Tag: citizenship

Remembering the Australian Freedom Ride

Historic and present-day campaigns for Indigenous Civil Rights

James Baker, ‘Falling Through the Net’ PhD Research Cluster

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

j.baker-2019@hull.ac.uk

In December 2020, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that the country’s national anthem will be amended in order to better represent the nation’s aboriginal past. The anthem will no longer refer to Australia as being ‘young and free’, a change that was well-received in the country’s parliament. It came as part of a broader campaign to better recognise indigenous Australians, including the induction of Johnny Mullagh to the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, the first aboriginal player to receive this accolade. When exploring the role of indigenous Australians in the country’s past, a defining event that is often overlooked is the Freedom Ride of 1965. This was inspired partly by the American Civil Rights movement and particularly the Freedom Rides that took place earlier in the decade. While many Australians continued to support the movement in the US, these events also encouraged people to address domestic civil rights abuses.

This is not to say that Australians at the time had previously been oblivious to indigenous issues. Just one month prior to the Freedom Ride, an article in the Canberra Times explored a recent survey conducted by the Sydney Morning Herald that found that tens of thousands of indigenous Australians were suffering from poverty, wage discrimination and limited access to education. Racism, both institutional and societal, was stated to be the cause, with the article citing substandard legislation as well as social indifference towards these problems. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were not yet recognised as Australian citizens and they had therefore been consistently ignored by governments at all levels.

Equally, aboriginal groups had been active in Australia for many decades prior to the Freedom Ride and had taken inspiration from campaigns in other parts of the world. For example, aboriginal dockworkers in Sydney campaigned throughout the early-twentieth century against racial discrimination, low wages and dangerous working conditions. Their occupation required them to travel across the Pacific Ocean which meant that many workers also witnessed first-hand several African anti-imperialist and social justice campaigns. As Alyssa L. Trometter has explained, indigenous labourers understood their struggle to be global and ideas pertaining to the attainment of racial equality were frequently exchanged between both continents. The Australian Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s built upon these earlier exchanges while utilising many of the same methods used in American campaigns for racial equality, including the Freedom Rides.

The Australian Freedom Ride commenced in 1965 in New South Wales. The student-led campaign was largely organised by Charles Perkins who would later become the first indigenous graduate of an Australian university. The event sought to highlight ongoing economic and social prejudices against indigenous Australians in addition to explaining how provincial governments continued to exclude aboriginal people from public facilities. The public baths at Moree became a symbol of the region’s ongoing racial segregation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had long been banned from these and other such venues, and white opponents of the Freedom Ride subjected the participants to racism and violence during attempts to desegregate the pool. Moreover, after their demonstration in Walgett, a driver of a large vehicle attempted to collide with the bus carrying the Freedom Riders, forcing the bus off the road and placing the lives of the demonstrators in danger. Despite this, local newspapers rarely reported the incident and the culprit was not brought to justice. The Freedom Ride continued undeterred. As the year progressed, the campaign gained increasing indigenous and non-indigenous support with pressure on the federal government to introduce civil rights for First Nation Australians intensifying.

The Freedom Ride succeeded in bringing about many positive changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Locally, the Freedom Ride led to the desegregation of Moree Baths as well as cinemas, hair salons and other amenities across New South Wales. As for Charles Perkins, after becoming the first indigenous graduate of tertiary education, he would later become the first indigenous Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and would have a substantial influence on Australian politics throughout this career. This event is also widely credited with helping to bring about the 1967 Australian Referendum, the result of which meant that indigenous people were given citizenship and stronger civil protections. The attainment of legal recognition for aboriginal Australians demonstrates that the Freedom Ride was not simply a local movement, but instead influenced public opinion and highlighted injustices nationwide.

Sadly, this did not lead to the outright cessation of discrimination against indigenous Australians. Aboriginal Australians are still disproportionally affected by unemployment, economic hardship and reduced access to state education. Furthermore, in 2008 the Australian Federal Government apologised to indigenous children who had been forcibly removed from their families to be raised in governmental and religious institutions. Official estimates suggest that as many as one in three indigenous children were separated from their families between 1910 and 1970. In some states including Victoria, this practice continued until 1976, over a decade after the Freedom Ride took place. Moreover, societal prejudice still persists. A 2020 study at Australia National University found that 3 in 4 people held a negative view of indigenous Australians and recent Black Lives Matter protests highlighted the ongoing issue of aboriginal deaths in police custody, with over 400 having occurred in the last thirty years alone.

It is however important to remember that First Nation Australians have played an active role in advocating for civil rights and legal equality. The Freedom Ride began as a local movement but gained national support and succeeded in creating meaningful legal change for the country’s minority groups. It must be remembered not only as a pivotal moment for the country’s treatment of its indigenous peoples but also for the global campaign for human rights. The influence of this event can still be felt today and underlines the significant contribution that indigenous Australians have made to the country’s history, a contribution that for far too long has been all but disregarded.

The Student Action for Aborigines bus outside the Hotel Bogabilla, February 1965 https://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/20135180866/ 

Review of recent publications

Dr Lorena Arocha

Lecturer in Contemporary Slavery

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

lorena.arocha@hull.ac.uk

Today Dr Lorena Arocha summarises the outcome of her collaborative research project with The Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Lorena Arocha, Meena Gopal, Bindhulakshmi Pattadath, and Roshni Chattopadhyay, ‘ “Ways of Seeing”—Policy paradigms and unfree labour in India’, Anti-Trafficking Review, 15 (2020)

In 2019, a collaborative project between the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Wilberforce Institute focused on exploring worker-driven initiatives to tackle exploitation in India. Many activists and organisations generously contributed to the project. In our recently published article, we trace the trajectory of different initiatives to address unfree labour and their impact on workers’ capacity to aspire to and exercise their rights in India. We attempt to understand the dimensions and effects of different ‘ways of seeing’ precarity and exploitation within the larger context of economic policies, social structures such as caste-based discrimination, gender-based violence, and state indifference.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit India, we tried to contact all contributing activists and organisations to find out how lockdown was affecting their work and impacting people already in precarious and exploitative work. Here we spotlight the work of two organisations that contributed to our project – Aajeevika Bureau and Sangram.

Aajeevika Bureau was set up in 2005 and works in the south Rajasthan-Gujarat migration corridor. It offers rural migrant workers not only direct services, support and protection, but also uses advocacy and research to push for legal reform and better policy implementation, building capacity among migrant workers, especially through its efforts to mobilise and organise workers into collectives. Since the beginning of lockdown, they have been recording and publicising cases of stranded migrants, providing and distributing food supplies and other essentials, raising funds through various crowdfunding initiatives, informing migrants and others what services are available, supporting existing structures among rural families to assist in containing the virus and warding against economic collapse, running a helpline, increasing solidarity and collaborating  with intellectuals and other commentators on social media campaigns, videos and webinars and joining forces with other workers’ platforms. Aajeevika Bureau launched a petition to the Prime Minister’s Office to help transport migrants back home in security and dignity, given the chaotic results during the Shramik Special Train scheme.

Thanks to their efforts, we know how employers used the lockdown to defraud workers of their wages, how workers are running into debt to buy food or medicines or travel back to their home states and the discrimination they face when trying to obtain food rations or medical assistance, with fatal results. Aajeevika Bureau also mounts pressure against state government decisions which favour businesses over workers, as with the cancellation of trains in the southern state of Karnataka at the behest of construction businesses, trapping migrants in, or the order by the northern state government of Uttar Pradesh, imposing a 12-hour shift for workers in industrial units. On International Labour Day, Aajeevika Bureau launched a research report, ‘Unlocking the Urban’. In the report, they painstakingly remind us that, though documenting the effects of the pandemic is important, we should avoid short-sightedness and see the crisis as an opportunity for making visible long structural exclusions. Using the twin framings of political economy and citizenship rights, they show how the ‘sedentary bias’ of most public provision policies in India allows central and state governments to make circular migrants invisible.

Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha or Sangram is an organisation which was established in 1992 in Sangli, in the southern state of Maharashtra. It works through a series of collective empowerment groups for socially and economically stigmatised communities, like sex workers and transgender groups. It is a women-led, rights-based network with a firm recognition of the structural inequalities at the heart of what these groups experience, including gender-based violence and discrimination. Sangram emerged at the time of another pandemic, that of HIV/AIDS, and are thus well versed in mobilising these collectives to address public health emergencies.
 
Sex workers and transgender groups have been gravely affected by the lockdown, not only because they have lost their source of income and might become homeless as a result, but their choices are often stark, when return to home states might mean facing violence and ostracism. And yet they were among the first to be aware about the risks posed by the virus and to implement measures to stall its spread as early as February 2020. Unable to access any social welfare scheme or any of the relief assistance provided by the government, they have been left to fend for themselves. Without non-governmental organisations and groups like Sangram, who have been raising funds and distributing food rations and medicines, this collective would have been completely isolated. Sangram is part of other sex workers’ collectives who are mobilising for advocacy purposes and organising webinars to voice in their own words the experiences of lockdown. Without this support, and in the face of campaigns that identify these groups as spreading the virus, isolation, anxiety over the future and hunger are leading to debt and suicide.

As indicated in our article, our pilot research suggests that ‘ways of seeing’ workers and their conditions matter. These ‘ways of seeing’ have distinct results for workers. Never have these been more stark than since the pandemic hit, as demonstrated by what happened to the millions of invisibilised migrant workers in India and reflected in the labour law changes the current government is staunchly pursuing. Paying attention to ‘ways of seeing’ is crucial, as these lead to different dispositions and strategies in challenging and re-imagining workers’ positions and futures.