William Cooper: Aboriginal Sunday
Friends in Christ, I am pleased to advise that our Archbishop, Kanishka Raffel, will be preaching at all three services tomorrow, 22nd January, the Sunday before Australia Day.
Along with some other churches, we are marking this as 'Aboriginal Sunday'. The Archbishop will be preaching from Genesis 4, reflecting on the sad story of Cain and Abel and its significance today.
Bangerang man, William Cooper
'Aboriginal Sunday' comes originally from the urging of a great Aboriginal Christian leader called William Cooper, and so I thought I could tell you a little about him, courtesy of information in an article written by Matt Busby Andrews, a former member of the Cathedral community.
William Cooper was born in 1860, and whitefellas had effectively taken their land – the fertile country along the Murray River north of Echuca. The new white masters could be cruel and were known to deny Aboriginal pastoral workers their wage. Stories were told of landed men going on “blackhunts” after church picnics of a Sunday.
Amid this violence around the river, William Cooper found one place where he knew he was safe. It was on an old sacred site, called Maloga. His sister had taken him there when he was 14, and he’d met a towering white man with a long black beard, called Daniel Matthews. Here he learnt to read and write – and the great stories from the black book from an ancient people, the Jews, who had become slaves, and whom God, the Creator of the world, would rescue. All it took was a leader brave enough to confront Pharaoh and say: let my people go.
Following a church service in January, 1884, Cooper approached Daniel Matthews and said “I must give my heart to God…” He was the last of his brothers and sisters to become a Christian. But from there, he began a lifelong work to speak for “the least of these”, to confront governments when they were unjust, and to demand to be heard at the highest levels, from Premier and Prime Minister to the King.
Cooper’s long campaign for Aboriginal rights, especially land rights, began with the Maloga Petition in 1887. The petition to the Governor of NSW held that Aborigines of the district, “should be granted sections of land not less than 100 acres per family … always bearing in mind that the Aborigines were the former occupiers of the land.” This was 100 years before Mabo.
But it was well into his 70s, when Cooper really hit his straps. He moved to Footscray in western Melbourne in 1933. Here he found his calling as an activist, an organiser, and a relentless letter-writer.
By 1935 Cooper had helped establish the Australian Aborigines League. As its secretary, Cooper circulated a petition seeking direct representation in parliament, enfranchisement and land rights. He and his team petitioned King George V:
“Whereas it was not only a moral duty, but also a strict injunction included in the commission issued to those who came to people Australia that the original occupants and we, their heirs and successors, should be adequately cared for; and whereas the terms of the commission have not been adhered to, in that (a) our lands have been expropriated by your Majesty’s Government in the Commonwealth, (b) legal status is denied to us by your Majesty’s Government in the Commonwealth…”
Cooper's interactions with governments achieved little result. And so, Cooper’s Australian Aborigines League, with others, arranged a Day of Mourning to commemorate the sesquicentenary of colonisation, on Australia Day, 1938. The event, which was watched by journalists and police, was held in Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, was the first combined, interstate protest by Australian Aborigines.
Cooper is also famous for leading a protest to the Consul General of the German Third Reich, in Melbourne on December 6, 1938. This act followed Kristallnacht – a night that saw Hitler’s brown shirts rampage through the streets of Germany looting, burning and smashing Jewish stores and synagogues. Cooper's group of Christians protested against “the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany.” Yad Vashem, the world’s premier research centre on the Holocaust, says it was the only protest against of its kind around the world, and Cooper is memorialised in Israel as a result.
By the time of his death in 1941 William Cooper had achieved almost none of the goals he had set for himself. But his protégé, Pastor Doug Nicholls, would drive the next great Indigenous organisation, and they achieved the monumental outcome of the referendum on May 27, 1967, enabling the Commonwealth to count Aboriginal people as Australian citizens.
The one success achieved in William Cooper’s lifetime was the establishment of a National Aborigines Day, first celebrated in 1940 across the Protestant churches, which he achieved through his partnership with John Needham of St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney. It was first known as “Aborigines Sunday” and was celebrated on the Sunday nearest to Australia Day. Cooper's appeal still stands before all Christian people – in his own words from his day:
“We request that sermons be preached on this day dealing with the Aboriginal people and their need of the gospel and response to it and we ask that special prayer be invoked for all missionary and other effort for the uplift of the dark people.”
You can see why Christian church leaders are still responsive to such concerns today.
Warmly in Christ,
Sandy Grant
Dean of Sydney