wednesday, more than 12 families and our supporters will march from Sydney Town Hall to NSW Parliament house at 12:30pm to protest the murders of our loved ones and demand action from the NSW Justice Department. We are fighting a battle that has been waged since Invasion in 1788. 
More recently, in 1981, aspiring footy star and Redfern All Black Eddie Murray returned home to the NSW regional town of Wee Waa, retiring to the country to heal from a footy injury he suffered on the ovals of Sydney. Within hours of Eddie’s arrival, he was set upon by local police and taken to Wee Waa lockup. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray would later be called to the cop station because Eddie had, according to Wee Waa police, committed suicide. 
Eddie's death, or should I say his murder, was and is one the most significant cases of black deaths in custody in our movement's history, not only because it was the spark that inspired a movement for justice, but because Eddie’s case embodies all the hallmarks of an injustice system that perpetrates violence on the Aboriginal community, then vehemently covers its tracks to evade all accountability. 
Not much has changed since the struggle of the 1980s. Granted, today one of our people is murdered by police every 28 days. Back then it was one murder every 11 days – but in the context of living in the “lucky country” that espouses its “love” and “appreciation” for its Aboriginal heritage and a “commitment to social justice” (laughable considering what they do to refugees and Muslims), one death is one too many. The fact that nearly every politically inclined Koori I know can recite key stats of the 1991 Royal Commission tells you that this issue hasn’t gone away, and we are fed up. 
Thirty-eight years on from Eddie’s murder, and we are hitting the streets again, for the same demands – in the face of a government and state bureaucracy indifferent to our plight. We will hear from the family of David Dungay Jnr, a 26-year-old Kempsey man who was murdered in his Long Bay Prison cell in 2015. David died after being subdued and then injected with midazolam – a sedative known to bring its victims to the brink of death. You might be asking, why on earth would they do such a thing? Because a Black man asserted his right to eat his Tim-Tams in his cell. 
We will also hear from my family, the Walker-Craigs, and the family of Clinton Speedy-Duroux and Evelyn Greenup. The trio, murdered in my hometown of Bowraville in the early 1990s, are more commonly known as the Bowraville 3 and the campaign for #JusticeForBowraville. These children’s murder cases have gone without justice for nearly three decades. Like the case of Lewis “Buddy” Kelly Jnr (whose family we will also hear from), the NSW police service completely bungled the initial investigations – and actively undermined the case for justice with their racial bias. Just to give you an idea of what this looked like – in the case of my first cousin Colleen Walker-Craig, when she was reported missing by my Aunt, the police questioned whether my Aunt Muriel was even Colleen’s mother given Colleen's fair complexion. They would go on to prophesise that Colleen, like Evelyn, had merely “gone walkabout” – Evelyn was four years old when she went missing. 
These cases are just a few of the many we will be fighting for. 
We know the struggle waged by our elders – the leaders of the Black Power movement – won significant gains for Aboriginal people in this country. They fought tooth and nail and put their entire bodies and livelihood on the line in the pursuit of land rights and ultimately political, economic and social independence. But true to its racist roots, the Australian government has swung the pendulum completely in the wrong direction. This backflip wasn’t gradual – it happened immediately after the pressure from our militant movement of the 1970s and 1980s subsided. The Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody released 339 recommendations to deal with police racism and violence towards our people – it's 2019 and less than three of those recommendations have been implemented.
The struggle for Black rights and equality rages on today because the logic of racist policing has not been smashed – no amount of police cultural training and “community engagement” can untangle the web of oppression and brutality afforded to our community at the hands of the cops. 
It’s going to take our people hitting the streets in our thousands, garnering solidarity from our supporters, to win even the most basic rights like equal treatment in the eyes of the law. Next Wednesday we hope to lay the basis for such a fight, and we need you to stand with us. 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/401595824033833/permalink/429744481218967/">Please join us on Wednesday at Sydney Town Hall at 12:30pm</a> – join us in this fight for justice. 
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First published at <a href="https://indigenousx.com.au">https://indigenousx.com.au</a>. Gavin Stanbrook is an Aboriginal socialist activist and a family member of Colleen Walker-Craig.

Gavin Stanbrook

‘Join us in the fight for justice’: Black Lives Matter protest to be held in Sydney

Thursday 13 September 1990 was the day my cousin, Colleen Walker-Craig, was last seen in Bowraville, New South Wales. Thursday 13 September 2018 was the day the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal reduced her life, and that of Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, to a few lines of legal jargon. “No retrial” was the response in layman’s terms. 
Our families have been fighting for justice for 28 years. And my experience in court on that Thursday tells me things haven’t changed. The state racism our families faced in the 1990s and 2000s – the racism that let a serial killer walk free because the victim was Aboriginal – has not gone away. 
It started well before I set foot in the courtroom. The morning of the judge’s decision, our families met with the state’s legal team for a pre-decision briefing. While the well-dressed figures in the room went through the basics of how the day would unfold, I couldn’t help noticing how lavish the place was. 
Gold trimmings on the walls, beautifully crafted pillars in the centre of the room and three judges’ gowns encased behind thick glass at the front. It seemed to form the edge of an ever tightening circle of state officials and bureaucrats around our families as we sat in the centre. They were like vultures not daring to show emotion – cold, calculated living embodiments of the “neutrality” the system purports to uphold.
It was clear why we were there, though it’s been something I have grappled with for a while but could never understand until recently. Underpinning the court’s lavishness, its officialdom, its “protocols”, is the idea that, as ordinary people seeking justice, we have to play by their rules. This is their domain, their playground. 
The judges went to prestigious universities, played sports with top politicians – so they decide what constitutes “fresh and compelling evidence” and what doesn’t. This is their house, and we must respect their every word. They are like the cardinals of the old feudal world, the prophets of justice in an unjust society. 
As the day went on and we moved into the courtroom, my stomach tightened. If you thought the break room was fit for a king, in this courtroom you’d be forgiven for thinking the judges descended from heaven. “Tap, tap, tap” – my interest in modern architecture was interrupted by a young man in a gown calling “Please rise” blah blah blah. The ridiculousness of judges having their own personal stick-tapper to introduce them was almost the final straw for me.
We all stood, heads bowed, paying respect to an institution that never respected us. The judges sat and the decision was read out. The next 10 minutes were an emotional roller-coaster. Not because the judge was animated in any way – he was as dull as they all are – but because the legal jargon was so confusing it was hard to keep up. 
Did we have the retrial? Did we not? Who the fuck knew? The decision was read out, and only then did the people in the room grasp what had just happened. Our family was denied justice on a technicality. I would discover later that, due to the bureaucratic terminology of the decision, family in Coffs Harbour attending via video link didn’t even know what had happened. 
Reality kicked in; shock is the only way to describe the mood in those first moments. Shock at how the judges gracefully floated into the room, kicked us in the guts and floated out as if nothing had happened. Shock at how such a decision could be made – after all the evidence, after our family has waited 28 years for justice precisely because of the racism of the courts and police that said our kids’ lives did not matter. It’s 2018, and many people say we’ve come far – clearly not. 
The rally 
That shock turned to anger. So we did what our family does best, we called a protest! Within a week, we pulled together solidarity from all parts of NSW – from Port Macquarie to Lismore and out west, several people messaged in to see how they could help. 
It was amazing, an outpouring of solidarity from ordinary people with the plight of our families. It was a ray of sunshine compared to the blocked doorways we keep getting from the state government – which would be bending over backwards to catch a serial killer if our kids were white.
Rallies kicked off in the main street of Tenterfield, Bowraville and outside the NSW parliament. In Bowraville, the local papers reported that 300 people turned up to join our families – a great outcome for the Nambucca Valley, which is known more for its sleepy spring days than fiery protests. 
The last protest in Bowraville was in the 1990s, organised by my family in response to the racism of local police in “dealing” with the murders. What I can’t seem to shake is that our families have had to fight tooth and nail to be treated equally to other Australian citizens. If your family member is murdered, you expect a full and serious investigation. Our community was robbed of that in the 1990s and we are still being denied to this day.
But in the face of such overt racism and injustice, we continue to fight. It’s because our family are fighters – we’ve gone this far, all the way to the High Court by the looks of it. We will not give up now. And we are not alone. The turnout to our protests shows there are hundreds if not thousands of people around the country willing to stand with us in our fight for justice. And as long as we keep fighting, they are with us. 
We will continue to fight, and I urge those who support us to keep their ears out for the next time we take the streets screaming “Justice for Bowraville!”

Justice for Bowraville! 

Only Australia could rival the entrenched racism and barbarity of countries such as the US, Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, notorious for locking up Blacks, immigrants and children. 
But the Northern Territory has set a new benchmark. All – 100 percent of – children imprisoned there are Aboriginal, according to the territory Families department. 
More shocking is that, according to the findings of the royal commission into Northern Territory youth detention, up to three-quarters of all detainees are on remand: they haven’t even been found guilty of an offence.
Some of these children endured racist brutality from prison guards in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, which made headlines in 2016. It’s worth noting that not one prison guard was charged over the abuse of Aboriginal children uncovered by the ABC’s Four Corners program.
True to its record, the governing Territory Labor Party is expanding the youth detention system rather than winding it back. It plans to invest more than $70 million to rebuild Don Dale and detention centres across Alice Springs, which has the second highest concentration of Aboriginal youth detainees in the territory. 
This is a continuation of the “law and order” policies implemented across the country by both Labor and Liberal governments. It’s also a clear example of how these policies disproportionally target Aboriginal people. 
When you run the Australian capitalist state, racism becomes your tool, rather than a cancer to be eradicated. Labor and Liberal have no interest in bettering the lives of Aboriginal youth – or non-Aboriginal youth for that matter. 
Solutions to the problems will not be found in their party platforms, which continue to peddle the same old garbage law and order policies that got us here. 
We can’t wait for yet another useless royal commission. The scum overseeing the incarceration of Aboriginal youth will change course only if they are forced to by a grassroots and collective struggle. 
There are lessons from the resistance to Trump’s kidnapping of Latino children in the US: we need to protest, we need to organise, and we need a politics that goes beyond attempts to reform a system that is racist to the core.

100 percent racist

The federal government’s Community Development Program (CDP), a “work for the dole” program in the Northern Territory, has in less than three years proven to be a racist con-job. 
CDP was promoted as an initiative to support long term unemployed. But since July 2015, employment providers have fined and sanctioned the majority Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workforce more than 400,000 times. With the number of people in the program only 30,000, that averages out to about 13 fines or sanctions per person.
The figures are a huge contrast to the number of fines and sanctions imposed on welfare recipients in non-CDP programs. 
Penalties start at $50 docked from a recipient’s pay and can progress to pay freezes of eight weeks or more. Even before any penalty is imposed, the allowance is below poverty level. And get this: the average CDP participant completes three times the hours required in the basic work for the dole program. 
The federal government is saving millions of dollars through mass sanctions while trying to push through tens of billions of dollars in tax cuts for big business.
CDP was implemented on the back of one of the most significant attacks on the Aboriginal community, the Northern Territory Intervention. The NT has become ground zero for treating Aboriginal people like guinea pigs, testing unpopular welfare policies on them, such as the cashless welfare card, before rolling them out elsewhere. 
With talk of expanding the program to more areas across the country (no doubt highly populated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people), the CDP will only further entrench inequality and destitution.

NT work for the dole program robbing Indigenous workers

It’s been 80 years since the first recorded protest for civil rights in Australia, led by the Aboriginal community in what is now known as the “Day of Mourning”, 26 January 1938.
The Aboriginal organiser of the march, William (Bill) Ferguson, was a Wiradjuri man born in 1882 at Waddai, Darlington Point, New South Wales, to Scottish station labourer William Ferguson, known as “Old Bill”, and Emily Ferguson, an Aboriginal domestic worker.
Ferguson was raised with his six siblings in a region dominated by the pastoral industry, a booming sector engaged in the mass theft of Aboriginal land for the creation of stations and mansions that housed their rich owners.
Ferguson is commonly known for his role in establishing branches of the Aborigines Progressive Association across NSW to organise and fight for Aboriginal rights. Less known is his impressive history as a working class militant in the shearing sheds and railways for the Australian Workers Union, and the impact this had on his approach to fighting for Aboriginal rights.
Politics
The era into which Ferguson was born and which he lived through was one of intense racism and class struggle. The Half Caste Acts of Victoria and Western Australia and the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Act destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of Aboriginal people around the country. The Aborigines Protection Board dictated most aspects of life, a gross injustice that remained a motivation for Ferguson’s political activism until his passing in 1950.
Ferguson grew up during the period of the great strikes of the 1890s. Mass campaigns of striking workers, from wharfies and shearers to labourers, transformed politics in eastern Australia. Class struggle was in the air.
The great strikes would have affected Ferguson, not only because his father worked in the shearing sheds, but also because Ferguson himself worked in the sheds from the age of 14 in 1896, collecting and piling wool. Here, Ferguson earned his stripes in the labour movement.
He quickly became a known orator and agitator in the sheds of NSW. “The athletic, chunky Scot and his dark skinned son, who grew like a beanstalk, tall and erect, [surprised] the older men with his persuasive talk”, wrote Jack Horner, author and Aboriginal rights campaigner.
Ferguson travelled the region, moving from stockyard to shearing shed in search of work. Little is heard of him during this period; only a few old union tags give some idea of where he stopped on his travels.
He resurfaced in 1916, the same year he joined the Australian Labor Party. From 1916 to the 1920s, Ferguson remained active in the labour movement. The period was also one of increasing attacks on the Aboriginal population, the state government ramping up the kidnapping of Aborigines from stations and towns across NSW.
The Aborigines Protection Board
The Aborigines Protection Board was known as the “persecution board” by the Aboriginal community, and Ferguson became one of its most active and outspoken critics. From sending stolen Aboriginal children to slave-driving convents or boarding homes, to “missions” such as Cabbage Tree Island being decimated by tuberculosis and various other preventable diseases, the Protection Board was anything but what its title suggested.
The board would appoint a “mission manager” and his partner to run the corrugated iron townships. “Slum lord” would be a better characterisation. Often, the government wouldn’t bother employing managers; it would appoint the local police sergeant to run the reserves, giving him the right to deny access to visitors, quarantine rations and forcibly evict people if they got too rebellious.
In 1923, at Christmas/New Year’s celebrations in Gulargambone – on the Cuckoo Corner Property, a place of annual gathering for the local Aboriginal community – Ferguson met with young Aboriginal victims of the Protection Board. They told stories of their experiences being “expelled” from their communities for “idleness”, a policy used to drive young Aboriginal men and women into precarious and often indentured labour. Here Ferguson declared:
“The Board in Sydney has a complete control of us; they can do anything. One day we will have a full inquiry made into these activities of the Protection Board … I’ve been a member of the union since I was a lad, picking up, and a member of the Labor Party since 1916, when I formed the new Trades and Labour Council in this town. I’ve my faith in the labour movement to help us; it is a workers’ organisation, and we are all of us workers here!”
Day of Mourning
The Protection Board had the backing of the state in all its forms. Ferguson recognised this and the need to get organised. This culminated in the 1937 re-establishment of the Aborigines Progressive Association in Dubbo, NSW, with Aboriginal activists Pearl Gibbs, Jack Kinchela and John Patten (there were plenty more but unnamed).
The association’s core demands were social and economic equality for Aboriginal people, Aboriginal emancipation, an inquiry into the Protection Board and Aboriginal representation on it. Ferguson had gained the support of Aboriginal activist William “Bill” Cooper, who had been petitioning King George V since 1935 for Aboriginal representation in the federal parliament.
The government dismissed the petition. In outrage and frustration, Cooper called a national meeting of Aboriginal activists for November 1937 to discuss the way forward. The Day of Mourning Protest was born. The Progressive Association and supporters marched 150 years after invasion, on the streets of Sydney, to demand justice, equality and an end to the racist policies imposed on Aboriginal people by the Protection Board.
Ferguson and Patten published a pamphlet, “Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!”, which criticised the government for “deliberately trying to exterminate Aboriginal people under the banner of ‘care and protection’”. They demanded a federal Aboriginal policy – most policies relating to Aboriginal people at this time were managed by state and territory governments. The call gained a response. The prime minister contacted Ferguson to arrange a meeting.
The struggle brought about what many saw as progress for Aboriginal rights. The Protection Board was “reformed” in 1940 and given a new name, the Aborigines Welfare Board. Yet it carried on with the same racist paternalism.
Ferguson later broke with the Labor Party after the Chifley government rejected his demands for more reforms. He passed away after giving a speech in 1950. The legacy that Ferguson and the activists of the Aborigines Progressive Association left is a blueprint for Aboriginal rights activists today: get organised, demand solidarity and never stop fighting.
Ferguson’s dreams of a liberated people are yet to be met; that is our task in the here and now.

Remembering Aboriginal leader William Ferguson

On 26 January, some of the biggest Invasion Day mobilisations for Aboriginal rights in the past decade were held in the east coast capitals.
Yet the main focus of the media has been a speech given by Tarneen Onus-Williams, Aboriginal activist and organiser of the Melbourne rally. Onus-Williams caused a stir amongst right wing commentators and government officials when she said “Fuck Australia, I hope it burns to the ground”.
Conservatives and moderates lost their shit. From former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett to Andrews Labor Government MPs, the attacks on Onus-Williams have been relentless.
Onus-Williams struck a nerve. She said what so many of us are thinking: No, this country isn’t great, and our people bear the brunt of a disgustingly unequal society.
Our people are fewer than 3 percent of the total population, yet make up 27 percent of prisoners. We are the most imprisoned people in the world –let that sink in.
The long-held demand of the Aboriginal rights movement to stop Black deaths in custody continues to be unmet, with a spike in Aboriginal people being murdered by racist cops and prison guards in the last two years alone.
Some of our communities are fighting diseases eradicated in the Third World.
We have endured a ramping up of the new stolen generation by state governments across the country, stealing Aboriginal children from their parents at the highest rates in history.
Our brothers and sisters in the Northern Territory are governed by the enforced segregation of “the Intervention”. They aren’t allowed to enter certain shops, they’re having payments cut and quarantined and, with the rollout of the Community Development Program, the “remote employment and community development service”, are forced to work full time for businesses while receiving below minimum wage payments. It’s two steps away from slavery.
Stolen Aboriginal land is still in the hands of the state and mining corporations, while our communities are destitute due to racist government policy.
This is 2018, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
So I support 100 percent the sentiment of Onus-Williams and the stand she has taken. The country would be a better place if the racist structures of Australian capitalism were dismantled and the people running them put to work doing real community service.
It’s telling, when our people speak up, when we feel empowered to fight back, that the media and the political right come out in full force to crush our spirit. It reminds me of the disgusting slurs directed at Yassmin Abdel-Magied after she rightly criticised the hypocrisy of Anzac Day in 2017.
What’s also telling is that some of the most vocal critics of Onus-Williams were silent about the murder of 26-year-old Aboriginal man David Dungay, who was tranquillised and allegedly suffocated by prison guards at Sydney’s Long Bay jail in 2015. He had told them that he couldn’t breathe, but continued to be held face down on a mattress before being injected with midazolam.
You couldn’t hear a peep when the Turnbull government amended native title law to allow the Adani coal mine to go ahead in Queensland. Nor were the snowflakes of the right concerned about Aboriginal children being kidnapped en masse by the state.
In Australia, an Aboriginal activist can on one day be dragged through the mud by the media and the right for metaphorically calling for the racist Australian state to burn. And the next day, the prime minister can announce $3.8 billion in funding for the Australian military industrial complex to build weapons that would literally burn cities to the ground.
And what does the forever outraged conservative right have to say? Nothing, crickets.
The Australian government and media racism and hypocrisy know no bounds. As the oppressed stand up, we can expect the same critics to squeal ever louder. It’s our task to drown them out and stand in solidarity with those fighting back.
That means giving unwavering support to Onus-Williams.

Defend Tarneen Onus-Williams

January 26 is, and always has been, Invasion Day. It marks the day the British colonised this country and brought with them the exploitative and oppressive practices that made the British Empire so barbaric, yet so profitable.
It’s an annual punch in the face for Aboriginal people, a day spent listening to television and talkback radio either ignore the truth about this invasion, or attempt to rewrite Australia’s history entirely.
We are pissed off – and we are not alone. As of 2017, 61 percent of young people viewed the celebrations negatively, expressed most clearly in Triple J’s decision to move the Hottest 100 to the fourth weekend in January.
Even more positive is the significant turnout at the annual Invasion Day rallies across the country, most notably Melbourne and Sydney. That people will come out and protest on Invasion Day rather than get pissed with mates is important, and the pathetic attempts by Triple M to reinstate the celebration of invasion with its Ozzest 100 cannot change that.
It’s important that the campaign to change the date has forced people to question the narrative of Australia Day and has galvanised widespread support for Aboriginal people, strengthening solidarity between us and our non-Aboriginal counterparts.
Nothing to celebrate
The nationalism that underpins Australia Day assumes there’s something to celebrate about this country. I don’t agree. Nationalism is a cancer. It tells us that although there may be deep inequalities, at the end of the day we are all “Aussies” and all share a collective interest in the prosperity of this nation.
It attempts to cover up the reality of how deep the division is between the “haves” and “have nots”. Last year, profit rates increased for big business. Average living standards declined by the greatest amount since the recession of the early 1990s. The idea that a worker like myself has anything in common with Malcolm Turnbull or the CEOs of big business is ludicrous.
So rather than change the date, I am against any day being allocated to celebrate the foundation of Australia. There’s nothing to celebrate, and some honest research into the past 230 years only makes this clearer. In the early days, the drive for profit through the establishment of the colony’s pastoral industry defined the relationship between Aboriginal people and the colonisers. The invaders labelled my people an inferior race that could not compete with white civilisation and were doomed to extinction.
This was the precursor to outright genocide, massacres such as Myall Creek and Appin that occurred up and down the east coast, and further inland as the colonies expanded. This is not an anomaly, and the reality of colonisation in Australia was very similar to colonialism more generally across the globe: an attempt to dispossess and siphon profit out of the colonised people to the benefit of the occupying power and its rich elite.
What followed was more than two centuries of oppressive laws and practices imposed on my people by state and federal governments. The Half Caste Acts of Victoria and Western Australia and the Aborigines Protection Act in the late 1800s dictated the entire lives of Aboriginal people, from who they could marry and associate with, where they could work and what they were paid with, to the denial of democratic rights and freedom of movement.
The land grab also led to the establishment of Aboriginal reserves, or “missions”, across the country. These missions still exist. I’ve lived on one, and the only difference between now and when they were first established is that they now have proper toilets. The government literally rounded up hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people, dragged them from their land and placed them on the outskirts of towns on sites managed by the Catholic Church or sometimes the local police. The rich pastoral investors needed the land, and the state did what needed to be done to meet their needs.
State repression of Aboriginal people escalated in the 20th century, as if the first 100 years of invasion weren’t bad enough. The policy of the new federal government had shifted from open genocide to assimilation, hoping we would die out and those children born with a lighter complexion could be “saved” and “reintegrated” into white society.
This led to a ramping up of the Stolen Generations – stealing Aboriginal children from their families, which destroyed countless lives. The land grab continued, this time for the interests of the mining sector. It was the same strata of society, the rich and their servants in parliament, who led the charge.
More recently we’ve had the Howard government’s “Northern Territory Intervention”. We’re told that the military was sent into Aboriginal communities to save the children. I’m calling BS on that. Politicians didn’t care when Elijah Doughty was killed in Kalgoorlie in 2016; they called him a young criminal, implying he deserved to die.
They didn’t care about Colleen Walker, Evelyn Greenup or Clinton Speedy-Duroux, the three Aboriginal children murdered in my home town of Bowraville in 1990-91; they blamed the families, or with my Aunty Muriel (Colleen’s mother), asked if she was even Colleen’s mother and suggested that Colleen had just “gone walkabout”.
That we had a Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody in 1991 with very limited implementation of its recommendations, and a spike in deaths in custody over the past two years, tells you something about how the Australian government relates to Aboriginal people.
Resistance
But our story is not one of passive acceptance of state repression. Like all oppressed people, there is only so far you can push us before we resist, and my people have an impressive history of doing exactly that. An Australia Day where we supposedly celebrate what unites us, regardless of the date it’s held, can’t paper over these struggles, which reveal deep divides built into Australian capitalism.
The Frontier Wars tell the inspiring history of Aboriginal struggle. From Pemulwuy and the Battle for Parramatta and Windradyne of the Wiradjuri, to Tullamareena, a Wurundjeri man who burnt down the first ever prison built in Melbourne after being imprisoned with his family for taking cattle from Wurundjeri land “owned” by a British banker – the outbreak of resistance started early, with skirmishes and guerrilla warfare waged well into the mid-1800s.
As Aboriginal people became more integrated into mainstream society, both a product of struggle and the entering into the workforce of a large section of the urban Aboriginal population, a layer of Aboriginal working class militants developed to become leaders of our struggle. All of our heroes deserve a mention. Australia Day could aptly be called “Amnesia Day” for how our struggles have been ignored or written out of history altogether.
We should remember others who resisted invasion and its consequences. Fighters such as Mumaring (also known as Daisy Bindi), a leader of the 1946 Pilbara strike, who fought for better wages and conditions for Aboriginal people working on pastoral stations. The 1966 fight over wages and conditions at Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory, led by Gurindji lore man Vincent Lingiari, quickly developed into the struggle for land rights.
Arthur Murray, a leader of the campaign for justice for Aboriginal deaths in custody after his son Eddie was murdered in the Wee Waa lockup, also was a working class militant who established the Cotton Chippers Union for seasonal Aboriginal (and non-Aboriginal) workers in Wee Waa in 1973. Arthur led an indefinite strike of 500 cotton chippers against appalling working conditions, underpayment by the boss and the terrible living conditions provided to the Aboriginal community.
We are still fighting
The struggle for Aboriginal rights continues today. In 2016, gains were made by the campaign led by Aunty Jenny Munro and other Aboriginal activists to demand Aboriginal housing on the Block in Redfern.
A year earlier, a mass campaign hit the streets in response to the Abbott government’s plan to forcibly close Aboriginal communities in South Australia and Western Australia, drawing solidarity from broad sections of society.
The campaign against black deaths in custody and against police brutality continues in the face of indifference from state and federal governments.
Many of these struggles are ongoing because the underlying causes of Aboriginal oppression remain. And while it is positive that there is a movement to change the date of Australia Day, the history of this country’s relationship with Aboriginal people is nothing to celebrate on any day of the year.
Nor is the history of exploitation of workers, or attacks on unions; the racism, sexism and homophobia built into Australia. The government uses every opportunity to fan the flames of racism and create new divisions.
Whether it’s “Sudanese gangs” in Victoria, the “threat” of refugees languishing on the dole and stealing our jobs – at the same time! – or a homophobic denial of marriage equality for more than a decade, governments relish the opportunity to have us biting at each other’s throats while the real “leaners” – the rich – slash our wages and make off with huge tax breaks. An anti-racist movement for Aboriginal rights can cut against such attempts to divide us.
So I will not be celebrating on Invasion Day. I’ll be protesting – and you should too. Join us at 10am on Friday 26 January for Invasion Day 2018 at the Block, Redfern.

There is nothing to celebrate about Invasion Day

Infamous corrupt NSW detective Roger Rogerson has been found guilty of murdering Jamie Gao. The court was presented with overwhelming evidence against Rogerson and his co-convicted former police officer Glen McNamara.
Rogerson was known for considering himself judge, jury and executioner. In the mid-1970s, while on duty, he shot and killed Phillip Western and Lawrence Byrne, two petty criminals. In 2006, he was quoted by Nine News as saying, “That’s what [a gun is] for, maybe they should use it more often … The thrill to me was catching them, chasing them, investigating them and catching them.”
In 1981, Rogerson was investigated for the murder of Warren Lanfranchi, a Sydney drug dealer who had close connections to Neddy Smith, a well-known standover man. Smith, also an associate of Rogerson, was later investigated for the murder of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, who was an outspoken witness linking Lanfranchi’s death to Rogerson.
The charges go on, including conspiracy to bribe and murder fellow officer Michael Drury, and the disappearance of Rogerson’s co-conspirator Christopher Dale Flannery, a Melbourne contract killer.
During this repugnant career, he was presented with 13 awards for bravery, and the highest award of honour in the NSW police force, the Peter Mitchell Trophy. Throughout his time in the force, the NSW police minister, commissioner and chief of department all supported Rogerson, and in many cases covered up his criminal activity. For many years, he was a protected specimen.
Rogerson and his department colleagues were subject to a police integrity commission inquiry for their involvement in criminal activity. Rogerson was later charged and found guilty of perverting the course of justice by lying to the commission.
He may be the most rotten of apples, but the barrel from which he came is a festering pile. The police exist to protect the rule of the bosses and politicians. Rogerson was a right wing turd who was more than willing to do their dirty work. He would attack protesters and was at one stage caught up in the framing of activist Tim Anderson, who later claimed that, while he was in custody, Rogerson and another officer beat him numerous times.
Rogerson’s record and the long cover-up of his and other officers’ crimes show that the establishment not only accommodates such behaviour but actively promotes it. They knew what he was doing, and instead of disciplining him, they awarded him medals.
With two Aboriginal people shot by the police in the last three weeks, and the hundreds of cases of police brutality and murder we see circulated on social media, the role of the police becomes ever clearer.

Roger Rogerson, rotten apple in a festering barrel

In 1990, my 16-year-old cousin Colleen Walker-Craig was murdered. She went missing from my home town of Bowraville on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Within months of her disappearance, two other children were also taken; Evelyn Greenup was 4 years old and Clinton Speedy-Duroux was 16.
Early in 1991, the remains of Evelyn and Clinton were found on a stretch of road outside of town. Colleen has never been found, but her clothes were discovered weighted down in a river at the end of the same dirt road.
From very early in all of the cases, the same name consistently comes up – Jay Hart (who has now changed his name). However, due to a delayed and lacklustre investigation into the disappearances, nobody has been held accountable for the killings.
Bowraville’s history is marked by a deep racist divide. In the old movie theatre on the main street, the first seating row, separated by a partition, was designated for use by the Aboriginal community, who were allowed to enter and exit only from a side door after the film had begun. At the bottom pub, my grandparents had to sit out the back near the stables if they wanted to be served. Aboriginal people weren’t allowed inside.
Bowraville was visited by Charlie Perkins and anti-racism students during the Freedom Rides of 1965. Ann Curthoys, a freedom rider, kept a diary of her experiences. “The discrimination in the town was absolutely shocking – by far the worst we’d encountered”, she wrote of Bowra. “The two populations were almost completely separate. At first we weren’t sure where to start – the town was just so bad.”
The murders
In September, it will be 26 years since my aunt Muriel Walker-Craig (Aunty Moonie) last saw her daughter Colleen. I was born a couple of years after she disappeared but feel like I know her. Her story, and the injustice inflicted upon our family, have always occupied a space in my consciousness.
I sat down with Colleen’s sister Paula Craig to ask her what Bowraville was like before the murders. “You could go to Bowraville and be safe; it felt like a family, it felt more safe growing up”, she says. Most Aboriginal people lived out of town, around “the mission” – the Bowraville Aboriginal Reserve, a remnant of Australia’s apartheid history.
It was there that Colleen was last seen – at a party on 13 September. A few days later, Paula remembers her mum asking around at a local football game if anyone knew where Colleen was. “It was surreal for me; it felt like she was just gone on a holiday, that’s what I kept thinking and hoping”, Paula says. “It didn’t really hit me until much later that she actually is missing, but I know mum knew that something was wrong.”
Aunty Moonie couldn’t make police take notice. When she went to them, they refused even to make an official report. “Their thought was that she went ‘walkabout’”, Paula recalls. When my aunt showed them a picture of her missing child the police joked about her light skin colour: “Are you sure she’s yours?”
“They really didn’t take mum serious at all.” Paula talks about my aunt forming search parties, covering the bush around the town. “There was no official search for Colleen; the only time they really did something was when the fisherman hooked her clothes”, she says. That was six months after she was reported missing. The police combed that part of the river but didn’t investigate the findings or look anywhere else.
On 4 October, less than three weeks after Colleen disappeared, her cousin Evelyn went missing from a house three doors up from where Colleen was last seen. Numerous witness accounts tell of Jay Hart hanging around outside the window of the room where Evelyn was asleep in bed with her mother Rebecca Stadhams (Aunty Becca) and brothers.
One witness recalls hearing Evelyn crying in the night. As she approached the room to investigate, she heard a loud thump, after which Evelyn stopped crying. Later that night, Hart would be seen rushing out of the house, leaving the room where Evelyn was asleep.
Aunty Becca woke the next morning to find Evelyn missing. After searching for her, she went with her sister Michelle to the police station. The reception they received was similar to that which Aunty Moonie got.
Bowraville was then a town with fewer than 1,000 residents. Two children were reported missing within weeks of each other. “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”, was what a police officer told Aunty Becca.
“There was a lot of anger and frustration, and we weren’t really getting anything from them”, Paula said as she recalled the first rally to demand action that the families held outside the Bowraville police station in 1991. “They never answered any of the questions that the families were asking.”
It was years later that they discovered that the first investigator sent into town wasn’t there to chase up leads but to investigate the families for child abuse. “He wasn’t even a detective; he knew jack shit about homicide”, Paula recalls, still angry.
Clinton Speedy-Duroux (Bubby) was the third child to go missing. The 16-year-old was last seen alive in Hart’s caravan on 1 February. Clinton’s nephew Marbuck tells me about his experience growing up and learning about his Uncle Bubby. “I always remember from a really young age knowing about it and fighting for Uncle Bubby and the girls”, he says. “You know, dad would always talk about him to us. It’s pretty much been a fairly big part [of our lives]; we are always organising, trying to get it out there and get it heard.”
 “Growing up in Bowra, for me it was like the families and the Aboriginal community were getting involved, but there’s people that have lived here for 30 years and haven’t heard about it. I mean, how can you not hear about it?”, he says. “I’ve always looked at this as being because we’re not worth enough.”
Families fight for justice
When I ask where he thinks the case will go now, Marbuck reflects on the ups and downs of our fight for justice. “It’s constantly something to look forward to, like we get ahead and then we keep getting knocked back again.”
Every time the case appears to move forward, the door is slammed in our faces by the very institutions that claim to deliver justice to all. Not if you’re Black. Justice for us means full gear riot squads lining the halls of the Port Macquarie court house when Hart was acquitted of Evelyn’s murder in 2006. It means the police sergeant telling my Aunty that her daughter was too white to be hers. It means three children killed in quick succession because the person responsible figured no-one much would care. 
 Hundreds of people rallied outside the NSW parliament on 5 May, still fighting to be heard. My Aunty Leonie led a chant demanding premier Mike Baird come outside and face the families. He didn’t, but we went inside, there to witness the debate on a bill that might mean Hart could face another trial. Greens MP Mehreen Faruqi addressed the Legislative Council and pointed out that justice would have been swift if the children were white.
Liberal MP John Ajaka spoke about why the government wouldn’t support the change in law. He appeared unmoved as families got out of their seats and walked out in disgust. “If these were your kids”, someone yells across the room, without finishing the sentence. Their point is devastatingly clear nonetheless. If these kids were white, everything about the last 26 years would have been different.
We know well that we cannot rely on the NSW government to deliver justice. The only reason anything has ever happened in this case has been because the families fought. Speaking to my cousins, it is clear they share a resolve. We want to find Colleen’s remains so we can finally put her to rest. All three families want justice and will keep fighting until we get it.

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