From Footscray to Gaza, a trail of tears without end

On the morning of Tuesday, December 6 in 1938, a small group of Aboriginal Australians gathered at a rented home at 73 Southampton Street in Footscray. The men wore suits and hats, the women were in their town best.

They prepared to set off on a long slow trail. Their mission? To tell the Nazis of Germany to stop their cruel persecution of Jews.

William Cooper (centre) with the founding members of the Australian Aborigines’ League at the opening in Northcote, around 1934.Credit: Koori Heritage Trust

Less than a month previously, Nazis in Germany had murdered scores of Jews, smashed Jewish businesses and homes, and burned hundreds of schools and synagogues. About 30,000 Jews were seized and sent to concentration camps.

Here was “Kristallnacht” – the night of broken glass – a violent marker in the process that would become the Holocaust when Hitler’s regime murdered 6 million Jews.

Amid international alarm and condemnation, in Melbourne, the members of the Australian Aborigines’ League – who may never have met a Jewish person, but who knew a great deal about anguish – passed a resolution.

“Our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another people,” they are said to have declared. “The Nazi government has a consulate here on our land. Let us go there and make our protest known.”

Leading them was William Cooper, founding secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League, who occupied the Footscray house with his wife Sarah.

Cooper was 77. After a life of great hardship, he had only another four years to live.

He was a committed letter writer on behalf of his people’s hopes for justice.

In the competition for scarce pennies between buying a stamp or paying to ride a tram or train, the stamp always won.

A statue of William Cooper and his letter to the German consulate in 1938 stands in Shepparton.

And so he walked. Everywhere.

At 11.30am, his group stood outside 419 Collins Street, about 8 kilometres from Cooper’s home.

There, they asked to be admitted to the German consulate.

Cooper and his colleagues wished to deliver a letter to the German consul, Dr RW Drechsler.

The deputation, it was reported the following day in The Argus, “was refused admittance”.

William Cooper, left, his eldest son, Daniel, daughter Amy and son Lynch. Among Cooper’s many tribulations, Daniel was killed in World War I in Belgium on September 20, 1917.

Cooper and his friends left their letter anyway, asking that it be sent along to the Nazi government.

According to a facsimile finally delivered in 2017 to the German government by Cooper’s descendants, it read:

“On behalf of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, we wish to have it registered and on record that we protest wholeheartedly at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government in Germany. We plead that you would make it known to your government and its military leaders that this cruel persecution of their fellow citizens must be brought to an end.”

It took until 2020 for the German government to formally apologise to Cooper’s family for the consul’s refusal in 1938 to pass the letter on to Berlin, which Felix Klein, the commissioner for Jewish life in Germany, said, “would have been the right and morally correct thing for a consulate official to do”.

Whether the protest was an attempt to draw a parallel between the suffering of Indigenous Australians with that of Germany’s Jews or a purely altruistic gesture, it seems possible to discern an echo of the generosity of another dispossessed people.

In March 1847, the Choctaw Nation, a Native American people, heard of the suffering afflicting the Irish during the Great Famine.

A member of the Choctaw Nation listens as a Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Peoples is read at a ceremony in Washington in 2010.Credit: AP

The Choctaw themselves were still suffering from the recent agony of having lost their lands east of the Mississippi and being forced to walk hundreds of kilometres west to a foreign reservation, perishing in thousands. Their march was known as the Trail of Tears.

Yet, the Choctaw had empathy for strangers starving on the far side of the world. They raised $US170 (worth about $US6400 today) and sent it to an Irish relief fund.

The kindness of the Choctaw people has long been celebrated worldwide.

It took decades, however, for the humble protest of William Cooper and his friends to become widely celebrated in Australia, despite books having been written about his life and a federal electorate being named after him in 2021.

Last week, when I wrote about Cooper’s attempt in the 1930s to have a letter sent to the King, requesting that a representative be appointed to the Australian parliament as a voice of the Aboriginal people – denied then, as now – a surprising number of readers and acquaintances divulged that they had never heard the story.

A mother weeps over her son’s body. He was a victim of a Hamas terror attack in southern Israel. Credit: AP

Still, Cooper has been much honoured by the Jewish community, all the way to Yad Vashem – the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. If you were to venture there, you would find a small garden near the entrance dedicated in 2010 to William Cooper.

The previous year, trees were planted in the Martyrs’ Forest nearby to commemorate the old protest by Cooper and his colleagues.

To cap it all, Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research in 2010 announced the establishment of a new academic Chair of the Study of Resistance during the Holocaust, endowed in honour of William Cooper.

You can’t venture to Yad Vashem today, however.

A Palestinian boy sits on the rubble of his building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza.Credit: AP

The attack on Israel by Hamas terrorists and the accompanying hideous acts of murder and hostage-taking, followed by Israel’s massive military strikes on Gaza and the deaths of many hundreds of innocent Palestinians, has left the museum of vast remembrance closed for security reasons, according to Yad Vashem’s website.

And so the world turns, its complicated passage, as William Cooper understood, too often a trail of tears.

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