William COOPER

COOPER, WILLIAM (b. near Echuca, Vic, 1861; d. Mooroopua, Vic, 29 Mar 1941). Aboriginal activist.

The fifth of eight children of Kitty Lewis of the Jotijota Murray River people, and James Cooper, a white labourer, young William Cooper was one of the first pupils of Daniel and Janet Matthews (q.v.) when they founded their Maloga Mission near Echuca in 1874. The last of his family to become a Christian, he retained his strong Christian faith to the end of his life. Forced initially to work on nearby Moira and Ulupna stations, he was sent to Melbourne to the home of one of the station owners, prominent Victorian politician and businessman Sir John O'Shanassy, for whom he worked as a coachman.

Cooper returned to Maloga in 1884 marrying Annie Murri in the same year. She died five years later, survived by one of their two children. Cooper married Agnes Hamilton in 1893. They had six children: Lynch, a champion runner won the Stawell Gift in 1928 and the World Sprint in 1929; Amy became matron of Melbourne's first Aboriginal Hostel; Dan was killed in World War One. Agnes died in 1910 and Cooper married Sarah Nelson (née McCrae) in 1928.

After 1884, Cooper spent his working life as a shearer and handyman in central and western Vic and NSW, necessary because Maloga and its government-funded successor, Cumeroogunga, needed all able-bodied men to work outside for wages to support their dependents. He quickly became active in agitation to obtain land grants for Aborigines of the regions in which he worked. In order to represent them better he attended adult literacy classes, read widely, and joined the Australian Workers' Union. In his earliest surviving letter, Cooper lobbied his local MP: 'there have been no grants of land made to our tribe ... I do trust that you will be successful in securing this small portion of a vast territory which is ours by Divine Right.' Officialdom ignored him.

Although ageing and partly deaf, Cooper left Cumeroogunga in 1933 in order to receive the old-age pension, which meagre resource he used to fund his campaign for Aboriginal rights which lasted until his death. In Melbourne, he joined the impoverished Aboriginal community around Fitzroy, which included many ex-residents of Cumeroogunga. Frustrated that Aborigines were British subjects but mostly denied Australian citizenship, Cooper met with parliamentarians and wrote at least 77 letters to government officials and politicians between 1933 and 1940. Cooper was greatly helped by several white supporters, including Arthur Burdeu, the Christian president of one of the Victorian railways unions; Helen Baillie, a wealthy woman with trade union sympathies; and Ernest Gribble (q.v.), by then the Church of England missionary at Palm Island.

Cooper understood the importance of organising Aboriginal people to speak with a united voice. He set up several groups which finally developed into the Australian Aborigines League in 1936. His main strategy was to organise a petition to King George V, calling on him to intervene to prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race and to grant them representation in the Commonwealth parliament. Obstructed by public officials and state governments, he persisted nevertheless in circulating his petition throughout Australia. Cooper, however, found it increasingly hard to maintain optimism. In his AAL report for 1936 he wrote 'At times I get very discouraged ... We have suffered enough, God knows, but surely the day of our deliverance is nigh. I hope I live to see it...' He told the Melbourne Herald, 'We are coming to the end of our tether'. In a letter to Ernest Gribble, Arthur Burdeu wrote 'Mr Cooper does get depressed at the slow progress... Still, God is not dead'.

Cooper was not asking for a great deal—simply to have the benefits enjoyed by other Australians. He spoke little of separate development, nor even of distinctive Aboriginal culture, but pride in his race and the certainty of his Christian beliefs always underlay his writing. Despite dwindling hopes, Cooper stubbornly presented his petition to the Commonwealth government in October 1937, demanding that it be forwarded to the new King George VI, but it was never forwarded. Aborigines were not citizens of the Commonwealth and the parliament concluded it need not represent them to the King. Ageing rapidly, Cooper conceived the idea of the Day of Mourning which Aboriginal people held in Sydney and Melbourne during the sesquicentenary of European settlement on 26 January 1936.

Cooper was angered by what he regarded as the apathy of the churches. Nevertheless, he defended the role of missions to the end of his life. One of his last acts was to appeal to the heads of churches to make the Sunday before Australia Day into Aboriginal Sunday to pray for the success of missions and for 'the uplift of the dark people'. The first Aboriginal Sunday was 28 January 1940. Cooper died at the age of 80, survived by six children and his third wife. He is buried in an unmarked grave at Cumeroogunga.

ADB 8; Andrew Markus, Blood from a Stone (Sydney, 1988); John Harris, One Blood(Sutherland, 1990)

JOHN HARRIS