While the Embassy did represent one of the earliest explicit declarations of Aboriginal sovereignty, Aborigines had long been aware of their separateness from the life of the nation. In fact, the rejection of ‘whiteness’ as ‘rightness’ was the foundational politics for many Black Power activists. For these campaigners, the essence of Black Power lay in its refusal to internalise a sense of inferiority. To be a Black Power activist was to have a positive sense of one’s identity. It was to build a new set of truths. As Victorian activist Bruce McGuinness put it, a ‘Blackward step’ would be ‘a forward step’.^[24]

Some Black Power activists drew upon Black American activism to promote an overtly ‘Black’ image. The ‘Afro’ was a popular hairstyle for those who were ‘black and beautiful’. Walker dressed in the black leather jacket and dark sunglasses of the Black Panthers, while Redfern activist Bob Bellear chose the Panthers’ black beret.^[25] Clenched black fists began to appear everywhere: at demonstrations, on badges, in leaflets and newsletters. Aspects of Black American language found their way into activist dialogue. ‘Honky’ or ‘the Man’ was the terminology used to describe the white oppressor, ‘Uncle Tom’ the label given to those seen to be in collusion with him. In 1972, McGuinness announced that the old book of rules had been torn up. The new book’s title was ‘Black is beautiful, right on brothers and sisters, and screw you whitey’.^[26]

Activists also found reading material that resonated with their own life experiences and desires. McGuinness recommended Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s best-selling Black Power as useful guides for Aboriginal Black Power activists. The latter book, which promoted the need for Black people to eschew coalitions with Whites and to ‘redefine themselves’, McGuinness wrote, ‘should be a prized possession of every Aborigine’.^[27] Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson and Angela Davis were also useful background reading.^[28] It was Malcolm X’s autobiography and speeches though, that most captured the imaginations of some of the younger Aborigines, with his uncompromisingly militant rejection of White culture, his pride in being Black, his belief in Black nationhood, and his call for self-defence ‘by any means necessary’.^[29]

Adopting these visual and rhetorical symbols of Black America did not deter Black Power activists from calling for pride in Aboriginality. Bob Maza, for instance, was an Indigenous activist from Queensland, who had been living in Melbourne during the late 1960s and had moved to Sydney in the early 1970s. From 1968 he began an urgent campaign to ‘create an awareness of the Koorie as a race’, pointing to the honour, integrity and self-discipline of the ‘old Aborigines’.^[30] In June 1969 he suggested that Malcolm X’s teaching and example could do much to enhance this self-discovery. ‘I only hope that when I die I can say I’m black and it’s beautiful to be black. It is this sense of pride which we are trying to give back to the aborigine [sic] today’, he claimed.^[31] Malcolm X taught him, he argued, that it was possible to ‘walk tall and with pride’, and that only a positive self-image could effectively challenge the internalised impact of White supremacy.^[32] Law student and Redfern activist Paul Coe agreed, believing that that Black Power was all about actively working against assimilationist paradigms through the ‘re-instating of black culture wherever … possible’.^[33]

It was this position on Black Power that Maza carried with him when he attended a Black Power conference in America in September 1970. After attending workshops with other Black Power delegates and meeting Black American groups around the country afterwards, he was ‘burning with passion’ to implement some of the ideas he had gleaned. He was particularly impressed by Amiri Baraka’s National Black Theatre in Harlem. They were ‘so powerful’, and ‘so strong’. Maza loved the way they were using theatre as a teaching medium and so, with a little theatre experience of his own behind him, helped to establish a National Black Theatre (NBT) in Redfern, in 1972.^[34]

This multifaceted theatre and community place was a space that could be used as a childcare facility during the day, where Black Panthers were known to participate in poetry readings for local children, and where community meetings were held. Carole Johnson, a dancer with a Black American company, had remained in Australia after her tour finished and it was here that she trained the dance division of the theatre. An art workshop produced sculptures, carvings and ceramics, as well as posters for demonstrations. Drama and writing workshops taught basic skills, and ‘Ebony Profile’ was established as a Black casting agency for advertising, television and film.^[35]

Black theatre was a consciously political undertaking from the beginning. The performers and writers involved aimed to put forward what they saw as a specifically Aboriginal view of social reality and to challenge White audiences. NBT was consequently often described as ‘protest theatre’, but its function was much broader. It was actively intent on exploring those factors that constituted Aboriginality. The theatre’s creative works were to be used as tools for recovering a different historical tradition and for putting forward Aboriginal narratives of dispossession. They would counter White-controlled images of Aboriginality and promote Black pride. This version of Aboriginality would not only declare its separateness from white Australia but also would celebrate it and teach it to others. For many, Aboriginal theatre was no less powerful than the Aboriginal Embassy or the Black Panther Party in achieving political goals or promoting Black Power.^[36] The theatre of NBT lay in the idea that there was no significant slippage between the parts the actors were playing and the reality of their lives once they had left the stage. Life on reserves and missions, in fringe towns and inner urban communities, seasonal work, racial violence, the continuing impact of colonialism and the intersections between past and present provided the creative impetus for Aboriginal theatre. So too did the political activities of the theatre’s actors, many of whom, as playwright Gerry Bostock observed, were involved in multiple spheres of activism. Those involved in Black theatre were just as likely to be found working with Aboriginal community organisations or at the Aboriginal Embassy — because, Bostock argued, they knew that ‘to do the job that has to be done involves struggle on many fronts, and you can’t devote yourself to one area’.^[37]