By Anthony Benbow, Fremantle branch
The Aboriginal community and progressive people everywhere have suffered a blow with the sudden death of Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs.
Clarrie passed away on November 26 at the age of 55, while visiting his ancestral homelands in WA’s south west. He was a member of the Nyungah council of Elders, a follower of Islam entitled to the title Haj, and a member of Socialist Alliance.
Clarrie’s lifetime of activism was grounded in, but not limited to, the struggle for Aboriginal rights. He was involved in an incredible range of social justice, environmental and human rights campaigns.
Clarrie was active in the Water Supply Union in the 1970s, and served as its president. In 1981, the WSU merged with the Federated Miscellaneous Workers’ Union and Clarrie was a FMWU state councillor and executive member from 1982 to 1989. During this time, he offered his solidarity to all other workers in struggle, including the occupation of the Cockatoo Island Dockyard in Sydney.
A major political struggle in Clarrie’s life was over the Swan Brewery. The old Swan Brewery was built over a water source sacred to Nyungah women. In the 1980s, the abandoned site was the subject of several "WA Inc" deals. Then Premier Carmen Lawrence did the final deal: Multiplex Construction boss and Labor campaign donor John Roberts would be handed the site, effectively for free, to develop it as luxury apartments and restaurants.
The Nyungah people of the Swan Valley set up a year-long protest camp at the site. Their wishes were simple: remove the old buildings and make the site a public park to restore its significance as a sacred site. Thousands joined the protests.
Clarrie was a key leader of that struggle and his imaginative tactics have become legend: installing a mailbox and insisting that Australia Post deliver letters direct to the camp, and painting everything he could red, black and yellow, including the concrete barriers erected by the developers, for example. Eventually, the WA government bypassed the federal laws, frustrated the legal challenges, forced the lifting of union work bans and used masses of police to break the community picket on August 26, 1992. But even then Multiplex and the government had to fight further legal challenges which stalled the development for three more years.
In 1988, to highlight 200 years of racism and genocide, Clarrie, Michael Mansell and other Aboriginal activists travelled to Libya on passports issued by the "Provisional Aboriginal Government of Australia", of which Clarrie was president. He travelled widely over the years, meeting many First Nations peoples in the Americas, and attending international gatherings. He told the 2001 UN Conference Against Racism: "If all Australians had the same experiences as Aboriginals, a third of them would not be alive today".
Clarrie was a strong supporter of all anti-racism campaigns, in particular against apartheid in South Africa. In 1996, following the election of John Howard and the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Clarrie travelled the country as part of the Justice Tour. In the 1996 WA election he stood on the Racism No! ticket. In 2001, as Socialist Alliance’s lead Senate candidate in WA, Clarrie spoke out strongly against the government’s treatment of refugees and the looming war on Afghanistan, and campaigned for the Alliance among some of WA’s Islamic community.
Clarrie was honest and not afraid to speak his mind. His criticism of the Keating government’s approach to Native Title was scathing. "We expected Native title, but we got Native welfare - at the same time the Native Title Tribunal has been an instrument to coerce the indigenous peoples of Australia to accept the Labor Party’s policy of compensation which, as at the 1st September 1994, amounted to a grand sum of less than $124 for each indigenous person of Australia", he said.
The last time I saw Clarrie was at the October 23 Perth protest against Bush’s visit, where he gave the Nyungah welcome to country, standing proud on the stage with his enormous land rights flag over his shoulder. Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs, you will not be forgotten. Your struggle will live on through what you inspired in us all.