Recommended
While many Australians will recognise the famous image of Charlie Perkins and local Aboriginal children in the Moree baths on the cover of Ann Curthoys' Freedom Ride, I suppose I should probably explain something for the international audience: Australia had our own Freedom Ride, based on the more famous ones conducted in the American South, and it's this that Curthoys' title refers to.
In one of her opening chapters, she draws out several distinctions between the American understanding of Freedom Rides and their Australian counterpart. For a start, in Australia, we usually use the singular, referring to only one Freedom Ride, although there were several subsequent trips. The American Rides had the specific aim of challenging segregation on interstate buses and terminals. While thirteen Freedom Riders (seven black, six white) set out, many more spontaneously converged on Jackson, Mississippi when racist violence was encountered (Curthoys, p. 30).
In contrast, the Australian Freedom Ride was a bus trip planned, paid for and executed by a student organisation called Student Action for Aborigines, which was based at the University of Sydney. SAFA's aims with the Australian Freedom Rides were much broader: to raise awareness of and protest the racism, de facto segregation and poor conditions experienced by Aboriginal people living in or around rural New South Wales towns, while also conducting a survey on these experiences. The most famous Freedom Rider was Charles Perkins, an Arrernte man, who had been one of the first two Aboriginal students admitted to the University of Sydney. The other, Gary Williams, was also present for parts of the Ride, but the other 30-odd students were all non-Indigenous Australians.
At school, I learnt about the Freedom Ride in a very uncritical manner, and I bought this book largely out of a desire to revisit this chapter of Australian history through a new lens, given that I now have a very different awareness of the implications of an organisation, made up largely of white Australians, advocating for Aboriginal rights.
On the whole, Freedom Ride was far deeper and more nuanced than I was expecting. The subtitle or tagline a Freedom Rider remembers gives the impression that it's more or less a memoir, but this is somewhat misleading. Curthoys reconstructs many things based on her diary entries and memories from the time, but many other people are interviewed and many different sources used in the course of the project. Furthermore, the book includes a great deal of analysis, evaluation and historiography that covers not only the Freedom Ride, but the Indigenous Rights Movement and the political environment of the 1960s as well.
Curthoys also regularly critiques the role, importance and impact of the Ride in the Indigenous Rights Movement. She raises questions surrounding Indigenous self-determination and the role of white and non-Indigenous Australians. Neither does she shy away from recognising the role of white saviour complex in SAFA's actions, although I don't think she ever uses that term.
When they entered a town, SAFA would ascertain if there was support amongst the local Aboriginal population for a protest. In some towns, they already had contacts, in some they established links with local leaders on entering a town, and in others they found that there was less desire to cooperate with their aims, for a number of complex reasons.
At the time, there was external criticism that SAFA was shooting into a town, protesting for a short time and then leaving the local Aboriginal population to pick up the pieces and deal with the hostilities. While much of this criticism came from people who thought there was 'no racial problem' and SAFA was just 'stirring up trouble', there were also some activists who thought a more softly-softly approach was needed. Interestingly, Curthoys reveals that the group were also conflicted about this. After their charged protest at Moree elicited a promise that the baths would be desegregated and Charlie Perkins and a group of local children were allowed in to bathe (see the photo on the cover of the book), the Riders left the town, agreeing that a white ally would test the sincerity of the desegregation by taking more kids to the baths the next day. They were refused entry, and when the Riders found out, they held a heated meeting to decided whether or not to double back and lend their support once again, or to continue on as scheduled. Ultimately - and I think to their credit - they did return to Moree.
The desegregation of the Moree baths - and the violence surrounding the protest there - is one of the common points of focus when discussing the Freedom Ride. Others include the protest of the RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) at Walgett and the incident that occurred afterwards, when the bus was followed and eventually rammed and run off the road by angry white locals.
Both for my generation, who learnt it at school, and my parents' and grandparents' generations, who remember it, the tendency has always been to focus on those few flashpoints, or the Ride as a backdrop for Perkins as a personality or an example of university activism. So while much of the content will be familiar to an Australian audience, there was also great amount of new information for me, not to mention the analysis of it all.
One aspect that features prominently, and which was a complete surprise to me, was the communist affiliation of many of the students; they joined SAFA from University communist societies such as the Eureka Youth League. In the middle of the Cold War, only three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Perkins tried to keep this quiet and prevent the Communist organisations from being publicly associated with SAFA, because he knew that this had the potential to alienate the media and a lot of people who might otherwise support them, such as the churches.
However, I don't think Freedom Ride should be restricted to an Australian audience. For international readers I think it would be very interesting to see how the toxic cocktail of racism, imperialism and economic interest, amongst other things, were - and are - applied in the Australian context. It's also interesting to note how SAFA, the Freedom Ride and wider public awareness about Aboriginal and TSI rights interconnect with the international happenings. SAFA was formed after student protests supporting the US Civil Rights Movement led to charges of hypocrisy; students were happy to be arrested protesting rights for people more than 15,000 kilometres away, but what where they doing for those being denied their rights in their own backyard?
As many people will be aware, one of Charlie Perkins' daughters is today the well-known filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Her first film, entitled Blood Brothers, was a documentary about her father and the Freedom Ride. Some excerpts can be found on the Screen Australia site, and I found them eye-opening, particularly the contemporaneous film footage and Charlie's reminiscences. Just while I'm on the subject, Perkins also has another documentary which I would highly recommend. It's called Black Panther Woman and it's a poignant and sensitive portrait of activist Marlene Cummins, who was part of the Australian Black Panther Party. It is not only one of the best docos I've ever seen, but it also been one of the most profound and thought-provoking works on the intersection of race and gender I've ever seen or read or consumed in any way, and I think about it often with relation to white feminism vs. intersectional feminism and good allyship. So, I leave you, on a tangent, with the trailer for Black Panther Woman:
While many Australians will recognise the famous image of Charlie Perkins and local Aboriginal children in the Moree baths on the cover of Ann Curthoys' Freedom Ride, I suppose I should probably explain something for the international audience: Australia had our own Freedom Ride, based on the more famous ones conducted in the American South, and it's this that Curthoys' title refers to.
In one of her opening chapters, she draws out several distinctions between the American understanding of Freedom Rides and their Australian counterpart. For a start, in Australia, we usually use the singular, referring to only one Freedom Ride, although there were several subsequent trips. The American Rides had the specific aim of challenging segregation on interstate buses and terminals. While thirteen Freedom Riders (seven black, six white) set out, many more spontaneously converged on Jackson, Mississippi when racist violence was encountered (Curthoys, p. 30).
In contrast, the Australian Freedom Ride was a bus trip planned, paid for and executed by a student organisation called Student Action for Aborigines, which was based at the University of Sydney. SAFA's aims with the Australian Freedom Rides were much broader: to raise awareness of and protest the racism, de facto segregation and poor conditions experienced by Aboriginal people living in or around rural New South Wales towns, while also conducting a survey on these experiences. The most famous Freedom Rider was Charles Perkins, an Arrernte man, who had been one of the first two Aboriginal students admitted to the University of Sydney. The other, Gary Williams, was also present for parts of the Ride, but the other 30-odd students were all non-Indigenous Australians.
At school, I learnt about the Freedom Ride in a very uncritical manner, and I bought this book largely out of a desire to revisit this chapter of Australian history through a new lens, given that I now have a very different awareness of the implications of an organisation, made up largely of white Australians, advocating for Aboriginal rights.
On the whole, Freedom Ride was far deeper and more nuanced than I was expecting. The subtitle or tagline a Freedom Rider remembers gives the impression that it's more or less a memoir, but this is somewhat misleading. Curthoys reconstructs many things based on her diary entries and memories from the time, but many other people are interviewed and many different sources used in the course of the project. Furthermore, the book includes a great deal of analysis, evaluation and historiography that covers not only the Freedom Ride, but the Indigenous Rights Movement and the political environment of the 1960s as well.
Curthoys also regularly critiques the role, importance and impact of the Ride in the Indigenous Rights Movement. She raises questions surrounding Indigenous self-determination and the role of white and non-Indigenous Australians. Neither does she shy away from recognising the role of white saviour complex in SAFA's actions, although I don't think she ever uses that term.
When they entered a town, SAFA would ascertain if there was support amongst the local Aboriginal population for a protest. In some towns, they already had contacts, in some they established links with local leaders on entering a town, and in others they found that there was less desire to cooperate with their aims, for a number of complex reasons.
At the time, there was external criticism that SAFA was shooting into a town, protesting for a short time and then leaving the local Aboriginal population to pick up the pieces and deal with the hostilities. While much of this criticism came from people who thought there was 'no racial problem' and SAFA was just 'stirring up trouble', there were also some activists who thought a more softly-softly approach was needed. Interestingly, Curthoys reveals that the group were also conflicted about this. After their charged protest at Moree elicited a promise that the baths would be desegregated and Charlie Perkins and a group of local children were allowed in to bathe (see the photo on the cover of the book), the Riders left the town, agreeing that a white ally would test the sincerity of the desegregation by taking more kids to the baths the next day. They were refused entry, and when the Riders found out, they held a heated meeting to decided whether or not to double back and lend their support once again, or to continue on as scheduled. Ultimately - and I think to their credit - they did return to Moree.
The desegregation of the Moree baths - and the violence surrounding the protest there - is one of the common points of focus when discussing the Freedom Ride. Others include the protest of the RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) at Walgett and the incident that occurred afterwards, when the bus was followed and eventually rammed and run off the road by angry white locals.
Both for my generation, who learnt it at school, and my parents' and grandparents' generations, who remember it, the tendency has always been to focus on those few flashpoints, or the Ride as a backdrop for Perkins as a personality or an example of university activism. So while much of the content will be familiar to an Australian audience, there was also great amount of new information for me, not to mention the analysis of it all.
One aspect that features prominently, and which was a complete surprise to me, was the communist affiliation of many of the students; they joined SAFA from University communist societies such as the Eureka Youth League. In the middle of the Cold War, only three years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Perkins tried to keep this quiet and prevent the Communist organisations from being publicly associated with SAFA, because he knew that this had the potential to alienate the media and a lot of people who might otherwise support them, such as the churches.
However, I don't think Freedom Ride should be restricted to an Australian audience. For international readers I think it would be very interesting to see how the toxic cocktail of racism, imperialism and economic interest, amongst other things, were - and are - applied in the Australian context. It's also interesting to note how SAFA, the Freedom Ride and wider public awareness about Aboriginal and TSI rights interconnect with the international happenings. SAFA was formed after student protests supporting the US Civil Rights Movement led to charges of hypocrisy; students were happy to be arrested protesting rights for people more than 15,000 kilometres away, but what where they doing for those being denied their rights in their own backyard?
As many people will be aware, one of Charlie Perkins' daughters is today the well-known filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Her first film, entitled Blood Brothers, was a documentary about her father and the Freedom Ride. Some excerpts can be found on the Screen Australia site, and I found them eye-opening, particularly the contemporaneous film footage and Charlie's reminiscences. Just while I'm on the subject, Perkins also has another documentary which I would highly recommend. It's called Black Panther Woman and it's a poignant and sensitive portrait of activist Marlene Cummins, who was part of the Australian Black Panther Party. It is not only one of the best docos I've ever seen, but it also been one of the most profound and thought-provoking works on the intersection of race and gender I've ever seen or read or consumed in any way, and I think about it often with relation to white feminism vs. intersectional feminism and good allyship. So, I leave you, on a tangent, with the trailer for Black Panther Woman:
