Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Indigenous activism in the 1930s represented by the campaign to send petitions to the King of England seeking rights such as representation in the Australian Parliament. Burraga, a Thirroul Elder, announces a plan for a New South Wales petition. Next, over images of newspaper clippings about conditions on NSW reserves, the narrator states that Indigenous people were starting to organise. The clip then focuses on a petition organised by William Cooper and finally presented to the Australian Government after six years of campaigning.

Educational value points

• The strategy of sending a petition to the King of England rested on the culturally derived belief that the King could and would intervene to help Indigenous people because of the obligation incurred when their land was taken without compensation and vested in the Crown during British colonisation. The petition strategy was promoted in the 1930s by the Yorta Yorta leader William Cooper (1861–1941) and taken up by Burraga, an Elder from the Gandangara people.

• The rise in Indigenous activism in NSW was the result of actions by the NSW Aborigines Protection Board (APB), the most devastating of which was the closure of the independent reserves. These dated from the 1860s when some Indigenous communities had gained the use of some of their country for farming, hunting and collecting food. In what is now known as the second dispossession, the reserves were closed and the land made available to white farmers.

• Although Cooper’s petition also called for the right to vote and for land rights, its main focus was the separate and direct representation of Indigenous people in the Australian Parliament. Both Cooper and Burraga felt that an Indigenous representative in the federal parliament was vital, given that government policy was decided without consulting Indigenous communities and that state government administration of Indigenous affairs had led to worsening conditions.

• The petition strategy failed. Cooper launched the petition to the King in September 1933 and although it had been signed by 1,814 people by 1938, the Australian Government refused to send it to the King when it was submitted. Believing that only Indigenous people should sign the petition and seeing it as a means of galvanising them into political action, Cooper had travelled to reserves throughout NSW to collect signatures over a six-year period.

• Cooper’s own political activism had been galvanised when he was expelled from the Cumeroogunga Reserve near Moama after protesting against the seizure of family farming blocks on the Reserve by the ADB in about 1908. In the early to mid-1930s he founded the Australian Aborigines’ League to campaign against discrimination and the denial of human rights and to work for reforms that would give Indigenous people the chance for advancement.

• Burraga became politicised after the Gandangara people were evicted by the ADB in the 1920s from St Joseph’s farm, an independent reserve in the Burragorang Valley in NSW. Moving to Sydney, he joined the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association and started making speeches advocating Indigenous rights at the Sydney Markets and in the Domain.