In 1965 I think it was, we were invited to go in and talk to the then prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies. There was a deputation from all over Australia of Aboriginal spokesmen and women and we did go in. Sir Robert Menzies had told the public and the politicians, the people of the House, that he would not have a referendum in his lifetime as prime minister. He’d been badly beaten on the referendum before where he had appealed to the people to outlaw Communism and when the people said ‘No outlawing of the Communist Party’, Sir Robert Menzies refused then to have anything to do with referendums in his lifetime as prime minister.
We lobbied the House of Parliament and it’s to their discredit, really, that when we asked them to bring out the laws concerning the Aboriginal people that there was no laws, no books on the Aboriginal people in their archives or libraries, and they had to quickly have them printed, so that the politicians could read what it was, for and against the Aborigines. There was one, however, on the national – the Canberra law book saying that if Aboriginals go into Canberra, any Justice of the Peace could declare them illegal immigrants into Canberra and they could be chased out of Canberra. This still applied to us, incidentally, at this period of time. And we always made a joke of it when we went to Canberra, you know, ‘If you get into trouble, you know the law on the book. If a JP says Get Out, make sure you get your blanket,’ because the law still said that before sending them out of Canberra, they must first issue them with one government blanket. So we were determined we’d get our government blanket if ever they threw us out.
We told everyone this and we made it a laughingstock – Canberra a laughingstock – to such an extent that the first thing Sir Robert Menzies did was delete that off the Canberra constitution. So it’s no longer there.
