Aboriginal Hero An Exception

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31621, 6 March 1968, Page 18

Aboriginal Hero An Exception

(From DAVID BARBER, N.Z.P.A. special correspondent)

SYDNEY, March 5.

The day a near-hysterical crowd of 200,000 people turned out in the streets of Melbourne to give a hero’s welcome to Lionel Rose, a white housewife 900 miles away said: “I don’t want Aborigines living next door to me”.

The two unrelated incidents came last week as a pertinent reminder that Australia still has an acute racial problem and that the first Australians still have a long way to go to gain equality. As a world boxing champion, the shy 19-year-old is now socially acceptable to his fellow countrymen. As an ordinary Aboriginal, without fame, he would not be.

In Melbourne, excited crowds mobbed his car, swarmed forward to touch him, to shake his hand, to shout: “Good on yer.” In Kempsey, a small town in northern New South Wales, white families who will soon have Aboriginal neighbours, said: “We’re not against dark people, but this will devalue our houses.” In Melbourne, fans shouted: “You beauty.” Girls cried: “We love you, Lionel.” In Kempsey, a housewife said: “You wouldn’t want your daughter to marry one.” Lionel Rose has arrived. He has come a long way from the battered and rusted tin shack with a dirt floor where he spent his childhood. He and his mother and eight brothers and sisters were feted by Melbourne’s social elite at last week’s civic reception. But across the continent, from Kalgoorlie to Cairns, 80,000 of his blood brothers still live primitive, povertystricken lives, their opportunities for advancement restricted by the fears and prejudices of their fellow countrymen.

Rose himself, Intelligent enough to have invested his ring earnings, has been quick to play down the racial aspect of his new-found fame. “I’m an Australian, and I think of myself and everyone else as Australians,” he rebuked a radio interviewer who suggested that he was a credit to his race. “I am not accustomed to thinking of people in terms of black and white.” But Australians at all levels of society have found it difficult to ignore the colour of the skin of their new national sporting hero. The newly-appointed Minister for Aboriginal Affairs,

Mr W. C. Wentworth, whose first official engagement was to welcome Rose home, hoped that his success would “materially help influence the outlook of all Australians towards his people.” But the “Sydney Morning Herald,” noting the saying that there was no better fighter than a hungry fighter, expressed the hope that Lionel Rose would be the first

and last Aboriginal to become a world boxing champion. “So many young Aborigines should not have to turn to battering an opponent for an equal chance of earning a good living and winning esteem,” the newspaper said in an editorial. “The success of a champion somehow lifts our collective ego. Our conscience is not so easily aroused.” Any Australian consciences that were aroused last week by the contrast of Rose’s homecoming to the outbursts of the housewives of Kempsey, must have been further jolted by another famous Aboriginal. Mr Charles Perkins, the first member of his race to graduate from an Australian University, and an earnest young man utterly dedicated to working for his people, repeated earlier warnings that a mass uprising of Aborigines fighting for equal rights would occur within five years unless millions of dollars were spent raising this status in the community.