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Statue salutes a champion on field and off

By Stuart Rintoul

10 December 2007 - WHEN Doug Nicholls left the bush and went to Melbourne to play football, the trainers at Carlton were so offended by the colour of his skin that they refused to rub him down.

He went to Fitzroy and made a name for himself, the first Aboriginal footballer to play for Victoria.

He became a champion off the field too, fighting for dignity for his people and what would later be called reconciliation. The whitefellas made him a knight and then a governor.

Yesterday, a bronze statue of Sir Doug and his wife, Gladys, was unveiled at Parliament Gardens in Melbourne - between the pomp and power of parliament and the old, mean streets of Fitzroy.

It was the first statue of a 20th century Aboriginal leader to be erected anywhere in Australia and the first to recognise the role of the woman behind the man.

Aboriginal people at the ceremony recalled that the best-known statue of an Aboriginal leader in Australia has been the statue of the 19th century warrior Yagan, in Perth. After he was killed in 1833, Yagan's head was removed and taken to London, where it was exhibited as an "anthropological curiosity". Within a week of the head being returned to Australia in 1997, the statue of Yagan was beheaded.

Pastor Sir Doug and Lady Gladys were both born in 1906 at the Cummeragunja mission on the NSW banks of the Murray River. When he was eight, he saw his 16-year-old sister Hilda forcibly taken from his family by the police and taken to the Cootamundra Training Home for Girls. He became a runner and a footballer, a tent fighter and a man of God, a pioneering campaigner for Aboriginal rights and the Governor of South Australia.

Lady Gladys became a charity worker and an advocate for women's rights and the underprivileged. The Gladys Nicholls Hostel was founded to ensure that her people were not homeless on the streets of Melbourne.

What would they have made of the state of Aboriginal Australia today, including thecontroversial federal intervention in the Northern Territory?

As she prepared for the unveiling yesterday, daughter Pam Pedersen said she thought they would be thinking "it's still a struggle; it's still a long way to go ... I think Dad would say, 'we have to fight on'," she said. "We can only keep fighting."

She recalled the rallies and street marches her father led and the trips her parents made to Canberra, pleading their people's case, how Sir Doug would sit at a little card table outside the Collingwood football ground, or the Northcote Town Hall, getting signatures on a petition for the 1967 referendum that voted to recognise Aboriginal people as citizens by counting them in the census.

But many things had also changed, she said, with opportunities that her parents' generation had only dreamed about. She tells her grandchildren: "You can be brilliant."

In 1991, the Canberra suburb of Nicholls was named after Sir Doug. But Ms Pedersen said it was wonderful that both of her parents had now been recognised in the city in which they lived and worked for change.

"It's just such an exciting moment for all Australians, and Aboriginal people throughout Australia," she said. She hoped it would herald many more statues commemorating the lives of Aboriginal people.

Source: The Australian

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