Alfred Neal OAM shares views of Voice referendum

Alfred Neal has perhaps more moral authority than anyone else in the nation when it comes to expressing a view on the Voice and while he will vote ‘yes’ he still has some concerns.

He guided a plough behind Clydesdale horses, cut sugar cane, built a bakery, started a banana plantation, raised ten children and quietly shaped the contours of Indigenous politics in Australia as the 20th Century unfurled.

The name Alfred Neal, OAM, should be writ large in the annals of Australian history. Yet Alfred – “Pop Alfie’’ to the young – is not widely known in Australia or even Queensland, and his stunning achievements in advancing the rights of Indigenous Queensland perhaps even less so.

Alf Neal with his great great grandson Kailan. Picture: Brian Cassey

As he sits on a veranda on a sunny April morning in Yarrabah, south of Cairns – age inhibiting his speech to the extent that son Percy is roped in to give voice to his father’s thoughts – this Indigenous political icon, who turned 100 last October, can effortlessly transmit that generosity of spirit and good humour which his family say remain his defining characteristics.

“He never put himself forward, he never wanted to be in the spotlight, he always wanted to use his influence in a quiet way,’’ says Percy, 73.

“He doesn’t like much of what happened to Aboriginal people and to himself, but he never got bitter about it.

“And he never stopped finding humour in everything. He laughed a lot, and he made his family laugh with him.’’

Alf Neal in 2008. Picture: Brian Cassey

Alf Neal hopes to cast a yes vote for the Voice referendum at the end of the year, yet his view of this constitutionally enshrined government mechanism reflects little of the romanticism that can sometimes shroud much of the public discussion around it.

He doesn’t appear to have much time for some symbolic expiation of white guilt, even if he has more reasons than most to call for it.

Born west of Cairns at Mount Mulligan (also known as Ngarrabullgan) into traditional Aboriginal life, Alf was taken from his parents by the then Anglican Mission at Yarrabah as an infant and raised in dormitories.

As a young man he became a field hand, guided ploughs behind draft horses and watched the first tractors appear in Cairns sugar cane paddocks.

He developed into a “gun’’ cane cutter and, learning of workers’ rights from unions such as the Waterside Workers’ Federation of Australia, successfully negotiated higher rates of pay for Indigenous cutters, always keeping an eye on the sugar price to know what sort of profits the cane cockies were making.

Mount Mulligan, where Alf Neal was born.

Unsettled with his calm but determined demeanour while insisting on better wages for fellow Indigenous cutters who were dealing with a flattened crop (making it far more difficult to cut), one Cairns cane cocky roared at him “who do you think you are, a bush lawyer?’’. The name stuck.

The bush lawyer built a bakery, became a local government councillor and helped establish a successful banana plantation on the Yarrabah foreshore, where eight share farmers produced profitable crops which they sold to the legendary wholesaler Tong Sing in Cairns.

His honesty as a labourer in the sugar industry was such that Clive Morton, a highly respected sugar grower in the Gordonvale district, told him to fill out his own time sheets, knowing full well Alf’s own sense of honour would prevent any cheating.

When child endowment was extended to Aboriginal children living on mission stations in the 1940s, Alf soon learned that the money went to the mission rather than the parents, and began negotiating with the state government in a successful campaign to have some of the funds paid to parents.

Alf Neal’s granddaughter Sonai Mene won a PM's literary award in 2017 after penning a story about her grandfather.

When Yarrabah residents staged a strike in 1957 to protest against inadequate rations, poor working conditions, and “the autocratic rule of the superintendent’’ (as a state government document puts it) he was in the thick of it.

When Yarrabah authorities temporarily banished him to nearby Bessie Point, Cairns wharfies sent him a few sheets of tin out of which he built a shack to house what was then a family of five.

He settled in, digging a well for water, often foraging for food for his family and occasionally acting as an intelligence operative for those in the mission who were still engaged in the strike action.

Just one example of his moral compass is illustrated by the story of a Yarrabah man who, despite the mission being classified as “dry’’ in the 1960s, attempted to smuggle in a bottle of wine in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. Concerned the real culprit might not cope well with the 10-day prison sentence, Alf, always a light drinker himself, put up his hand for the crime, then served the prison term in the police watch house next to the cemetery.

Stolen Generation Elder Alfie Neal. Picture: Brian Cassey

“I remember going to see him in jail as a little kid.’’ Percy says.

”He used to joke with us that he was more afraid of the spirits of the dead in the cemetery than he was of the cops.’’

By the 1960s, Alf had the respect of Australia’s rising Indigenous political class and had come under the influence of people largely forgotten to history, but hugely influential in mid-20th Century Queensland.

One mentor was Joe McGuinness, active in the Waterside Workers’ Federation and secretary of the Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League.

Alf and another confederate, Indigenous elder Ruth Hennings, sat on the Yarrabah foreshore underneath the local “Tree of Knowledge’’ using light from hurricane lamps to plot strategies in their pioneering roles with the advancement league.

Those beachside conferences were crucial in bringing about the watershed 1967 referendum, enabling laws for Indigenous people and including them in the census.

In 2019 Alf’s efforts were recognised by Order of Australia awards received by himself and six other Indigenous leaders, including Ms Hennings.

Alf Neal. Picture: Brian Cassey

Through all his trials Alf has maintained his sense of humour, a broad belief in the Christian lessons of his childhood and a dedication to the simple proposition that Indigenous men and women should be allowed to participate in the economy, just like everyone else.

“If you have not been given the opportunity to participate in the Australian economy for 100 years, you are going to struggle to succeed,’’ as Percy puts it.

A key point to advancement, as Alf sees it, is freehold title to land.

The ability to go to a bank, show the deeds of title, then ask for a loan to build a house or a business is taken for granted in mainstream communities.

But despite advances in recent years, it still remains elusive for many Indigenous people living on land that they have come to see, after generations of settlement, as their own.

Many remember the 1980s, when now federal member for Kennedy Bob Katter – as Queensland Indigenous affairs minister – championed land leases, still referred to as “Katter leases,’’ which appeared to open the door to land ownership.

But Alf wants what the rest of the nation has – genuine freehold title – and along with that he wants an end to the “mission mentality’’ that continues to evolve in different forms in state and federal bureaucracies.

“My father could have bought and operated a sugar cane farm,’’ Percy says.

“But he wasn’t even allowed to go out and buy a fridge until the 1970s.’’

Alf has his reservations about the Voice.

When high-profile Indigenous leaders gathered at Yarrabah last April for one of the biggest Voice gatherings since the original 2017 Uluru Convention and made the “Yarrabah Affirmation,’’ calling for the referendum to be included in the next federal government term, he both addressed and supported the crowd.

Indigenous Order of Australia recipients who worked on the 1967 referendum, Alfie Neal and Ruth Wallace Hennings. Picture: Brian Cassey

But privately, he noted there were very few Yarrabah people among that crowd.

The reason is reflected in his own fear that a thoroughly urbanised middle class will have their hands on the levers of the Voice, leaving the ordinary Indigenous man and woman on the sidelines.

How the Voice, itself an instrument of government, is going to free Indigenous people from government oversight and control is yet to be determined.

But Alf is as determined to get the referendum over the line as he was back in 1967.

If it fails, he fears hardcore racists will be emboldened and attention on the plight of Indigenous Australia will falter and fade.

“If we lose this, we will be left between the devil and the deep blue sea,’’ he says.