Jack Patten

Born on the Margins of the Barwon

Jack Patten was born in 1905 in Brewarrina, a small town on the Barwon River in the far north-west of New South Wales, country belonging to the Ngiyampaa people — a community that had by the early twentieth century been largely confined to government-managed Aboriginal reserves and subjected to the comprehensive administrative control exercised by the NSW Aborigines Protection Board. That board had sweeping powers over virtually every aspect of Aboriginal life: it could determine where Aboriginal people lived, restrict their movements, remove their children, regulate their employment, and withhold wages. It was, in effect, a system of administrative apartheid, and the people it governed had no meaningful recourse against its decisions.

Patten grew up under this system and developed, from an early age, a fierce and articulate rejection of it. He was literate, politically astute, and possessed of a clarity of moral argument that gave his writing and speaking unusual force. Unlike many Aboriginal activists of his generation, he had not been absorbed into the missionary or pastoral labour systems that bound so many of his contemporaries to forms of dependence that made organised political action difficult. He moved, instead, toward the emerging networks of Aboriginal political organisation that were beginning to coalesce in New South Wales in the late 1920s and 1930s, drawn by a conviction that the conditions of Aboriginal life could not be changed by petitions and appeals alone — that what was required was organised, collective political pressure that the government could not ignore.

The broader context of his activism was one of paradox. The 1930s saw Aboriginal people in New South Wales and across Australia living under conditions of poverty, restriction, and official neglect that bore no relationship to the values of equality and democratic governance that Australian society claimed to embody. Aboriginal workers — where they were permitted to work at all — received wages a fraction of those paid to white workers for identical labour. Aboriginal children were removed from their families under assimilationist policies designed to breed the "Aboriginality" out of subsequent generations. Movement was controlled; marriage was controlled; access to education was controlled. And yet the political system that maintained all of this presented itself to the world as a democracy.

The Aborigines Progressive Association

In 1937, Jack Patten became president of the Aborigines Progressive Association — an organisation that had been founded earlier in the decade by Pearl Gibbs and others, and that had established itself as the most politically assertive Aboriginal organisation in New South Wales. Under Patten's leadership, the APA developed a programme that was clear, consistent, and radical by the standards of the time: full citizenship for all Aboriginal Australians, the abolition of the Aborigines Protection Board, equal wages for Aboriginal workers, access to education on equal terms with white Australians, and the right of Aboriginal people to determine where they lived and how they raised their children.

These were not modest demands. In the context of 1930s Australia, where Aboriginal people were officially classified under flora and fauna legislation in some states, where the prevailing government policy was one of "protection" that amounted to incarceration, and where the mainstream political parties regarded Aboriginal affairs as an embarrassing problem to be managed rather than a moral catastrophe to be addressed, the APA's programme was profoundly confrontational. Patten made no effort to soften it. He was a polemicist as well as an organiser, and his writing had a directness and anger that was unusual for Aboriginal public discourse at the time, when the risks of speaking too loudly were considerable.

He also understood the power of publication. The APA produced its own manifesto — Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights! — which laid out the case for full citizenship in language that was accessible, morally forceful, and designed to reach white Australians as well as Aboriginal communities. It was one of the first sustained political documents produced by an Aboriginal organisation in Australia, and its arguments anticipated the constitutional changes that would not be achieved until the 1967 referendum, three decades later.

The 1938 Day of Mourning

The sesquicentenary of British settlement in Australia — the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788 — was marked by the Australian government with elaborate celebrations. A re-enactment of the landing was staged at Sydney Cove. Pageants were organised in cities and towns across the country. The narrative was one of triumphant nation-building: 150 years of progress, prosperity, and civilisation built on what official discourse presented as empty land.

Patten and the APA saw the sesquicentenary as an opportunity rather than an occasion for celebration. While white Australia partied, they organised. On the same day — 26 January 1938 — Patten and his co-organiser Pearl Gibbs convened what they called the Day of Mourning: a conference held at the Australian Hall in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, that brought together Aboriginal people from across New South Wales and beyond to assert a counter-narrative to the official celebrations and to demand, in the most public way possible, the rights that 150 years of colonialism had denied them.

"This festival of 150 years of so-called 'progress' in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original Australian inhabitants by the white invaders of this country."

The Day of Mourning was, by any measure, a historic event. It was the first national civil rights gathering in Australian history organised by and for Aboriginal people. The conference passed a resolution calling on the federal government to grant full citizenship rights to all Aboriginal Australians — the right to vote, the right to equal wages, freedom from the control of the Protection Boards, and access to education, health, and social services on equal terms with white Australians. A deputation was sent to Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who received it and promised to consider the demands. He did not act on them. But the event itself — the gathering, the resolution, the deputation — established something that could not be taken back: the documented, organised, public demand of Aboriginal Australians for the rights that democratic theory said they should already possess.

The Campaign Beyond the Conference

The Day of Mourning was the most visible act of Patten's political career, but it was not the whole of it. In the years that followed, he continued to organise through the APA, travelling to Aboriginal communities across New South Wales, speaking at meetings, gathering signatures for petitions, and maintaining the pressure on state and federal governments that the 1938 conference had initiated. He was particularly focused on the wages question — the systematic theft of Aboriginal labour through wage suppression and non-payment that the Protection Board system had institutionalised — and on the conditions on Aboriginal reserves, which he documented with a journalist's eye for detail and a politician's sense of what would land hardest with an audience.

He also engaged with the labour movement, seeking alliances with trade unions and left-wing political organisations that were, at least in principle, committed to the same values of equality and workers' rights that Aboriginal people were demanding. These alliances were often fragile and sometimes hypocritical — the labour movement's commitment to Aboriginal workers' rights did not always extend to practical solidarity — but Patten pursued them because he understood that Aboriginal people could not achieve their political objectives without allies in the broader Australian polity.

The APA eventually lost momentum in the early 1940s, as wartime conditions disrupted civil society organisation and the federal government's attention turned to the Pacific War. Patten's later years were marked by the kind of personal and political difficulty that so often accompanied the lives of Aboriginal activists operating against the grain of their society, without institutional support and under constant administrative scrutiny. He died in 1957, before the 1967 referendum that vindicated so many of the arguments he had spent his life making.

The Foundation Beneath the Movement

The historical significance of Jack Patten has sometimes been obscured by the later fame of the 1967 referendum and the figures most closely associated with it — Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs, and others who carried the movement through its middle decades. But the foundation on which those later achievements rested was in significant part his. The Day of Mourning established the precedent of organised, public, national Aboriginal political action. The APA manifesto established the framework of citizenship rights as the appropriate language for Aboriginal political claims. The deputation to Lyons established the practice of direct political engagement with the federal government that later activists would develop and refine.

He was, in short, one of the architects of modern Aboriginal political organisation in Australia, and his work in the 1930s created the conditions in which the work of the 1950s and 1960s became possible. The Day of Mourning is now commemorated annually and is recognised as one of the founding moments of the Australian civil rights movement. When Australians gather on 26 January to debate what that date should mean and who it excludes, they are, whether they know it or not, continuing the argument that Jack Patten and his colleagues put on the public record in Sydney in 1938 — the argument that a nation cannot honestly celebrate its founding while refusing to acknowledge what that founding cost the people who were already here.