‘Deep parallels’: Nova Peris calls for Aboriginal solidarity with Jewish people

At a small gathering in Melbourne on Friday, former senator Nova Peris will evoke the legacy of Aboriginal rights activist William Cooper to call for greater solidarity among Indigenous people towards Jewish Australians.

It is one of a series of planned commemorations of Cooper, whose 1938 protest against the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany has in recent years gained totemic status among Australian Jewry. The commemorations will take place against the backdrop on ongoing war in Gaza and surging levels of antisemitism.

Michael McDonogh, a descendent of Aboriginal activist William Cooper, with former senator Nova Peris in Melbourne.Credit: Eddie Jim

The culmination of the Melbourne event will see one of Cooper’s great, great-grandsons, Michael McDonogh, present a Victorian government representative with a statement of unity calling for an end to racism and greater social cohesion.

A sharper message is expected to be delivered by Peris. Her support for Israel since the October 7 atrocities has put her at odds with Aboriginal activists such as Gary Foley – a student of Cooper’s life and now a prominent figure with the pro-Palestine protest movement – and Indigenous senator Lidia Thorpe, who regularly attends pro-Palestine rallies and has drawn parallels between the experience of Indigenous Australians and Palestinians.

William Cooper is said to have led an Australian Aborigines’ League delegation to the German consulate in Melbourne to protest the Nazis’ treatment of Jews.

According to a copy of her speech provided to this masthead, Peris will tell a group of multi-faith leaders and Jewish and Aboriginal community members that, in leading an Australian Aborigines’ League protest 86 years ago against the persecution of distant people he had never met, Cooper showed a moral clarity needed today.

“When he marched to the German consulate in 1938, he didn’t march for his own people. He marched for the Jewish people – strangers to him but bound to him by a shared understanding of suffering and the unyielding belief in justice,” Peris will say.

“He knew, as we must, that the fight against hate anywhere is a fight against hate everywhere.

“As I reflect on his legacy, I see the deep parallels between the Aboriginal and Jewish peoples. Both of us have endured systemic oppression and attempts to erase our histories, and yet both of us have survived—stronger, prouder, and more determined to ensure that these injustices are never forgotten.

“William Cooper’s protest ... was an extraordinary act of courage. It was an act of empathy, of moral clarity, and of profound humanity. It reminds us that we cannot stand silent in the face of injustice.”

Cooper’s story was first brought to the attention of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum by Foley and now forms part of permanent Holocaust exhibits in Melbourne, Sydney and Jerusalem.

A statue of William Cooper brandishing a letter to the German consulate stands in Shepparton.

McDonogh says that although his great, great-grandfather is rightly remembered for intervening on behalf of European Jews, he saw in their treatment by the Nazis echos of how Aboriginal people were still treated in Australia.

“He was watching his people being exterminated,” he said. “That was the correlation with what the Nazis were trying to do to the Jewish people.”

Cooper died before the establishment of Israel and the mass displacement of Arab Palestinians during the war in 1948. What would Cooper make of today’s conflict in the Middle East?

McDonogh offers this perspective: “I think he would still be standing up for all kinds of human rights. But if one side refuses to acknowledge the other side’s existence, what are they supposed to do? If you are on the side of human rights, how can you pick a side?”

There is dispute about some details of Cooper’s 1938 protest, which was sparsely documented in contemporaneous written records.

There is no surviving copy of the text he is said to have left with the German consulate. Monash historian Bain Attwood, a Cooper biographer, doubts whether he would have walked to Footscray from the city, given his advanced years and ill health at the time. He argues that elements of the story have morphed from history into myth.

Abe Schwarz, an interfaith and social justice campaigner who has spent 20 years raising public awareness of Cooper’s protest, said the accepted account was largely based on the oral testimony of witnesses to the event.

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