It is also important to note that not all of the interaction between Aboriginal people and other cultures took place on these shores and that not all Aboriginal people who left Australia did so against their wishes. In fact analysing the reasons why some chose voluntarily to venture overseas may yield important insight on future Aboriginal directives.

One intriguing recent revelation is through the academic work of Terry Foenander in the United States. His search at the National Archives in Washington, DC, on details of the background of naval personnel who served in the Union Navy during the Civil War has revealed some interesting and bizarre finds. Foenander’s research assistant ‘located the names of at least six Union naval personnel whom, it would seem to this author, were original natives of Australia and New Zealand’.^[36] Foenander’s revelation raises the intriguing question ‘did a small number of Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maoris serve in the Union Navy during the Civil War?’ Foenander is ‘of the opinion that there would most certainly have been some who served as mariners, and some of these mariners would have been in the US at the start of the war, or later, enabling them to enlist in the services.’^[37] If Foenander’s find proves correct one is struck by the impact that these men would have made when and if they returned to Australia.

One Aboriginal international traveller we know something about was Anthony Martin Fernando, born in northern New South Wales in 1864.^[38] Despite being removed at an early age from his family, Fernando refused to bow and initiated a lifetime struggle against colonial domination. He drew strength from his Aboriginal cultural identification. Frustration with the inequality of Aboriginal existence and the failure of British law to uphold Aboriginal objection was responsible for him gaining work as a boilerman on a ship to Europe. Whether Fernando left Australia with a plan already in place to take the message of Aboriginal inequality to an international audience is not clear. However, his experience in Europe instilled and invigorated his opposition to the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. Having survived the Great War he appears in 1921 attempting to gain an audience with the Pope. He was refused on the grounds that he did not possess internationally recognised papers of identification. He was not to be daunted and moved to Switzerland and attempted to garner the support of the Swiss government to an innovative directive on Aboriginal affairs. As Heather Goodall tells us, he outlined a proposal that was

Again Fernando was rebuffed; a man of lesser courage and strength must surely have buckled. He took to the streets of Milan and London carrying placards and handing out pamphlets highlighting the ill-treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. He was gaoled in Italy by Mussolini ‘as an enemy of an ally of fascist Italy’. He was interned without a trial for many months before eventual deportation to Britain. He instigated a one-man campaign against Australia ‘picketing Australia House. He covered himself with toy skeletons and pointed to them as he called out to passers by: “This is what they are doing to my people in Australia”.’^[40] Severely embarrassed, the Australian authorities attempted to sweep him under the carpet. He was arrested on numerous occasions and they even instigated an attempt to have him put in a mental asylum, in what was, as Goodall states, ‘a well-known tactic of political repression’. The doctors refused to certify him, one of them writing: ‘he holds strong views about the manner in which his people are treated, but that is a sign not of insanity but of an unusually strong mind.’^[41]

Fernando refused to be intimidated by anyone. In 1929 he appeared before the court in London after pulling a gun on a white man ‘who had abused him because he was black’. He utilised the platform and moment to vent his anger once more at the powers that be:

In Fernando’s eyes if the British needed an example of savagery they needed to look no further than the mirror. For over two decades Fernando had waged a one-man campaign of unrelenting protest; as late as 1938 he was still in the news. Once more in court now aged seventy-four, he remained unbowed, ‘We are despised and rejected, but it is the black people who keep this country in all its greatness’.^[43] Fernando died shortly after this court appearance and as Goodall reverently describes, he had maintained ‘his struggle against enormous odds, alone but unfailingly presenting his peoples case on the other side of the world, in the heart of the land of the colonisers’.^[44] What Fernando sadly was not to know was that his efforts and sacrifice in challenging the foundations of Empire itself did not go unnoticed. As Goodall tell us, ‘Aboriginal activists like Pearl Gibbs back in New South Wales hungrily clipped the press accounts of his words, taking them for inspiration for their own campaign’. Fiona Paisley has also shed new light on the remarkable and courageous Anthony Martin Fernando.^[45]

Aboriginal women sometimes left Australia too. An Aboriginal missionary, born at Pialba in Queensland, Mrs Charles Aurora, was described by an old missionary friend Elizabeth McKenzie Hatton as a ‘woman carrying a high standard of Christian character – a clever, refined, and educated woman, she has been used to help in the translation of the scriptures in the language of the Solomon Islands.’^[46] In 1921 and after fourteen years service in the Solomon Islands she returned to Queensland and was ‘shocked to find, in this Christian land of ours, so little being done for her own people and the half caste girls’.^[47] She was so distressed by the conditions she witnessed she travelled to Melbourne beseeching McKenzie Hatton to ‘go back and help her to rescue these young and helpless girls’.^[48] In unleashing the determined McKenzie Hatton on a collision course with government authority Mrs Charles Aurora could well be said to have played no small part in the rise of Aboriginal political mobilisation some three years later. McKenzie Hatton would prove one of the most astute and courageous allies of Aboriginal rights to surface in the early decades of the twentieth century.^[49]

The freedom of international travel and its impact on Mrs Charles Aurora and Anthony Fernando can be contrasted with the tight and restrictive controls of movement exerted over the Aboriginal population within Australia during those years. Tom Lacey, later to be treasurer of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association 1924 to 1928, revealed those very restrictions to an international audience when he penned a letter to Amy Jacques Garvey – wife of Marcus Garvey in 1924:

Lacey recognised the negative long-term effect of confinement on missions and reserves for the Aboriginal population. The authorities ‘have got their minds so much doped that they think they can never become a people’, he wrote.

International travel gave Aboriginal people a much broader perspective of events and made them aware that others around the globe had shared similar tragedy under the weight of colonisation. Certainly they were given the courage to challenge the notions of inferiority they were expected to accept. Many recognised the importance of maintaining or re-establishing strength from their own cultural identity and history. This sense of identity and history was very much at the forefront of Marcus Garvey’s platform, and later W. E. B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. As Robert Young has argued, both Du Bois and Fanon moved away from analysing the ‘psychological effects of domination and disempowerment plotted in the terms of Hegelian consciousness, to increasingly radical social and political demands for empowerment and self determination’.^[51] This was the very platform and directive taken up by the Aboriginal movement in Sydney during the mid 1920s.^[52]

This chapter has traced how I myself became interested in transnational/transcultural history, and some of the approaches it suggests to a reworking of Australian Aboriginal history. There is a great opportunity for broader awareness and understanding of Aboriginal history to a degree previously beyond the wildest imagination. There are so many areas that could be explored – for instance the impact on Aboriginal activism of Aboriginal servicemen and women returning from fighting overseas in the Boer War, World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. My aim here is simply to highlight a long tradition of international interaction between Aboriginal people and many differing groups, in the hope of inspiring others to pursue these most unlikely areas of study.