Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows an interview with Dr Kumantjayi (Charles) Perkins as he drives through the countryside. The interviews are intercut with scenes illustrating his recollections of his boyhood and his early adulthood, which he describes in voice-over. The scenes of Perkins’s past, some of which are archival and one a re-creation, show young Indigenous Australian boys being chased by non-Indigenous boys, and Perkins as a young man getting ready to go out, playing pool, archival footage of a dance in the 1950s and walking on the campus of the University of Sydney.

Educational value points

• Dr Kumantjayi (Charles) Perkins (1936–2000) explains the reasons he went to university and what prompted him to begin a life of Indigenous political activism. The clip provides the rationale for Perkins’s later work as student leader of the group Student Action for Aborigines and spokesman for the Freedom Ride of 1965, which is the focus of the documentary Freedom Ride. A significant Indigenous leader, Perkins worked in the federal public service for 21 years, and became the first Indigenous head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

• The clip highlights Perkins’s early experiences of and insights into racism. It includes an episode in his childhood after he moved from Alice Springs to a boys’ home in Adelaide. Name-calling led to his first awareness of how language can be used to label and divide people. Although the young Perkins had never heard the word ‘nigger’ before, the way it was said, with the threat of violence attached, taught him the meaning of the word and made Perkins realise that in the eyes of non-Indigenous Australians he and his mates were inferior.

• Perkins explains his response to the many experiences he had of racial discrimination in Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s. Recognising through personal experience that Indigenous Australians were prevented from participating in ordinary activities in Australian society, Perkins decided to ‘confront society’. One way he chose to do this was to go to a public dance where, at the time, Aboriginal people were not welcome. Although he was rejected dance after dance, he was consciously challenging racism. It was these hidden rules of racial discrimination that he sought to expose during the Freedom Ride.

• The clip shows Perkins on the campus of the University of Sydney at a pivotal period in his life. Perkins’s determination to be listened to and his commitment to Indigenous activism led to his decision to obtain a university degree. In 1963 he became probably the first Indigenous person to graduate from a university in Australia. The university gave him the forum to speak, brought him to public notice during the Freedom Ride and prepared him for his future career.

• This clip provides an example of the changes being made by Indigenous people in different parts of Australia in the early 1960s. At the time the government policy of assimilation aimed to absorb Aboriginal people into mainstream Australian culture and racial discrimination was entrenched. However, Aboriginal organisations and individuals were vigorously working for change: better living conditions, equal pay, land rights and a referendum that would change the constitution and lead to full citizenship rights for Indigenous Australians.

• Indigenous Australian filmmaker Rachel Perkins (1970–) portrays her father’s story in Freedom Ride, the first episode in the SBS series Blood Brothers (1993). Perkins’s works explore and communicate a range of experiences of Indigenous Australian people. She has directed the feature films Radiance (1998) and One Night the Moon (2001). She was also a key creator of the SBS series First Australians (2008) and the accompanying book First Australians: an illustrated history (2008).