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Book Review
| Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: a Freedom Rider Remembers, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2002. pp. xxii + 352. $35.00 paper.
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| Ann Curthoys has written what will be the definitive account of the 'Freedom Rides' — the bus trip around northern New South Wales by 30 odd Sydney University students in 1965 and the return visits by small groups of students in the following 18 months. The under-title — 'a freedom rider remembers' — understates the case because Curthoys managed during the 1990s to collect interviews with most of the riders (including this reviewer). In this book she weaves together those interviews, the recollections of Aboriginal people who lived in the towns we visited, her own memories (supplemented by the diary she kept during the trip), and extensive media archives. But the sense of ownership suggested in the subtitle is undoubtedly correct; it's a project that fascinated her for more than a decade and she began its realisation by retracing the dusty steps of that bus ride. |
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There is a quiet pride in the retelling of this story. The good press the trip received from the metropolitan media at the time was one of the pleasant surprises of the time; and that good press has persisted for decades now. How could anyone object to Aboriginal kids being allowed into the local swimming pool or black teenagers being able to sit upstairs at the town cinema or indigenous ex-servicemen being permitted to join the local Returned and Services League (RSL)? The truly remarkable thing is that they ever were. |
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The high points of the book are the accounts of how the colour bar was challenged and eventually broken at the swimming pool in Moree and at the Walgett cinema. Here the narrative picks up pace and is gripping and suspenseful. Those chapters may not be on the edge of your seat stuff as in the opening chapter — 'Islam in Los Angeles' — of Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire (the biography of Martin Luther King), but they do have that and-what-happens-next feel and a cast of courageous heroes and heroines. |
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There are some longueurs in her long intricate account which are probably inherent in the book's methodology and the author's point of view. All those interviews make for comprehensiveness, but memories taken in isolation (and without questioning) can lack the vividness and richness which may come if you'd put some of the riders in the same room together where they could spark off each other, supplementing and contradicting each other's recollections. This may also have led to more prominence being given to other perspectives besides that of the dominant alliance among the riders. |
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This rider was intrigued as to why there is no mention in the book of the riders' meeting which rejected the help offered by the Waterside Workers Federation (WWF) because the majority didn't want to run the risk of being associated with the Communist Party to which the WWF leaders belonged. Only the four from the anti-Stalinist Australian Labor Party club and a handful of independents wanted to accept the offer as a first step to drawing the labour movement into the campaign. The offer was doomed because the sole Aboriginal on the bus, and our acknowledged leader, Charlie Perkins rejected it out of hand. (Charlie was quite anti-communist and besides didn't want to endanger our good relations with the conservative mass media.) The eight riders from the Communist Party-aligned Labour club acquiesced in Charlie's stand. |
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Another absence which had me scratching my head, this time from Ann's account of the actions that followed the bus trip, was any mention of the lunch-time mass meeting held at Sydney University to raise funds for the Aboriginal stockmen on strike at Wave Hill — a development more important than the bus ride. Two of the strikers visited the campus and what was soon obvious was that only one of them could speak English. As they conversed in their own language we were reminded of the rich indigenous cultural heritage that had survived in northern Australia but which had been all but obliterated in NSW and certainly formed no part of our voyage of discovery in February 1965. |
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Of course there was an element of do-goodism about the bus trip and this worried some of the riders before the trip, but the ride itself solved this problem by re-awakening Aboriginal political activism in the towns we visited. In the follow-up trips that took place in the 18 months after the bus ride white students linked up with Aborigines who now took the lead in their own campaigns. As Ann writes in the closing pages, Australian race relations would never be the same again after the 'freedom ride' of 1965. |
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