"To Make It Brilliantly Apparent to the People of Australia": The Pilbara Cooperative Movement and the Campaign for Aboriginal Civil Rights in the 1950s

During the 1950s an Aboriginal mining cooperative in Western Australia's Pilbara attracted widespread interest as a model for addressing Aboriginal disadvantage throughout Australia. Individuals and organisations involved in the struggle for equal rights for Aboriginal people learned what they could of the ideology, operation and history of the cooperative, chiefly through the writing and speeches of its non-Aboriginal leader and spokesman, Don McLeod. They saw in the Pilbara cooperative a model of Aboriginal-directed change which contrasted markedly with the tutelary monocultural approach of individual advancement which characterised state and Commonwealth government assimilation policy at the time. The intense interest shown in the cooperative by the Victorian Council for Aboriginal Rights, in particular, provides evidence that throughout the 1950s campaigners sought alternative solutions to Aboriginal disadvantage to those proposed under assimilation policy.