If you want to meet the best Australians, meet Indigenous men and women who understand this extraordinary country and have fought for the rights of the world’s oldest culture. Theirs is a struggle more selfless, heroic and enduring than any historical adventure non-Indigenous Australians are required incessantly to celebrate.
I know this to be true, because I have been reporting from and filming in Indigenous communities for most of my life. In 1984, I met one of the best Australians, Kwementyaye Randall.
Kwementyaye Randall was, like so many others, stolen from his mother. He was seven when he was taken by the “authorities’, and he never saw his mother again and grew up alone. Indeed, he felt the full force of Australian colonial brutality and duplicity most of his life; but he fought it and rose above it, and he never faltered in confronting the injustice imposed on Indigenous people. I mourn the passing of this old friend, a real hero in a nation that has yet to find the moral sense to honour those who courageously stand against oppression within Australia.
When I interviewed Kwementyaye for my film, Utopia, in 2012, in Mutitjulu in the shadow of the great rock known as Uluru, he was white haired and a distinguished elder, but he still had the twinkle of the rebel in his eyes. His ballad “My Brown Skin Baby, They Take ‘Im Away,” is one of the most moving political songs of our time. He sang it for me when we first met and I can still feel my thrilling response. Yes, it was a sad song; but it was also angry and it said there would be a fight until there was justice.
Sitting in the shade outside his house more than 30 years later, he spoke eloquently about the love and respect for this land that he and Indigenous people felt.