The life and death of Arthur Murray

The story of an Australian hero whose skin was the wrong colour encapsulates the tragedy of centuries of abuse of Aboriginal people’s rights.

By John Pilger Published 04 October 2012

Derelict terraces used to accommodate impoverished Aborigines in Sydney. Photograph: Getty Images

Arthur Murray died the other day. I turned to Google Australia for tributes, and there was a 1991 obituary of an American ballroom instructor of the same name. There was nothing in the Australian media. The Australian newspaper published a large, rictal image of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, handing out awards to his employees. Arthur would have understood the silence.

I first met Arthur a generation ago and knew he was the best kind of trouble. He objected to the cruelty and hypocrisy of white society in a country where his people had lived longer than human beings had lived anywhere else. In 1969, he and Leila had brought their family to the town of Wee Waa in outback New South Wales and camped beside the Namoi River. Arthur worked in the cotton fields for a flat rate of A$1.12 an hour. Only “itinerant blackfellas” were recruited for such a pittance; only white people had unions in the land of “fair go”. Having not long been granted the vote, the First Australians were still not counted in the national census – unlike the sheep.

Persons unknown

Working conditions in the cotton fields were primitive and dangerous. “The crop-sprayers used to fly so low,” Arthur told me, “we had to lie face down in the mud or our heads would’ve been chopped off. The insecticide was dumped on us, and for days we’d be coughing and chucking it up.” In 1973, a Sydney University study reported its “astounded” finding of fish floating dead on the surface of the Namoi, poisoned by the “utterly mad, uncontrolled” level of spraying, which continued.

Arthur and the cotton-chippers made history. In 1973 they went on strike, and more than 500 of them marched through Wee Waa. The Wee Waa Echo called them “radicals and professional troublemakers”, adding that “it is not fanciful to see the Aboriginal problem as the powder keg for Communist aggression in Australia”. They were abused as “boongs” and “niggers”; the Murrays’ riverside camp was attacked and the workers’ tents smashed or burned down.

Although food was collected for the strikers, hunger united their families. Leila would wake before sunrise to light a wood fire that cooked the little food they had and to heat a 44-gallon drum, cut in half lengthways and filled with water that the children brought in buckets from the river for their morning bath. With her ancient flat iron she pressed their clothes, so that they went to school “spotless”, as she would say.

The enemies Arthur and his comrades made were the Australian equivalent of those who had stood in the way of Martin Luther King’s civil rights campaigners in the United States. They were the police, local politicians, the media. “Who in the town was with you?” I asked Arthur. He thought for a while. “There was a chemist,” he said, “who was kind to Aboriginal people. Mostly we were on our own.” Soon after the cotton workers won an hourly rate of A$1.45, Arthur was arrested for trespassing in the grounds of the Returned Servicemen’s Club. His defence shocked the town; it was land rights. All of Australia was Aboriginal land, he said.

On 12 June 1981 Arthur and Leila’s son, Eddie, aged 21, was drinking with some friends in a park in Wee Waa. He was soon to leave for Sydney, where he was confident he would be selected to play for the Redfern All Blacks Rugby League team to tour New Zealand. At 1.45pm he was picked up by the police for nothing but drunkenness. Within an hour he was dead in a cell, with a blanket tied round his neck. At the inquest, the coroner described police evidence as “highly suspicious” and records were found to have been falsified. Eddie, he said, had died “by his own hand or by the hand of a person or persons unknown”. It was a craven finding familiar to Aboriginal Australians. Everyone knew Eddie had too much to live for.

Arthur and Leila set out on an extraordinary journey for justice for their son and their people. They endured the ignorance and indifference of white society and its multilayered political and judicial bureaucracies. They finally won a royal commission, only to see the royal commissioner, a judge, suddenly appointed to a top government job in the critical final stages of the hearing. They eventually secured the right to exhume Eddie’s body, and suffered terribly in the process, in order to prove the true cause of death. And they proved it: his sternum had been crushed by a blow while he was alive. And they reaffirmed how common their story was. “They’re killing Aboriginal people,” Leila told me, “. . . just killing us.” Today, Aborigines are incarcerated at five times the rate of black people in apartheid South Africa and their suffering in custody is widespread.

End of a road

In 2000, the then New South Wales Police minister, Paul Whelan, met Arthur and Leila at his office in Sydney and ordered a special investigation. He promised them that this “would not be the end of the road”. There was no serious inquiry and the minister retired to his stud farm. He has returned none of my calls.

Leila could not read, yet this remarkable woman memorised almost every document and judgment. She died in 2004, broken-hearted. Incredibly, Arthur reached the age of 70 when most Aboriginal men are dead by the age of 45. In a typical case this year, CCTV footage of Alice Springs Police Station showed a policewoman cleaning blood off the floor while a stricken Aboriginal man was left to die. Austra - lia, said Prime Minister Julia Gillard on 26 September, deserves a seat at the top table of the United Nations because it “embraces the high ideals” of the UN. No country since apartheid South Africa has been more condemned by the UN for its racism than Australia.

When I last saw Arthur, we walked down to the Namoi riverbank and he told me how the police in Wee Waa were still frightened to go into the cell where Eddie had died and had pleaded with him to “smoke out” Eddie’s spirit. “No bloody way!” Arthur told them. Peace to all their spirits; justice to all their people.

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View the discussion thread.

11 comments

Sun, 2012-10-07 11:36 — Mrs.Josephine Hyde-Hartley (not verified)

I suppose it's hard for modern organisations and ways of governance that have traditionally worked with some chosen few, to get their heads round absolutely everyone and no-one ( no-one of course being those who end up " out of it" for some reason). It seems the way modern organisations (can't help but) work is by a process of perpetually shoring up home made, ever hardening barriers to entry.. Eventually whole cultures come to understand and believe only that all members of the public must enter and be part of their world. ( Eg Compulosory voting in Australia - so bad i can't even spell it. )

People who are " out of it" ( even though they were there first) end up being treated as if temporarily wilful, stupid and/or vulnerable. To me it's amazing so many still think we must be happy to go cap in hand, so to speak, through whatever arrangement of unnecessary and inappropriate complaints and appeals systems are being sold as available to help achieve at best, only modern game playing goals..set ups that have no chance of helping everyone to access what Laws may state is rightfully ours.

Then things get even more twisted; it's common knowledge those who refuse to complain about some awful set up that's spoiling lives, who try to carry on doing what we normally do, eventually get blamed even for this and vilified even for struggling along regardless of what to others may seem an alarmingly ignominious position.

Ill- informed policy games by workers who don't really know the meaning of the word " no", or even " yes" sometimes - should not be used to test the mettle of real people struggling to get along. I really think Australia should scrap the compulsory voting law.Surely the new nation of Australia is rich enough now to review the past, present and future development of all kinds of people living there, as equals.

Sun, 2012-10-07 01:00 — blindboy (not verified)

What a shallow, grossly offensive series of postings! Let's have some context here. The reports of aboriginal culture are all, for obvious reasons, post-European contact. Wherever Europeans went, smallpox followed, usually with devastating consequences. In many areas the first explorers found only deserted camps as most of the population had either died or fled from the epidemic. There is evidence to suggest that these epidemics were not accidental. Live Smallpox was brought out on the First Fleet to provide material for variolation, a primitive type of vaccination. This material went missing before the first major outbreak in the Sydney region. The consequences of these epidemics was social disruption as death rates, from available evidence, seem to have exceeded 50 %.
As for the complete nonsense of them being nomadic, tribal areas had clear boundaries. Camp sites were often seasonal but returned to year after year to coincide with the availability of particular foods. As for the suggestion that they were in some way under nourished numerous reports describe the exact opposite and Phillip himself was so struck by the health and bearing of those in the northern area of Sydney he named the area Manly.
Even today in what were the most populous areas it is easy to live off the land. All along the coast and rivers there were extensive stone fish traps. They didn't store food because it was so abundant!
As for the present issues no-one pretends that there are not serious problems. There are also serious problems in the Catholic Church and numerous private schools and with far less excuse. Consider the generational disadvantage, the denial of the right to reasonable wages and social support, the denial of educational opportunity and the exploitation by the grog merchants. These are not excuses, they are reasons.
In general the postings just confirm the observations I made in my first post. You don't have to try very hard in Australian society to find a bunch of shallow racist bastards.

Mon, 2012-10-08 15:25 — CaptainRhodes (not verified)

Thank you for your reasoned response. It's good to see someone who speaks sense. Some of the comments in this article have made me seriously depressed and ashamed of the country I called home for so long.

On what is essentially an obituary too.

Sat, 2012-10-06 09:20 — Gideon Polya

Excellent article by John Pilger.

Australia has been involved since 1788 in an Aboriginal Genocide in which about 2 million Indigenous Australians have perished from violence, deprivation or introduced disease. Australia also furthered the Aboriginal Genocide by the forcible removal of about 100,000 children from their mothers (the so-called Stolen Generations). About 9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably from deprivation each year out of an Indigenous population of 0.5 million. The avoidable death rate is 1.8 per hundred of population per year for Indigenous people in Australia, one of the world’s richest countries, as compared to 1.0 per hundred of population per year for non-Arab Africa. Australia initially refused to support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Google "Aboriginal Genocide').

On top of this is a continuing ethnocide - of 250 Indigenous languages spoken in 1788 before the European invasion only about 50 remain, this racist ethnocide being now promoted by racist educational policies akin to those applied by the English in Wales and Ireland in the 19th century and which also mean that Indigenous children in the Northern Territory are mal-educated to the point that 80% fail to meet basic literacy (Google "Educational Apartheid").

Australia’s PM Julia Gillard and its Foreign Minister Bob Carr have recently been in New York lobbying African and other countries to support an Australian seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Anti-racist Australians who deplore Australia’s involvement in a continuing Aboriginal Genocide; its blind support for the racist Zionist-backed US War on Muslims (12 million Muslim deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation since 1990; Google "Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide"); and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide by race-based, genocidal Apartheid Israel (2 million Palestinian deaths from violence or violently imposed deprivation since 1936; Google "Palestinian Genocide" and "Australia's secret genocide history") must urge African and indeed ALL nations nations to vote AGAINST an Australian seat on the UN Security Council and to apply Sanctions , Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Australia as well as against Apartheid Australia-backed genocidal Apartheid Israel (Google "Open Letter: Africa must oppose Australia’s bid for a UN Security Council seat").

Sat, 2012-10-06 07:03 — blindboy (not verified)

The racist denialism of many of these comments would be surprising if it were not so common. Anyone who has travelled outside the Australian capital cities and taken the opportunity to talk to the local indigenous people knows about Australia's vicious racist past and smug, indifferent present.
Consider the massacres, not just one or two isolated events but the constant systematic effort in every state through out the 19th Century, to murder the indigenous people to open up land for farming. I was tempted to say there was indiscriminate slaughter but the murders were anything but indiscriminate they targeted precisely those clans and tribes who attempted to retain their lands and traditional way of life.
Consider then the present statistics on imprisonment, life expectancy, infant mortality and educational attainment. It is true that over two hundred years of determined racist discrimination cannot be undone in a single generation but Australia's efforts fall far short of what might decently be expected and the problem is not only a lack of political will. You don't have to dig too deep in most Australian society to find the same racist attitudes that have always been there. They are often hidden by what the holders regard as "political correctness" and the rest of us consider common decency, but have a couple of beers in any pub or RSL in the country, throw in a hint that you are open to their real opinions and out comes the same old bullshit, the same tired clichés, the same smug, shallow indifference and grotesque sense of entitlement.
If Pilger is some sort of champagne socialist, living a comfortable middle class life, so what? It doesn't change the truth and at least he has the courage to put it in print.

Fri, 2012-10-05 16:09 — Fred Garvin (not verified)

You need to celebrate your diversity! As, I'm sure, Mr. Pilger does by sending his children to the schools where Aboriginal children go, as a sign of solidarity. Doubtless Mr. Pilger also lives here, just to make sure he doesn't become a champagne socialist who simply talks about the poor while living a comfortable, upper-middle class lifestyle and pretending to know about the poor: the worst form of parasitism.

Fri, 2012-10-05 09:03 — Michael Rolfe (not verified)

Sorry, John Pilger, you are being a bit disingenuous. Obituraries don't always get published immediately after some death in the Australian press: it isn't like the times. But there is a respect in the Australian media for the fact that Aboriginal custom treats death differently from European custom (images of deceased people are not welcomed in Aboriginal terms)

By the way, the houses illustrated were far fron derelict when they were purchased by the Whitlam government. Sadly, the upkeep has not been a sucess story regarding the aboriginal owners.And the impoverishment of Aboriginies has at least something to do with work skills and the changing face of the economy. Once upon a time, in the great heastory of NSW rail, these might have been used to house workers at the nearby Everleigh Street railway works. Like railway works all over the world, that employment has now ceased

Fri, 2012-10-05 04:58 — Raul Duke (not verified)

Fnuny how Plain John Smith doesn't provide any verifiable references for those quotes in support of his muddle-headed racist "history".

Fri, 2012-10-05 00:18 — NRussell Reidew statesman (not verified)

Well I'll be buttered on both sides !! plain john snith (not verified) , you really do have a problem with the oldest civilisation on this planet, don't you??

Thu, 2012-10-04 22:11 — plain john snith (not verified)

"The story of an Australian hero whose skin was the wrong colour encapsulates the tragedy of three centuries of abuse of Aboriginal people’s rights."

Since the place was only colonised in the 1780s, the reference to three centuries is rather puzzling.

"Arthur worked in the cotton fields for a flat rate of A$1.12 an hour. "

Wasn;t that bad a rate forty years ago: I worked as a labourer myself for a while, and didn't earn much more.

"Leila would wake before sunrise to light a wood fire that cooked the little food they had and to heat a 44-gallon drum, cut in half lengthways and filled with water that the children brought in buckets from the river for their morning bath. With her ancient flat iron she pressed their clothes, so that they went to school “spotless”, as she would say."

Well, if it wasn't for the white man coming to Oz, they wouldn't have drums, buckets, flat irons clothes or schools.

"When I last saw Arthur, we walked down to the Namoi riverbank and he told me how the police in Wee Waa were still frightened to go into the cell where Eddie had died and had pleaded with him to “smoke out” Eddie’s spirit.

Yeah, sure: I really believe this story. Pilgering meets Hariing.