For young Redfern activists, racism was a constant presence. It permeated every facet of their lives but found its clearest expression in their frequent encounters with the police — which arose, they were certain, from an official campaign of intimidation, harassment, and high-level surveillance.[40] Police behaviour at the Empress Hotel (the ‘Big E’), or the Clifton Hotel in Regent Street was a typical example. ‘It was like a taxi rank’, Foley claimed. ‘They’d come in and beat the shit out of everyone inside, arbitrarily arrest anyone who objected, and when the wagons were full they’d drive off and lock people up on trumped-up charges’.[41] Simply to be on the streets of Redfern late at night was enough to contravene the ‘unofficial curfew’. If you were on the streets after 10 pm, recalled activist Chicka Dixon, ‘brother, you’re taking a chance’.[42]
It was Foley, his cousin Gary Williams and Paul Coe who eventually took decisive action. Coe, Foley claimed, ‘started trying to convince me and Williams that we could do something about [police harassment]’. He began encouraging them to read political literature, but was becoming particularly enthusiastic about his discovery of a campaign called the ‘Pig Patrol’ that the Black Panthers had begun in America. He handed the information to Foley. ‘This is a great idea. Read this’.[43]
These activists realised that, while they could not trail police around the streets with loaded weapons as the Black Panthers were doing, the techniques were nonetheless easily adapted for Redfern. They could at least carry notebooks and pencils. Thus armed, some activists entered the ‘Big E’ one Saturday evening in 1969. ‘As the pigs began to do their nightly act we started writing down everything that they were doing’, Foley recalls. ‘We wrote down their numbers, their van numbers, who they were arresting’.[44] After several months, a group of activists including Williams, Foley, Paul and his sister Isobel Coe, Tony Coorey, Les Collins, Lyn Thompson, Shirley Smith (Mum Shirl) and James Wedge had amassed a vast amount of incriminating evidence.[45]
What followed was a series of meetings between these activists and Hal Wootten, Dean of Law at the University of New South Wales. They were, he noted, an ‘impressive group’, intensely proud of their Aboriginality, and determined to solve the social problems that beset their community.[46] The first Aboriginal Legal Service of New South Wales was consequently launched only a short time later. While activists relied heavily on the assistance of sympathetic White lawyers, this was the first organisation in the state to be conceived, established and controlled by Aborigines since the Aborigines Progressive Association in 1937.
Institutional racism was crippling Aboriginal life in Redfern in other areas as well, and young Black Power activists continued to seek a solution. Coe continued to read about the Black Panther community survival projects in the United States — free clothing, political education classes, free food programs, and a news service, as well as a ‘Free Breakfast Program’ for children, and a ‘People’s Free Medical Research Health Clinic’. Party Chairman Bobby Seale had promoted the programs as means of ‘organising the people’, and letting them know ‘that in this time, in our time, we must seize our right to live, and we must seize our right to survive’.[47] When Gordon Briscoe, an inaugural council member of the Legal Service, visited a Redfern house in June 1971 on business related to the service, he was outraged. Inside, the Aboriginal client was so ill that he was unable to speak, his impoverished family unable to afford medical attention.[48]
The determination to ‘seize the time’ that Aboriginal activists had shown in their establishment of the Legal Service was redeployed. Within only a few weeks, the Aboriginal Medical Service had opened for business a few doors down from the Legal Service in Regent Street, Redfern. Here volunteers provided basic health care and developed programs to counteract the increasing numbers of patients coming to the service with health problems caused by malnutrition.[49] Free fruit and vegetables were delivered to Aboriginal families, and the Breakfast for Children Program provided Aboriginal schoolchildren with breakfast on school mornings where otherwise they might have eaten nothing.[50]
Although Foley and other Black Power activists readily acknowledged the way in which these programs were inspired by the American Black Panther Party,[51] the programs were, nonetheless, a response to the unique conditions of the Aboriginal community. Transformed to meet the needs of inner-city Aborigines, activists also understood them as being embedded within the fight for land rights. For Briscoe, the services represented ‘the contemporary extension of the historical resistance to white superiority.’ They were statements of independence and self-assertion, aimed at getting White society to recognise that ‘this is our land and we mean to get it back’.[52] For Coe the Legal Service had a definite role outside the provision of legal assistance. It was, he argued in 1975, an interim step leading towards a Black nation. ‘I believe, and always have believed’, he maintained, ‘that the Aboriginal people have never ever relinquished their sovereignty or their rights … that we have always been and still are, a nation within a nation — that we are a sovereign people.’[53]