Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the coming of the sixties to Australia

TLDR: Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the coming of the sixties to Australia as discussed by the authors, by Jennifer Clark 2008, UWA Press, Crawley, WA, vii+308pp, ISBN 978098029657070 (pbk)

Abstract: Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the coming of the sixties to Australia Jennifer Clark 2008, UWA Press, Crawley, WA, vii+308pp, ISBN 9780980296570 (pbk) The 1950s saw the growing strength of decolonisation so much so that by February 1960 the then Prime Minister of Britain, Harold Macmillan, commented on these changes in his now much quoted 'wind of change' speech. Decolonisation opened new sensibilities about race and political protest. Clark describes the fifties as a period that 'experienced the beginnings of change, the first tentative and resisted steps towards a subtly new intellectual perspective that was anti-materialistic, millennial, liberating, confronting and open, political and self-conscious' (p.8). These changes are difficult to describe because of the uncertainty over beginnings and endings. Clark refers to description by the American historian Todd Gitlin: 'Sweeping, unsettling and mysterious since they [the sixties] surged up with no advance warning, anticipated by virtually no one ... and melted away almost as rapidly as they had come, leaving perplexity and acrimony galore and ... continuing controversy' (p.9). The fifties and early sixties in America are characterised by the working out of racial matters in politics and in the culture, matters that Australian historians traditionally 'gave minimal attention to ... in general and Aborigines in particular', focusing instead on major events such as the Freedom Ride of 1965, the 1967 Referendum and the Tent Embassy of 1972. Jennifer Clark starts Aborigines and Activism by underlining the importance of African American forms of protest, arguing that American historians of the sixties, unlike their Australian counterparts, 'unfailingly recognise the important contribution African Americans made in formulating a method, an ideology and a language of protest' (p.2). Australia is placed firmly by Clark in international events of the period and their impact on Australian political and cultural life. She argues that her telling of the Australian race (hi)story of the sixties 'is contingent upon understanding its place within the coming 60s phenomenon to Australia' (p.8). Clark demonstrates the internationalisation of the struggle for Aboriginal rights and the way in which international activists were enlisted to support the Aboriginal struggle brought about in large measure, as she has argued, by a developing race consciousness on the part of Australian activists. The growing number of Aboriginal organisations such as the Federal Council 'were able to join in the international clamour for racial justice and equity that was so evident after Sharpeville'; she adds that 'those concerned with race in Australia emerged as a political force to capitalise upon international race consciousness' (p.92). …