The Australian Aborigines’ League could not ignore the persecution of the Jews by Nazis. What might the league’s founder, William Cooper, make of a new war?
On the morning of Tuesday, December 6 in 1938, a small group of Aboriginal Australians gathered at a rented home at 73 Southampton Street in Footscray. The men wore suits and hats, the women were in their town best.
Amid international alarm and condemnation, in Melbourne, the members of the Australian Aborigines’ League – who may never have met a Jewish person, but who knew a great deal about anguish – passed a resolution. Cooper and his friends left their letter anyway, asking that it be sent along to the Nazi government.
Whether the protest was an attempt to draw a parallel between the suffering of Indigenous Australians with that of Germany’s Jews or a purely altruistic gesture, it seems possible to discern an echo of the generosity of another dispossessed people. Yet, the Choctaw had empathy for strangers starving on the far side of the world. They raised $US170 and sent it to an Irish relief fund.It took decades, however, for the humble protest of William Cooper and his friends to become widely celebrated in Australia, despite books having been written about his life and a federal electorate being named after him in 2021.
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