Paddy Gibson, Wendy Bowles and John Nolan look at the life of legendary working class Aboriginal activist Ray Peckham, and the lessons from his battles for Aboriginal rights
Raymond Edward Peckham (Uncle Ray) died on 6 June in Dubbo, aged 95. Uncle Ray was one of the most important Aboriginal leaders of the 20th Century. He was a committed Marxist and trade unionist and a long-term member of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).
Ray travelled extensively during the 1950s and 1960s, visiting Aboriginal reserves and missions across NSW to organise against oppression.
Aboriginal people in this period lived under the draconian NSW Aborigines Protection Act, facing segregation, police violence and extreme poverty on the fringes of society.
Ray took the demands of his people into the trade union movement, winning support to abolish racist laws and recognise rights to land and self-determination.
His philosophy and rich life history hold vital lessons for the struggle today.
Ray believed that Aboriginal people and non-Indigenous workers shared a common struggle against a capitalist system based on exploitation, war and racism.
It was the common experiences of exploitation that created opportunities to use the collective power of trade union organisation to fight back.
“The unions were like our boondi or nulla nulla [fighting stick]”, Ray explained.
“That’s what we need back today, for the young people to understand that we are all working-class people, we have power in the union to fight the system.”
Segregation and solidarity
Ray grew up on the Talbragar Reserve outside of Dubbo in the 1930s, under the dictatorial power of the Aborigines Protection Board (later Welfare Board).
His early schooling was on the Reserve, after the nearby Brocklehurst Public School refused entry to Aboriginal children. But this segregation was challenged by a growing movement.
The Great Depression created hardship and repression across society. Black and white workers influenced by socialist politics, both living on the margins, started to stand together for change.
Ray’s father Tom Peckham was active in the Unemployed Workers’ Movement organised by CPA members and was well respected by socialists in the Dubbo Labor Party branch.
Tom’s comrades opposed school segregation and won the NSW Labor Party to a position in support of full citizenship rights at the 1935 state conference.
Ray eventually shifted to Dubbo Public School, where an attempt at segregation was defeated.
“We were all working class kids,” he explained, “they couldn’t break the unity of the workers.”
Tom was a member of the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) and travelled to Sydney for the famous Day of Mourning protest on 26 January 1938.
Ray was deeply inspired by Dubbo-based APA activists Pearl Gibbs and Bill Ferguson and worked all his life to realise their vision of freedom and justice.
Joining the movement
In 1950, Ray shifted to Sydney, where Pearl Gibbs was also living temporarily. He often recounted the way that Pearl threw him headfirst into the struggle:
“She said, ‘I’ve been waiting for one of you bastards to come down here and give me a hand!’ and the first thing she did was take me down to Sussex street and the Trades and Labour Council”.
“The strongest unions were communist led, they became our power-base for the Aboriginal movement”.
In 1951, these unions affiliated to a new organisation, the Aboriginal Rights Council (ARC).
Ray was selected to travel as an ARC delegate to the World Youth Festival in East Berlin, in the Soviet Bloc.
The Welfare Board wouldn’t approve his passport. “That’s when the trade unions came on the scene,” Ray explained:
“The Waterside Workers’ Union, the Seamans’ Union… They contacted the government and said ‘If Mr Peckham doesn’t leave this harbour, then not only is this ship not leaving the harbour, no ships will be leaving from anywhere in Australia until he gets his passport.’ Four hours it took. And we were on our way.”
On his return, Ray joined the CPA and began organising a Youth Carnival for Peace and Freedom in Sydney in 1952.
All levels of government tried to stop the Carnival going ahead, denying access to sporting fields, venues and transport. Foreign delegates were banned. Ray told a Miners’ Federation radio program:
“The Menzies Government is throwing an iron curtain around Australia. They are frightened that the people of Australia will find that the youth of foreign countries are not enemies”.
Despite this Cold War repression, the Carnival was a huge success. The ARC organised large-scale Aboriginal participation, with a sports and culture day at La Perouse providing a strong show of unity against racism.
The Tribune reported that 30,000 people filled the Domain for a closing demonstration, following “a march led by Ray Peckham and four other Aborigines”.
Ray worked on building sites and joined the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF), after Pearl introduced him to BLF organiser Jack Mundey.
Mundey was part of a new left-wing leadership growing in influence, encouraging a militant, anti-racist culture in the union.
Ray recounted a dispute on the State Office Block where BLF material was printed in more than 20 languages. “Black and white, New Australians, it didn’t matter who you were… unity gave us power”.
Back in Dubbo for a spell in 1959, Ray was arrested and charged under the Aborigines Protection Act for enjoying a beer at the pub.
Breaking the Protection Act
Ray was active in the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, formed in 1956, to challenge the tyranny of the Aborigines Welfare Board. The Fellowship helped initiate the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines (FCAA), later FCAATSI.
Ray attended his first federal conference in 1960. This is where he took on a role traveling out to missions and reserves across NSW to expose shocking conditions and organise communities.
Ray often made these trips with his partner Helen Hambly, a white supporter, and Dick Hunter, an Aboriginal man from Broome, both members of the Fellowship and the CPA.
In Coonamble in 1960, Ray, Dick and Helen made their first real breakthrough, defeating an attempt by racist Council members to deny Aboriginal people access to land in town to build housing.
This was just one of many struggles where Aboriginal people secured better housing, including at Coomaditchie near Port Kembla and Moree, where an organising drive forced construction of new houses on reserves and established Stanley Village.
At Purfleet Mission on the mid-North Coast, residents started a rent strike against the Welfare Board in 1960. Ray explained that “babies were dying from diphtheria and that sort of thing”, due to the flooding of pit toilets and shocking conditions.
In response to the strike, the AWB took court action to evict strike leader Horry Saunders and his family. Ray travelled to Purfleet and told Horry, “the best thing you can do is come to Sydney with me, we will get the weight of the Trade Unions behind us.”
Ray and Horry spoke to thousands of unionised workers across the building, maritime, mining and power industries in early 1961, collecting money and moving resolutions for the abolition of the Board.
Fred Patterson, a communist barrister, represented Horry in the NSW Supreme Court and won the case. “We showed they could be beaten and they were on their way to being abolished”, said Ray.
He wrote in the Tribune that widespread union support proved, “the strength of working people can help us Aborigines crack through the curse of the colour bar”.
All this pressure forced reforms to the NSW Protection Act in 1963. Aboriginal people could now legally drink alcohol. Powers to confine Aboriginal people to reserves and to control their wages were also repealed.
Despite this change in law, targeted campaigning was needed to force some pubs to lift the colour bar.
“We would get the Liquor Trades Union to put a ban on the pub,” said Ray, “force them to change that way, with a black ban.”
In 1965, Ray organised two trade union delegations to Walgett to help local leaders end continuing practices of segregation. They used sit-in tactics to force the issue, first at the Luxury Picture Theatre and then the Oasis hotel.
Ray won early support for Land Rights in the union movement. He carried a resolution at a meeting of 600 trade union delegates at the Labour Council in Sydney in July 1963 demanding the NSW government, “grant land ownership of Aboriginal reserves under their own control”.
Two months later, he was a part of a FCAATSI union committee that lobbied the ACTU Congress to adopt a position for Land Rights nationwide.
When NT Aboriginal stock-workers went on strike in 1966 to demand equal pay and return of land, Ray hosted strike leaders, toured unionised work-sites in Sydney to raise funds and led demonstrations in solidarity.
Ray was also a regular speaker at demonstrations against the Vietnam war in the mid-1960s and was arrested at an anti-war sit-in. He always argued that the struggle for Aboriginal rights was part of the worldwide movement against racism and imperialism.
Ray collected many thousands of signatures on worksites in support of the 1967 Referendum and was proud when 90 per cent of Australians voted, “Yes for Aborigines”.
But he always argued against the widespread misconception that the Referendum won equal rights:
“We still don’t have full citizens rights today”, he said. “The NT Intervention [introduced in 2007] is basically word for word the old Aborigines Welfare Board policy. We haven’t won yet”.
Ray left Sydney in 1969, following splits in FCAATSI and the CPA and the end of his relationship with Helen Hambly. But he had completed the task set down by his elders in the APA—the Welfare Board was abolished in the same year.
Ray travelled around Australia working, before settling in Dubbo in the 1990s.
He was on the front line again campaigning in his old age, joining the fight to save Australia Hall, site of the historic Day of Mourning, and resisting coal seam gas development in the Pilliga forest, amongst other battles.
Ray’s life of activism embodied the transformative power that working-class solidarity can bring to the struggle against racism and for Aboriginal rights. He left an amazing legacy we all must carry forward.
Paddy, Wendy and John have written a biography with Uncle Ray that they hope to publish soon.
