About

In 1927, a young Aboriginal girl who had been sexually abused at a place of employment was sent to Sydney. After she became pregnant, her child died. She was then sent back to the place of employment where the assaults had taken place. Her plight came to the attention of an Aboriginal man, Fred Maynard. He wrote her a letter:

"My heart is filled with regret and disgust, first because you were taken down by those who were supposed to be your help and guide through life. What a wicked conception, what a fallacy."

The man who wrote this letter was my grandfather, Fred Maynard. It was 1927, and it took a lot of courage to stand up and speak out if you were black. Aboriginal people were under tight control on government reserves. Not only was Fred Maynard fighting for the rights of Aboriginal people, but he was also fighting a David and Goliath battle with the New South Wales Protection Board. He would also establish and lead the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAP). It's a story that's been lost to history but certainly now needs to be reclaimed.

Melville House, near Maitland, where my great-grandmother Mary, a Wonnarua woman, worked as a domestic servant. Her husband, William Maynard, worked as a laborer on the property. On the 4th of July 1879, she gave birth to my grandfather, Fred Maynard, one of six children. Mary died when Fred was five, and his brother Arthur was four. The kids were then abandoned by their white father, and life was about to become very tough for the boys.

My grandfather and his brother were brought to Dungog, where they came under the charge of a strict Christian minister and his wife. They meted out harsh Protestant discipline to the boys. My grandfather would later tell his children that the minister was the cruelest man that ever walked the planet. Fred and Arthur were treated like animals, forced to live in a stable, and did tedious menial jobs around the small dairy attached to the presbytery. They took a beating if they did not perform their tasks to perfection. They had to get up with the cows at first light, even in the height of winter.

By the time Fred was eight, he'd read everything he could lay his hands on in the minister's library. By the time he was 12, he'd educated himself in philosophy and biology. The boys fled the minister's clutches in their early teens.

About 100 km from here is the site of the St. Clair Aboriginal Mission, and Fred's Uncle Tom Phillips had a farm there. That reserve was one of the first to be taken over by the Aborigines' Protection Board in 1916. The reserve, including the farm, was taken off Aboriginal people altogether in 1923. What happened there to Fred's uncle would help shape his views of the world.

The only chance these children have is to be taken away from their present environment and properly trained before being apprenticed out. And once having left the Aboriginal reserves, they should never be allowed to return to them permanently. The whole object of the board was to put things into train on lines that would eventually lead to the camps being depleted of their population and finally the closing of the reserves and camps altogether. It has been the policy of the board not to allow children, many of whom are almost white, who have been removed from camp life to return there, but to eventually merge themselves into the white population.

It's hard to imagine looking here now that this was once a busy industrial wharf with the most appalling working conditions. Fred and his brother Arthur would come to work here in 1907 when Fred was 28 years of age. But before he got here, he traveled widely and did a range of things. He worked as a timber getter, a bullock team driver, a photographer; he even ran a nursery in Sydney at one point.

The horror workplace here on the wharf was known as The Hungry Mile. Men were pushed to ensure that they worked to move 100 tons of lead an hour, 1,800 to 2,000 bales of wool for gangs for 8 hours, 80 tons of bagged sugar to be uploaded every hour. There was a long history of militancy on the Australian wharfs. Clearly, Fred Maynard was influenced by the trade union movement. But the single biggest impact on his political ideology would come through connections with visiting black seamen from overseas. Through these connections, he realized that there were similar struggles for equality taking place all over the world.

One of the earliest international organizations to form in Australia was the Coloured Progressive Association, mainly comprised of African Americans, West Indians, and Africans. But Aboriginal people were also a part of this group. In the same year that Fred Maynard started work on the Sydney docks, African American boxer Jack Johnson visited Australia. Jack Johnson was an inspiring figure for black and oppressed people around the world. He was charismatic, articulate, and heavily politicized. At the end of his visit to Australia, he was given a farewell by the Coloured Progressive Association, and present was one Fred Maynard.

Jack Johnson returned to Australia the following year, 1908, where he finally managed to get World Champion Tommy Burns into the ring here at Rushcutters Bay in the newly constructed Sydney Stadium. It was, up until the 1956 Olympic Games, the biggest sporting event that Australia had hosted. The beating Johnson gave Burns was so savage that the police had to jump in to stop the match. Aboriginal and Islander communities around the country were overjoyed and in jubilation at Johnson's victory. But many white commentators noted with concern the message that the victory would send to black men around the world.

Already, the insolent black's victory causes skin troubles in Woolloomooloo. An hour after I heard Alaskin laying down the law of Queensberry to two whites, and they listened humbly. It is a bad day for Australia.

In the wake of World War I, revolution was in the air. There had been uprisings in India, Egypt, Ireland, and of course, the Russian Revolution. In the United States, masses of black people began moving from the rural areas to the cities in search of better working opportunities. Much was the same in Australia. And the key players in the AAP, Fred Maynard, Tom Lacy, Sid Ridgeway, and Dick Johnson, were also working in the city, not living on reserves. Many Aboriginal people were now refugees in their own country, having had their successful farms torn away, or attempting to escape the clutches of the New South Wales Aborigines' Protection Board.

Through their contacts with African American sailors on the waterfront, men like Fred came to know the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and most importantly of all, the father of black nationalism, Marcus Garvey. Most people haven't heard of Marcus Garvey, but in his day, he was world-famous. He arrived in the United States from Jamaica in 1916 and established the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) the following year.

Garvey established The Negro World, a newspaper with a massive international audience, and it also covered the shocking conditions of Aboriginal people in Australia. Martin Luther King once said that Garvey was the first man of color in the United States to start