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The wild ride of Charlie Perkins

By MARTIN FLANAGAN

8 April 2000 - It's the day after Charles Perkins told the world that Sydney would burn during the Olympics. A news crew from Seven is waiting outside his Sydney home; so am I and so is a German journalist. Over the next two days Perkins will do interviews with journalists from around the world. When I ring him later in the week, he can't remember all the countries, but lists a few - England, Ireland, Germany, the United States, Switzerland, Japan twice.

Arriving with a friend, Perkins steps from the car with a mobile phone to his ear, talking to yet another journalist. He thought his remarks would get a reaction, but nothing this big. "It's because I hit one of their sacred cows - sport." Expensively dressed (dark blue suit, white shirt and tie), he is walking with the aid of a crutch.

Perkins' entree into white society came through soccer. He had a season with English club Everton in the late '50s, but says that ended when he almost hit the coach. Almost hit his assistant, too. He returned to Australia and played with ethnic teams, first Adelaide Croatia, then, later, as captain-coach of Sydney Olympic. He played in defence and says nobody got past him without losing a leg. Perkins hates losing. At 63, the price he pays for his ferocious play is trouble with both ankles, hence the crutch.

Perkins' tone with the journalist on the phone, and in all subsequent interviews, is mild and reasonable. His remarks have been taken out of context: "I said there could be trouble, and there could. You get 100,000 people on the streets and anything can happen." He says there were 20,000 protesters on the streets at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982 and things are worse now. In 1982, the Aboriginal cause was advancing. Now it's going backwards. But Perkins is being conciliatory. Howard has two months to apologise for his remarks, which amount, in Perkins' view, to saying the stolen generation is a myth. "If he does, we can sit down around a table and everything can be sorted out."

After the television interview, Perkins ushers us into his Victorian home, which combines classical taste - polished board floors and delicately painted cornices - with a collection of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal art of the highest quality. His daughter Hetti is a curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The German journalist and I sit in leather armchairs surrounded by dot paintings, our interview again postponed by the arrival of a reporter and a photographer from the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The newspaper's front page that morning has a photograph of Perkins leaving home, crutch under his arm, and the words: "How Charles Perkins incinerated sympathy for stolen generation".

Inside, columnist Piers Ackerman asserts that the Olympic agenda of an Aboriginal minority now stands revealed - "to mount an unprecedented campaign to denigrate Australia in the eyes of the international community". However, the essential plank of Perkins' argument has been given vivid expression by the newspaper's cartoonist, Warren. He has a small John Howard stepping into two giant high heels marked "Pauline Hanson".

"Pauline Hanson never left parliament," says Perkins a number of times during the afternoon. "She's still there and her name is John Howard. Australians are good people. Can't they see this man is tearing us apart?"

The young men from the Daily Telegraph look more like conscripts than volunteers, and Perkins meets them with a blast: "Tell your editor he's got people working for him who are arseholes", but then agrees to talk to them out the back, leaving me and the German alone. Peter Sartorius, a senior editor with a Munich magazine, is in Australia doing a series of articles on the country before the Olympics. He is pursuing interviews with Aboriginal leaders and prominent Asian Australians.

Having apologised for his English, which is not fluent,Sartorius admits being perplexed by the idea of the stolen generation. He understands the issue surrounding an apology, because "we have that debate in my country". What confounds him about the stolen generation is that the policy was law. He has a high opinion of the British legal tradition. "Where is the human rights?" he asks. He finds it equally confounding that the law was imposed selectively. Laws should be uniformly applied.

Sartorius is unaware of the racial theorising that underpinned the policy. Charles Perkins A Biography, by historian Peter Read, explains that in the '20s and '30s, particularly in the Northern Territory, there were recurring fears that the white population would be outnumbered by "half-castes". Fuelling the paranoia were other theories, often contradictory, that "half-castes" were more intelligent than "full-bloods", which would make them more menacing in the event of a "reversion to savagery". At the same time, as Read points out, a professor of anatomy at Adelaide University declared that Aborigines were "too low on the scale of humanity" to benefit from "the civilising influence of Anglo-Saxon rule".

Perkins is not a member of the stolen generation, but belongs to what he calls an institutional generation. His early life was spent in a strictly supervised home for "half-castes" five kilometres outside Alice Springs. Here, children were poorly fed and serious illness was common, while at school the syllabus included lessons on the early explorers and "the might of the British Empire". Perkins' grandmother, who could not speak English, would appear outside the camp and call to her grandchildren in the Arrente language.

Perkins' situation was unusual - his mother, Hetti, was employed at the home as a dormitory master. He credits her with having put "the fire in my belly and the steel in my spine". However, in 1945, she agreed to Perkins leaving Alice Springs, along with five other boys, and going to Adelaide with an Anglican priest, Father Smith.

THE STORY of Perkins' passage from "St Francis boy" to the expensive Sydney home he now occupies is long and incident-packed.

Most famously, he led the "freedom rides" through outback New South Wales in the mid-'60s, challenging segregation laws that kept blacks out of some public spaces, including swimming pools.

Earlier, in the '50s, he learnt what it means to have to carry a pass (signed by a priest and a policeman). When a cricket team he captained went to a pub in Port Adelaide, he was served, but told to take the drink outside. At dances where he might be the only black face, he would force himself to keep asking white women for a dance. "You're torn apart," he said later, "but what do you do? It's awkward, it's embarrassing, terribly embarrassing, it's very difficult, but you go and do it anyhow. You gotta do it."

Eventually, he met a young white woman who treated him as her equal. Eileen Munchenberg, a South Australian of German Lutheran descent, has been his wife for 40 years. Perkins says freely that meeting her was the making of his life. Peter Read implies she saved Perkins' sanity, shielding her volatile husband from "the dark, intuitive hemisphere of history". Perkins has long been an angry man. He believes his youth was stolen, but Read found his subject's greatest anger was reserved "for those who did not allow him to fulfil his potential in the European areas of education, soccer and politics.

"Father Smith's last legacy to Perkins... was to place the finest achievements of indigenous culture below those of the Europeans. At the heart of the story of St Francis House lies an enigma which will not be resolved within the lifetime of the boys."

It is an enigma that finds expression in another of Perkins' quotes: "When Aboriginal children are separated, something dies... the connection is never made again. You always stay a little bit different." Perkins says the forced removal of children is the most emotive issue in Aboriginal Australia because most families connect to it in some way. In faraway Broome, Patrick Dodson agrees. He has met black South Africans who have said that whatever the excesses of the authorities under apartheid, taking children from their homes was never one of them.

Against the backdrop of this most sombre of subjects, the afternoon in Perkins' dining room is played out like a farce. The pair from the Daily Telegraph have hardly left when A Current Affair makes its first pitch. They want a head-on clash between Perkins and Bruce Ruxton - black warrior, white warrior, lots of abuse. Perkins won't be in it and tells them so on the phone. "Who's Ruxton? He knows nothin' about Aboriginal issues. The bloke's a rockinghorse."

Within 30 minutes, a pretty production assistant from ACA appears at the door. Ruxton is in the Melbourne studio, mounted on his steed of war and ready to charge. Without Perkins, there is nothing to attack. Outside the window, a satellite dish from an outside broadcast unit can be seen spiralling into the air. Still Perkins won't be in it and sends an Aboriginal friend to tell them so. Perkins is now attempting to talk to the German, praising France and Germany as great nations and decrying the folly of the Australian Government's attitude towards the UN.

The production assistant, ignoring Perkins' friend, returns with a phone. Will he talk to the executive producer? Another long conversation ensues with Perkins trying to find new ways of saying no. But the man on the other end will not be denied. At one point, Perkins holds the phone away from his ear and looks to the heavens. His ankles are killing him and he hasn't slept properly for two nights.

Finally, ACA plays its trump card. It puts Mike (Munro) on the phone. The word "mate" suddenly appears in the conversation. Finally, Perkins says Ruxton can go on tonight, and he'll talk about going on tomorrow.

PERKINS returns to the German, whose questions are mostly biographical. Earlier in the day, while waiting outside Perkins' house, a bird dived past us, making a humming sound in the air. The German was frightened and explained: "It is the sound of a bullet." He has spent the past five years covering the war in Bosnia. Now, with furrowed brow, he directs his last question to the subject of Perkins' outburst the previous day: "You said: `Burn, baby, burn."' The German's English is literal. He is picturing a human infant.

Perkins suddenly looks tired. He reaches about, saying he has been quoted out of context, that he doesn't remember saying those words to the BBC at that time.

Would the BBC accept this explanation, I wonder. Does he want violence at the Olympics, I ask. "Shit, no," he replies. "I've led hundreds of demonstrations and none of them have been violent." But he doesn't deny that violence could occur. "There's a lot of frustrated young blacks out there. They're not as patient as we were."

Perkins says his comments have widespread support, but some in the Aboriginal community say he has played into John Howard's hands. They fear that with former Northern Territory Chief Minister Shane Stone elevated to the national presidency of the Liberal Party, Australian politics is heading in the direction of Northern Territory politics.

If there is violence at the Olympics, I say to Perkins, you'll get the blame. "Well," he shoots back, "they're not going to blame themselves, are they?"

Source:The Age

related links :

• Charles Perkins
  October 19, 2000 - The Times (UK) - Obituary: Aboriginal leader who campaigned for civil rights reform and was the first of his people to become head of a government department.

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