Black, White … and Red? The Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club in the Early 1960s.

Jackie Hartley*

Can sport and sporting organisations be a tool of resistance for Indigenous people and communities? This article investigates the interplay between sport and politics through a case study of an all-Aboriginal Sydney football club, the Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club. In the early 1960s, the Redfern All Blacks represented a highly political response by inner-city Indigenous people to life in Redfern, to the dominant racial discourse and to discriminatory acts, attitudes and legislation. For young Indigenous men, the re-formation of the Club in 1960 presented them with a means to challenge the depressed socio-economic conditions of Redfern through sport. On a community level, the All Blacks forged community links and articulated a distinctive Indigenous identity that defied the dominant discourse of assimilation. Finally, members of the All Blacks became involved in more direct forms of action, developing relationships with the Aboriginal-Australia Fellowship and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines that proved to be mutually beneficial in the fight against discrimination. Such relationships brought the All Blacks to the attention of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), who suspected communist infiltration. More than ‘just’ a sporting club, the All Blacks was a strong example of sport becoming a means of resistance.

Introduction
In 1970, Ken Brindle (Honorary Secretary of the Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club) expressed his belief that ‘all the placard-waving, demonstrating and demands will not open one tenth of the doors that can be opened through sport’.1 Yet, for the Indigenous community of Redfern in the early 1960s, the divide between ‘sport’ and ‘politics’ was not this simple. The Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club (the ‘All Blacks’ or the ‘Club’) provides a fascinating example of how the two pursuits can, in fact, be intimately entwined.	1
This article examines the history of the Redfern All Blacks in the early 1960s. It is argued that the Club provided the Indigenous community of Redfern with a vehicle of resistance to depressed socio-economic conditions, to racial discourses and to discrimination. The focus moves from individuals, to the Indigenous Redfern community, to broader political movements. The history of the All Blacks is located within the history of Indigenous presence in Redfern and the socio-economic conditions of the suburb. It is argued that the Club provided an outlet for young Indigenous men to individually challenge these conditions. The focus then shifts to issues of community and identity. The article analyses the role of the All Blacks in forging community links and articulating a distinctive Indigenous identity that defied assimilation. Finally, the All Blacks are located within the wider political circle of Aboriginal advancement groups, and ASIO’s fear of communist infiltration of these groups is examined.	2
Bernard Whimpress has argued that the majority of works in the historiographical field of Indigenous people and sport have been written from an ‘oppositional’ perspective, stressing the racial discrimination that imposes barriers to success and overshadows achievement.2 From a survey of the field, Whimpress’ classification is merited. Certainly, early works by Colin Tatz and Bret Harris sought to pay tribute to Indigenous sporting achievements that had hitherto been ignored. Additionally, Tatz and Richard Broome have demonstrated the benefits that sport may confer, including confidence, the provision of role models and brief, yet enduring moments of sporting achievement that challenge white racial dominance. Yet, on balance the Indigenous experience of sport is most commonly argued to be that of racism, exploitation and a lack of opportunity. In contrast, Whimpress defines the ‘revisionist’ perspective as that which views sport as ‘a symbol of resistance and a way of accommodating to white ways’. There has recently been a movement, led by Whimpress and the later work by Broome, towards a ‘revisionist’ approach that returns a sense of agency to Indigenous people in their experiences of sport.3	3
The ‘revisionist’ approach remains in its infancy, with the ‘oppositional’ perspective dominating the field. These histories from an ‘oppositional’ perspective have offered valuable contributions to the historical knowledge of the pervasiveness of racism in the Australian culture. In doing so, ‘oppositionist’ sports historians have largely ignored a concept which historians of ethnic participation in sport have embraced – the importance of sport at a community level, and of the role of sport in the articulation of distinctive identities. The two Australian historians who have attempted to address these issues, Colin Tatz and Charles Little, have provided the groundbreaking work on which this article seeks to build.4	4
Historians concerned with Indigenous people and sport have also avoided assessments of the extent to which sport can be ‘a symbol of resistance’ for Indigenous communities. It is argued that, far from being ‘just’ a football team, the Redfern All Blacks Rugby League Club was embroiled in often deeply political connections in the early 1960s. While racism certainly pervaded the history of the All Blacks at this time, the Club offered a way for the Indigenous people of Redfern to assert their Aboriginality, to raise their self-esteem, to build an urban community and to offer a highly political challenge to discriminatory discourses and conditions. This challenge was suspected by ASIO as being part of a communist plot.	5
As part of the emergent ‘revisionist’ field, this article aims to make a contribution not only to the history of sport, but also to the wider history of urban Indigenous people and the political movements with which they were engaged in the early 1960s. The All Blacks were an ostensibly non-political organisation which in fact became intricately connected to politics in a climate of socio-economic depression and discrimination. In doing so, the All Blacks represented a form of resistance to these conditions. The history of the All Blacks in the early 1960s thus refutes the belief that Cashman and Tatz perceive to be all-pervading in Australian society – that sport and politics do not mix.5	6
Redfern and the All Blacks
The early history of the Redfern All Blacks is reflective of the history of Indigenous people in Redfern in the first half of the twentieth century. While the modern suburb of Redfern is situated on the land of the Gadigal people, a clan of the Dharug, Volke and Smith are astute in their observation that ‘it is an irony of history that they [Indigenous people] were regarded as alien when they began to return in the ‘60s and ‘70s to an area that was already regarded as outcast by middle-class European society’.6 Yet, they had begun to return much earlier than this. Anecdotal evidence from Roger Syron and Shirley Smith (Mum Shirl) suggests that there was an Indigenous presence in Redfern in the 1930s, although estimates of its strength vary.7 Merv 'Boomunulla' Williams, 1940s, Redfern, Sydney   (Mumbler Collection, AV Collection, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra).	7
Tatz’ assertion that the All Blacks were formed at this time is supported by stories which have survived in the Redfern community. One such story, told to former All Black Charles Madden explains that the moniker ‘All Black’ was not originally racially significant, with the team formed by both black and white players. Rather, in the context of the Great Depression, the name is believed to have had a more practical origin – the only uniforms available were ‘all black – black shorts and black socks – they had to call themselves the Redfern All Blacks!’.8 The oral narrative cannot be verified, but this by no means reduces its historical interest or usefulness. The early Club may not have been an expression of racial identity, but of the economic conditions of the Depression. Significantly, such memories of the All Blacks of the 1930s are indicative of an Indigenous presence in Redfern at this time.9	8
The next recorded period in the history of the All Blacks corresponds with intensified urban migration during World War II. Wartime employment freed many Indigenous people from their economic dependence on the Aborigines Welfare Board. With its low rent, proximity to Central Railway Station and the presence of established Indigenous families, Redfern became central to the aspirations of many young Aborigines, desperate to leave reserves and country towns.10 By 1946, when Chicka Dixon arrived, ‘the big thing was to come to Sydney. Go to Redfern. That was the big thing in life’.11	9
After examining the Annual Reports of the South Sydney District Junior Rugby Football League (SSDJRFL), Little argues that the Club began in 1944.12 While this is different to the date offered by Tatz and members of the Redfern community, this roughly accords with the account given in Jack Horner’s biography of Indigenous activist William Ferguson. According to Horner, Bill Onus and Ted Duncan (two young Indigenous activists) decided to use the profits from weekly dances in Redfern (formerly used to cover the cost of ensuring that Indigenous ex-servicemen received repatriation benefits) for the All Blacks. Even at this stage, the Club was strongly connected to the socio-economic conditions of the community, particularly the effects of urbanisation. As Horner notes, the Club was started to counter ‘the sheer boredom of slum life for men brought up in the bush’.13 Reflecting the wartime influx of Indigenous people into Redfern, the Club became literally ‘All Black’, the name now representative of its racial composition.14	10
While the All Blacks of the 1940s attempted to improve the lives of new arrivals in the city, the Club’s success was such that for some Indigenous men football became a ‘pull’ factor prompting movement to Sydney – even if just for the football season. In 1946, the Daily Mirror reported the story of Frank ‘Babs’ Vincent who, on being invited to play for the All Blacks, cycled 350 miles from Eubalong (near Condoblin) to join the team. With most believed to have come from the Cowra region, it was reported that players ‘find jobs in factories during the football season. In the off-season, many go back to the bush to work on sheep stations’.15 Playing with the All Blacks thus became part of the seasonal work patterns that so many were still engaged in.	11
The history of the Club from this point is one of discontinuity, which Little attributes to fluctuations in the Indigenous population. The All Blacks played in the South Sydney Junior competition until 1952, returning to the competition in 1955 and 1956 before disappearing again. By 1960, the time was ripe for the All Blacks to be, as Madden terms it, ‘resurrected’.16	12
As in previous decades, the All Blacks of the early 1960s did not exist in a social vacuum, but were strongly linked to patterns of urbanisation and social depression. Kaye Anderson has argued that after the 1973 dedication of ‘The Block’ for Aboriginal use, Redfern became associated in non-Indigenous narratives with ‘slum’ conditions, filtered through ‘a screen of racialized representations’.17 However, these racialised representations of Redfern, punctuated by international metaphors, began much earlier than 1973. In 1948 Smith’s Weekly warned that ‘[i]n the squalid Sydney suburbs of Redfern, Waterloo and Surry Hills, where hard-living and poverty have annihilated moral standards, a Harlem has come into being’.18 In the early 1960s, the suburb was again metaphorically transformed into ‘Sydney’s Harlem’ whose simmering racial tensions had the potential to form another ‘Little Rock’ or ‘Sharpeville’. Later, one intrepid ABC documentary explained in deeply sombre tones that ‘[t]his is not Manchester 1840 or Pittsburgh 1880 – this is Sydney, 1965’.19 Such conditions, it seemed, were feasible elsewhere, at other times in history – but it surpassed belief that they existed in the Lucky Country at the peak of its prosperity.	13
While Indigenous people had long been drifting to the cities, in the late 1950s/ early 1960s there was, as expressed in The Australian, an ‘exodus’20 of Indigenous people to Sydney – the term indicative of the non-Indigenous perception of the large numbers arriving in the city. While exact figures are again elusive, anecdotal evidence suggests that the power of inner-city Sydney to lure Indigenous migrants was strong. As Madden explains, ‘Redfern was like a hub for all the Kooris, when they came to Sydney, they come to Redfern’.21 However, not ‘all the Kooris’ settled in Redfern, with Randwick and Blacktown recorded as having similar numbers of Indigenous residents as South Sydney in the 1971 census. Even in South Sydney they comprised only 1.5 per cent of the multicultural population. Yet, Madden’s observation reveals the sense that, for many Kooris, Redfern was regarded as the place to be.22	14
Employment was offered as the most significant reason for moving to the city in Pamela Beasley’s 1963-64 survey of the Redfern/Chippendale area (which found 500 people willing to be identified as Aboriginal). Mechanisation, drought, recession and competition for low-skilled jobs from migrants had forced many Indigenous families out of the rural sector and into the city.23 The intolerable nature of discrimination in the country was also a reason for seeking to relocate. Ken Brindle, leading spokesperson of the Redfern community, encapsulated the unenviable dilemma that many were faced with:	15
One thing’s pulling ‘em, the other’s pushing ‘em … Not many aborigines want to leave the place where they were born and bred. But there just aren’t any jobs in the country. And if you’re coloured and out of work in a country town you’re just plain unwelcome no matter how much you feel you belong there.24
Yet, the city did not present an urban utopia. As one Redfern resident, Mrs Mosley, reportedly commented to journalist Sascha Miles, ‘[t]his isn’t much of a place to live in, but you’ve got to take anything you can get’.25 Discrimination was alive and well in the city, with Brindle claiming that ‘[e]mployers choose a white man in preference to an aboriginal every time’.26 Another major impediment to the realisation of urban aspirations was police harassment. As Jack Horner conveyed in a 1962 letter to Judge Curlewis, ‘the mutual distrust of aboriginal people and the policeman is a basic fact’.27 Indigenous people were often the target of racist police attention. In one example, the Aboriginal-Australia Fellowship (AAF) alleged that 68 Indigenous youths were arrested and charged with minor public order offences in a ‘clean up’ of the streets on Easter Thursday 1961.28 To Brindle, the arrests were clearly racially motivated – he was adamant that ‘white boys would have got away with after a caution’.29	16
These oppressive socio-economic conditions meant that for many Indigenous people, the transition from city to country was not easy. Anthropologist C.D. Rowley observed many returning to the country, suffering from frustrated aspirations, a lack of housing, and from the difficulties in getting employment.30 For others, returning to the country was an unpalatable option. As Brindle explained, ‘[a] few go back, but most stay; what do they have to go back for?’31 Sport, it was hoped, would open doors for the young men of Redfern.	17
Sport and Survival
The All Blacks were re-formed in 1960, mainly at the impetus of Brindle, who became the Club’s Honorary Secretary. The Club re-entered the South Sydney Junior competition in 1961, with teams in both ‘A’ and ‘C’ grades. A ‘D’ grade team was added in 1962.32 While an ASIO source claimed in late 1962 that the team had been suspended from the competition due to ‘“ringing in” players in various grades’,33 the Club also entered teams in the 1963 competition. By 1964, another period of hiatus had begun.34	18
As in earlier decades, the rebirth of the Club in the early 1960s was linked to the prevalent socio-economic conditions. The All Blacks represented an attempt by Indigenous people in an urban context to challenge their situation through sport. Amongst the stated aims of the Club during the 1960s were aspirations that were typical of any sporting club, such as attempting ‘to evelavate [sic] the club to a higher plane in the feild [sic] of grade football’. The Club also saw itself as working towards ‘the advancement of Aborigines in all feilds [sic] of sport’.35 However, the Club was not merely concerned with improving performances in sport, but in the ability of sport to uplift its participants.	19
Brindle was instrumental in modelling the teams around his dreams for the Indigenous youth of Redfern. Len Fox, former Communist Party of Australia (CPA) activist and AAF Executive member, recalls that Brindle had a wider vision – he was involved with the All Blacks not just because he was ‘keen on football!’. Rather, Fox believes that Brindle viewed football as a means of helping the boys who migrated from the country to gain ‘a better grip on the wider world’.36	20
With the Club resolving to stimulate ‘the interest of young Aborigines in every form of social activities’,37 part of Brindle’s vision was undoubtedly to prevent young Indigenous men from getting involved in crime. Brindle recounted to Fox that ‘these youngsters got locked up so often and on so many charges that we got together in 1960 and formed the All Black Football Club’.38 Football became one of the very few means of occupying time for young men who were unable to secure employment. It was hoped that sport would be an outlet for young Indigenous men and a means of deterring them from trouble. 39	21
Brindle perceived a lack of self-confidence to be a significant reason for the inability of his people to assert themselves. He explained to The Bulletin	22
[o]ur main trouble has been we’ve lacked any real faith in ourselves. It’s been made so plain to us that we’re not fit to live in decent society that we’ve half come to believe it. 40
The All Blacks were, to Brindle, a chance for the young Indigenous men of Redfern to gain this faith in themselves. Madden recalls being told by Brindle that when he first came to Sydney:
[H]e went to Redfern Oval and seen the Redfern All Blacks run out, all blackfellas playing in the one side, playing against the white side you know, and there was no holding back and they got stuck into it … that’s what got him involved, he said, because he wanted to be part of an organisation that was getting Kooris to come and stand up for themselves. 41
This encounter with the early All Blacks left a great impression on Brindle, who grew up in Kinchela Boys Home. Sport could be a means of raising self-esteem for those from similar backgrounds.42
This aspiration was not limited to the on-field solidarity of playing in a team of ‘all blackfellas’. The all-Aboriginal organisational structure of the All Blacks was an important way of engendering a sense of responsibility, and was a source of pride for those associated with the Club. As Madden reflected ‘the beauty of it was all the players were Aboriginal and all the committee were Aboriginal’.43 Brindle’s observation in 1970 that being involved in the Executive of the Club provided young Aborigines with ‘good training in management’44 is equally applicable to the All Blacks of the early 1960s. While the foundation Executive included familiar faces from the earlier All Blacks (such as Vice-President Ted Duncan) young Aborigines assumed responsibilities as the Club found its feet.45 In 1963, the Club possessed a ‘fresh young committee, average age twenty-five years’.46 The Club boasted that, in Ben Cruise, it possessed the only ‘playing Treasurer’ in the competition.47	23
Additionally, all the selectors and coaches with the Club were Aboriginal. Indigenous people had complete control in adjudicating the composition of the teams, the grading of players, and enforcing the discipline of training. At this stage, with the regulatory scheme of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW) still in force, it was perhaps one of the few facets of life which Indigenous people of Redfern were able to have control over and responsibility for. As such, it was certainly a step towards Brindle’s dream of enabling them to ‘stand up for themselves’.48	24
However, there appeared to be one major flaw in the aspiration of improving the lives of the Indigenous community of Redfern through sport. The masculine nature of rugby league excluded Indigenous women from the benefits apparent on the football field and in the Club’s organisational structure. However, while women were not able to become players or officials, the All Blacks still played an important part in their lives. Women and other non-players, as well as the players and officials, were involved in the web of community connections which the All Blacks promoted. Not only was the Club a symbol of the resistance of Indigenous people individually (as players and officials) but collectively, as a community. The manner in which the All Blacks promoted community life directly challenged the dominant discourse of assimilation.	25
Community, Identity and Assimilation
By the early 1960s, assimilation had been the policy of federal and State governments for 20 years. The policy promoted homogeneity, with the official definition adopted at the 1961 Native Welfare Conference stating that ‘all Aborigines and part-Aborigines’ were ‘to live as members of a single Australian community’.49 An ‘identity trap’50 had been created – non-Indigenous Australia had again assumed the authority to dictate the direction that Indigenous identity was to take.	26
Ann McGrath argues that the movement from protection to assimilation encompassed a shift from the scientific classification of Indigenous people, moving the focus ‘from biology to lifestyle, from skin colour to what was inside people’s heads’.51 However, scientific idiom remained in the media. A 1962 Four Corners documentary portrayed Indigenous people as the subjects of the ‘social experiment’ of assimilation, with urbanisation the catalyst. The La Perouse reserve was described as ‘a test tube in the long drawn-out experiment of assimilation of Aboriginal people’. Migration to suburbs such as Redfern was the next stage.52	27
The experiment, some concluded, was successful. Journalist Michael Charlton reported that ‘they live in the inner suburbs like white people do, many of them look like and are treated like white people’. 53 Similarly, anthropologist J.H. Bell commented approvingly that:	28
They live side by side with Europeans, work with them, and maintain a variety of cordial relationships with them. They know no other way of life and would accept no other. They are to all intents and purposes assimilated.54
Yet, other studies (such as the work of Dianne Barwick of Melbourne and of Fay Gale in Adelaide in the late 1960s) contended that assimilation had not created an assimilationist success story.55 As The Hon. E.G. Wright pondered during parliamentary debate over the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Bill 1963 (NSW) ‘[d]o the aborigines want assimilation? There has been no concerted agitation by the aborigines themselves to be assimilated’.56 Attachments to community and identity were not as tenuous as many believed.
Paul Hasluck, Federal Minister for Territories, regarded the ‘[e]ncouragement of social and sporting activity among both Aborigines and part-Aborigines’ as a method of advancing the assimilation policy.57 In the case of the All Blacks, sport created a far different result. As early as the 1950s, as Rowley notes, the very existence of the All Blacks was being questioned in the press as being contrary to the requirements of assimilation. The All Blacks of the early 1960s provided a strong example of sport being used not to further assimilation, but to forge distinct community groups and identities. Indigenous people in urban areas were not necessarily being absorbed into the wider society, but were forming communities and articulating identities that challenged the dominant assimilationist discourse.58	29
The All Blacks and the Redfern Community
The All Blacks played an important function in developing a community of people from diverse places of origin. Some were part of the Stolen Generations, and had moved to Sydney after growing up in institutions, just as Ken Brindle had. Harold Smith and Alan Murray were also, as Murray describes it, ‘inmates’ of Kinchela Boys’ Home who found their way to Redfern and into the All Blacks. Some were from remote Reserves, such as Valentine ‘Monty’ Maloney (President of the Club in 1961/62) who was born on Yarrabah Mission, near Cairns.59 Others, such as Abbie Towney, came from Wellington, where, as it was described in a SSDJRFL program, ‘the ducks fly backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes’.60 It was a long way from Redfern.	30
Yet, despite the distances travelled, family connections remained strong. While non-Indigenous observers condemned their overcrowded living arrangements, to Indigenous people of Redfern, the fact that they could help family connections in the city was a source of proud differentiation from white society. As Brindle explained to The Bulletin:	31
When a country chap arrives in a big city he’s among friends right away. We give him a bed, lend him dough, help him find a job. In this business of helping one another along we reckon we’ve got something pretty valuable that the white feller hasn’t got and we want to hang onto it.61
This ‘business of helping’ was regarded as a valuable trait of Indigenous culture that they sought to retain in an urban setting. They were not prepared to discard this in the name of assimilation.
The centrality of family connections was also evident in the All Blacks. It was not so much that individuals played for and supported the Club – whole families did. As Alan Murray explains, ‘we [the players] were like brothers … well, actually lots of us were brothers!’62 A perusal of SSDJRFL programs from the early 1960s reveals several family combinations: the Brown brothers, John and Roger; the Curry brothers, George and Norm; along with the forward combination of Trevor and Barry Christian. The Mumbler family was highly influential in the All Blacks, with Eric and Bill Mumbler acting as coaches and selectors, and with John ‘Warren’ Mumbler playing on the ‘C’ grade wing.63	32
The All Blacks built upon these family connections. As Jack Horner explains, ‘the football helped bring the families together’ in an urban community.64 One of the matches that Horner attended was recorded in the AAF newsletter as being ‘a real family day, of mothers, children and friends’.65 Alan Murray recalls that All Blacks events were important in connecting various families for another reason – enabling young men and women to meet. Husbands and wives were met at the Club’s functions, with their kids later playing for the teams.66	33
The community connections that the All Blacks promoted had particular importance for those for whom a sense of ‘connection’ had been forcibly removed – members of the Stolen Generations. Brindle supported many Kempsey boys when they came to Redfern, and encouraged them to make the move. Many of these became players with the All Blacks. To Murray, and to other ex-Kinchela ‘inmates’, sport was important because of their lifestyle in the homes; with little else to do, sport became a major outlet. This centrality of sport to stolen children was also experienced across the continent in Western Australia. Australian rules football legend Graeme ‘Polly’ Farmer, who grew up in Sister Kate’s Home for Children, recalls that with little else to do in a tough competitive atmosphere, the children turned to football.67	34
To Murray, the process of growing up in an institution created an experiential gulf between the ex-Kinchela boys and other Indigenous people of Redfern. As he recounts, participating in the All Blacks helped retain the bonds that had developed in Kinchela, organised around sport. However, the All Blacks played a further important role for the former ‘inmates’ – it connected them to established families and to other urban migrants, providing a bridge when there was no other. As Murray explains, ‘we were disconnected … the All Blacks were a way of connecting again’.68	35
These connections were enforced by the All Blacks both on-field and off. The nature of rugby league as a team sport, rather than an individualistic pursuit was important in this process. An Anglo-Celtic game, rugby league, was moulded to fit an Indigenous framework and to fill the needs of community connection in an urban setting. The team atmosphere provided the players with a sense of solidarity and mutual support. At times, the teams were reportedly hampered by the players’ unwillingness to train. But matches were a different matter altogether. As Smith explains ‘I tell you what, when they did [play] they sure teamed up!’69	36
The All Blacks also promoted community connections off-field. Illustrative of the fact that the Club was not merely concerned with football is the name commonly given to it – the ‘Redfern All Blacks Football and Social Club’ [emphasis added].70 In the early 1960s, the All Blacks filled a social void created by the prohibition of the sale of alcohol to Indigenous people contained in Section Nine of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW).71 As Charles Madden recalls ‘at the time, they weren’t allowed to go to pubs, and drink and that you know so that it [the Club] was a community group that brought them all together, banded them all together’.72	37
Holding dances at local town halls in conjunction with the AAF was one way that the All Blacks prompted community interaction. Brindle believed that ‘the Blacks came to the dances we organised at Redfern Town Hall because it was a meeting place’.73 Indeed, 299 people attended the Christmas 1962 function.74	38
A further important function of the All Blacks within the Redfern community lay in the social and economic support that the Club offered. In 1970, Brindle wrote that ‘[c]ommittee members find it impossible not to become involved in their players problems and often find themselves helping to find employment, accommodation and quite often legal assistance for minor offences’.75 This also happened in the All Blacks of a decade earlier. The Club was championed alongside established cooperative movements at the 1962 Annual Meeting of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA)76 as a model of Indigenous self-help. It was reported that the All Blacks ‘had started out with football and now expanded into culture, employment assistance, family unity’.77	39
The All Blacks were part of the support network that members of the Redfern community provided for new arrivals. Brindle, in particular, frequently assisted players in making the transition into urban life, finding them employment and housing them with his family in Caroline Street. Additionally, Brindle was heavily involved in assisting the players with their legal problems. He frequently made representations to the police and courts on their behalf, and, with the Reverend Ted Noffs, liaised with police.78	40
The Club was also involved in the campaign to establish a hostel for Indigenous youths. Fighting for the establishment of the hostel was one of the Club’s foundation aims, with the Executive resolving at the formation meeting in 1960 ‘to support wholeheartedly the appeal for funds for the erection of an Aborigines Hostel’.79 In seeking to develop their own modes of self-help, and to advance the welfare of the community, the All Blacks assisted Indigenous people to form their own community structures and to look to them, not to the ‘single Australian community’ for assistance in the urban environment.	41
All Black Women
While rugby league is often regarded as a masculine domain, women were not excluded from the community connections promoted by the All Blacks. Women played a major role in fundraising, with female supporters involved in the Women’s Social Committee of the Redfern All Blacks Football Club. Harold Smith recalls that his ‘missus used to raffle chooks, her and her friends’ and that the women were responsible for the catering at fundraising cabarets.80	42
In a sense, the role of women in the All Blacks organisation fulfilled traditional stereotypes of behind-the-scenes support. Yet, their roles were no less important to the survival of the Club and their significance should not be lessened simply because it was not an on-field achievement. This supporting role did not mean that the women were excluded from the community connections and pride that the All Blacks fostered. From the 1940s, women were central to the ‘cheer squad’ that followed the All Blacks almost religiously.81 Ruby Langford recalled that in the 1950s when she went with her father to Redfern Oval to watch the All Blacks play they ‘sat on the hill amongst all the other Kooris’.82 The sense of inclusiveness evident in the expression ‘all the other Kooris’ is indicative of the community support for the team and the sense of pride in being identified with the Kooris at the football which women were a part of as early as the 1950s.	43
In the early 1960s, women again were active in the off-field activities of the Club. The Women’s Social Committee played a major role in getting ‘all the Kooris’ along to the games. Jack Horner recalls that Mrs Emily May Tompkins, the ‘energetic’ Secretary of the Women’s Social Committee, was instrumental in gathering support for the team, and getting families along to watch the matches. When she unexpectedly passed away in June 1961, her importance to the Club and the community was such that a one-minute silence was held before the commencement of the next game of the All Blacks. Similarly, while Murray confided that in his opinion the women were just there to meet the men, he recalls that they shared in the pride and loved the teams. As such, while rugby league may have been a predominately masculine game, the women were a strong part of the community connections fostered by the All Blacks.83	44
In developing community connections, and promoting self-help within the community, the All Blacks were not displaying an intention to assimilate. Urbanisation had not led to the demise of attempts by Indigenous people to belong to community structures other than the ‘single Australian community’, but had prompted the need for new structures appropriate to the stresses of the urban environment.	45
The All Blacks, Identity and Integration
An ABC documentary, Living on the Fringe, made the curious observation in 1964 that Indigenous people stayed in the city ‘because they have a chance of discovering their own identity’, whereas in the country they were destined for anonymity and ‘social oblivion’.84 The All Blacks assisted this process of identity discovery and articulation in defiance of ‘assimilation’.	46
In 1970, Brindle commented that players saw the Club as ‘an expression of identity’.85 This expression was also evident in the All Blacks of the early 1960s. Continuing the name of the Club as the ‘All Blacks’ in the 1960 re-formation was an open declaration of the community’s sense of their Aboriginality, indicating that for many, their sense of identity had not been lost. Indigenous people regarded this identification as a source of pride. To play football in an all-Aboriginal team gave the players, according to Charles Madden, ‘a lot of pride in themselves’.86 Smith believed that ‘just having an Aboriginal side there, you know, in the competition’ was something to be immensely proud of.87	47
In a sense, the All Blacks’ participation in SSDJRFL competition was symbolic of the wider failure of the assimilation policy. The Club was one of many local clubs that Indigenous people of Redfern could choose to play with. To play with other teams, such as Redfern United, would have pleased assimilation advocates – with Indigenous people dispersed individually amongst predominately white teams. Yet, the Redfern All Blacks were perceived as the natural Club for Indigenous men of Redfern to belong to. As Madden explained, the choice of team was simple – ‘all the blokes, all the Kooris that came to Sydney played with the Redfern All Blacks’.88 In fact, not ‘all’ the footballers who migrated to Sydney played for the Redfern All Blacks – a few Kooris played for other neighbouring clubs. La Perouse United was another Koori team in the competition. However, Madden’s claim is indicative of the degree to which the Indigenous people of Redfern identified with the All Blacks.89	48
The reason that Harold Smith offers for so many choosing to play with the All Blacks rather than other local teams is closely linked to their sense of community and identity. It also highlights their resistance to assimilation – ‘they just loved their own people, you know’.90 The Indigenous people of Redfern continued to identify themselves as a ‘people’ distinct from the wider non-Indigenous society, and held on with affection to their own community structures and identity, rather than being assimilated. This included identifying with their own football team, and with the community connections that this represented.	49
However, by no means was the Club representative of strict segregation. The Club played in the mainstream South Sydney Junior competition. The game they played was Anglo-Celtic in origin. Additionally, the community that supported the team was not geographically segregated – despite the popular image, Redfern was not a black ghetto, but multi-racial. Brindle was proud of the ability of his people to live and work alongside non-Indigenous people. As he declared to Charlton, ‘I know that you couldn’t pick a dark man’s home in the city from a white man’s’ and ‘I think that ninety-nine percent of them that do work in the city join their unions and are accepted by their fellow workers’.91	50
Nor did the articulation of a distinctive Indigenous identity through the Club preclude multiple means of identification, for instance, with political allegiances. The President of the All Blacks, Monty Maloney, is reported by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to have declared to a conference of the CPA that ‘I don’t refer to myself now as an aborigine but as a Communist’. Yet this same report indicates that he repeatedly referred inclusively to Indigenous communities as ‘my people’.92 What appears to be a contradiction in Maloney’s self-image is actually a strong example of Lucy Taksa’s thesis – that ‘[p]eople usually have numerous interests and sources of identity that link them to more than one community’.93 Being identified with the Indigenous community did not prevent an individual from identifying with other communities.	51
The All Blacks were not representative of assimilation or strict segregation, but were part of a movement towards a different conceptualisation of their place within the wider society – integration. While assimilation presumed a loss of identity in order to receive the full benefits of citizenship, integration was premised on the retention of identity yet acceptance in society. As anthropologist A.P. Elkin noted in 1960, integration possessed ‘a stronger racial and political connotation than assimilation … It is a protest against absorption’.94 While not a radical policy by current standards, a significant component of the identity trap was to be removed in the policy of integration – the dominant culture was to accommodate a measure of Indigenous self-identification.	52
The presence of the All Blacks within the South Sydney Junior league was, in effect, integration in action. The team retained their own identity, the Indigenous community had their own Club, but were a part of the mainstream competition. Yet, the All Blacks’ challenge to assimilation through integration was not merely symbolic, but also a central part of the Club’s stated aims. The All Blacks resolved to stimulate ‘the interest of young Aborigines in every form of social activities, and their complete integration in the general community life’ [emphasis added].95 The term was deliberately repeated in an ‘Aims and Statements’ document of the team a year later.96	53
The use of the term ‘integration’ rather than the competing ‘assimilation’ was a highly significant choice on behalf of the Executive. By seeking integration rather than assimilation, the All Blacks were wading into the ‘politics of identity’ and seeking to assert their authority to define their own position within the wider Australian society.	54
Significantly, they had done so years before integrationist discourse became popular and finally entrenched with the abolition of the Aborigines Welfare Board in 1966.97 In 1960, the All Blacks were aligning themselves with a radical position, one which had been adopted by the AAF, FCAA and CPA by the mid-1960s.98 While some anthropologists had also begun to challenge the dominant policy, these criticisms were by no means universal in academic circles 99 Similarly, the popular press did not wholeheartedly embrace integration. While Read believes that an article by Peter Coleman published in The Observer in 1959 was the first public criticism of assimilation, Murphy argues that the article was still within the framework of the inevitability of absorption.100 It was not until late 1964 that a series of articles in the Sydney Morning Herald prompted the Editor to express a tentative preference for integration.101	55
The dominant political discourse remained firmly assimilationist, as evident in the parliamentary debates surrounding the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Bill 1963 (NSW). Only a minority of parliamentarians, such as The Hon. Edna S. Roper and Mr. Bill Rigby (who was a foundation Vice-President with the AAF) protested against assimilation.102	56
The All Blacks had entered into a significant debate about the place of Indigenous identity within the wider Australian society, advocating a highly progressive position for the time. In openly declaring their Aboriginality, with pride, the All Blacks became embroiled in the ‘politics of identity’. Yet, the highly political nature of the All Blacks was not confined to challenging racial discourses, with the Club becoming involved in the organised political movements that sought to combat racism.	57
Reds in the Dressing Sheds? Racism, Rugby League and Radical Politics
Sport alone could not overcome the discrimination faced by the Redfern community, despite the aspirations behind the All Blacks. The Club itself was directly affected by the discriminatory provisions of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (NSW), with Section Nine effectively preventing it from fundraising at events at which alcohol was sold, or to train at grounds (such as Redfern Oval) which had a bar.103	58
Additionally, Indigenous people associated with the All Blacks were often unable to avoid racist police attention. At least seven players were arrested as part of the 1961 Easter Thursday raid of Redfern’s streets. Brindle too, was subjected to intense police scrutiny. To combat such oppression the Indigenous people of Redfern in the early 1960s needed to make political connections.104	59
To a significant extent, it was sport that enabled such connections, most notably with the AAF and FCAA, to grow. Much suspicion accompanied the AAF and FCAA’s first forays into Redfern.105 As Brindle explained to Faith Bandler, ‘we were cynical. We had the anthropologists around too long, so when some of the FCAATSI executive was around we thought of them as the anthropologists’.106 He also suspected the AAF of ‘tapping’ the finances of the All Blacks in their hosting of dances in Redfern. A necessary precondition to developing a working relationship with the Indigenous community of Redfern was that these suspicions be overcome.107	60
Sport provided fertile ground for this to occur. The AAF believed in the ability of sport to connect Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and aimed to ‘stimulate sporting and cultural activities among the Aboriginal people and to encourage closer sporting and cultural contacts between the Aboriginal and European Australians’.108 Consistent with this aim, members of the AAF attempted to foster relationships with the Indigenous Redfern community by supporting the All Blacks at matches. Jack Horner is particularly fond of a match report in the AAF’s newsletter which recounts that ‘our Secretary [Horner] found himself acting as a goal post in an unofficial match on the Hill between ten year-olds, using a borrowed shoe as a ball’!109	61
Furthermore, in 1961 the AAF began to co-host its dances in Redfern with the All Blacks. This was perhaps an attempt to both placate Brindle’s allegations of tapping the All Blacks’ finances and to build trust within the community. The dances provided a way for Indigenous patrons and non-Indigenous organisers to mix freely and equally in a social environment – undoubtedly a new experience for many involved. As Jean Horner recalls, the dances were ‘a great contact … for both the city and country people of both races. Many lasting friendships were formed’.110 In Jack Horner’s opinion, in co-hosting the dances the AAF had ‘come to know the young people, and, we hope sincerely, to have gained their trust’.111	62
The success of the AAF (in particular) in winning the trust of Indigenous people in Redfern was such that Brindle was later to claim that the ‘Redfern All Blacks and the Fellowship were the only two organisations the Aboriginals had any respect for’.112 The connections forged by the All Blacks and these Aboriginal advancement organisations had overcome initial suspicion, and provided a basis for black and white to work together to fight discrimination.	63
With the All Blacks providing a bridge between black and white, the Club itself became part of the growing movement for Aboriginal rights – and the wider, political forms of resistance. The Club was the only sporting organisation to be financially affiliated to the FCAA in 1962. Herbert Groves and Ted Duncan were two longstanding Indigenous activists that held Executive positions in the re-formed Club. Other members of the Executive also became involved as office-bearers and delegates with the AAF and FCAA, including Ken Brindle, Monty Maloney and Roger Brown. Warren Mumbler, ‘C’ grade winger, attended a General Meeting of the AAF in February 1962. Additionally, Jack Horner suggested to Brindle that George Currie (or Curry), a member of the ‘A’ grade team, would be an appropriate representative of the All Blacks on the FCAA Referendum Committee. This affiliation of the All Blacks with organised means of resistance was highly advantageous for the Indigenous community of Redfern.113	64
The Benefits of Political Connections
One major benefit of these political connections lay in the ability of the AAF and FCAA to provide the All Blacks with access to a ‘public voice’ to represent the Indigenous people of Redfern. Firstly, they were given a voice in the Aboriginal rights movement, sending delegates to AAF and FCAA events. Brindle, Maloney and Brown used the 1962 FCAA Conference to ensure that the views of urban Indigenous people were not neglected, drawing attention to the discriminatory effect of Section Nine and to the police ‘persecution’ suffered by members of the Club.114	65
Secondly, the links between the All Blacks and these Aboriginal advancement organisations assisted the Club to gain a voice in the media, and gave their stance respectability. In December 1961, Jack Horner appeared with Brindle in a Sun Herald article which revealed the problems that Section Nine was causing the Club, and exposed the actions of the police. Additionally, the All Blacks were able to gain publicity in the radical press. In January 1962, Harry Stein (believed by ASIO to be part of the ‘Communist Party of Australia Fraction’ of the FCAA National Executive Structure) exposed the discrimination apparent in the All Blacks’ inability to find a training ground.115	66
Thirdly, through the AAF and FCAA, the Club was given access to a voice in State Parliament as part of the campaign against Section Nine. Bill Rigby, foundation Vice-President of the AAF, championed the All Blacks’ cause, raising their experience as a ‘glaring example’ of the section’s discriminatory effect during parliamentary debates over the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Bill 1963.116 Their experiences were also instructive to Parliament in another respect – in illustrating the fact that they drank anyway, but that prohibition ensured that Indigenous Australians only had access to ‘inferior liquor’. The Hon. W.C. Peters invited Members of Parliament to ‘visit the dressing room of the Redfern All Blacks, a team of footballers, and see their filthy, vile plonk, as they term it, because that is the only stuff they can get’.117 However, the Club’s experience had become part of the wider, convincing reasons why Section Nine should be repealed. Through the AAF and FCAA, the All Blacks enabled the problems of the community to be heard.	67
The AAF and FCAA also facilitated the participation of members of the All Blacks in political campaigns against discrimination. To the Aboriginal advancement organisations, the All Blacks represented an important point of contact from which they could seek Indigenous support for their work. By 1962, the use of Indigenous sporting clubs as a means to organise Indigenous people had become FCAA policy. Sport, it was perceived, could be a tool of resistance. At the 1962 conference of the FCAA, Charles Neilson, of the Community Development Committee, proposed that the organisation encourage community development ‘through sporting clubs that could develop cultural activities and political growth (eg Redfern)’.118 The notion of nurturing political growth amongst Indigenous people through sport derived from the belief that sport was central to their lives. In Jack Horner’s opinion, sport was always a good way to organise Aboriginal people: ‘They’re all mad keen on sport!’119	68
Accordingly, non-Indigenous activists with the AAF and FCAA saw in the All Blacks a means of reaching the Indigenous community of Redfern and involving them in political activities. Brindle was regarded as a highly effectual organiser, with Len Fox recalling that ‘he knew how to work amongst them in a rank and file way, yet didn’t get them to do what people outside wanted them to do – only what they wanted to do’.120 In May 1961, Jack Horner wrote to Brindle asking his permission to arrange for a member of the AAF to ‘explain to members of your Club what the Fellowship is, what it does and where our money goes to’. As he explained, ‘[u]ntil your Football Club started there was no way of doing this’121 – indicative of the pivotal role that the All Blacks played in assisting Aboriginal advancement groups in their efforts to inform and organise the Redfern community.	69
To members of the All Blacks, the AAF and FCAA provided the means to take action against discriminatory legislation. Brindle and Maloney joined study groups conducted by the AAF and were given, according to Jack Horner, ‘helpful criticism and assistance in preparing speeches’.122 A petition against Section Nine was circulated amongst the Redfern community, including at football matches and Brindle recruited Indigenous people from Redfern to attend demonstrations about the issue during the February 1962 State election campaign.123 When the government’s intention to repeal the section was made clear, the All Blacks’ contribution to the campaign had been such that the AAF recognised that ‘[n]one of this could have been successful without the support from many and varied quarters … [including] the All Blacks Football Club’.124	70
The All Blacks had found allies to assist them in combating discrimination. Sport had assisted the process of forming positive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to allow them to work towards their shared goals. In doing so, the All Blacks had become part of the wider movement for Aboriginal rights. Such could only be, in the eyes of ASIO, suggestive of a communist plot.	71
The All Blacks – a ‘Communist Front’?
By forging links with the AAF and FCAA, the All Blacks were unwittingly becoming embroiled in another political connection – with ASIO’s fear of communistic influences in Aboriginal rights movements. By the early 1960s, the CPA had displayed a progressive stance on Aboriginal affairs for over 30 years. Participating in Aboriginal advancement organisations was one way for CPA members to be involved in the fight for Aboriginal rights. Faith Bandler, Len and Mona Fox and Helen Hambly were amongst members of the AAF and FCAA who were at one stage involved with the CPA.125	72
ASIO was concerned about this trend and feared that the CPA was working ‘to penetrate, use and ultimately transform into ‘CPA front’ organisations those existing organisations concerned with the true welfare of the Australian Aboriginal people’.126 The structure of the FCAA, AAF and other related organisations were analysed to ascertain if they were ‘Communist Fronts or Penetrated by Communists’.127 The extent of ASIO’s fear of the communist infiltration of Aboriginal rights organisations was such that the All Blacks became a target of their suspicions.	73
It was the connections with the FCAA that first drew ASIO’s attention to the All Blacks, with the Director-General noting that the Club was ‘an affiliate of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement which [was] under the influence of a Communist Party of Australia fraction’.128 The participation of the All Blacks at the 1962 FCAA conference was duly noted, with Brindle, Maloney and the Club attracting files.129	74
Was there any basis for ASIO’s suspicion of the All Blacks? Brindle and Maloney did have connections with the Left, although the nature of their affiliation varied. Certainly, they differed in their opinions as to the extent of political involvement that the All Blacks should have. According to Jack Horner, ‘Monty Maloney wanted them to join up with the communists and Ken Brindle wouldn’t have a bar of it. It didn’t stop the football of course! But the political interference made Ken angry’.130	75
Len Fox has identified Brindle as a leading member of the ‘broad’ Left – never joining a political party or studying socialism, but becoming ‘a spokesman for an important minority group’.131 Brindle strenuously denied affiliation with the CPA. He sensed the irony in being derided for his skin colour but also being accused of being ‘red’. Bandler recalled that ‘when equal rights workers were being labelled “Reds”, Ken would laughingly reply “Are you blind mate, I’m black”!’132 In his arguments against Charles Perkins’ demand in 1968 that CPA members resign from the FCAATSI Executive, Brindle stressed that he was always careful to ‘tread the centre path’.133 He was not identified as a CPA member in a 1964 survey of FCAATSI. 134	76
Maloney, by contrast, was not so intent on travelling the ‘centre path’. A builders’ labourer, Maloney was elected in 1961 as an international delegate of the Builders’ Workers’ Industrial Union (BWIU) to tour the Eastern Bloc and attend the twelfth anniversary celebrations of the German Democratic Republic. Upon his return to Australia, Maloney joined the CPA.135 His experience of leftist politics profoundly shaped his views on political action. He advised the 1962 FCAA conference delegation that Indigenous people should ‘[g]o to the working class if you want help. You will never get it from the politicians’.136 Similarly, combining socialistic terms with typically Australian vernacular, he stated in the AAF’s newsletter that the ‘reason for the victory on section nine was mass struggle and organisations of people who believed in a fair go’.137	77
Despite this surveillance of Maloney and Brindle, and concern about the Club’s links with the FCAA, ASIO were unable to uncover an insidious communistic plot behind the All Blacks. In 1964, ASIO was forced to place the team on a list of organisations that ‘have been reported to exist but insufficient information is held to assess the extent of communistic involvement within them’.138 This was not an admission that ASIO believed the Club to be free from a communist plot – it suggests merely that the organisation felt that the evidence was inconclusive. The suspicion remained – even though suggestions of the All Blacks being used as a communist front evoked hoots of laughter from Jean and Jack Horner and Mona and Len Fox!139	78
The surveillance undertaken by ASIO of the All Blacks is illustrative of the extent of paranoia that existed regarding attempts by Indigenous Australians to resist discrimination. Organisatio