Born: 16 August 1943, Australia
Died: 14 November 2010
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Roberta Barkley Patterson
The following is excerpted from The Conversation essay Australia once enshrined white superiority. These 10 trailblazers helped shift our attitudes to race by Angela Woollacott, Australian National University. It is republished under a Creative Commons license.
In early 20th century Australia, Indigenous people were denied citizenship and the nation had a racially exclusive immigration policy. Most people not only accepted the “White Australia” policy but openly identified with its assumption of white supremacy. Popular culture was replete with overtly racist terms and images.
Even after World War II, as Australians began to focus on their region and nearby colonies threw off their imperial rulers, acceptance of “White Australia” continued for many.
Yet from the late 1940s, some Australians began to question the racial inequality on which colonialism relied. By 1975, when the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, racially exclusive immigration had been jettisoned and First Nations people had legal equality, albeit not parity.
Such a profound shift in popular consensus did not occur spontaneously. Here are ten key Australians who prodded the country to question its own thinking on race.
10. Roberta Sykes
Roberta Sykes (1943-2010) was the daughter of an Australian mother and African–American father. Of her childhood in Townsville in the 1940s-50s, Sykes would recall:
As children, we were overwhelmed with the history, images and successes of white people to the extent that we could not have been blamed for doubting our own existence and worth and the existence and worth of all, and any, other Black people.
Forced out of school early by racism, she became a nurse, before working as a journalist. She helped to found the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, among many other entities. In the early 1970s, as a prominent activist for Aboriginal rights, Sykes was invited to speak on racism, rights and colonialism in countries including the UK, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.
She earned her PhD at Harvard University, held positions in academia and as a consultant, and was awarded the 1994 Australian Human Rights Medal. In 1986, in her Australia Day address to the National Press Club, she condemned the fact that “Australian Aborigines were still living under siege almost 200 years after white people arrived on their land”.
Angela Woollacott, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
