The only subject Gary Foley failed in the 1964 High School Certificate exam was history – which is of interest, he says, only because he is now a professor of history. It’s of interest too because Foley was the first Aboriginal student to sit the exam at his secondary school in rural New South Wales (NSW). ‘The only reason I got as far as I did before they threw me out was because I got a scholarship from the Gosford Apex Club,’ he explains, ‘which enabled my poor old grandmother to at least get me a school uniform so I didn’t stand out from all the rich white kids.’
It was also his first direct experience of racism. When the headmaster expelled him the following year, it was with the words ‘we don’t want your kind here’. It wasn’t a lack of love for history that spurred Foley’s rebellion, but rather a growing awareness of the irrelevance of what was being taught to him. ‘We had to learn the names of the kings and queens of England going back centuries and all that sort of nonsense,’ he says. It served as a useful lesson for him though. Years later, when he himself became a history professor, he resolved that what he taught his own students would be relevant, whether or not they liked it.
At 75, Foley is himself a kind of historical artefact – one of few surviving witnesses to some of the most pivotal events in contemporary Australia, from the 1967 referendum, the emergence of the Black Power movement and Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest in Canberra, to a new era of purported ‘reconciliation’ and another failed referendum in 2023.
‘I’m not only an Aboriginal, I’m an aberration, because I’ve lived a lot longer than I should have,’ he says. He’s joking, but there’s a grim truth to it. The majority of those who stood alongside him facing off the police at the Tent Embassy died young, mostly very young. ‘There’s only a few of us left,’ says Foley, who also appeared in a 1979 edition of New Internationalist on Aboriginal rights. ‘We’re the hardened, persistent ones who are too irritated to die.’ It’s a sober indicator, not only of continuing disparities in life expectancy, but of how little has changed in terms of the demands made by his generation – of the continuing currency of their anger.
Redfern radicalism
It was when Foley threw in the towel with school and headed to Sydney as an apprentice draughtsperson that he first found a forum for that collective anger. His move narrowly preceded the 1967 referendum on constitutional inclusion of Indigenous people in the census, and the concurrent collapse of the apartheid system that had governed their lives for over a century. In NSW alone, more than 50,000 people previously confined to rural reserves and missions (‘concentration camps’ in Foley’s words) suddenly found themselves free to move – and without any form of government support. There was a mass exodus toward the city, where the biggest Aboriginal community in history took shape in the now renowned, inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern. ‘Within two years of me arriving, I was in the midst of a big, Black ghetto of impoverished, landless refugees,’ Foley recounts. ‘The NSW police took it upon themselves to contain this sudden blip on big white Sydney and so began a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the community. It was in that context that I became politicized.’
From different geographies and backgrounds but all now confronted with the same problem of police violence, a younger generation of Redfern’s Aboriginal residents began talking, sharing stories and educating themselves and one another. Simultaneously, there was another influx of sorts into Sydney: US soldiers on rest and recuperation leave from the Vietnam war. A vast number of these troops were what Foley describes as the US’s ‘cannon fodder’ – working-class African Americans. ‘All these poor Blacks from the [US] ghettos would arrive in Sydney and ask themselves “where’s the Black community?”’, Foley recounts. ‘Well, there was no Black community except us. They too began hanging out in Redfern, sharing stories, weed and literature: from Native American texts to the writings of Malcolm X. ‘The situation they were describing in their community was pretty similar to the situation that confronted us – police harassment and brutality,’ he says.
A mirror for the racism of white Australia, Black Power campaigns in the US resonated in Redfern, in particular the Black Panthers in Oakland, California. Inspired by the latter’s so-called ‘Pig Patrols’, Foley and his peers – including the renowned activist Paul Coe – mounted an extensive police surveillance program. They gathered swathes of evidence on police violence and corruption, and incurred plenty of police beatings along the way. Their initiative laid the foundation for what soon became the Redfern Aboriginal Legal Service –
Australia’s first free, shopfront legal aid, and a concept that was later taken up by Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. This was followed by a medical centre, the first Aboriginal theatre company and other social programs.
Between student and civil rights movements in the Global North and decolonial campaigns in much of the Global South – radical struggles that were broadcast for the first time via television – it was a moment of international upheaval and disillusionment with the old order. This ethos was no less palpable in Australia in the aftermath of the 1967 referendum – a vote which returned the biggest ‘yes’ in national history, signaling apparent social unanimity on Aboriginal inclusion. ‘The older generation of Aboriginal political leaders had told us young people that it we got a “yes” vote then things would change for us,’ explains Foley. ‘But despite such an overwhelming vote of support, the governments did nothing. We realized that the older generation had sold us a pup. Their strategies and tactics had come to naught. That was the turning point. We set forth on our own path.’
With allies in the trade union movement and Australian Communist Party (which had previously had one of the world’s most radical manifestos on Indigenous self-determination, including advocating for an independent nation with its own consulate and army), they harnessed the radical political momentum – notably the anti-racism sentiment emerging in response to apartheid South Africa, re-focusing Australians’ gaze on the apartheid in their own backyard. ‘We were developing a really strong movement, a national Black Power movement, which was building rapidly in various parts of Australia,’ Foley says. ‘Some people called it the Self-Determination Movement, others called it the Land Rights Movement, but it was all the same thing.’
Aliens in their own land
With land rights marches in all Australia’s capital cities by 1971, Canberra was on high-alert. Then Liberal Party Prime Minister William McMahon chose the opportunity of his 1972 Australia Day speech to respond, making clear his government’s rejection of land rights. The same evening, a car set out from Redfern to Canberra. Pitching a beach umbrella on the lawns of Parliament House with a sign reading ‘Aboriginal Embassy’, the activists announced that they were ambassadors. Since they had been made landless, alien subjects on their own country in the prime minister’s speech, they also required their own formal representation, like all the other foreigners in Australia. A camp was set up and a list of demands submitted to the government, including land and mining rights, preservation of sacred sites and compensation for unreturned lands. All were flatly rejected. ‘The idea was to provide communities with a starting base to develop their own economic enterprises that weren't in conflict with their cultural values or environment,’ Foley explains. ‘We saw economic independence as the key prerequisite for genuine self-determination and political independence.’
‘The idea was to provide communities with a starting base to develop their own economic enterprises that weren’t in conflict with their cultural values or environment’
Within weeks, the Tent Embassy received visitors, from the Canadian Indian Claims Commission to Soviet diplomats, the Irish Republican Army and Whitlam, the Labor opposition leader at the time, who left with firm guarantees of land rights. His election to office later that year confirmed the success of the Tent Embassy – a voice for disillusionment with decades of conservative rule and a signpost for the formal end of the policy of assimilation. In his victory speech, Whitlam declared that land rights would be granted ‘because all of us as Australians are diminished while the Aborigines are denied their rightful place in this nation’. It was the last time Foley ever believed a word a politician said, he notes.
‘I regard Whitlam as by far the greatest Australian Prime Minister in my lifetime, and yet he failed us,’ says Foley. Whitlam, an avowed republican, was up against a monolith of Western imperial interests – including, Foley notes, the CIA, which purportedly played a role in his 1975 dismissal by the Governor-General, the official representative of the British Crown. But the failure of his government to institute more far-reaching land rights and structures of self-determination set the country firmly back on a course of inequity. Subsequent governments have granted cosmetic land rights alongside the co-option of Aboriginal self-determination into various government bodies – what Foley calls the ‘Black bureaucracy’ – such as the 1991 establishment of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission (ATSIC), or in Foley’s words, ‘Aborigines Talking Shit in Canberra’. These policies have produced a lucrative industry under which assimilation has continued to be peddled in the name of advancing equality, or ‘Closing the Gap’.
‘If the government had given us what we were demanding back then in the way of land rights and compensation, they wouldn’t have spent a third of what they've spent since,’ Foley says, noting that he’d be richer than Elon Musk if the budget for Aboriginal affairs had all actually gone to Aboriginal people (spending on indigenous programmes in 2023–24 alone was approximately AUD $5.3 billion (USD $3.28 billion)). ‘All this in a fruitless quest to tinker with the edges of the problem – the health situation, the incarceration rate – all of it’s tinkering at the edges. And that’s why nothing ever changed.’ When Foley first moved to Redfern, 99 per cent of Aboriginal people were living in poverty. When they established the Redfern legal service, there were no Aboriginal lawyers. ‘Today we’ve got about more than ten millionaires. Today there are now more Aboriginal lawyers than ever, and there are correspondingly more Aboriginal people in jail than there’s ever been,’ he says. ‘But there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’
Looking forward, going backwards
Foley says he doesn’t expect to see much change in his lifetime, that the discourse on race in Australia – especially when compared to the US – is still extremely juvenile. ‘Australians need to honestly face up to their own history. Until such times as people come to terms with the truth of the past, you cannot make any progress forwards,’ he explains. ‘That is going to be one of the most important prerequisites for any notions of Treaty and reconciliation.’
He is speaking in the future tense because, with most Australians still staggeringly uninformed about the country’s 80,000-year history and denialism rife in university history departments and national curricula, such progress seems a long way off. Most of the country’s politicians are ignorant of even basic notions of white privilege, as Foley points out, and racism is as entrenched as ever – a fact that resounded in the vicious 2023 referendum campaign and outcome. ‘After the 1967 referendum we saw the beginnings of the white backlash,’ he says. ‘Since then, we’ve had six decades of culture wars, we’ve had Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, multi-million-dollar anti-Aboriginal publicity campaigns financed by the mining industry to protect their vested interests, and Rupert Murdoch's tabloids pushing anti-Aboriginal propaganda.’
It is probably time for him to go away and die, Foley reckons – he will only get more disappointed the older he gets. But he is not entirely without hope, taking heart from teaching – and often being taught by – his history students at Victoria University in Melbourne’s diverse inner-north, a refreshing change from his previous posts at the country’s more elite universities. He also sees a staunch and uncompromising generation of Aboriginal activists and leaders heading the struggle in new forms. Just as in the 1980s his mob established the Aboriginal Information Service in London and alliances with the German Greens, new forms of international solidarity are being forged with indigenous and anti-colonial movements globally, such as in North America and Palestine.
When asked for advice though, Foley tells the youth of today only to dress well so they look good in their ASIO (Austalia’s national security agency) shots (he has an extensive file from his Redfern days) and to not listen to him. ‘I tell my students that in the same way we said to the old people that their tactics and strategies had failed, you young people are perfectly entitled to tell my generation that we haven’t succeeded,’ he says. ‘So it’s your turn now. Here’s the baton, take it and run.’
