William Cooper

William Cooper (born December 18, 1861, Echuca, Victoria, Australia—died March 29, 1941, Mooroopna, Victoria) was an Australian activist who fought for civil rights for Australian Aboriginal people. He founded the Australian Aborigines’ League (AAL), which became one of the most important Aboriginal organizations in the 1930s.

Cooper’s father was a white labourer, and his mother was from the Yorta Yorta people (an Aboriginal group living in what is now northeastern Victoria and southern New South Wales). Cooper trained to be a labourer at a young age, learning such rural skills as how to train horses and to shear sheep. When his mother and some siblings moved onto a mission, Cooper joined them. He converted to Christianity in the 1880s.

Cooper and many other Yorta Yorta moved onto the Cummeragunja reserve near Shepparton, Victoria, in the late 1880s. The reserve was operated by the Aborigines Protection Board, which gave the Aboriginal families freedom to farm and to work the land. Cummeragunja was successful until about 1908. About that time the board took control of the family farms and declared that the money earned from the reserve had to go to the board. The Aboriginal residents objected to that change, and many of them, including Cooper, were either kicked off the reserve or left it.

Cooper moved around during the 1910s and ’20s, working as a rural labourer. He joined the Australian Workers’ Union and was a spokesman for Aboriginal workers in New South Wales and Victoria. In 1930 Cooper returned to Cummeragunja, and three years later he moved to Melbourne. His home there became a gathering place for Aboriginal activists, including Margaret Tucker and Douglas Nicholls. These activists petitioned the government for Aboriginal representation in Parliament, for land rights, and for the right to vote. Their group was formally established as the Australian Aborigines’ League in 1936.

In 1938 Cooper, along with William Ferguson, Jack Patten, and other activists, organized the Day of Mourning as a response to celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the British arrival in Australia in 1788. Held on Australia Day (January 26), this demonstration brought attention to the damaging effects that European settlement had had on Indigenous peoples. The Day of Mourning led Cooper to look for support in establishing an annual event. That same year, he and other activists had gathered 1,814 signatures for a petition to King George VI asking for representation for Aboriginal people in Parliament, but the Australian government declined to forward the petition to the king. In 1940 National Aborigines Day was celebrated. That day evolved into NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week, a weeklong celebration of the Indigenous cultures of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands.

Cooper spent the last years of the 1930s protesting the treatment of Aboriginal people at Cummeragunja and other reserves. In 1938, when he heard the news about Kristallnacht, in which Nazis attacked Jews and their property all over Germany, he led an AAL delegation to deliver a letter of protest to the German consul in Melbourne. The delegation was not allowed into the consulate, so the letter was left with a guard. (Cooper’s grandson, Alfred Turner, delivered a copy of the letter to German officials at the Australian Embassy in Berlin in 2017.) In late 1940 Cooper retired to Barmah, Victoria, in Yorta Yorta country.