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from Part I - Historical Conceptions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2009
The 1938 Day of Mourning, held in Sydney on 26 January, was (to the knowledge of many white Australians) the first public demonstration on the issue of citizenship rights by Aboriginal people. It was a demand for full citizen status and equality. The following resolution was unanimously passed:
We, representing the Aborigines of Australia, assembled in conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January, 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the whiteman's seizure of our country, hereby make protest against the callous treatment of our people by the whiteman during the past 150 years, and we appeal to the Australian nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community.
Fourteen days earlier Jack Patten, president of the Aborigines' Progressive Association, and Bill Ferguson, organising secretary, had sent their manifesto, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights’, to the press, national libraries and selected people. Jack Horner rightly described it as ‘very brash’ and its plain style ‘somewhat offensive’. To have spoken politely to a white audience would have seemed to Patten and Ferguson to be doing what Europeans expected of them. Supplication was not their purpose. What they sought was ‘justice, decency and fair play’. ‘Is this too much to ask?’ they wrote.
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