Learning in activism

Tulladunna: Workers rights & safety

Cotton chipping workers’ safety & pay. Land rights. Deaths in Custody.

The occupation of the Tulladunna camp site at Wee Waa in winter, 1981, planned to focus on 2 issues: 

• Labour exploitation: racism and industrial toxicity: the recent history of wage exploitation for casual contract labourers and danger from the toxic chemicals used in rural industries, particularly cotton. Aboriginal workers took industrial action in December 1972 and January 1973 – demanding decent wages and safe conditions.

• Land Rights: the cotton industry led to more housing insecurity for Aboriginal people who had already been dispossessed and forced off their land – the Local Council had closed Tulladunna camping ground for Aboriginal chippers to force them to live 8 km out of town. 

But just before the planned occupation began: 

• Deaths in police custody: Eddie Murray, the son of activists Arthur and Leila Murray, was arrested on a minor charge and died shortly after in the police cells in Wee Waa. The Murray family and their community did not believe the police account of suicide and began the long campaign for a proper investigation into his death.

So the occupation went ahead – now focussed on 3 issues.

Exploitation: workers’ safety and pay

The irrigated cotton industry came to Australia in the early 1960s. Although the industry used many chemical herbicides and pesticides, it found difficulties in the period when cotton plants were small. Weeds grew thickly during summer where the water was being delivered onto the cotton, so the weeds threatened to smother the young crops. The only way to remove them was to chip them out by hand, a backbreaking job in the intense summer heat. 

Most of these ‘cotton chippers’ were Aboriginal workers, who took these hard and low-paid jobs because they had no other choices. They were facing severe unemployment because rural industries were mechanising and reducing their workforce. Chipping cotton might be the only job that Aboriginal workers could get all year. Over 1200 Aboriginal workers came from all over NSW to work on the cotton fields, employed by contractors in severely exploitative conditions because they were being squeezed by the cotton farmers. What little accommodation was made available for workers was expensive, so no Aboriginal people took it. Instead, they camped out on the large reserve called Tulladunna near town, where there was no washing or toilet facilities but where the river was close.

There were no toilets or washing facilities either in the fields and chippers were not protected from the sun. Already in that summer of 1972-73, a number of chippers had collapsed on the fields from heat stroke. Just as dangerous, the pesticides sprayed onto the crops were toxic: workers were exposed either as they moved along the rows or, as often happened, they were sprayed themselves as they worked on the crops while the crop-dusting planes flew other them. Just two of these chemicals were chlordimeform (only banned in 1976) and endosulphans, known already to cause immediate illness and long-term disease. View transcript Siobhan McHughes interview: Ockham’s Razor

The chippers faced hostility from the white townspeople who resented the annual arrival of the seasonal workers and urged the police to take aggressive methods, including an informal curfew and frequent arrests in which Aboriginal people were held for days but released with no charge. During the intense heat of December and January, a number of Aboriginal cotton chippers had collapsed and died in the cotton fields and their deaths were blamed on the conditions they faced there. Despite this dangerous exploitation and harassment, the chippers received little support from the Australian Workers Union, and their frustration broke out in industrial action.

Local Aboriginal cotton workers were supported by the NSW Aboriginal Legal Service and by the NSW Builders Labourers Federation, with whom Kevin Cook was an organiser. The Aboriginal workers formed themselves into the Cotton Chippers’ Union and began strike action on Friday, 12 January which lasted till 26 January, 1973. Read Tribune article They gained the attention of the Australian Council of Churches, which sent the Rev H. Herbert to the town a few days later to report on Aboriginal chippers’ conditions. Read report by Rev H Herbert The newly-elected Federal Australian Labor Party Government also became involved, with Ministers expressing support for the Aboriginal workers. Read Canberra Times article The Australian Workers Union had earlier failed to support the cotton chippers because as casual, seasonal workers they needed different types of organising than did the majority of the AWU members, who were shearers and other more long-term labour. After the January strikes, the AWU became more active, supporting the workers to gain a negotiated interim settlement with a wage rise – from $1.16 per hour to $1.45 and some better conditions. There was still a long way to go. So Aboriginal activists and their supporters continued to press for better conditions and better wages, taking their claims to an Industrial court in December 1973. Read Canberra Times articles The NSW government continued to warn, however, through New Dawn, its magazine for Aboriginal communities, that conditions would still be poor in the 1974 summer and Aboriginal people should expect fewer jobs.

Dispossession and Displacement leads to demands for secure Land Rights

By 1981, there had been few improvements in conditions for Aboriginal cotton chippers in Wee Waa. Aboriginal workers had continued to face toxic spraying and there were still few amenities provided for seasonal workers. Then the Shire Council supported white residents’ demands that Aboriginal people be moved out of sight. What few amenities had been erected at Tulladunna were pulled down and re-erected on a camping block 8 km out of town, next to a commercial piggery, so the site was referred to by all as The Piggery. This move severely disadvantaged Aboriginal workers, who relied on the river to fish and wash, as well as proximity to the township not only for purchasing food but to gain work from the contractors who took on extra labourers daily from the camp site. Above all, the Council was contemptuously demonstrating white power over Aboriginal land. So during National Aborigines Week, in early July 1981, Wee Waa Aboriginal activists and their supporters – including a bus load of Tranby students – planned to occupy Tulladunna to make the point that this was Aboriginal land. 

Death in Police Custody

Then, just days before the Occupation was planned to begin, Eddie Murray, a young local Aboriginal man from the Murray family which had been active in the earlier industrial campaigns, died in police custody after being locked up on a minor charge. The Wee Waa police claimed he had committed suicide but there were many discrepancies in the police accounts. Suicide was a rare event among Aboriginal people at that time, and it seemed unlikely that this young man had taken his own life. Eddie’s family and their friends in Wee Waa and across the state were deeply suspicious. 

So the Occupation went ahead but its theme was broadened to become a protest about not only the industrial conditions of Aboriginal workers and the injustice of Council power over Aboriginal land and communities, but about the danger which all Aboriginal people faced at the hands of the police. Around 150 people came to Tulladunna for the occupation – from Wee Waa itself and from Dubbo, Walgett, Lightning Ridge and Collarenebri, from where many of the Wee Waa Aboriginal families had come in the 1960s.

The Wee Waa Aboriginal families who had roots in Collarenebri included the Murray family and the Flick family. So there were many relatives from Collarenebri at the Occupation, including Isabel Flick who became such a strong supporter of the Murray family in their calls for justice and who taught at Tranby. So too was Karen Flick, who had grown up in Wee Waa. She was the daughter of Joe Flick and Isobelle Walford Flick, who had moved to Wee Waa from Collarenebri in the late 1960s. Karen later came to work at Tranby as the Student Advisor and became an active member of the Black Deaths in Custody campaign. Along with people from the region, there was as well the busload of Tranby students, brought up by Kevin Cook, in his new role of Secretary General of the Cooperative. Everyone camped out in the bitter winter cold.

During one of the nights of the Occupation, some key sites for Wee Waa’s white residents were spray-painted with slogans. These places included the War Memorial and the Returned Servicemen’s League Club, (a racially segregated club which denied service to Aboriginal people, even though many Aboriginal people from the region had served overseas in the military in both World Wars). The spray-painted slogans opposed racism and violence and accused the police and the cotton industry of killing Aboriginal people. White townspeople were outraged!

Media attention was drawn by these disturbing events: the unexplained death in custody of a young Aboriginal man, the determined Occupation of Tulladunna in the bitter cold and the white town’s uproar about the graffiti. An ABC TV investigative team came to Wee War to cover the linked stories, with Jenny Brockie reporting. This investigative piece and the video footage shot by Madeline McGrady for her short film, Welcome To Wee Waa, recorded Aboriginal people’s views on the spot about the injustices they saw happening.

The Inquest into Eddie Murray’s death was held in two parts, first in Wee Waa then in Sydney, and many of the participants in the Occupation also attended both hearings. There were Tranby students in attendance at the Inquest and these events were one of the reasons the later Campaign to end Black Deaths in Custody was based at Tranby. The Coroner’s judgement was that Eddie’s death had been by suicide, but so many doubts remained that the Murray family and their supporters continued to call for a deeper inquiry. It was to be a long campaign, which became linked to the demands from Western Australian Nyungah communities about the similarly unexplained death of John Pat in police custody two years later, in September 1983. The families’ sustained and courageous calls were strongly supported by Tranby and it was in the Glebe campus that many of the meetings were held in the campaign which eventually led to a Federal Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, set up in 1987 and reporting in 1991. See Black Deaths in Custody Campaign

Although the Royal Commission Recommendations addressed some of the issues of Indigenous vulnerability, there have remained many questions. In recent times the disproportionate jailing of Aboriginal people has escalated and as a result, Aboriginal deaths in custody have continued to occur with distressing frequency. There are very real fears that the lessons learned from the tragedies which led to the Royal Commission have not been learned.

Yet some things have been won. The Local Aboriginal Land Council at Wee Waa has celebrated the return of Aboriginal control over Tulladunna by restoring the site to recognise the many Aboriginal workers’ families who lived on the area during the hard times of the cotton chipping work and the campaign to win justice in working conditions, in safety and cultural life. A ceremony to record this major restoration and history project was held in May, 2018. Professor Heidi Norman, a chief investigator on the Networking Tranby project and Director of the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Hub at UTS, was in Wee Waa to film this important ceremony marking the return of Aboriginal people’s control over their land and their celebration of their history of the struggle for justice.

Tulladunna, the video of the ceremony and recordings of the participants: