Connections

The Committee for Defence of Native Rights (CDNR) was formed in May 1946 by Perth residents who were concerned about the imprisonment of Clancy McKenna and Dooley Binbin. A broad range of people and organisations were involved, including church groups, communists, unions and women’s organisations. Although it was dismissed as a communist front, the CDNR played a significant role in ensuring that government authorities acted within the law in their efforts to put a stop to the strike. At a time when any form of Aboriginal dissent in Western Australia was quickly crushed, usually by removing offenders to distant institutions, the CDNR’s campaign brought national and international attention to the strike, forcing the state government, anxious to avoid censure over its treatment of Aborigines, to deal with the strikers with unaccustomed restraint. Legal representation provided by the CDNR was also significant in challenging the use of Native Affairs legislation to suppress dissent among Aboriginal people. Legal representation enabled Don McLeod to avoid three-months’ imprisonment, while the threat of legal challenge under habeas corpus prevented the removal of strike leaders to institutions far away.

At a time when assimilation was being promoted as the solution to Aboriginal disadvantage, a network of activists for Aboriginal rights during the 1950s looked to the Pilbara as a model of Aboriginal-directed change that enabled Aboriginal engagement with the wider economy without dismantling Aboriginal sociality and culture. The Australian organisation most enthusiastic about Pilbara movement was the Council for Aboriginal Rights, whose secretary, Shirley Andrews, was active in seeking and disseminating information about the cooperative that promoted Pindan as a viable alternative to assimilation.

The Pilbara movement gained more attention in 1956 when London-based Australian feminist and peace campaigner, Lady Jessie Street, a member of the executive of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society in London, received two audio tape recordings of McLeod speaking. Interest aroused by these recordings contributed to the Anti-Slavery Society’s determination to bring the question of Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people before the United Nations. Street’s visit to Australia in 1957, and the survey she conducted in preparation for submission to the United Nations, was a catalyst for the formation of a federal organisation to campaign for rights for Aboriginal people in Australia. Her visit to the Pindan cooperative and her ongoing interest in its affairs brought further attention to the Pilbara movement and increased its influence on the direction of the broader movement for Aboriginal rights in Australia.

Throughout the 1950s, McLeod spoke and corresponded with a wide range of people interested in the experiences of this independent community. A central tenet of the Pilbara movement was the claim that Aboriginal people had been betrayed by the 1897 and 1905 repeals of Section 70 of the Western Australian constitution. Inserted as a condition for self-government being granted to the colony by the British Crown in 1890, this section stipulated that one percent of consolidated revenue be expended on the colony’s Aboriginal population. McLeod and marrngu consistently demanded the restoration of this provision, and called for the one percent of state revenue to be paid into a fund directly controlled by the Aboriginal people. This demand was closely linked to a key point: Aboriginal people were capable and must be free to determine their own future and control their own affairs. McLeod therefore objected when claims made by the Western Australian politician Bill Grayden of severe malnutrition among Aboriginal people in the vicinity of the Warburton Ranges, which were documented in a film entitled ‘Their Darkest Hour’, became a focus of the Aboriginal rights movement in 1957. Grayden’s portrayal of helpless people in need of government and mission intervention was, McLeod insisted, ‘diametrically opposed’ to Pindan’s message that Aboriginal people could and must control own affairs, and that mission and government intervention was the problem, not the solution.