8 OPAL

OPAL – the acronym for One People of Australia League and the aim of the League? To Weld the Coloured and White Citizens of Australia into One People.

Perhaps OPAL can be thought of as a forerunner to the Reconciliation movement? Or perhaps the forerunner to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-based organisations; or perhaps it was none of these, it was just itself.

I have selected four OPAL journals from the Indigenous collection and specifically from the box marked ‘Neville Bonner’. One journal has a blue trim and a photo of Uncle Willie McKenzie is on the cover. It is the 8th edition, July 1968.

And the photo of Uncle Willie McKenzie is amazing.

Michael Aird, who manages the Anthropology Museum on the St Lucia campus, says Uncle Willie was the first Aboriginal staff member of the university.

Another is a totally red covered journal centred with the OPAL logo, the acronym and accompanying motifs easily crafted into the design of a shield. This is the September 1966 edition.

The 26th edition dated June/July 1973 is yellow trimmed with Miss Opal, Edwina Lou-Ellen Merrypor (refer to page 23), on the front cover.

The last journal is red trimmed with a photo of Neville Bonner on his wedding day with his bride Heather. This is the 23rd edition from September/October 1972.

I have purposefully chosen these journals because of the connection to Uncle Neville Bonner. At one time he was the President of OPAL and would write commentary at the front of the journals. This was before he became a federal politician. He lived in Ipswich. My family also lived/lives in Ipswich.

My earliest memory is the old people of my family telling the story of Uncle Neville coming to Ipswich as a young man, sleeping rough under the bridge that spanned north and south Ipswich, across the Bremer River, because he didn’t know any of the families until old Mrs Florrie Davidson took him in. I also remember the old people of my family talking about him being a boomerang maker.

One of my earliest memories was when we lived at Churchill and the Aboriginal men throwing the boomerangs in our paddock and playing cricket together. This would have been when all the families had come off Purga Mission and were living together in and around Churchill. I have other memories of coming home from school, when our family lived in town and Uncle would be sitting at the dining room table having a cuppa tea with my Mum, talking politics. These were always interesting conversations because they were on the opposite side of the political fence.

I flip through the pages of the journals and study the photographs. There is one of Evonne Goolagong (AC, MBE). She is so young and beautiful. I see another photograph of Roslyn Watson, one of our first dancers, a ballerina. Roslyn is related to Gaala Watson, who is an academic staff member and Higher Degree by Research student in Business Studies.

I read in wonder at Uncle’s words. In 1973 in the regular designated column set aside for the President within the journal, ‘The President Speaks‘, he wrote:

I stand, an Aborigine sick at heart as I watch your wilful emotional pollution. I stand an Aborigine, and thus a born conservationist, compelled to warn that if you have not already tipped the balance within our environment, then we must be perilously close to an imbalance.  Accompanying the environmental danger comes emotional pollution, heed I warn you and my fellow Aborigines warn you, and get back into tune with Nature (page 4).

Reading these words makes you see he was a man ahead of his time. These words forewarned of what we are experiencing today, 49 years later. An imbalance on a global scale and where the full force of environmental dangers have been keenly and continuously felt with flood, fire and epidemic. Get Back in Tune with Nature Indeed!

I remember him, that shock of fabulous thick hair, greying and then turning white.

I remember.

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Biography

Tracey Bunda is a Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman and Professor and Academic Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland. Tracey has over three decades’ experience in leadership within the university. Her research interests include race and power, Indigenous women’s leadership and Indigenous education. Her expertise is sought by universities, government and industry. Additionally Tracey practices bush food gardening and weaving.