Changing_Rights_and_Freedoms_of_Australian_Aborigines

Since the European invasion aborigines have been subjected to unequal treatment and racial discrimination as the white settlers believed they were a superior race and saw the Aborigines as being inferior and ‘primitive’. Due to this belief, the Aborigines have been deprived of rights and freedoms any white person is entitled to hold. Although Aborigines have been fighting for their rights and freedom from the beginning, significant action was undertaken during the period of the 1960s which succeeded in gaining the aborigines rights and citizenship. Charles Perkins was born in Alice Springs in 1936, a skilled soccer player and an Australian Aboriginal activist. He moved to Adelaide to coach a local soccer team, there he became the vice president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals. In 1963 he moved to Sydney where he was one of the founding members of ‘Student Action for Aborigines’ (SAFA), later becoming president. On 12th February 1965, he and fellow student Jim Spigelman led about 28 others on a two week bus tour of rural Australia, there aim to publicise and ‘reveal’ to the people the discrimination being carried out towards aboriginal people in hope to try and redress it. This bus tour came to be known as the ‘Freedom Rides’. The civil rights movement occurring at the time and the work of Martin Luther King, who worked to gain the freedom of the African-American people in America greatly influenced Perkins and the freedom rides and believed in the use of ‘non-violent action’ and establishing ‘creative tension’ by dramatically highlighting acts of discrimination until people could ignore them no longer. Desegregation; the separation of hospitals, schools and other facilities and leisure activities for black and white people was a main focus for the freedom rides. Their intention was to target towns which had the reputation of being racist towards their aboriginal inhabitants, “What we were trying to do was to go into those racist towns and establish a shadow of a doubt that discrimination and prejudice did exist...” One of their first stops was the town of Walgett, where aborigines were being denied entry to the local RSL. The freedom riders formed a protest line outside the club and help out posters proclaiming “Good enough for Tobruk, why not Walgett RSL' And ‘Bullets did not discriminate’. After this incident, the Anglican minister evicted the students from their lodgings in the church hall due people’s hostility towards their actions. As the bus headed out of Walgett, a truck forced the bus of the road but luckily, other local aborigines came to the bus’ aid with their cars and warded off the attackers. A journalist witnessed the incident and the freedom rides gained much publicity in their works which was their primary intention in the first place. They encountered more acts of discrimination in the town of Moree where children were denied entry to the local swimming pools. SAFA protested by taking eight children from the reserve and tries to gain access to the pools but the manager refused them, saying ‘darkies not allowed in’. A crowd gathered and after some time 4 police officers and the mayor of Moree decided to allow the aboriginal children into the pools as long as they were ‘clean’. Having thought the ban was overturned, the freedom riders left Moree only to find out three days later the ban had been reimposed. They tried once again to break the ban but after 3 hours remained unsuccessful and attracted some 500 angry locals who shouted abuse, through tomatoes and rotten eggs and spat at them. The confrontation received huge press coverage and once again the efforts of the freedom riders were widely publicised once again. The bus went on to Lismore, Bowraville and Kempsey before returning to Sydney in August 1965 where it revisited the towns they had previously encountered, finding, to their disappointment some of the discriminatory bans they helped eradicate were re-imposed. Charles Perkins and his fellow students, with the freedom rides, managed to stir up debate and sparked discussion around Australia on the state of Aboriginal affairs. The media coverage the trip gained led to pressure for reform at national and international levels which would eventually lead to influence the decision of the 1967 referendum. Aboriginal people, although the original custodians of the land, were not seen as being Australian citizens and were excluded from the census. In 1951, the policy of assimilation encouraged them to forget their Aboriginal heritage and traditional beliefs and to ‘assimilate’ into an average Australian way of life, ‘In the course of time, it is expected that all persons of Aboriginal blood or mixed blood in Australia will live like white Australians do.’ This policy did little to help the Aboriginal people and later generations saw it as another attempt to destroy Aboriginal culture. Prior to 1962, Aborigines did not have the right to vote and it was not until the Civil Rights Movement in America induced many changes in Aboriginal rights, the right to vote being one of them. In 1965, the policy of assimilation was changed to one of integration which allowed the Aborigines to continue their cultural and traditional customs to co-exist with non-Aboriginal culture. Aboriginal activism, the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Rides all lead and influenced the 1967 referendum. The constitutional referendum was held for people to vote on whether discriminatory references to Aboriginal people should be removed in Sections 51 and 127 of the Constitution and whether Aborigines would be allowed to gain full citizenship. The question was ‘Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled 'An Act to alter the Constitution' so as to omit certain words relating to the people of the Aboriginal race in any state so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the population'’ The yes vote was overwhelming in the amendment with 90.77 percent of the nation voting in favour of it. Both in the 1960s and today, the referendum has frequently been seen as having provided full citizenship to Aboriginal Australians although the constitutional changes didn’t actually provide any new rights to the aboriginal people, it was however, seen as a great symbolic victory. The post-war period allowed many changes in the rights and freedoms of Australian Aboriginals, influenced by Aboriginal activism such as the ‘Freedom Rides’ which lead to gain the aborigines the right to vote, full citizenship and the right to live following their traditional customs and Aboriginal heritage and beliefs.