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process is never singular and unidirectional but (like a large river) includes cross­currents,
back­eddies, and quiet areas out of the main stream that allow for different forms of life to
flourish. These successful CDEP schemes are good examples of this; set up as specifically
Aboriginal programs to address Aboriginal disadvantage, in their everyday practice they
challenge orthodoxies of essential difference between groups of people whose lives, objec­
tively, are inextricably interlinked.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1 If the personal is the political, what are the similarities, and the differences, between the
political nature of gender identity and that of racial identity in Australia?
2 Are there differences in the ways in which racial identity and difference are treated in
Australia regarding Aboriginal people and other groups (e.g. Asian migrants)? If so,
what are they?
3 The Australian Bureau of Statistics classifies a household as Aboriginal for its purposes
if the household head and/or their spouse identifies as Aboriginal. What are the
sociological implications of this in the light of the above discussion?
4 Do the CDEP schemes discussed here really illustrate the possibility of transcending
racially constructed difference, or do they illustrate that in these economically depressed
rural areas, class similarities are more relevant to people than racial differences?
Further Reading
Attwood, B. (1989) The Making of the Aborigines, Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
Attwood, B., Burrage, W., Burrage, A. & Stokie, E. (1994) A Life Together, A Life Apart: A History of
Relations Between Europeans and Aborigines, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press.
Landon, C. & Tonkin, D. (1999) Jackson’s Track: Memoir of a Dreamtime Place, Ringwood, Viking.
Tovey, N. (2004) Little Black Bastard: A Story of Survival, Sydney, Hodder Headline.
71 Freedom Rides
ANN CURTHOYS
In February 1965, a group of university students travelled in a chartered bus around country
towns in New South Wales protesting about racial discrimination against indigenous people.
Altogether thirty­four students were involved, eleven of them women. Two of the male
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Freedom Rides
students were indigenous, including the students’ leader, Charles Perkins. Their protests
outside segregated swimming pools, clubs, and cinemas drew an angry response from some
of the white people in those towns, leading one to force the students’ bus off the road in a
dangerous manner outside one town and hundreds to verbally abuse, throw missiles at, and
in some cases physically assault the students outside a segregated swim­ming pool at another.
This angry response was taken up by the urban media who saw it as a sign that New South
Wales was little different from the American South, with its racist white segregationists.
In the ensuing public debate, urban public knowledge of racial discrimination in country
towns grew, some soul-searching went on in the country towns, racial segregation was
challenged and in some cases ended, and alternative ideas of inclusion, equality, and full
citizenship rights were much debated. Along with many other events and campaigns, the
Freedom Ride contributed to the holding and passing of the referendum of 1967, which
amended the Australian constitution and gave the federal government the power to legislate
specifically for Aboriginal people, and also symbolised a desire for a new deal for indigenous
people. While the situation of Aboriginal people remains very difficult in many ways, the
Freedom Ride is generally regarded as a symbol of hope.
The idea of the Freedom Ride arose in the context of a growing feeling that Aboriginal
people should be fully included in Australian society as equals. The earlier practices of
segregation and confinement on reserves and missions were coming under heavy critique,
and state government policies were tending towards inclusion and assimilation. Legislation
reducing Aboriginal people to the status of a child unless they were fully European in
their culture and repudiated their own families and people was repealed during the early
1960s. Under the Australian constitution, anyone who has a right to vote at state level
automatically has that right at federal level, so voting rights were granted state by state.
By the early 1960s, Aboriginal people had the right to vote in all states except Western
Australia and Queensland, and these two die-hard states finally gave way in 1962.
Yet the removal of legislatively sanctioned discrimination in the very early 1960s did
not mean social, economic, or political equality. Racist ideas and institutions persisted. The
segregationist practices of earlier decades continued, though very unevenly and more in
the countryside than the cities. In small towns across the country, Aboriginal people were
employed in a narrow range of jobs, usually seasonal, excluded from living in town and
from enjoying town facilities like clubs, swimming pools, cinemas, and certain cafes and
shops. They continued to live on the outskirts of towns, either in unsanitary shanty towns
and camping grounds, or on supervised mission stations and reserves with powerful white
managers who controlled their everyday lives in a way no white person had to endure.
Indigenous people’s health and education levels were extremely low. There was a growing
Aboriginal movement for what was often called ‘full citizenship’, meaning full rights to
equal pay, to live in town and share facilities, and to influence government policy. There
was a sense that it was time for change.
A politically diverse multi-racial movement for Aboriginal rights emerged and in 1958
the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines (later, Torres Strait Islanders were
added to the title) was established. Many felt there would be substantial change only
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when the federal government, more susceptible than state governments to international
opinion and pressure, took responsibility. Behind the scenes, senior government officials
were becoming concerned that Australia’s international reputation was endangered by the
continuing existence of racial discrimination.
Australians were influenced by the civil rights movement in the US, learning from news­
papers and television of such key events as the conflicts surrounding the integration of the
Central High School at Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957; the US Freedom Rides of 1961, which
had been designed to challenge segregation on interstate buses and in inter­state bus terminals;
and the police violence against thousands of African-Americans conducting peaceful demon­
strations in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Students at the Univer­sity of Sydney expressed
their support for the US movement by using their tradi­tional Commemoration day on
6 May 1964 to protest in support of the US Civil Rights Bill, which was struggling to
make its way through Congress. When people asked why they had not campaigned against
racism in Australia itself, some students turned their attention to Aboriginal rights, forming
Student Action for Aborigines (SAFA). For the first time there were Aboriginal students at
the University of Sydney, including Charles Perkins, already a seasoned political activist,
and Gary Williams, a school leaver from northern NSW. Another key member of the new
organisation was Jim Spigelman, now Chief Justice of New South Wales but then a 19-yearold student in Arts law, one of four students on the Freedom Ride whose Jewish background
had alerted them from an early age to questions of race. The other students in SAFA included
some on the Left, in the Labour club or the ALP club, some in Christian societies like the
Student Christian Movement, some with more conservative politics, and some with no
known political or religious affiliations. The only thing they really shared was a concern with
indigenous rights, and a commitment to non-violent direct action, which they learnt about
through reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’.
The students wanted to do something dramatic, to draw attention to the persistence
of racial discrimination, and agreed to put on their own Freedom Ride, borrowing the
idea from the US. Gradually their focus came to rest on places of leisure and sociability
in country towns—pools and picture theatres and RSL clubs—that remained segregated
as the result of either local council regulations or private commercial decisions. There was
no legislation to prevent racial discrimination. There was also to be attention drawn to the
appalling conditions under which indigenous people lived, in shanty-towns, on reserves
and missions.
In all, the Freedom Ride visited eight towns and held demonstrations at four of them—
Walgett, Moree, Bowraville, and Kempsey. Here I outline two of the best-remembered
events.
The third town visited was Walgett, and it was then that the Freedom Ride came to
national attention. The Walgett Returned Servicemen’s League club refused indigenous
veterans membership, allowing them in only on Anzac day, and sometimes not even then.
Though the exclusion of indigenous ex-servicemen from the Walgett RSL club was perhaps
a small matter compared with the massive problems in housing, health, and education
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Freedom Rides
con­front­ing indigenous people at the time, it had great symbolic importance. The students’
demonstration on 15 February 1965 outside the Walgett RSL led to huge interest, with
hundreds of people, black and white, standing around in the street arguing, but there was
no violence. One of the reasons the Freedom Ride was so shocking in Walgett and the other
country towns was the spectacle of a black leader with white followers, and the willingness of
the white students to side with Aboriginal people against the dominant whites in the towns.
When the students were made to leave the Anglican church hall in the middle of the night
by an angry Anglican minister, they were followed by a farmer’s son who used his pick-up
truck to ram the bus, forcing it off the road into a deep ditch in a very dangerous manner.
With a journalist on board, news of the bus being forced off the road suddenly became news
in the Sydney dailies and the Freedom Ride finally achieved its aim of making headlines.
The bus went on to Moree, where six more members of the press joined the bus. Moree,
sometimes dubbed ‘Australia’s Little Rock’, was larger, wealthier, and even more determined
to keep Aboriginal people in their place. The artesian baths were a huge tourist attraction,
and both the baths and the adjacent swimming pool were kept for whites only. Highlighting
the absurdity of the rules, the exclusion did not apply to children in school groups. In
response to a student demonstration, the council authorities allowed indigenous children
into the pool, and the students left for the next town thinking they had achieved their goal
of desegregation. When Aboriginal children were again excluded from the pool, the students
returned for a second confrontation. Hundreds of whites turned up, many drunk as it was
a Saturday and the pool was across the road from a hotel. The Freedom Riders insisted the
Aboriginal children be allowed into the pool, and the pool manager refused. Abuse, rotten
eggs, and tomatoes were thrown, and some students were knocked to the ground. In an
atmosphere of escalating tension, it was finally agreed that the Mayor would ask the council
to rescind its discriminatory resolution if the students left town immediately.
These events had been witnessed by large numbers of journalists, and the demonstration
received huge publicity, in Australia and overseas. As the student bus continued to visit
more towns, television teams joined and the Freedom Ride became the media event the
students had originally intended.
A huge public debate ensued, bringing to public attention in a new way the ongoing
struggles by Aboriginal rights organisations. SAFA and other student organisations con­
ducted many follow-up trips to country towns, investigating conditions, and sometimes
putting on protests. The desegregation of the picture theatre in Walgett in August 1965
was a particularly remarkable event, where Aboriginal local activists took over, but worked
with white students to hold their demonstrations too. Through these follow-up trips, many
closer associations were formed, and some of these students later became important in the
development of Aboriginal Legal Services and Medical Services in country towns. Charles
Perkins came to public attention, where he remained for the rest of his life until his passing
in 2000. The decade or so after the Freedom Ride was an era of change; there was a
growth in funding for Aboriginal communities and services, and an explosion in Aboriginal
creativity in the arts—in painting, dance, theatre, and later in writing.
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While so much has happened in indigenous politics and life since then, both good and
bad, the Freedom Rides remain a symbol of activism and hope, a small but very important
part of the making of Australian society today.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1 What is the significance of the fact that only two of the thirty-four students were
Aboriginal? Was this an advantage or a disadvantage for the students’ achieving
their aims?
2 To what extent, and why, did the Freedom Ride succeed in its aims?
3 Was the Freedom Ride assimilationist in intent and/or effect?
4 Why were the international media interested and the urban Australian media
largely supportive?
Further Reading
Curthoys, A. (2002) Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers, Sydney, Allen & Unwin.
Perkins, C. (1975) A Bastard Like Me, Sydney, Ure Smith.
Read, P. (2001) Charles Perkins: A Biography, Ringwood, Penguin.
Scalmer, S. (2002) Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia, Sydney,
UNSW Press.
72 The Incarcerated
JACQUELINE WILSON
You’d drive past the prison along Murray Road, you might go past it every day, and there’d be the lake and
the park on one side, and on the other this bloody great long wall. twenty feet high. It was weird, ’cos you
sort of knew that there were people in there, but you couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going on in
there. It was just a blank.
FoRMER NEIGHBouRHooD CoMMutER,
oN PENtRIDGE PRISoN, MElBouRNE.

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