How William Cooper became “the man who stood up to Hitler”
As recently as the early 2000s the Aboriginal leader William Cooper (1860–1941) was barely recognised in his own country. But he has been celebrated in recent years, and this greater recognition can be attributed to a story that has come to be told about him: the story of “the man who stood up to Hitler.” The story’s origin lies in a verifiable event: in December 1938 the Australian Aborigines’ League, an organisation headed by Cooper, tried to present a petition to the German consul in Melbourne protesting against Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jewish people the previous month.
That fragment of a story began its evolution when the well-known Melbourne Aboriginal activist Gary Foley came across a brief report about the event in a newspaper of the time. In an essay published in 1997 he drew a connection between the League’s protest and the event now widely known as Kristallnacht, a Nazi-sponsored pogrom against Jewish people. Foley believed the League was the first group in Australia to try to formally protest against the German government’s persecution of Jewish people, but his main aim was to draw attention to Australia’s persecution of Aboriginal people by noting the comparison with the Nazis.
Read the article on the Inside Story.