September 26, 2011 • 21 mins
The final part of this series takes place in Australia, where students were inspired by the Freedom Rides and protested discrimination against Aboriginal Australians. Tune in to learn how the group tried to break down racial barriers and empower local Aborigines.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm Doublina Chuk reporting, and we
are still talking about the Freedom Ride. So we've been
talking about them now for a little while, but we've
(00:21):
been talking about the freedom rides that took place in
the American South in nineteen sixty one. And just in
case you missed those earlier episodes, that was about groups
of protesters, black and white, male and female, from all
over the country who rode buses through Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia,
and most notably through Alabama and Mississippi to test laws
(00:45):
that were already in place. But we're large largely overridden
by local Jim Crow traditions. And one thing we kept
emphasizing throughout those episodes was the press coverage of the rides,
especially the photos. People across the U saw these images
of beaten up students, a bus on fire, and violent
mobs going up against non violent protesters. But the thing
(01:08):
is is that people around the world saw those images too,
not just in the US, even all the way in Australia,
where they really struck a chord. Australian society was also
segregated along racial lines, since the Aboriginal and the tourist
Straight Islander Australians were essentially second class citizens, underserved in
housing and healthcare, ineligible for federal benefits, and often without
(01:30):
legal rights for their own children. And I think that's
the part that most people know about Aboriginal people, that
loss of their children is still in generation. But in
the nineteen fifties and the early sixties, campaigns for Aboriginal
rights were starting to gain ground in Australia, but the
fact remained that many Australians in the larger cities just
(01:52):
weren't really aware of how bad discrimination and how bad
conditions were in the smaller interior towns and on the reservation.
So a publicity fueled event like an Australian version of
the Freedom Rides would be possibly just the thing to
kind of shake them up, wake them up a little bit, right,
But we can't act as though there was just this
(02:15):
neat and direct jump through from the students in Sydney
watching students in Nashville and immediately going out and staging
their own freedom rides instead and kind of Ironically, it
was a later U S civil rights event that jump
started the Australian freedom rides, and that was the nineteen
sixty four Civil Rights Act. So while the Act was
being debated in Congress, students in Sydney showed their disapproval
(02:38):
of the attempts to block the bill by dressing up
as KKK members and protesting outside of the U S Embassy.
This obviously caused quite a raucous as you could imagine.
There were arrest, there were international headlines, and unsurprisingly there
was some backlash too. Mrs Are showed, for instance, rode
into the Sydney Morning Herald to point out kind of
(03:00):
the obvious here, until Aborigines had the same rights as
white Australians, it was a bit hypocritical to protest racial
discrimination in other countries. So the students really took that
point to heart and they decided to form a group
and and try to deal with us, try to learn
more about racism in their own country. So these students
(03:22):
at the University ofs and He formed a new group
to focus on Australian issues, and they called it the
Student Action for Aborigines um S a f A for short,
and it was headed up by Charles Perkins, and Perkins
is a pretty well known figure for most Australians, I think,
but I'm not sure. I hadn't heard of him before,
and I'm not sure how well known he is outside
(03:44):
of Australia. He eventually became the first Aborigine to earn
a university degree, and that's probably what he's most famous for.
He was also the first to head up a government department.
But he had been born on a reservation near Alice Springs,
and like a lot of mixed race children, he had
been removed from his parents and raised in an Anglican
boys home. But unlike a lot of the other children
(04:07):
who had fewer opportunities, was really really good at soccer,
and he had gotten to go play pro in England
and finally even turned down an offer with Manchester United.
I think even those of us who don't know much
about soccer, I know about Manchester United. He turned down
an offer with them to return back to Australia and
play as captain for one of the local clubs. And
(04:31):
there was a two part reason for that. I mean, one,
it's a good soccer opportunity, but the other is that
living abroad had made him think more about devoting himself
to Aboriginal rights at home. He wanted to he wanted
to be at home when he wanted to make a difference. Yeah,
enough to give up a huge opportunity to play for
one of the biggest leagues in the world. So with
Perkins at the head of the s A f A,
(04:52):
the group started planning something big and they decided to
follow the model of the U. S. Freedom Writers. So
basically a bus tour with the both men and women
of European and Aboriginal descent taking on New South Wales. Yeah,
and they even explicitly we're trying to follow the U. S.
Freedom Writers model that here's a clip from their announcement
(05:13):
of the ride. The party known as s A f
A plans to see firsthand the conditions in which Aboriginal
people of New South Wales are living. The team will
also make protests in certain towns in which it is
felt that there is discrimination against the Aboriginal people. The
team has been largely patterned on the concept of the
Freedom Writers, who were involved in the programs of integration
(05:35):
in the United States. So the whole thing, though, was
going to be a chartered bus, of course, and it
was going to cost eight hundred pounds for accommodation, food,
everything like that on the ten day tour. And I
like the way they raise money for it. It's it's
very old fashioned sounding, selling Christmas cards, staging folk and
jazz concerts and holding dances too. So by February nineteen
(05:59):
sixty five they were all ready to go. Unlike the
US rides though, where the goal was to test laws
that were already in place, the s a f A
Ride would try to do these three things. The first
was attract public attention to the plight of the Aborigines
and everything about that their poor health, education, housing issues,
(06:21):
and also to help lesson segregation between Aborigines and whites.
And finally also to support the local Aborigines and ending
discrimination in their own communities. So it was part protests,
slash media campaign, part fact finding mission. And the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and tour Straight Islander Studies has copies
(06:41):
of the survey forms of the students took with them,
which I think is really interesting. The questionnaire for Aborigines
included questions like are the white people giving the Aborigines
a fair chance. Do you think that the Aboriginal situation
has improved at all in the past twenty years? And
can you say that you have never been to the doctor?
And the shnare for white people? Included questions like the
(07:03):
Aboriginal problem exists because Aborigines are misunderstood. Do you agree
Aborigines who still have their separate customs should give them
up and become average citizens? Do you agree? And really
kind of hard hitting ones, steal personal ones would you
welcome an Aboriginal neighbor in your street? I liked how
the questions are sort of these grand social questions, but
(07:25):
also ones like have you been to the doctor? Have
you um? Or would you welcome a neighbor on your street?
You know once that people are going to have to
answer kind of honestly, I would think. But Perkins wasn't
the only eventual big name on this trip. Other notable
members of the group included Jim Spiegelman, who was later
(07:46):
the Chief Justice of New South Wales Supreme Court, Darcy
I Think Cassidy, who is a student reporter and has
done a lot of the writing about the Freedom Ride,
Reverend Ted Nooffs of the Wayside Chapel. I kind of
thought of him as the Diane Nash of the Australian
Freedom Rights organizing things back in the city. And Anne
(08:06):
Kurthoys who journaled the trip, and it's interesting to read
her journal too because she interspersed the eventual violence and
all of the hard living conditions that they observed with
some lighter moments like learning how to toss a boomerang
and playing basketball with Aboriginal leagues, so sort of getting
down to the relationship building that the students were trying
(08:28):
to accomplish as well. Right, So they set out and
their plan was to visit several cities. I'll try not
to butcher them too much, the cities of Orange, Wellington, Gilgandra,
wal Get, Marie, Bogabilla, tenor Field, liz Moore, Grafton, Bowraville,
Kempsey and tari And they were staying in most places
(08:50):
only about a day, so it was a quick tour
they were. They were pretty much in and out of
most of these cities, although they were or towns. Rather
they were visiting Aborigines living in different situations. So those
who were on a settlement, which is kind of like
a reservation, I think, and those who were living in
towns and talking to some of the white people too,
(09:12):
So the first few days of the trip really favored
that fact finding aspect, and the students didn't run into
too much outright hostility, even though they did see a
lot of social problems and Wellington, Kurthoys noted that there
were tin houses with dirt floors and kids who all
had eye diseases and really contaminated dirty river water that
(09:34):
they had to walk long distances for. In a later town,
they noted that town jobs weren't really a possibility for
the Aboriginee, so they'd have to do seasonal labor in
the wool industry, which was kind of unreliable and only
got you through part of the year. But the first
real trouble came in wall Get, where word had already
(09:56):
gotten out what kind of protests they were planning on staging. Yeah,
somehow it had gotten out already that they planned a
petition the Return Service League Club, which refused entrance to
Aboriginal veterans of World War one and two. So when
the Freedom Writers get to wall Get, they are picketing
with signs that say things like end color bar and
bullets did not discriminate, and they start to draw a
(10:17):
crowd both of curious Aborigines and of white people, and
in sort of a cheeky move, return Service League folks
even offered everyone drinks. So at sundown the students, who
had by that point been joined by local Aborigines, ended
the picket and headed back to their accommodation, which was
(10:38):
an Anglican church hall where they'd stayed before with no problems,
but the minister told them this time that they'd have
to leave. They had antagonized the people and apparently left
beer cans in the hall. Yeah, which um, one of
the journaling Freedom Writer does admit to, so this is
a problem. Though. They're stuck in wall Get without accommodation,
(10:58):
and the local Aborigines did offer them a combination in
these abandoned tram cars on the edge of town, which
was nice, but the Freedom riders were worried that such
a dark distance location with no kind of defensive protection
would just mean trouble in the middle of the night,
so instead they fetched their driver from his hotel and
(11:20):
they headed out of town, but a few miles out
of town in a in a scene that must have
really kind of been reminiscent of the the events that
took place in Anniston in the U S Freedom Rides.
It's this dark, uninhabited area and a posse of cars
and trucks appeared and started to push the bus off
the road, and eventually a small truck did tip the bus.
(11:43):
It didn't fall completely over, but um cars surrounded it
and it seems like a pretty bad situation suddenly for
the Freedom Riders. But fortunately those cars turned out to
contain Aborigines who were trailing the bus to try to
protect it and any of the cars that were harassing
the bus sped off into the night, and the students,
(12:04):
accompanied by their Aboriginal escort, went back to town and
filed a police report, and by that point a crowd
had gathered, so it was sort of the first wake
up call that this bus ride wasn't gonna necessarily be
all fact finding and inspiration um. And after that they
went on though, continued on the trip and eventually wound
(12:26):
up in Mari, where after the events at Walgat, the
press coverage had really exploded. Yeah, it was good for
the mission, all that press raised public attention, but not
so great for getting straight answers out of the people
they were interviewing. People weren't as eager to talk to
them after that, perhaps understandably, but the students decided that
they needed a focus like they had in wall Get
(12:48):
with the Return Service League Club. They picked out public pools,
this time, which were segregated by the local council and
Aboriginal kids were only allowed to stay in the pool
one day a week for a brief school pe session.
So with the permission of Aboriginal parents, the students took
a group of kids to the pool and tried to
buy them admission. After an hour or so stalling and
(13:11):
a phone call to the mayor, the pool staff finally
relented and decided to let the kids in. Perkins immediately
came back with twenty one more kids and also talked
to the white kids who were there to see what
they thought of the whole thing basically, and Kurt always
remembers them being pretty ambivalent, at least a lot less
so than their parents were. Yeah, who were who were
not into the whole thing. And after the seeming success
(13:34):
in Marie, you know, it seemed like they had integrated
the pool, the group moved on to Boggabilla for more
surveys where they learned that educational opportunities didn't really exist
for the Indigenous people beyond sixth grade or so, and
police really had free reign of the homes. You know,
just more of this painting a picture of what life
(13:54):
was like for these people. But on their way to
their next stop, they got a call and found out
that the day after they had left Maury, sixty Aboriginal
kids tried to go back and get in the pool
and exercise this new right they had. And while some
of them were allowed in, the pool closed early, and
when it reopened about an hour later, the mayor stated
(14:17):
that it was back to the segregationist statute that had
existed from the nineteen fifties. So the Freedom Writers had
a little debate about what to do, whether to keep
on going or to go back to Maury and not
let this, not let their actions be defeated so quickly.
So they went back to Maury, and this time it
(14:40):
was a lot more violent. There was fighting, there were arrests,
and the riders were even pelted with gravel when rotten
eggs and vegetables. But finally the mayor did agree to
put forward emotion that admittance into the pool would be
based on health only, and um that to me, that
kind of sounds like a way for him to still
exercis as some racial discrimination because the health of the
(15:04):
Aborigines was often worse than the local white people. But
the writers still felt like they had achieved somewhat of
a victory and they were escorted by police back to
the bus and they ran into a problem though, another
problem that our writers in the American South had run into.
Their driver quit yeah, so they had to bring in
(15:24):
a new driver to be able to move on. And
as for the rest of the ride, there really wasn't
anything as dramatic as wall Get or Morey that happened
on the rest of the trip. Later towns did show
some discrimination, poor living conditions, very few opportunities, but no violence.
So by the end Kurthoys admitted that they were losing
some steam and the press kind of made the interviews
(15:46):
impossible for them. All. The press did keep the stories
in the paper for a week, though the stories were
often sympathetic but sometimes entirely dismissive. A cartoon in The Australian,
for example, pretty much made fun of the writers, showing
the um sort of riding off and the Aborigines being
left behind in a cloud of dust. So I think
that as you were saying, that's probably how a lot
(16:08):
of people felt about the rides. Yeah, but the riders
were also they were really interested in making sure that
that cartoon or that whole view of the ride wasn't accurate,
and they wanted to put the information that they had
gathered through all those surveys and all the connections they
had made to meeting people and and making connections with
(16:28):
the local groups that existed, to put all that to
good youth. So later in the year, an Aboriginal organization
in wall Get asked for help desegregating the luxury theater
the Oasis Hotel, and they went to the student group
for help and for students, and two Aboriginal women were
eventually arrested when the attempt was made. In August nineteen sixty.
(16:52):
Perkins also reported back at the Federal Council for the
Advancement of Aborigines and Tourist Straight Islanders and presented some
of that data to um that some of the data
that he and the students had found. And as we
mentioned too, he went on to have a career in
Aboriginal affairs for the government. So while some eventual Aboriginal
(17:14):
rights leaders remember the effect of the writers pulling into
their towns, the big change really came from putting the violence,
discrimination and the poor living conditions front and center for
Australians who weren't used to seeing it at a time,
and they got it all on tape, to the bus
being run off the road and wall Get the vice
president of the Walget Return Service League club saying he'd
(17:35):
never allow an Aborigine you to join. All of that
ended up on film and people who were more removed
from this day to day discrimination were shocked to see it. Yeah,
so when the time came to actually change legislation, more
Australians had a better sense of the true discrimination in
their country. And there were two parts of the Constitution
(17:57):
that specifically discriminated against Aborigines then. The first was that
federal laws didn't apply to Indigenous people. So this made
it so that different states, different local governments could pass
different laws regarding Aborigines, and it meant that they didn't
have access to federal services like social security. And the
(18:17):
other main problem with the constitution is that Aborigines weren't
counted in the census, so it meant that they only
got these very basic state services. And um, you can
actually see ad score campaigns for trying to get Aborigines
counted in the census, and and they make quite a point.
But only two years after the Ride, the nineteen sixty
(18:40):
seven referendum amended those two sections of the Constitution, with
more than nine percent of Australians voting in favor of
doing so. So even though Aborigines didn't get full rights
from the nineteen sixty seven referendum, it was still a
really big step forward in better services and and better
treatment and just kind of acceptance that there was a
(19:02):
major problem. And even though the Australian Freedom Ride has
a few years to go before it hits its fiftieth anniversary,
students at the University of Sydney marked the event this year,
traveling by bus through the same towns and gathering input
from Indigenous communities to present to the government to further reform,
so take it the step further going with it. And
(19:23):
they were even led out by the Central Coast Aboriginal
motorcycle group, the Black Knight, which I just thought that
sounded so awesome, but I thought it was interesting that
they chose the fiftieth anniversary of the U s Freedom
Rides kind of the starting point of of the inspiration
behind the Australian rides, as as the anniversary they wanted
to commemorate. I don't know, it's it's been really neat
(19:45):
to learn about these two events, and I have to
thank listener Eli who suggested the Australian Freedom Ride, which
I hadn't heard of. I of course knew about the
US Freedom Rides, but uh, learning that there was this
Australian offshoot made me want to research both of them
and get to know not only the offsheet but the
inspiration too. Yeah. And it's I mean, even though one
(20:08):
was inspired by the other, they're very different. They are different,
and it's been nice to, uh to learn a little
bit more about them and to kind of compare and
contrast I guess you would say the climate especially. Yeah,
exactly how two different countries to very different countries with
a similar yet still very different problem dealt with it. Um,
(20:29):
So thank you to Eli, and also thank you to
listener Helen who helped us out with some of these pronunciations.
Any mistakes are ours and not hers. So we were
really interested to learn that Australia had its own freedom ride.
And I'm sure that there have been other events inspired
by the original freedom rides, or or just events kind
(20:50):
of like this. Everybody gets on a bus and goes
out and accomplishes something. So if you want to let
us know about any of those other events around the world,
feel free to email at that History podcast at how
stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter at mt
in History, and we are on Facebook too, And if
you're not done learning about Australia related topics, we have
(21:11):
an article on our website called what was Australia's Stolen Generation?
And you can look at it by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics because at how
stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Daddy and I'm Doublina Chuk reporting, and we
are still talking about the Freedom Ride. So we've been
talking about them now for a little while, but we've
(00:21):
been talking about the freedom rides that took place in
the American South in nineteen sixty one. And just in
case you missed those earlier episodes, that was about groups
of protesters, black and white, male and female, from all
over the country who rode buses through Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia,
and most notably through Alabama and Mississippi to test laws
(00:45):
that were already in place. But we're large largely overridden
by local Jim Crow traditions. And one thing we kept
emphasizing throughout those episodes was the press coverage of the rides,
especially the photos. People across the U saw these images
of beaten up students, a bus on fire, and violent
mobs going up against non violent protesters. But the thing
(01:08):
is is that people around the world saw those images too,
not just in the US, even all the way in Australia,
where they really struck a chord. Australian society was also
segregated along racial lines, since the Aboriginal and the tourist
Straight Islander Australians were essentially second class citizens, underserved in
housing and healthcare, ineligible for federal benefits, and often without
(01:30):
legal rights for their own children. And I think that's
the part that most people know about Aboriginal people, that
loss of their children is still in generation. But in
the nineteen fifties and the early sixties, campaigns for Aboriginal
rights were starting to gain ground in Australia, but the
fact remained that many Australians in the larger cities just
(01:52):
weren't really aware of how bad discrimination and how bad
conditions were in the smaller interior towns and on the reservation.
So a publicity fueled event like an Australian version of
the Freedom Rides would be possibly just the thing to
kind of shake them up, wake them up a little bit, right,
But we can't act as though there was just this
(02:15):
neat and direct jump through from the students in Sydney
watching students in Nashville and immediately going out and staging
their own freedom rides instead and kind of Ironically, it
was a later U S civil rights event that jump
started the Australian freedom rides, and that was the nineteen
sixty four Civil Rights Act. So while the Act was
being debated in Congress, students in Sydney showed their disapproval
(02:38):
of the attempts to block the bill by dressing up
as KKK members and protesting outside of the U S Embassy.
This obviously caused quite a raucous as you could imagine.
There were arrest, there were international headlines, and unsurprisingly there
was some backlash too. Mrs Are showed, for instance, rode
into the Sydney Morning Herald to point out kind of
(03:00):
the obvious here, until Aborigines had the same rights as
white Australians, it was a bit hypocritical to protest racial
discrimination in other countries. So the students really took that
point to heart and they decided to form a group
and and try to deal with us, try to learn
more about racism in their own country. So these students
(03:22):
at the University ofs and He formed a new group
to focus on Australian issues, and they called it the
Student Action for Aborigines um S a f A for short,
and it was headed up by Charles Perkins, and Perkins
is a pretty well known figure for most Australians, I think,
but I'm not sure. I hadn't heard of him before,
and I'm not sure how well known he is outside
(03:44):
of Australia. He eventually became the first Aborigine to earn
a university degree, and that's probably what he's most famous for.
He was also the first to head up a government department.
But he had been born on a reservation near Alice Springs,
and like a lot of mixed race children, he had
been removed from his parents and raised in an Anglican
boys home. But unlike a lot of the other children
(04:07):
who had fewer opportunities, was really really good at soccer,
and he had gotten to go play pro in England
and finally even turned down an offer with Manchester United.
I think even those of us who don't know much
about soccer, I know about Manchester United. He turned down
an offer with them to return back to Australia and
play as captain for one of the local clubs. And
(04:31):
there was a two part reason for that. I mean, one,
it's a good soccer opportunity, but the other is that
living abroad had made him think more about devoting himself
to Aboriginal rights at home. He wanted to he wanted
to be at home when he wanted to make a difference. Yeah,
enough to give up a huge opportunity to play for
one of the biggest leagues in the world. So with
Perkins at the head of the s A f A,
(04:52):
the group started planning something big and they decided to
follow the model of the U. S. Freedom Writers. So
basically a bus tour with the both men and women
of European and Aboriginal descent taking on New South Wales. Yeah,
and they even explicitly we're trying to follow the U. S.
Freedom Writers model that here's a clip from their announcement
(05:13):
of the ride. The party known as s A f
A plans to see firsthand the conditions in which Aboriginal
people of New South Wales are living. The team will
also make protests in certain towns in which it is
felt that there is discrimination against the Aboriginal people. The
team has been largely patterned on the concept of the
Freedom Writers, who were involved in the programs of integration
(05:35):
in the United States. So the whole thing, though, was
going to be a chartered bus, of course, and it
was going to cost eight hundred pounds for accommodation, food,
everything like that on the ten day tour. And I
like the way they raise money for it. It's it's
very old fashioned sounding, selling Christmas cards, staging folk and
jazz concerts and holding dances too. So by February nineteen
(05:59):
sixty five they were all ready to go. Unlike the
US rides though, where the goal was to test laws
that were already in place, the s a f A
Ride would try to do these three things. The first
was attract public attention to the plight of the Aborigines
and everything about that their poor health, education, housing issues,
(06:21):
and also to help lesson segregation between Aborigines and whites.
And finally also to support the local Aborigines and ending
discrimination in their own communities. So it was part protests,
slash media campaign, part fact finding mission. And the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and tour Straight Islander Studies has copies
(06:41):
of the survey forms of the students took with them,
which I think is really interesting. The questionnaire for Aborigines
included questions like are the white people giving the Aborigines
a fair chance. Do you think that the Aboriginal situation
has improved at all in the past twenty years? And
can you say that you have never been to the doctor?
And the shnare for white people? Included questions like the
(07:03):
Aboriginal problem exists because Aborigines are misunderstood. Do you agree
Aborigines who still have their separate customs should give them
up and become average citizens? Do you agree? And really
kind of hard hitting ones, steal personal ones would you
welcome an Aboriginal neighbor in your street? I liked how
the questions are sort of these grand social questions, but
(07:25):
also ones like have you been to the doctor? Have
you um? Or would you welcome a neighbor on your street?
You know once that people are going to have to
answer kind of honestly, I would think. But Perkins wasn't
the only eventual big name on this trip. Other notable
members of the group included Jim Spiegelman, who was later
(07:46):
the Chief Justice of New South Wales Supreme Court, Darcy
I Think Cassidy, who is a student reporter and has
done a lot of the writing about the Freedom Ride,
Reverend Ted Nooffs of the Wayside Chapel. I kind of
thought of him as the Diane Nash of the Australian
Freedom Rights organizing things back in the city. And Anne
(08:06):
Kurthoys who journaled the trip, and it's interesting to read
her journal too because she interspersed the eventual violence and
all of the hard living conditions that they observed with
some lighter moments like learning how to toss a boomerang
and playing basketball with Aboriginal leagues, so sort of getting
down to the relationship building that the students were trying
(08:28):
to accomplish as well. Right, So they set out and
their plan was to visit several cities. I'll try not
to butcher them too much, the cities of Orange, Wellington, Gilgandra,
wal Get, Marie, Bogabilla, tenor Field, liz Moore, Grafton, Bowraville,
Kempsey and tari And they were staying in most places
(08:50):
only about a day, so it was a quick tour
they were. They were pretty much in and out of
most of these cities, although they were or towns. Rather
they were visiting Aborigines living in different situations. So those
who were on a settlement, which is kind of like
a reservation, I think, and those who were living in
towns and talking to some of the white people too,
(09:12):
So the first few days of the trip really favored
that fact finding aspect, and the students didn't run into
too much outright hostility, even though they did see a
lot of social problems and Wellington, Kurthoys noted that there
were tin houses with dirt floors and kids who all
had eye diseases and really contaminated dirty river water that
(09:34):
they had to walk long distances for. In a later town,
they noted that town jobs weren't really a possibility for
the Aboriginee, so they'd have to do seasonal labor in
the wool industry, which was kind of unreliable and only
got you through part of the year. But the first
real trouble came in wall Get, where word had already
(09:56):
gotten out what kind of protests they were planning on staging. Yeah,
somehow it had gotten out already that they planned a
petition the Return Service League Club, which refused entrance to
Aboriginal veterans of World War one and two. So when
the Freedom Writers get to wall Get, they are picketing
with signs that say things like end color bar and
bullets did not discriminate, and they start to draw a
(10:17):
crowd both of curious Aborigines and of white people, and
in sort of a cheeky move, return Service League folks
even offered everyone drinks. So at sundown the students, who
had by that point been joined by local Aborigines, ended
the picket and headed back to their accommodation, which was
(10:38):
an Anglican church hall where they'd stayed before with no problems,
but the minister told them this time that they'd have
to leave. They had antagonized the people and apparently left
beer cans in the hall. Yeah, which um, one of
the journaling Freedom Writer does admit to, so this is
a problem. Though. They're stuck in wall Get without accommodation,
(10:58):
and the local Aborigines did offer them a combination in
these abandoned tram cars on the edge of town, which
was nice, but the Freedom riders were worried that such
a dark distance location with no kind of defensive protection
would just mean trouble in the middle of the night,
so instead they fetched their driver from his hotel and
(11:20):
they headed out of town, but a few miles out
of town in a in a scene that must have
really kind of been reminiscent of the the events that
took place in Anniston in the U S Freedom Rides.
It's this dark, uninhabited area and a posse of cars
and trucks appeared and started to push the bus off
the road, and eventually a small truck did tip the bus.
(11:43):
It didn't fall completely over, but um cars surrounded it
and it seems like a pretty bad situation suddenly for
the Freedom Riders. But fortunately those cars turned out to
contain Aborigines who were trailing the bus to try to
protect it and any of the cars that were harassing
the bus sped off into the night, and the students,
(12:04):
accompanied by their Aboriginal escort, went back to town and
filed a police report, and by that point a crowd
had gathered, so it was sort of the first wake
up call that this bus ride wasn't gonna necessarily be
all fact finding and inspiration um. And after that they
went on though, continued on the trip and eventually wound
(12:26):
up in Mari, where after the events at Walgat, the
press coverage had really exploded. Yeah, it was good for
the mission, all that press raised public attention, but not
so great for getting straight answers out of the people
they were interviewing. People weren't as eager to talk to
them after that, perhaps understandably, but the students decided that
they needed a focus like they had in wall Get
(12:48):
with the Return Service League Club. They picked out public pools,
this time, which were segregated by the local council and
Aboriginal kids were only allowed to stay in the pool
one day a week for a brief school pe session.
So with the permission of Aboriginal parents, the students took
a group of kids to the pool and tried to
buy them admission. After an hour or so stalling and
(13:11):
a phone call to the mayor, the pool staff finally
relented and decided to let the kids in. Perkins immediately
came back with twenty one more kids and also talked
to the white kids who were there to see what
they thought of the whole thing basically, and Kurt always
remembers them being pretty ambivalent, at least a lot less
so than their parents were. Yeah, who were who were
not into the whole thing. And after the seeming success
(13:34):
in Marie, you know, it seemed like they had integrated
the pool, the group moved on to Boggabilla for more
surveys where they learned that educational opportunities didn't really exist
for the Indigenous people beyond sixth grade or so, and
police really had free reign of the homes. You know,
just more of this painting a picture of what life
(13:54):
was like for these people. But on their way to
their next stop, they got a call and found out
that the day after they had left Maury, sixty Aboriginal
kids tried to go back and get in the pool
and exercise this new right they had. And while some
of them were allowed in, the pool closed early, and
when it reopened about an hour later, the mayor stated
(14:17):
that it was back to the segregationist statute that had
existed from the nineteen fifties. So the Freedom Writers had
a little debate about what to do, whether to keep
on going or to go back to Maury and not
let this, not let their actions be defeated so quickly.
So they went back to Maury, and this time it
(14:40):
was a lot more violent. There was fighting, there were arrests,
and the riders were even pelted with gravel when rotten
eggs and vegetables. But finally the mayor did agree to
put forward emotion that admittance into the pool would be
based on health only, and um that to me, that
kind of sounds like a way for him to still
exercis as some racial discrimination because the health of the
(15:04):
Aborigines was often worse than the local white people. But
the writers still felt like they had achieved somewhat of
a victory and they were escorted by police back to
the bus and they ran into a problem though, another
problem that our writers in the American South had run into.
Their driver quit yeah, so they had to bring in
(15:24):
a new driver to be able to move on. And
as for the rest of the ride, there really wasn't
anything as dramatic as wall Get or Morey that happened
on the rest of the trip. Later towns did show
some discrimination, poor living conditions, very few opportunities, but no violence.
So by the end Kurthoys admitted that they were losing
some steam and the press kind of made the interviews
(15:46):
impossible for them. All. The press did keep the stories
in the paper for a week, though the stories were
often sympathetic but sometimes entirely dismissive. A cartoon in The Australian,
for example, pretty much made fun of the writers, showing
the um sort of riding off and the Aborigines being
left behind in a cloud of dust. So I think
that as you were saying, that's probably how a lot
(16:08):
of people felt about the rides. Yeah, but the riders
were also they were really interested in making sure that
that cartoon or that whole view of the ride wasn't accurate,
and they wanted to put the information that they had
gathered through all those surveys and all the connections they
had made to meeting people and and making connections with
(16:28):
the local groups that existed, to put all that to
good youth. So later in the year, an Aboriginal organization
in wall Get asked for help desegregating the luxury theater
the Oasis Hotel, and they went to the student group
for help and for students, and two Aboriginal women were
eventually arrested when the attempt was made. In August nineteen sixty.
(16:52):
Perkins also reported back at the Federal Council for the
Advancement of Aborigines and Tourist Straight Islanders and presented some
of that data to um that some of the data
that he and the students had found. And as we
mentioned too, he went on to have a career in
Aboriginal affairs for the government. So while some eventual Aboriginal
(17:14):
rights leaders remember the effect of the writers pulling into
their towns, the big change really came from putting the violence,
discrimination and the poor living conditions front and center for
Australians who weren't used to seeing it at a time,
and they got it all on tape, to the bus
being run off the road and wall Get the vice
president of the Walget Return Service League club saying he'd
(17:35):
never allow an Aborigine you to join. All of that
ended up on film and people who were more removed
from this day to day discrimination were shocked to see it. Yeah,
so when the time came to actually change legislation, more
Australians had a better sense of the true discrimination in
their country. And there were two parts of the Constitution
(17:57):
that specifically discriminated against Aborigines then. The first was that
federal laws didn't apply to Indigenous people. So this made
it so that different states, different local governments could pass
different laws regarding Aborigines, and it meant that they didn't
have access to federal services like social security. And the
(18:17):
other main problem with the constitution is that Aborigines weren't
counted in the census, so it meant that they only
got these very basic state services. And um, you can
actually see ad score campaigns for trying to get Aborigines
counted in the census, and and they make quite a point.
But only two years after the Ride, the nineteen sixty
(18:40):
seven referendum amended those two sections of the Constitution, with
more than nine percent of Australians voting in favor of
doing so. So even though Aborigines didn't get full rights
from the nineteen sixty seven referendum, it was still a
really big step forward in better services and and better
treatment and just kind of acceptance that there was a
(19:02):
major problem. And even though the Australian Freedom Ride has
a few years to go before it hits its fiftieth anniversary,
students at the University of Sydney marked the event this year,
traveling by bus through the same towns and gathering input
from Indigenous communities to present to the government to further reform,
so take it the step further going with it. And
(19:23):
they were even led out by the Central Coast Aboriginal
motorcycle group, the Black Knight, which I just thought that
sounded so awesome, but I thought it was interesting that
they chose the fiftieth anniversary of the U s Freedom
Rides kind of the starting point of of the inspiration
behind the Australian rides, as as the anniversary they wanted
to commemorate. I don't know, it's it's been really neat
(19:45):
to learn about these two events, and I have to
thank listener Eli who suggested the Australian Freedom Ride, which
I hadn't heard of. I of course knew about the
US Freedom Rides, but uh, learning that there was this
Australian offshoot made me want to research both of them
and get to know not only the offsheet but the
inspiration too. Yeah. And it's I mean, even though one
(20:08):
was inspired by the other, they're very different. They are different,
and it's been nice to, uh to learn a little
bit more about them and to kind of compare and
contrast I guess you would say the climate especially. Yeah,
exactly how two different countries to very different countries with
a similar yet still very different problem dealt with it. Um,
(20:29):
So thank you to Eli, and also thank you to
listener Helen who helped us out with some of these pronunciations.
Any mistakes are ours and not hers. So we were
really interested to learn that Australia had its own freedom ride.
And I'm sure that there have been other events inspired
by the original freedom rides, or or just events kind
(20:50):
of like this. Everybody gets on a bus and goes
out and accomplishes something. So if you want to let
us know about any of those other events around the world,
feel free to email at that History podcast at how
stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter at mt
in History, and we are on Facebook too, And if
you're not done learning about Australia related topics, we have
(21:11):
an article on our website called what was Australia's Stolen Generation?
And you can look at it by visiting our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics because at how
stuff works dot com
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