For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. 
Perhaps not any more. In a recent Instagram post, Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union, an Indigenous activist group, claimed that “economic migrants” (those seeking a better life away from poverty in the underdeveloped world) participate in the colonial occupation of Australia and therefore “reap the fruits of colonialism and imperialism themselves” and are “agents of empire”. 
The post was particularly bizarre, given the context in which it was made. In recent months, refugees have set up protest camps outside government offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The encampments are attempts to highlight the federal government’s inhuman treatment of refugees. Stewart-Assheton’s post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
Stewart-Assheton’s anti-migrant prejudice is shameful. Indeed, the label “economic migrants” has long been used by the political right to generate hostility toward immigrants and to turn working-class people against each other, distracting them from the crimes of big business and politicians. 
Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants isn’t a random quirk of the Black People’s Union. It flows from some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary “anti-colonial” politics. 
The dominant framework on the left for understanding anti-Aboriginal racism is settler colonial theory, first popularised by the academic Patrick Wolfe. Activists influenced by that framework present the main divide in Australia as being between Indigenous people and a homogeneous “settler” population. Anyone who is not Indigenous—no matter how exploited or oppressed they may be themselves—is considered to be a privileged settler and coloniser reaping the benefits of Aboriginal people’s oppression. 
This idea downplays the fact that the majority of so-called settlers suffer from gross forms of exploitation and oppression. After all, can we really believe that poor migrants working shitty jobs in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne have more in common with CEOs or politicians than they do with refugees and Aboriginal people, just because they happen to have moved to Australia? 
What utility does the concept of “settler” have when it can be equally applied to Peter Dutton, who calls for people waving Hezbollah flags to be deported from the country, and people of Lebanese heritage who defy the pervasive racism of the politicians and the media—and harassment from the cops and the security services—to protest against Israeli terrorism? By the logic of modern “anti-colonial” politics, whatever the differences between them, both are part of a privileged settler population.
The movement of people worldwide has been a constant feature of human society, particularly in modern times. Some migrants move to flee poverty, only to be met with horrendous racist treatment in their new country—if they are admitted at all under the many migration laws that determine whether or not they will be of use to capitalists. 
Migrants can be horrendously paid and work in precarious workplaces, while their rights as workers are not respected at all. On top of this, they are often used as scapegoats to cover for the failures of the capitalist system. 
For example, in Australia, the Liberals are now blaming the housing crisis on migrants, when it’s the government-designed housing market that has turned shelter into a vehicle for making one section of the (disproportionately Liberal-voting) population incredibly wealthy through perpetual asset-price inflation. 
The housing crisis affects almost all working people, particularly those with lower incomes and families lacking accumulated wealth. Yet supporters of settler colonial theory would have migrants slaving away in shitty jobs and living pay cheque to pay cheque “pay the rent” as though they are no different from Rio Tinto. 
Of course, there have been periods when migration has occurred as a part of brutal processes of colonisation—as in the history of colonial Australia. However, to condemn anyone as an evil settler and coloniser for having left the country in which they were born to go somewhere else that has an indigenous population—that is foolish in the extreme. As in the case of Stewart-Assheton, it can just dovetail with the anti-migrant bile of the racist right. 
The problem isn’t just that it can lead activists to counterpose the interests of refugees and migrants. To follow the logic of the argument would mean condemning the hundreds of millions of workers living in Canada, the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand as lackeys of imperialism and capitalism.
In some situations, the strident denunciation of settlers has been used to justify the most reactionary crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists have unleashed waves of violence and forced expulsions of Rohingya, who have been categorised as “migrants” rather than native to the country. 
In her book Home Rule, Nandita Sharma shows that conflicts in Africa have often been framed as racialised struggles between supposed “Black African natives” and “light-skinned Arab migrants”. Sharma argues that the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide had its roots in “the self-identification of Hutus as the National-Natives of Rwanda and the categorization of Tutsis as colonizing Migrants” who had to be violently removed from a country that they apparently did not “belong” to. 
Sinhala chauvinists in Sri Lanka similarly argue that Tamils are basically foreigners, and far-right Hindu nationalists in India want to expel Muslims from the country on similar grounds. 
None of this is to deny the very real oppression suffered by indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, particularly here in Australia. However, when activists and theorists try to set up a world view based on the idea that the whole planet is a struggle between settlers on the one hand and radical indigenous peoples on the other, it can only lead to absurdity. 
Many activists influenced by settler colonial theory would reject Stewart-Assheton’s conclusions. But conceptualising the fundamental divide in the world as a battle between indigenous peoples and settler populations makes it easy to see why people can dismiss the rights of migrants and the struggles of workers.
In many ways, settler colonial theory is a form of indigenous nationalism. Like all forms of nationalist politics, it views the world in a classless and sectional manner. This is clear from Stewart-Assheton and the Black People’s Union argument that the key divide in Australia is not between bosses and workers but between Indigenous people and settlers, and that, therefore, an anti-colonial revolution by Indigenous people (who make up just 3 percent of the population) is supposedly the first step to both Indigenous liberation and socialism. 
It’s on this basis that Stewart-Assheton says that all anti-racist, progressive and working-class struggles should be subordinated to Indigenous struggles (and therefore subordinated to the Black People’s Union) and that any failure to agree with such a program or its theoretical underpinning springs from a settler mindset.
This so-called radical program is incapable of securing either Indigenous liberation or socialism. In the end, all it does is take the focus away from the capitalist class and pit the struggles of oppressed people against each other in an Olympics-style game of identity politics, in which the starting point is figuring out who is most oppressed, rather than thinking about how we can best unite to beat our common enemy—the capitalist ruling class and its repressive state.
Oskar Martin is the Indigenous representative on the Student Council at the University of Melbourne Student Union.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/indigenous-liberation-and-socialism">Indigenous Liberation &amp; Socialism</a>.

Oskar Martin

Jordan Humphreys

Are migrants colonisers?

In 2021 Western Australian mining conglomerate Mineral Resources Limited (MRL) celebrated the launch of its new <a href="https://www.mineralresources.com.au/news-media/new-waalitj-centre-a-real-work-of-art/">Waalitj Centre</a>, a large warehouse in the iron ore-mining township of Koolyanobbing built to store and manage the company’s equipment. The warehouse’s exterior, the company writes, “showcases an impressive mural representing our relationship and respect for Traditional Owners on the lands on which we operate. Commissioned by respected local Aboriginal artist, Aaron Hayden, the artwork draws inspiration from his experience of the Yilgarn region and represents MRL’s ongoing relationships with the local Njaki Njaki people”.
MRL boasts that the Waalitj Centre reflects the company’s focus on “continuous improvement, innovative thinking and working smarter to become more productive every day”. No doubt the mural gives MRL executives a warm feeling on visits to its giant and highly lucrative iron ore mine nearby. How many of the Njaki Njaki people themselves would share that feeling is unclear.
It’s not just mining companies like MRL that are keen to promote their supposed respect for Aboriginal culture. Whether it’s commissioning artworks, publicising their support for the Indigenous Voice to parliament, or promoting Indigenous spokespeople and welcome to countries, much of corporate Australia is keen to foreground its supposed anti-racist credentials.
This, however, is a facade. To the extent that companies want to present themselves this way, it’s so that they can better exploit people and natural resources. MRL’s Koolyanobbing mine is estimated to contain up to 40.8 million tonnes of iron ore, currently worth more than $8.4 billion. The traditional owners of the land these mines are on, apparently so admired by company management, can expect to see only a tiny fraction of this revenue. It’s a similar picture elsewhere in Australia, where mining companies are enjoying massive profits from high commodity prices while the majority of traditional owners live in poverty. A few murals and a cultural centre here and there are a small price to pay to gain the political licence for such a windfall.
Mining giant Rio Tinto is another example. The company’s <a href="https://www.riotinto.com/-/media/Content/Documents/Sustainability/Indigenous-Peoples/RT-Our-commitment-to-Indigenous-Australia.pdf?rev=6431d08025fa49d59a7a9a2e92bb742b">action plan</a> for working with Aboriginal people says “we recognise the cultural, spiritual, and physical connections that Indigenous people have with land, water, plants, and animals”. But in 2020, the company blew up sacred rock shelters at Juukan Gorge to make way for an iron-ore mine. As historian Clare Wright <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-masters-of-the-future-or-heirs-of-the-past-mining-history-and-indigenous-ownership-153879">put it</a>, “In a matter of minutes, eight million tonnes of ore were ripped from the earth, and with them, 46,000 years of cultural heritage destroyed ... For this hefty price we all paid, Rio Tinto lawfully gained access to $135 million of high-grade iron ore”. 
Respect for Indigenous culture takes a back seat as soon as it bumps up against the pursuit of profit.
The 2023 campaign by Western Australian business organisations against the state’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act (ACHA) further illustrates the point. While very moderate, the ACHA was seen by the Pastoral and Graziers Association of WA as a threat to its members’ future profits. The mining industry was similarly concerned. Warren Pearce, chief executive of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC), complained that under the ACHA <a href="https://safetowork.com.au/wa-to-roll-back-cultural-heritage-laws/">mining projects</a> would be “slowed down substantially”. In a meeting of AMEC, mining executives argued that the ACHA would restrict mining companies from obtaining critical materials, metals and iron ore. 
Western Australia’s Labor government ultimately gave in to the pressure, and the ACHA was repealed. This victory of corporate interests against a real (though very limited) example of Indigenous empowerment didn’t stop them, though, from continuing to boast of their commitment to “Indigenous empowerment” in the abstract, non-actionable sense. AMEC head Pearce was <a href="https://nit.com.au/05-12-2023/8915/2023-amec-awards-recognise-first-nations-influence">back at it in December</a>, describing the organisation’s awards night as an opportunity “to showcase the [mining] industry’s commitment to exploration, diversity and inclusion, the environment, [and] First Nations empowerment”.
Corporate Australia’s determination to undermine any attempt to grant Indigenous people control over land is just one part of the picture. Just as important is big business opposition to measures that would help reduce poverty and expand public services, like higher wages, better working conditions, more funding for public health and housing. It’s these measures that, in the short term, would have the most significant impact on the lives of Indigenous people—yet big business consistently uses its clout to argue against them. The policies they favour, such as privatisation, tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and greater “flexibility” and “wage restraint” for workers make it harder for Indigenous people to get ahead. 
Indigenous poverty is both a product and a cause of racism. The entrenched racism of Australian society helps justify the lack of serious government action to improve conditions for Aboriginal people. And the conditions of poverty in which many Aboriginal people live are used, in turn, to reinforce racist stereotypes and justify racist policing and sky-high levels of incarceration. 
Politicians and right-wing ideologues can then point their finger at Indigenous people to show why individual responsibility, rather than social support, is key to improving living standards. Once this is established, it’s an easy slide to apply the same logic to everyone, with all the cuts, privatisation and punitive social measures that go with it. For corporate Australia, this means less of their profits going to wages, public services and welfare via taxes, freeing up more public money to be spent on infrastructure for industry, corporate subsidies and tax cuts. 
None of this can be somehow made right by a bit of funding for cultural centres, regular acknowledgements of country, and other corporate displays of respect for Indigenous people. If we’re to achieve genuine liberation for Indigenous people, we need to see through their attempts at “blackwashing” and abolish capitalism and its racist institutions for good.

How corporate Australia blackwashes its complicity in racism 

The issue of Catalonian independence has returned to the forefront of Spanish politics in recent weeks. At least 170,000 people protested in Madrid on 18 November against an amnesty deal for 400 people who were arrested for their involvement in a 2017 independence referendum. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) signed the deal with two Catalonian political parties and the Basque Nationalist Party in return for support to form government. 
The large demonstration followed several protests of tens of thousands that have taken place across Spain over the past few weeks. They have called Sánchez a traitor to Spain and demanded his resignation. 
The centre-right People’s Party (PP) and far-right Vox are the movement’s key leaders. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has called on the European Union to overturn the amnesty, while Vox’s Santiago Abascal has said he is “alerting international allies to what is happening in Spain”. (One of Vox’s notable international allies is Italian far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.) Neo-Nazi groups led protests outside the PSOE’s headquarters for fifteen consecutive days when the amnesty was announced. 
The right, which lost last July’s election, has gained traction out of the protests, and could continue to grow if they continue. There is little support for the amnesty in the general population: 70 percent of Spanish voters opposed the deal in a mid-September poll, including two-thirds of those who voted for the PSOE in the July election. 
Spanish nationalism is a cornerstone of the political right. Vox gained popularity by opposing the 2017 referendum. Since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in 1978, the PP has opposed national autonomy for the Catalan and Basque regions and appealed to the Spanish constitution, which gives the national government the power to suspend a region’s autonomy.
The Spanish left has not been much better. The PSOE is firmly against independence, and Sánchez signed the amnesty only to save his own skin. In 2017, Podemos, a progressive party, supported the referendum but opposed independence. 
The referendum ignited a battle between the Spanish state and Catalan civilians. Then Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy deployed more than 10,000 police units to stop people from even approaching a ballot box. They injured hundreds of Catalans, destroyed polling places and seized ballot boxes. 
Despite this, 3 million people voted. With around 2.3 million votes counted, 90 percent voted yes to independence. 
However, the approach of then Catalan President Carles Puigdemont to begin talks with the PP government prior to declaring independence put the movement into a standstill. Rajoy took advantage of this, using the constitutional power to dismiss Puigdemont and the Catalan government. Catalonia was put under the control of Madrid. 
Autonomy was restored after a new government was elected in 2020—but nine separatist leaders were imprisoned for between nine and thirteen years. 
Anti-Catalonian independence is a right-wing drag on Spanish society, and the current protests could help the PP, Vox and neo-Nazi groups gain traction. At a time when the far-right is surging in parts of Europe, such as Italy and the Netherlands, this is a dangerous development.

Right-wing protests building in Spain

“The Black Power movement shook the world; it certainly shook the roots of this country.” 
– Jenny Munro
Redfern was centre of the Black Power movement in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s, when the Sydney suburb became a congregational point for Aboriginal people. In 1950, Redfern had an Aboriginal population of around 3,000. But by 1976, there were as many as 20,000 residing there. The large Aboriginal migration was in large part due to the greater freedoms city life had to offer. In rural New South Wales, segregation was still prominent, Aboriginal people being restricted from entering higher education and accessing social services. 
“I finished year twelve and had no work in racist country towns and then headed to the bright lights of Sydney, as did lots of other young people”, Aboriginal activist Jenny Munro, who became active in those years, tells Red Flag. “Sydney was like a whole new world for us after the repression that we had grown up with in country towns. There was a whole lot more freedom down here. You could become anonymous in the city.” 
City life, however, was still far from ideal. The Sydney social service categorised Redfern as a “slum”, most of the housing in the suburb being century-old, run-down terraces. In some cases, racist landlords would not lease to Aboriginal people. When Aboriginal people did get a lease, homes could become overcrowded with families and friends fleeing from the country. 
Sydney police treated Aboriginal people in abhorrent ways. Historian Gary Foley, speaking to Red Flag in Melbourne, recounts that his “welcome” to the city was being grabbed and bashed by the 21st division squad. The racist harassment in Redfern was intensified after the Aboriginal Welfare Board closed in 1969, allowing the police to take a more central role in trying to control the population. Police raids at the Empress Hotel became a “mandatory practice” for the police, Foley recounts. Interrogations at the Empress were, Munro says, something “that defined the community for a long time”. 
While Aboriginal people were dealing with harassment and poor housing, many tried to find employment in the hope of lifting their living standards in the impoverished suburb. However, this often proved difficult. About 22 percent of Aboriginal people in Sydney were officially unemployed in 1973, but only about one-third of them received unemployment entitlements. There were limited educational opportunities for Aboriginal people, resulting in many being employed only as unskilled labourers. Those employed in unskilled jobs had an average weekly take-home pay of less than $70, while the national average was $84.70. Many Aboriginal people became builders labourers, working on construction sites. Some, such as Kevin Cook and Monty Maloney, became members of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation. 
When Aboriginal people could not find work, they were sometimes assisted by various community organisations, such as South Sydney Community Aid, the Redfern All Blacks rugby team and the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, which offered welfare support while promoting Indigenous rights. 
By the early 1970s, Redfern had become a dynamic urban Aboriginal community, which extended out towards Waterloo, Alexandria and even Newtown. In dealing with the poor housing and social conditions and incessant racism from the police, the space for Aboriginal activism to explode and challenge Australian racism was opening. But there were differences of opinion regarding the best way forward.
Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes, in a debate with Senator Neville Bonner, argued that Black Power meant Black capitalism (Aboriginal people working their way up the capitalist system and pecking order), blood and guts (fighting in the streets, riots and looting) or Black action—Aboriginal people identifying, controlling and solving their problems and those of the community. Sykes asserted that Black Power for Aboriginal people meant the last, striving towards self-determination. 
Sykes’ understanding of Aboriginal Black Power was shared by other Black Power activists, who also had their own distinctive interpretations. John Newfong viewed Black Power as a modern, urban ideology that was to tackle issues regarding modern Australian society. Munro views it as the maintenance of “Black knowledge” and “Blackness”. Likewise, other activists stressed the importance of cultural and spiritual revival that Black Power had to offer. Foley thought Black Power had to be rooted in political and economic demands. Paul Coe viewed it as the need for Aboriginal people to “take control both of the economical, the political and cultural resources of the people and of the land ... so that they themselves have got the power to determine their own future”. 
While the Redfern activists had a shared commitment to Indigenous self-determination, they did not establish a unified ideological outlook. Foley recounts that Black Power activists used to steal books from Bob Gould’s Third World bookshop, until Gould started to give a discount to Aboriginal people. The Black Power activists read the likes of Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Jean Paul Sartre and more. Reading such activists and intellectuals enabled the Black Power activists to engage with a variety of politics—from the anti-colonialism of Fanon to American Black nationalism, communism, anarchism and Maoism. 
The US Black Panther Party was a major inspiration for Redfern Black Power activists. Some of them had even met the Panthers in the US, through meeting and organising with Caribbean activist and academic Roosevelt Brown. Brown visited Redfern when he came to Melbourne in 1969 and offered some of the activists an invitation to the Congress of African People in Atlanta the following year. Activists such as Bob Maza and Sol Bellear joined the trip, and visited the Panthers in Harlem, New York. The visit inspired the Redfern activists and taught them a lot about the Panthers’ community programs centred on health and education, and confrontational tactics against the police.
Unlike the US Black Panther Party, the Redfern Black Power activists did not form a party with a view to challenging Australian capitalism. However, in Brisbane 1971, an Aboriginal Black Panther Party was formed, adhering to the model and politics of the US party, with an aim of overthrowing Australian capitalism. Activists like Foley and Paul Coe became members of the party and helped with its operations.
In developing Black Power in Australia, the Redfern activists also looked towards previous Aboriginal activists such as Fred Maynard, William Cooper, Doug Nichols, Bill and Eric Onus, Bill Ferguson and Jack Patten. Such activists had established various organisations, like the Australian Aborigines League, and held protests like the Day of Mourning action in 1938. Bill Onus and Ferguson were incredibly influential for the Redfern activists, as they had politically organised and fought around issues of Aboriginal land and legal rights. 
In particular, the campaign for the 1967 referendum provided an important lesson for the Redfern activists. 
More than 90 percent of Australians voted to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as a part of the population and for the federal government to make laws about them. The referendum’s success was put down to ten years of campaigning by the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the Australian Aborigines League, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship and the Aborigines Progressive Association. While the referendum achieved progress in gaining legal representation for Aboriginal people, it was still insufficient to achieve greater social gains.
Foley says that the federal government “sat on their hands and did nothing” after the referendum, believing that they had done enough to meet the demands of Aboriginal people. But the Redfern activists knew that they needed to develop their own tactics and strategies that were different to those of previous generations of activists. The younger generation, Foley says, was dealing with a different set of issues. They wanted more political agitation, action and militancy to achieve things like land rights and self-determination—the Australian capitalist state was not going to improve Aboriginal life of its own accord. 
The week after being beaten up by the cops, Foley met Paul Coe at the Wayside Chapel, which he describes as “a lively nest of everything from bikies and Hell’s Angels, through to hippies and revolutionaries, and Christian folk amongst the mix”. Foley asked Coe where he was from and was living. Coe reached into his pocket, pulled out a toothbrush and said, “Wherever this is”. Foley told Coe about his dealings with the police, at which point Coe did two things: 
“He handed me a book and said ‘Read this’. The book was the autobiography of Malcolm X. Then he told me about how he was also dirty on the coppers in Redfern because as it turned out, his cousin had been shot by police in 1963 on Sydenham station. That event had politicised him. So, he said to me, ‘We want to do something about these fucking coppers’. And I said, ‘What can we do?’ And he said, ‘Well the first thing we can do is to get together and have a yarn about it’.” 
Activists such as Billy Craigie, Isabel Coe, Alan Doolen, Tony Coorie, Gary Williams, Lyn Thomson, and others joined the discussion about the police. “This became the core of the Black Power movement in Redfern. The issue that brought us together, ironically, was police harassment, police brutality”, Foley says. 
The Redfern activists took inspiration from the Black Panthers’ “pig patrol” initiative. The Panthers in America had found a loophole in California law that allowed them to carry firearms if the weapons were not concealed. So, with their guns out, they followed police patrols in an attempt to intimidate them out of harassing Black people. The Redfern activists couldn’t carry firearms, but the basic premise of monitoring the police to help the community tackle harassment was taken up. Foley describes the Redfern activists “follow[ing] the coppers with a pencil and book” to note down police officers’ numbers and licence plates. They could then keep track of police raids and the cops’ general movements in Redfern. 
Through the pig patrol, the Redfern activists were beginning to organise themselves politically. And they were able to rally Aboriginal people through protests and provision work. Pig patrol gained the attention of then dean of the law faculty at the University of NSW, Hal Wotton. Paul Coe was a student under Wotton, and the Black Power activists invited him to visit them. “Once he saw Redfern, he assisted us in pulling together a team of young radical lawyers. We then set up the first free, shopfront legal aid centre for anyone in Australia”, Foley recalls. The collaboration of the Black Power activists and Wotton helped set up the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) in 1970. 
Other services were soon created; the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) in 1971, and the Murawina Aboriginal preschool and the Aboriginal Housing Company (AHC) were both established in 1973. “The Block” became a point of community unity, as the housing was over time purchased by the AHC for Aboriginal-managed housing. The Block became an affordable source of low-cost housing for disadvantaged Aboriginal people, acting as a counterweight to the private housing market. 
Aboriginal people had received little to no assistance from the NSW state or federal governments in dealing with day-to-day needs. For Aboriginal people deprived of basic health and social necessities, services like the ALS and AMS established a base level of aid. However, such services had political limitations. As service providers, even very good ones, they didn’t aim to tackle the capitalist system generating the gross inequalities. The bodies would later be corroded and bureaucratised.
The Black Power activists were situated in a time of mass radicalisation, during which they engaged in a variety of protest movements. They began working closely with the Builders Labourers Federation, in particular with the union’s fight to save buildings in Victoria Street, Sydney, from being bought by private developers. Foley remembers BLF people like Bob Pringle and Joe Owens being “close comrades and staunch supporters”.
Alongside the BLF, the Redfern activists were involved in the 1973 cotton chippers’ strike in the town of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-black-power-came-wee-waa-1973-cotton-chippers-strike">Wee Waa</a>. Michael Anderson and Billy Craigie went to support the strike, while Paul Coe and Sol Bellear provided legal support for the arrested strikers. The Redfern activists’ connection to the strikers was important in breaking down racism and demonstrating the solidarity between activists in city areas and working-class people in rural regions. The strikes, with an array of support and militancy, were able to increase pay and introduce double time for Saturday and Sunday work, a massive win for the cotton workers.
The connections between the Redfern activists, the BLF and the strike in Wee Waa showcases the dynamic solidarity the workers’ movement can have with Aboriginal struggle. The Wee Waa strikers and the BLF’s unity with the activists in Redfern cut down the racist division between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, turning attention towards fighting the bosses of private developer companies and racist politicians and institutions.
In 1971, the South African Springbok rugby team toured Australia, and the Redfern activists, alongside the anti-apartheid campaign, prepared protest stunts to illustrate the barbarity of the South African <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/gary-foley-reflects-1971-springbok-tour-protests">apartheid</a> system. Actions included storming fields and even interrogating members of the Springbok team, which was staying at the Squire Inn, close to the Redfern activists’ communal “Black Power” house. Foley and others donned South African jerseys and entered the Squire Inn to confront the players. After the Springboks’ departure, members of the anti-apartheid campaign, in conjunction with the Gurindji land rights campaign, called for a march against racism and left the organising of the march to the Redfern Black Power group. 
The 1971 Springbok tour enabled the Redfern activists to highlight the parallels of South African and Australian racial policies and also helped the Redfern activists to prepare for one of the greatest political protests in radical Australian history. In response to Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon’s denial of land rights, Billy Craigie, Tony Coorie, Michael Anderson and Bertie Williams were driven by Communist Party photographer Noel Hazzard to Canberra to erect a beach umbrella on the lawns outside Parliament House, in what was the beginning of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/celebrating-50-years-aboriginal-tent-embassy">Aboriginal Tent Embassy</a>. The idea behind the embassy, Foley says, was to show that “Aborigines were treated like aliens in their own land”. Students at the nearby Australian National University opened their union building for support activities, while members of the BLF and the Communist Party visited the embassy in solidarity.
The government ordered the police to remove the protesters. Jenny Munro recalls that when they moved in, the cops “didn’t care if anyone got hurt”. In response, more than 2,000 Aboriginal people, socialists and left-wing activists staged one of the biggest land rights demonstrations in Australian history on 30 June 1972. Unfortunately, after the Tent Embassy protest, the NSW government went on the offensive against Redfern. In April 1973, a Commonwealth grant for the purchase of 41 houses in Louis and Caroline streets was <a href="http://kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/205.pdf">approved</a>. This broke up the Redfern community. New regulations on public housing tenants were imposed, and, Foley says, “Aboriginal families were forced into the western suburbs of Sydney, one family per street as a return of the assimilation policy”. The offensive against Aboriginal people in the suburb has never really ended.
There are many lessons to learn from the Black Power movement in Redfern. Munro takes pride in the fact that the Black Power activists’ “training came from the streets, fighting the police in the big smoke”. This grassroots focus is something we must replicate today. Our politics and organising can’t be advanced by seeking out careers in the state and NGO bureaucracies or through reformist organisations that back the capitalist class. If we want power, we’ve got to fight for it.

Are migrants colonisers?

How corporate Australia blackwashes its complicity in racism

Right-wing protests building in Spain

A history of Black Power in Redfern

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