Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian and an associate professor at Griffith University. She is the author of Glamour in the Pacific, Loving Protection?, and Uncommon Ground. Her articles have appeared in such journals as Feminist Review, Journal of Women’s History, and the Law and History Review.

The Lone Protestor

AM Fernando in Australia and Europe

By Fiona Paisley

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2012 Fiona Paisley
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-922059-05-5

Contents

Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Timeline,
Introduction,
CHAPTER ONE First Forty Years and his ‘Guiding Star’,
CHAPTER TWO Murder in Western Australia, 1903,
CHAPTER THREE Internment in Austria, 1916,
CHAPTER FOUR To the Swiss People, 1921,
CHAPTER FIVE Street Protest in Rome, 1925,
CHAPTER SIX Picketing Australia House, 1928,
CHAPTER SEVEN Testimony at the Old Bailey, 1929,
CHAPTER EIGHT Speaker in Hyde Park, into the 1930s,
CHAPTER NINE Civilising England, 1938,
Postscript,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

First Forty Years and his ‘Guiding Star’

At the heart of the story of Fernando’s childhood is a painful separation. Fernando was born to an Aboriginal mother in Woolloomooloo, Sydney on 6 April 1864, details about his origin and identity that he would repeat many times during the second half of his life. Record-keeping in the mid-nineteenth century in the colony of New South Wales rarely included Aboriginal births, so the story of his earliest years emerges from a patchwork of archival sources, including a number of evocative autobiographical statements he shared with some Anglo-Australian people he met in London during the late 1920s. While much about Fernando’s first years remains sketchy and dependent on hearsay, on a number of occasions he stressed the importance in his life of the Aboriginal mother he never really knew.

Several second-hand reports indicate that Fernando chose to explain himself to non-Aboriginal listeners as an Aboriginal man whose formative years were marked by rupture. When Fernando talked about his life with white supporters interested in his origins, connections of country, language or community were not the fundamental features of what he told them. Instead, he located his Aboriginality primarily in his connection to his mother who, he asserted, was the person who most inspired his life’s work. Or perhaps more precisely, it was her absence from his early life that became an abiding inspiration for his lifelong mission against injustice.

The guiding star of his life

In 1929, when he was sixty-five, Fernando honoured his mother as ‘the guiding star’ of his life. The moving phrase that so well captured the continuing presence of his mother was recorded by Mary Montgomery Bennett, an Anglo-Australian humanitarian living in London, who met Fernando that year. In two versions, one written to a colleague soon afterwards and the other published in a book in the following year, Bennett offered close approximations of Fernando’s own words:

A good father is good, but a good mother is above every other good. I was taken from my mother when I was little, but the thought of her has been the guiding star of my life.

I was taken from my tribe before I was old enough to remember my mother, but the thought of my mother is the guiding star of my life.

As these testimonials suggest — initially in Australia and later in Europe — in protesting for Aboriginal rights Fernando renewed a connection with his mother’s memory. Rather than being diminished by distance or the passing of time, their connection was commemorated in each of the acts of protest that signposted his political career. Unable (or unwilling) to provide many recollections about his early life, Fernando spoke instead about the spiritual guidance of his mother that linked him to the Aborigi