The Testimony    (17 page)

The incident had a familiar effect on me: a drawer fell out of the filing cabinet in my mind and spilt its contents onto centre stage. It took a few days to gather the Litzmannstadt Ghetto pictures and memories and file them away again.

Freed of his duties as a senator, Sid initiated a spate of projects and activities. As some were in my areas of interest, we joined forces. We found much common ground in our values, views and passions, and in the direction of our pursuits. The discovery of extensive common ground is a joyful and bonding experience. It is grounds for the dance of kindred spirits.

Julia says that it must have been something in the water Sid and I drank as children in Lodz to account for our synchronised thinking. Yes, the shared cultural ambience of our childhood and growing up in the upside-down world of the war, witnessing the horrendous consequences of prejudice—the barbarous Holocaust—had indeed shaped our attitudes, values and anxieties.

The Holocaust loomed large in Sid’s psyche and in his notion of collective responsibility and guilt. I argued that this notion, valid or not, should not include children. I also said that he was as guilty of the Holocaust as I was of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

We also shared and were shaped by the three postwar years spent in Stalin’s area of influence: East Germany for Sid, Poland for me. The perversion of the noble ideal of socialism left a bitter mark on our youthful enthusiasm. To those who have experienced totalitarian regimes, democracy is precious and must be protected from damage.

We both rejected belief in God. Sid went through a thorough philosophical analysis of his beliefs and values before rejecting religion. In my own rather primitive way I could not accept an omnipotent, omniscient and loving God who allows such great suffering of the innocent. The annual reports of UNICEF tell me that between nine and eleven million young children die terrible deaths from starvation or disease each year.

We were both alarmed by the success of Pauline Hanson and her brand of xenophobia. Her tactics of mobilising disaffected people—in her case, the farmers—during economic recession, through hatred towards a common enemy responsible for their ills (Asians and Aborigines at first, later Africans and Muslims) had an eerie resemblance to Nazi Germany. Hansonism gave us a fright, and so did the introduction of laws of sedition, the increase of powers for secret police and the fostering of patriotic fervour.

We found that, before our encounter and growing friendship, we had each supported a number of causes and issues that could be broadly grouped as matters of social justice: I, in my small way of writing letters to the press and supporting petitions and submissions to relevant authorities; Sid, on the larger stage as a senator, a speaker at symposia, a writer of many published articles and as a convenor and leader of action groups.

The issues included the need for a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, the protection of gay rights, and many campaigns: for prison reforms; against child labour and exploitation in sweat shops; against the privatisation of the CBA bank, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) and some prisons; against the appalling treatment of asylum seekers; and, most of all, against the many wrongs still inflicted on the First Australians.

We both regarded the unregulated market as a jungle where predators prevailed. We both complained about the abolition of the excellent Victorian Law Reform Commission when Jeff Kennett came to power. We lamented the neglect of the valuable research report ‘
Knowledge Nation
’, produced by Dr Barry Jones AO, and we pleaded for better funding for the ABC.

When I came to Australia in 1948 everyone, by my standards, seemed very well off except Indigenous Australians. And there was the all-too-familiar shadow of perceived racial inferiority cast over them. But study and a demanding job kept my involvement at a low and sporadic level. On my retirement from work in 1996, I wanted to make a contribution beyond my membership in several Aboriginal groups.

This path also led to the Spindlers. Julia and Sid had been involved in such hands-on work for many years, and had spent several of them in Alice Springs setting up various services and structures for the local Aboriginals. They were now involved in several projects in Melbourne, and I gladly joined them, participating in their well-structured activities based on the understanding of needs and of cultural sensitivities. Their Towards a Just Society Fund, now with a growing number of participants, provides bursaries for Aboriginal students at several universities in Victoria, while the Friends of Worawa group supports students in an Aboriginal secondary college. These activities are based on the belief that education will provide a circuit-breaker in the cycle of Aboriginal disadvantage. This work also entailed committee and planning meetings, many held at the Spindlers’ home.

In social settings people sometimes observed how much Sid and I were on the same wavelength and how we often finished each other’s sentences. His German-tinged accent and my Polish-tinged accent puzzled people. To the question ‘How did the two of you get together?’ Sid always replied: ‘Halina and I spent our childhood during the war in the same Polish city but on opposite sides of a barbed-wire fence.’ In the awkward silence that often followed one could sense a deepening puzzlement.

I found instant rapport with Julia. There was no ice to break where she was concerned, and I came to marvel at her many skills and accomplishments. We both enjoy the humour of the absurd—laughter, as Victor Borge declares, is the shortest distance between two people.

The Spindlers’ four children, married and with successful careers and young children of their own, participate in some of their parents’ activities, and meet with them frequently. It is a pleasure to observe the dynamics of this family, the closeness of the siblings, the high quality of their relationships and their ingrained friendliness. Sid, the proud father, always stressed that, unfortunately, he could not claim any credit for it: his ‘workaholism’ made him almost an absentee father, and Julia alone shaped the family.

In 2007 I had the great privilege of reading the first draft of Sid’s autobiography. I always thought it important, for his grandchildren’s sake, to have on record Sid’s rebuttal of the allegations of his Nazi Party membership. The book struck me as a valuable document on several levels. It is a vivid description of a child growing up during World War II, and a story of personal struggle with evil and the process of evolving values and ideals. The account of Sid’s early years in Australia forms a slice of the postwar migration experience here. The story of the birth of the Australia Party, followed by the Australian Democrats, offers valuable insights into a period of the political history of this nation. Thanks to Sid’s prodigious work as a legislator, the book reveals how the legislative process shapes and civilises our society.

The book also describes the extraordinary number of community projects and activities in which Sid and Julia were, and are, involved. While his workaholism may have been, as Sid believed, the legacy of a demanding father, the direction of his activities and obsessions was a legacy of the Holocaust. Unlike me, Sid read many analyses of that event, sought answers and tried to define causes.

His book highlights significant achievements by an individual who was driven, persistent and unceasing in his fight for human rights, social justice and for positive discrimination toward the disadvantaged. He was not an easygoing, laid-back chap and was rather poor on small talk. Julia’s part in these achievements was large and frequently acknowledged by Sid. He referred to her as the mainstay of his life. And she was, indeed.

The diagnosis of his liver cancer in 2007 shocked and saddened his family and friends. But Sid worked on his laptop in hospital during chemotherapy, writing major articles and letters to the press. Between treatments he ran our planning and committee meetings with even greater urgency. If compulsive, obsessive social activism were a cure for cancer, we who loved him could have relaxed.

* * * 

Sid Spindler died on 1 March 2008, his fiftieth wedding anniversary. By sheer strength of will he prolonged his rapidly ebbing life to meet this date. His death is such a great loss to his family and to the disadvantaged in our society.

And to me, for he was the brother I had wanted since I was a kid.

WILLIAM COOPER

I don’t remember when I first heard about William Cooper, but I recall my amazement and then a kind of elation. He was an Aborigine, a leader fighting for basic human rights denied to his people. And he was a lone voice in Australia protesting against the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany and Austria. I saw it as an affirmation of the brotherhood of the oppressed and persecuted.

William Cooper was born in 1861 to an Aboriginal mother and a white Australian father. As a ‘half-caste’ child he was at risk of being taken away from his parents to be ‘assimilated’, and often had to hide to escape the hunting police.

At the mission he learned to read and write, and became an avid reader. When the family was forced to move into a reserve, the young William was taken to work as a farm labourer. Later, working as a coachman for a politician in Melbourne, he started reading about countries that had indigenous populations such as New Zealand, the USA, Fiji and South Africa.

Cooper was forty when his country became the Commonwealth of Australia, under the 1901
Act of
Federation
. Its constitution excluded the first inhabitants from its state. William Cooper was never regarded as a citizen, had no right to vote and was not counted in the census. Twenty-six years after his death the 1967 referendum ended this exclusion.

His many fights against the dispossession and persecution of his people included a petition to King George V. This was intercepted by the Australian government, and never reached the king. In 1936 he founded the Australian Aboriginal League (AAL), the first organisation to fight for legal and land rights and parliamentary participation for Indigenous Australians. His opposition to the entrenched racist policies of Australia failed repeatedly.

William Cooper knew of Nazi Germany, where Jews were classified as full, half or quarter Jews, depending on ancestry, deprived of legal rights and incarcerated in camps. It bore an eerie resemblance to the treatment of his people.

On 9 and 10 November 1939 the Nazis organised a pogrom of Jewish communities in Germany and Austria. Ninety-one Jews were murdered, and 30,000 deported to concentration camps. Windows of synagogues, Jewish homes and businesses were smashed, the premises plundered and set on fire. History records this event as
Kristallnacht
, in reference to the broken glass that was strewn in the streets.

William Cooper learned about this from a report in
The Age
on 11 November and decided to act. He led a delegation of AAL members, walking all the long way from his humble home in Footscray to the German Consulate in Albert Road, South Melbourne. There he tried to present the following resolution to the German consul:

On behalf of the Aborigines of Australia, we register a strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany, and ask that the persecution be brought to an end.

The Argus
newspaper reported the following day:

A deputation from the Australian Aborigines’ League, which visited the German consulate yesterday, with the intention of conveying to the consul (Dr R W Dreschsler) a resolution condemning the persecution of Jews and Christians in Germany, was refused admittance. The resolution voiced, on behalf of the Aborigines of Australia, a strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government in Germany, and asks that this persecution be brought to an end.

This delegation represented people who were the subject of genocidal policies and actions in their recent past. William Cooper’s delegation was a lone voice of protest at the outset of the Jewish Holocaust.

William Cooper died in 1941 a disappointed and defeated man. Recognition and acclaim for this remarkable human being was a long time coming. In 2002 a plaque commemorating his protest march against Nazi Germany was unveiled in the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne in a joint ceremony with the Aboriginal community and Cooper’s descendants. Leading members of the Centre helped to establish the Koori Heritage Trust in central Melbourne and an Aboriginal legal service. The centre is holding annual community forums for Aboriginal Victorians and Holocaust survivors. In 2008 the theme was William Cooper’s recognition of the universality of racism and discrimination.

And in Jerusalem, on the seventieth anniversary of his protest, seventy Australian trees were planted at the Holocaust Remembrance Centre in his honour.

In December 2010 the International Institute for Holocaust Research in Jerusalem established a new academic chair endowed to honour William Cooper. The chair is for the study of resistance during the Holocaust.

In what seems to be the only photograph of William Cooper, I see a white-haired and moustachioed gentleman, stern-faced and dignified, in a white shirt and dark tie and suit. I would have loved to have known him.