Late last April the street artist Hego spent seven hours carefully pasting a mural of an Indigenous Australian world war one serviceman onto a wall in inner-Sydney Redfern.
The mural is comprised of 12 square metres of architectural printer paper. It stands nearly as high as the Aboriginal Housing Company building on whose corner it is posted. Situated on one of Redfern’s busiest corners at the entrance to The Block – urban Sydney’s most culturally significant Indigenous area and, now undergoing redevelopment, perhaps its most controversial – Black Anzac tells many stories.
First it evokes the general question: why a black digger? And then it follows: but who was he?
Hego posted the mural of Trooper Alfred Cameron junior, without any accompanying explanation, to pose those very questions. And as far as political street art goes, its purpose is superbly met through its subversive challenge to Australia’s reverence for a white Anzac legend and its cultural blindspot for a violent colonial frontier that gave rise to an earlier generation of Indigenous warriors.
Hego, 28, explained:
The whole point of putting the mural right outside The Block without any explanatory text was it was facing the main pathway from Redfern Station to Sydney uni where about 5,000 students walk each and every day. I wanted the mural ... to start a conversation and strategically I start it with the next generation of Australia’s leaders.
Hego’s mural belongs there. But it could just as easily be in the Australian War Memorial which, while priding itself on conveying the story of this country’s black diggers, steadfastly refuses to erect a monument on memorial grounds to honour them.
Instead, as reported previously in this column, memorial director Brendan Nelson has commissioned work on a statue depicting black and white service personnel together. But why together? His spokesman said:
The Australian War Memorial is a place where we treat all service people equally and that is reflected in the way the Memorial commemorates the commitment and sacrifice of all servicemen and women.
But Indigenous Australians were no more genuinely equal when they wore a uniform during the two world wars than they were before or after. And pitifully little is changed today.
The original citizens were not considered Australian citizens even while they wore the uniform. They fought for an empire that had taken their land and killed their not too distant ancestors, under a Union Jack flag that symbolised only bloody oppression to them. Their experience was unique.
Once demobilised, many returned to find their situation had worsened since enlistment: ancestral lands had been taken, sometimes to supply soldier settler blocks for white servicemen; the authorities had taken children away, and pay had been stolen by the so-called “Aboriginal protectors”.
Those who suffered severe psychological and physical injury were not given the same support as white veterans.
They joined up and fought for all sorts of reasons: to earn money, because their brothers had done so and, as often as not, for notions of country that are largely anathema to other Australians. As the war memorial’s own Indigenous liaison officer Gary Oakley has pointed out, when Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander service personnel talk about country “it’s a different way of thinking”.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were not permitted to enlist in the Australian Imperial Forces for the two world wars unless they could prove that they were of substantially European descent. Recruiters turned a blind eye as the need for more troops for the imperial forces intensified. Thousands managed to enlist over the course of the two wars, and they received the same pay and conditions as other Australian recruits.
An estimated 400 Indigenous Australian soldiers went to the first world war. They were men like Alfred Cameron junior, a descendent of the Temprominjirie and Milmanjirie clans from South Australia’s Coorong. He joined the 3rd Australian Light Horse Regiment and served in Gallipoli, the Middle East and later in the 1st Australian Machinegun squadron on the European Western Front.
He was luckier than many other Indigenous servicemen, both during and after the war. Having survived injury and serious illness, he returned to work on ancestral lands that are still with his descendants today.
In her book Ngarrindjeri Anzacs, Doreen Kartinyeri looked at 21 men from the Raukkan mission and the lower Murray who enlisted and fought (about 20% of the district’s Indigenous men compared with about a 9% enlistment rate in the general population). Five of the 21 died.
“When I look back over the history of my people, I see the protector interfering in all aspects of Aboriginal people’s lives, most of the time for no good reason. And yet here they had a good reason but did nothing to stop the men enlisting. My mother and her family always blamed the protector for the deaths,” Kartinyeri writes.
Hego says he has been overwhelmed by public feedback to his mural from people, many of whom previously knew nothing about the Indigenous diggers story (a photograph of the mural was liked 60,000 times on two image sharing websites on the day it was posted. Hego is now collaborating on a crowd funded film (through Pozible) with filmmaker Tim Anastasi and producer Kimberley Low.
The 1933 poem Black Anzac, by Cecil Fisher, initially inspired Hego, who based his mural on an original four by six inch black and white photograph of Cameron.
“It touched on the fact that the Aboriginal Anzacs hadn’t been acknowledged before. I had never heard of them during school studies of world wars one and two,” he said.
If the crowd funding campaign raises the requisite $10,000 to finish the movie by next Anzac Day, Hego plans to install another mural - based on a photograph of Cameron in Egypt.
Black Anzac stands on the corner of the same building that is adorned with a sign bearing the name Pemulway. Here, Pemulway’s name is associated with a controversial project to redevelop The Block, to the consternation of many former residents who may not be able to return.
Pemulway of the Eora, an early freedom fighter against European occupation, was killed in battle. Like so many other Indigenous resistance fighters his head was cut off and sent to England.
The authorities – including governors – sometimes ordered the decapitation of dead warriors to incite “terror” amongst the hostile tribesmen.
But you won’t learn anything about that in the Australian War Memorial. It stubbornly refuses to tell the violent story of the frontier – referred to as “war” by black and white soldiers, and governors – in its displays which are supposed to convey the full Australian experience of conflict.
The name Pemulway evokes the early - and ongoing - battle for country by Indigenous Australians. Just as Hego’s towering Redfern mural is all about another fight for country.
With time and weather the mural of Trooper Cameron is slowly fading into an ever ghostlier visage.
Just as the stories of Cameron, and others like him, are being revived.