Freedom Rider Ann Curthoys joined 60th Anniversary events commemorating the historic action for Aboriginal rights and justice. The following is her keynote address delivered in Walgett on 17 February 2025, 60 years to the day the Freedom Rides arrived.
It is a great honour to be here in Walgett for these commemorations of the Freedom Ride of 1965.
In many ways, if the Freedom Ride made a difference to Walgett, I can say that it is also true the other way around, Walgett helped make the Freedom Ride. When the bus left the University of Sydney on 12 February 1965, it passed through several towns before arriving in Walgett.
Although we saw shocking living conditions and clear examples of racial discrimination is those towns, we did not conduct demonstration there as Charlie Perkins and the others felt that we didn’t have enough connection with local Aboriginal leaders to do so. Walgett was different – it did have a strong tradition of Aboriginal protest, resistance, and leadership, with figures like Harry Hall, Ted Fields, Gladys Lake, George Rose, and others. Six months before the freedom ride there had been protests over the police gaoling two young boys for stealing crayons and a table tennis bat, and these protests had helped create links between local and Sydney activists.
So, in Walgett we students decided to take action, and held our demonstration outside the RSL, for refusing membership and admission to Aboriginal ex-servicemen. That demonstration, where we held up placards protesting against the RSL exclusion of Aboriginal people, lasted for seven hours, during which time multiple arguments broke out, and Charles Perkins gave a strong speech articulating clearly what we were on about – an end to segregation, discrimination, and inequality. It was very very hot!
Afterwards, when the Reverend Dowe insisted we vacate the church hall in which we had been staying, forcing the bus with its load of students to set off for Collarenabri around 9pm at night, we were placed in considerable danger when a local truck rammed the bus and forced it off the road. The thing is, the bus at that point contained not only us students but also a cadet reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald, who had just joined us on the spur of the moment that day in Walgett. He was able to give a firsthand account of how our protests against racial discrimination had so angered some of the locals they took seriously dangerous action against us. And with that, the news was out, and the story hit the media, and other journalists and media outlets joined us.
The media was there in force when we went to Moree, and then the coastal towns. Walgett was important in another way, too. There wasn’t just one Freedom Ride visit to Walgett, there were two. And the second one, in September 1965, saw close liaison between the visiting students and local activists. I was not directly involved but I researched it for my book, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. When a group of students arrived, Harry Hall gathered together a group of young women to go to the cinema with the students – his daughter, Pattie, his niece, Lorna Hall, and 18-year-old Marie Peters. That Saturday evening, Harry and Ted Fields, together with Pattie, Lorna and Marie, went along with the four students to seek admittance to the white upstairs section of the theatre. The girls were accompanied by three male students, and the female student, Christine, had a male Aboriginal partner. The group bought upstairs tickets but were then not allowed to go upstairs. One of the students, David Pepper, later told me:
We invited these girls to go to the movies, and here we were scruffy students with our old jeans on and t-shirts and the girls had their hair done, wore fantastic gear, and looked fantastic… So the scruffy students were permitted to go in but these girls who were dressed up to the nines and looking fantastic weren’t allowed to go in.
Police became involved, which hadn’t happened in February, and one of the students was forcibly removed from the theatre. Aidan, David, Christine, Ted and Marie were arrested and charged with obstructing the manager’s free passage on the stairway of the Luxury Theatre. The two Hall girls were kept in gaol for about four hours, but then – being under 18 – were released into the custody of their fathers. Marie remembers that she and Christine were held in a cell together. Charles Perkins later said that this was the first time that Aboriginal people had been arrested for participating in an organised civil rights demonstration.
I have personal links with Walgett, through my great and sadly departed friend Frances Peters-Little. I knew Frances first when she was a student at UTS, and then when I supervised her Masters thesis at ANU. She, my husband John, and I jointly edited a book, ‘Passionate
Histories: Myth, Memory and History in Indigenous Australia’, and later I read drafts of what would become her book on her famous father, Jimmy Little. Her mother was Marjorie Peters and Walgett was very dear to Frances’s heart. We spent time together here in 2015, the second time I had visited Walgett that year, for I had been on the 50th anniversary bus which arrived in Walgett from the University of Sydney. Hundreds of people walked through the streets to the RSL, where we gave and heard speeches about the Freedom Ride. That was a remarkable occasion, and probably the first time I realised how much the Freedom Ride meant in the
Freedom Ride towns. It would be the same in Moree.
It is hard to comprehend that an event you were engaged in as a 19-year-old student would be so well remembered for so long after. We all know some political actions succeed and others fail, and you never know at the time which it will be. I sometimes wonder exactly why the Freedom Ride is so well remembered, especially when times are tough as I think they are in many ways in the world today. I think the reason is that it symbolises for young people now the possibility of change, the importance of action by young people, and the significance of Aboriginal leadership, in this case Charlie Perkins. There are many unresolved issues left for us today, and many things we would want to change, but it is important to recognise the quality of Aboriginal leadership and activism this town has seen for decades now and to take heart from that. We freedom-riders learnt so much from you, your families, and your predecessors, and today we thank you.
