Religion

The Co-operative at Tranby had been set up in 1957 by the more left-wing sections of the Anglican Board of Missions, mainly through Canberra High Anglican Bishop, Rev. Edward Burgmann – known as the ‘Red Bishop’. He had supported the Rev Alf Clint in his work in setting up community co-operatives in Papua New Guinea, North Queensland and the northern rivers area of New South Wales. Alf Clint and Bishop Burgmann saw these co-operatives as empowering Aboriginal communities so they would be able to extract themselves from exploitative labour relationships with colonial plantation owners and pastoralists. Kevin Cook and Bob Bellear continued this interest in the radical wing of Church groups, in particular the Australian Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

The Australian Council of Churches (ACC) set up an Aboriginal Advisory Board in the later 1970s, chaired by Gary Foley, a former Tranby student who was an outspoken critic of the damage that Church missions had done to Aboriginal people. As Chair of the ACC Advisory Board, Foley became the Aboriginal consultant to a team from the World Council of Churches’ Program to Combat Racism which visited Australia in mid 1981 to report on the conditions of Aboriginal people. Their members came from Pakistan, Costa Rica, East Germany, South Korea, the United States, Zaire and Britain. Gary Foley said he believed Aboriginal people would get a fairer hearing internationally than they would in Australia.

→ A World Focus on Aborigines Conditions, Daily Mirror, (Sydney) 16 June 1981 [PDF 168KB]

The WCC team’s report heavily criticised Australia for its discrimination against Aboriginal people. This report was a major embarrassment for the Australian government as it prepared for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting which was held in Australia soon after. The publicity generated by the international report enabled Aboriginal protests to be profiled across the country.

→ Church Group slams neglect of Blacks, The Age (Melbourne), 11 August 1981 [PDF 226KB]

→ The unshakeable black conscience, The Age (Melbourne), 25 Sept 1981 [PDF 908KB]

In 1981, Bob Bellear resigned from the ACC Advisory Committee to focus on his legal studies, and Kevin Cook took his place. This photograph shows the Advisory Committee in 1982, with members Phillip Hall (Walgett), Mick Miller (Townsville), Gary Foley (Chair: Nambucca Heads and later Melbourne), Joyce Clague (Maclean), Kevin Cook (Wollongong and Tranby) and Bob Weatherall (Queensland).

In 1983, Kevin became ACC Committee Chair after Gary Foley retired to concentrate on teaching. Kevin held that role for ten years and recalled his interaction with the ACC during the writing of his book, Making Change Happen. He saw this as another example of the productive outcomes that could be achieved from building alliances. The people Kevin had come to know so well at Coady International Institute in Canada had showed him how valuable the networks of churches and related organisations like co-operatives could be in supporting and expanding the political movements of the Philippines, India, South Africa and Zimbabwe. This is how he remembered it:

I think how we got everything through, was with the Australian Council of Churches. Now what we’d been saying in the NSW land rights movement was that we had to get the trade union movement, the churches, and other groups, other forward-thinking groups, to support us.

So I went in there to the ACC and here we were – we had a line right to the Australian Council of Churches. And soon as we got in it, we were able to direct funding to Aboriginal organisations that would never, ever have been funded.

Particularly like the Kimberley Land Council. And there were a number of other groups who would never have got funded, only through us. We didn’t fund the medical centres or things like that, because they were getting funded already.

The Australian Council of Churches was an incredibly good organisation to work with at that particular time. You could go into the office and see the coordinator of the Australian Council of Churches and just sit down and say, ‘Look these are the issues that we want the churches to support’. And here was one fella that could just send out a fax to every church.

You’ve gotta learn to survive. That was one of the things we learned in the NSW Land Council struggle. That was a good struggle and we used everything that we knew. We used the trade union movement, the churches, and a heap of prominent non-Aboriginal people, to get that through.

We had ten years of having that direct contact with the churches. I don’t think we ‘used’ them: we worked with the churches and it went really well.

- Making Change Happen, 278-280.