Joyce Caroline Clague (nee Mercy), an incredible warrior for Aboriginal rights and justice for all oppressed peoples, died peacefully on 25 September, aged 86.
Joyce was instrumental in establishing many community organisations, winning rights and access to services that still improve lives every day.
Joyce was a Yaegl woman from the Clarence River in northern NSW, born on the Ulgundahi Island Aboriginal Reserve at Maclean in 1938.
She was born into world where Aboriginal lives were tightly controlled under the NSW Aborigines Protection Act.
When Joyce was just 10, her mother Hilda Mercy died of pneumonia on the verandah of the segregated hospital at Maclean.
Joyce’s family proudly asserted their Aboriginal identity in defiance of this regime and Joyce grew up fluently speaking her Yaegl language.
At just 16, in 1954, she travelled to Sydney to make representations on behalf of her uncles to a union conference, discussing the impact that mechanisation of the sugarcane industry was having on Aboriginal workers.
This helped to inspire recognition of the power of working-class solidarity and a life-long commitment to the labour movement.
From 1960, Joyce was active in the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), the lead organisation in the campaign for the 1967 referendum, where 90 per cent of Australians voted to remove discriminatory clauses from the constitution.
Major trade unions were affiliated to FCAATSI and Joyce helped to push the ACTU to back important initiatives like the referendum and fights for equal pay and land rights.
In her role as the first welfare officer at the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs in 1965, Joyce also drew on union resources and networks to provide practical support for the day-to-day needs of Aboriginal people.
Joyce kept an incredible archive that includes some of the only surviving copies of the Aboriginal Worker, a newsletter produced by Black trade unionists and their supporters in the mid-60s to deepen union connections with the struggle.
In the early 1990s, Joyce worked for the NSW Labour Council and played a key role in organising training programs for Aboriginal construction workers and advocating for Aboriginal housing projects.
Building unity in struggle
Joyce worked hard to build bridges between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous activists and believed strongly in the importance of joint action against racism.
During the 1960s in Sydney, she was a member of both the Australian Aboriginal Fellowship, a predominantly non-Indigenous campaign organisation, and the Aboriginal-controlled Aborigines Progressive Association.
The joint struggle led by these groups, with the strong support of trade unions, eventually abolished the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board in 1969.
In the early 1970s, Joyce was a leading member of both FCAATSI and a new all-Aboriginal group, the National Tribal Council.
In all her struggles, Joyce worked alongside her husband Colin Clague, who she met attending an Asian Christian Youth Assembly in the Philippines in 1964.
Joyce’s lengthy ASIO file shows that spies were worried about the relationship with Colin, said to be a “committed socialist” now influencing Joyce.
But Colin says it was Joyce doing most of the influencing. Meeting Joyce and connecting with Aboriginal people and culture profoundly reshaped his Christian socialist world view, deepening a commitment to egalitarianism and justice.
Both Joyce and Colin were members of the Labor Party and fought all their life for a left-wing, activist vision within the party.
The couple moved to the NT in the late 1960s. When the ALP would not preselect Joyce for the electorate of Stuart in Central Australia in the 1968 election, she stood as an independent candidate to promote the battles against racism raging across the Territory.
She fought hard in support of striking Gurindji stock workers at this time, who had walked off Wave Hill station and were demanding the return of their land.
Joyce helped Aboriginal people reclaim lands in Central Australia and then, when she returned to NSW, played a key role in the campaign that won the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act in 1983.
Joyce was instrumental in the successful Yaegl Native Title Claim No. 1, a ground-breaking case that won recognition of rights to both lands and waterways.
Solidarity extends our condolences to Joyce’s family and all those who loved her. We pay tribute to her extraordinary life and contribution to the struggle for justice.
Much of the information for this obituary comes from the website established by Joyce’s family to honour her life, joyceclague.com. We encourage people to visit the site and read more about her extraordinary life.
By Paddy Gibson
