The 1938 Day of Mourning was a turning point in the history of Australia and Aboriginal activism. It showed white Australians that Aboriginal people, far from being members of an uneducated, “uncivilized” and doomed race, were well aware of their rights and their history. It showed them that they had the means to campaign against the racist measures employed by white-led institutions, first and foremost the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board. Most importantly, The Day of Mourning became possible when men and women from various Aboriginal groups in New South Wales and Victoria united to voice their demands.
The Men and Women Behind the Day of Mourning
Jack Patten, Pearl Gibbs, William Ferguson, Herbert Stanley “Bert” Groves, and William Cooper are the names that will forever be associated with the 1938 Day of Mourning. Except for William Cooper, they were all born and bred in New South Wales.
Jack Patten (1905-1957) was a Yorta Yorta man born at Cummeragunja Mission, just across the Murray River. “Aunty” Pearl Gibbs (1901-1983) was born in La Perouse, New South Wales, to a mother with Ngemba ancestry and a white father. William “Bill” Ferguson (1882-1950) came from Waddai, Darlington Point, and he was the son of an Aboriginal woman and a Scottish shearer. Herbert Groves (1907-1970) was a Kamilaroi man from the Walhallow (Caroona) Aboriginal station near Quirindi. William Cooper (1861-1941), the eldest in the group, belonged to the Yorta Yorta people but was born in Victoria, at the intersection of the Goulburn and Murray rivers.
They all shared a common goal of dismantling the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board, which imposed racist and discriminatory measures to control the lives of Aboriginal people.
Groves was a young man working as a handyman on the Bulgandramine Aboriginal reserve for the Protection Board when he met Ferguson, who was actively campaigning against the Board at the time.
Patten began his activism in the boxing ring under the name “Ironbark.” While on tour, he witnessed the poor living conditions endured by Aboriginal people at the Clarence River Aboriginal Settlement, where he also met his wife, Selina Avery. The local school denied admission to the community’s children based on their ancestry, just like Patten had been excluded from the Navy on purely racial grounds.
When and Where
In 1937, Patten, Ferguson, and Cooper established the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), with Patten as president. Less than a year later, on January 26, 1938, they organized the first Day of Mourning. As 120 motorized floats paraded through the streets of Sydney to celebrate the sesquicentenary of European settlement, a group of around 100 Aboriginal men, women, and children gathered at the Australian Hall, a popular venue for concerts at 150-152 Elizabeth Street, now owned by the Metropolitical Local Aboriginal Land Council. Around 1,000 supporters marched through the streets of Sydney wearing black.
It was the first time that Aboriginal people had organized themselves on a national level, with activists coming from different states, to protest the dispossession and discrimination they had experienced since 1788. They renamed January 26 a “Day of Mourning.”
In 1938, the Day of Mourning represented the culmination of years of meetings and petitions organized by the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) and the Australian Aborigines League (AAL), which had been established by William Cooper in 1932. The Day of Mourning was, first and foremost, a chance to call attention to Aboriginal rights and the need for practical political changes.
It was also the moment when Aboriginal people could come together and mourn the loss of their lands, the attempt to erase their culture, and the colonial attack on their languages and their children, who, in 1938, were systematically being removed from their families and placed in missions, reserves, and stations (also called “managed reserves”), often far away from their country. Here managers and church officials could “save” them and turn them into “white” children with a British education.
From 1940, the Day of Mourning became known as “Aborigines Day.” Every year, on the Sunday before Australia Day, Aboriginal organizations gathered to remind white Australians of their role and the role of their ancestors in the building of the nation. In 1955, the Day of Mourning was moved to the first Sunday in July and from a day of protests, it turned into a day of celebration of Aboriginal culture.
In 1974, from a day of celebration of Aboriginal culture, Aborigines Day became a week of celebration, after the formation of the National Aborigines Day Observance Committee (NADOC). It usually takes place from the first to the second Sunday in July. In 1991, NADOC became known as NAIDOC, National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, in an effort to include and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
The Importance of January 26
On January 26, 1938, non-Indigenous Australians gathered in Sydney to celebrate the birth of Australia, that is, the 150 years since Captain Arthur Philip (1738-1814) landed at Sydney Cove in present-day New South Wales on January 26, 1788.
Organizers had pressured Aboriginal people living in Sydney to participate in the celebration. When they staunchly refused, the organizers turned to a group of Aboriginal men from western New South Wales and made them travel to Sydney. Here, as part of the celebrations, they had them wear what they considered “traditional” Aboriginal clothes and run up the beach away from the British in a grotesque re-enactment of Philip’s landing at Farm Cove. It didn’t matter that this is not how the Eora, the Traditional Custodians of the south-east foreshore of Australia, had reacted to the British invasion. This was how white Australia in the late 1930s was determined to see Aboriginal people.
The first European settlement dates back to 1788. Aboriginal people didn’t simply run away, nor did they give up their lands, as colonial propaganda has conveniently portrayed them for centuries. It took colonists 50 years to fully penetrate and settle the Australian continent — 50 years of clashes and escalating violence between the settlers, who soon started to build huts, grow crops, and import livestock. Aboriginal groups witnessed imported weeds and cattle scour their native grasses and bush food.
On January 26, 1938, the Aboriginal men and women gathering at the Australian Hall and on the streets of Sydney protested not only the discrimination and dispossession they had been experiencing since 1788 but also the Western, non-Indigenous take on history that white Australia was imposing on them and their descendants. The 1938 Day of Mourning was about the present as much as it was about the past.
Just the Beginning
The Day of Mourning was also the beginning of Aboriginal activism. In 1939, Jack Patten led what is now known as the Cummeragunja Walk-Off to protest the poor management of the mission where he was born. 27 years later, Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari led 200 other domestic workers and stockmen with their families to walk off the Vesteys’s cattle station at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory. The strike lasted seven years and is now known as the Wave Hill Walk-Off.
The 1960s saw the emergence of the Aboriginal Lands Rights Movement. In March 1963 the government announced the granting of mining leases for bauxite mining in an area of over 300 square kilometers (115 square miles) of land excised from the Aboriginal reserve of the Yolngu people, who had been living in Yirrkala, in the Gove peninsula in north-east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, from time immemorial. The community elders were not consulted.
The Yolngu people requested an inquiry and presented the Australian Parliament with the so-called Yirrkala Petition. Yolngu artists typed it up and placed it on bark sheets before painting the sheets’ borders with stories of their moieties Dhuwa and Yirritja.
The fact that the petition was first written in Yolngu Matha, and then later translated into English, makes it unique. It was also the first Aboriginal petition and the first document written in an Aboriginal language to be officially recognized by the Commonwealth government. Eventually, the Select Committee on Grievances of Yirrkala Aborigines, Arnhem Land Reserve issued a report recommending that Yolngu sacred sites be protected, and compensation paid to them. 25 years later, the 1988 Barunga Statement, presented to then-President Bob Hawke, was placed on a sheet of composite wood too, and its sides were painted by Yolngu, Arrernte, and Warlpiri artists from central Australia.
The Yirrkala and Barunga bark petitions, the success of the 1967 Referendum, the massive protests that accompanied the 1988 Australian Bicentenary, the groundbreaking Mabo Case in 1992, the Wik Peoples v Queensland in 1996, as well as the Griffiths v Northern Territory case (hailed as one of the most significant cases since the Wik and Mabo cases) all have their roots in the determination of the men, women, and children behind the 1938 Day of Mourning, those who organized it, those who took part in it, and those who ensured its success.
