Land Rights legend Bill Day built a legacy of fighting and winning

Larrakia Land Rights champion Bill Day was ahead of his time. So much so he had an ASIO file. Read what he did.

Cyclone Tracy was still five years away and he wasn’t even a subject of interest with ASIO when Bill Day arrived in Darwin and stirred up a hornet’s nest locals never knew existed.

In 1971, living among the Aborigines, the Perth-born schoolteacher thrust land rights into the spotlight with a typed newsletter named ‘Bunji’ – yolngu for comrade – and with the power of the pen, upset tropical applecarts and rattled cages in the highest office in the land.

William Bartlett Day Jr, Bunji’s founding editor, died peacefully in Perth’s Bethesda nursing home on June 26 aged 82, after a long battle with glioma.

Young man with a mission to deliver Land Rights to Larrakia people.

The loss of the trailblazing anthropologist and grassroots journalist will be felt acutely among Aboriginal Australians, who’s successor generations know his reputation and speak fondly of him.

Eighteen months after hitchhiking north in the wake of the historic 1966 Wavehill walk-off and the following year’s national referendum that granted Aboriginal people the vote, his life’s mission began with the first issue of Bunji.

His legacy is measured not by great leaps forward for First Australians, but by the way he united and militated the tribes, especially the Larrakia.

It was their land that Darwin had been built upon and what they called Kulaluk – over which Dick Ward Drive runs – became Bunji’s cause célèbre.

So determined were activists, one, Fred Fogarty, firebombed a surveyor’s truck in present-day Ostermann Street, Coconut Grove.

Fogarty was among a formidable group, black and white, that included surviving locals, Rob Wesley-Smith, Jack Phillips and Cheryl Buchanan, who co-chairs Queensland’s Truth and Treaty Board.

Bill Day in his later years

In 1973, the Larrakia formally won back Kulaluk when it was handed to the original owners in the historic Woodward Report.

By then, the core group was being watched by ASIO because they were communists. Bill’s file is accessible on his exceptional website, drbilldayanthropologist.com.

Other direct actions included traffic blockades and office occupations.

Five people from the ‘One Mile Dam mob’ protested the RAAF’s use of Quail Island as a bombing range by wading out to the island, 50km west of Darwin, and forcing an immediate ceasefire.

A cartoon depicting them camped out with F111s flying overhead appeared in the NT News, which, with the new ABC, was sympathetic to the cause.

Bunji’s enemies, though, were powerful and included cattle barons, developers, rednecks, politicians, the military and the mining industry.

Day, then married with two children, survived Cyclone Tracy holed up in Phillips’s home.

Despite massive damage and the large-scale clean-up and rebuild, Bunji resumed publication as did full-blooded protests.

The view of Darwin city from One Mile Dam.

NT politicians showed mixed support, with another breakthrough in 1979 when Chief Minister Paul Everingham handed over the lease to the occupants of tiny One Mile Dam, in the shadows of the CBD.

Day wrote in Bunji, then chronicled in his minor classic, ‘Bunji: A story of the Gwalwa Daraniki Movement’ (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994) that successive governments kept dishonouring promises.

Not included in Day’s historically unimpeachable autobiography, is the autographed promotional poster of George Brurrumbu, whose stage performance, ‘Nerrpu’, was a highlight of the 2005 Darwin Festival.

In the year before Day left Darwin for good, George wrote:

“To Bill Day, mate you’re famous with Yolgnu people like me who live in the bush.”

His University of Western Australia lecturer, Associate Professor Victoria Burbank – under whom he did his PhD in anthropology – told her postgraduate student in 1996, that she had never had a student like him and doubted she ever would again.

Besides his family and three remaining siblings, Bill leaves behind his dearest Darwin friend, Maningrida woman Dulcie Malimara.

His Perth funeral is on July 10, with a local service being organised.