[Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains the names and pictures of deceased Aboriginal persons. Readers are warned there may be words and descriptions that may be culturally distressing.]

“Give our children the same chances as your own, and they will do as well as your children! We ask for equal education, equal opportunity.”

These words might have been spoken this year. In fact, they come from the national statement of the Aborigines Progressive Association which, in 1938, called for a “Day of Mourning and Protest” to mark 150 years of British occupation.  

To reflect on this year’s NAIDOC theme – 50 Years of Deadly– we revisited nearly a century of First Nations educational activism. Across petitions, pamphlets, dialogues, and speeches, the same educational aspirations appear again and again.

Different generations, but the same demands.

This piece is an invitation to listen across time.

Give our children the same chances

Across nearly 90 years, First Nations leaders have insisted on equality of educational opportunity. 

On the steps of the Sydney Town Hall for the Day of Mourning in 1938, Jack Patten declared that Aboriginal inequality was “not a matter of race, it is a matter of education and opportunity”. 

Two years earlier, Yorta Yorta leader William Cooper had written to the NSW premier demanding that Aboriginal children receive full educational opportunities so that they might become “doctors, nurses, teachers”.

Patten (far right) led a protest outside Australia Hall in 1938. Photo: Library of NSW

Half a century later, speaking to the Australian Teachers Federation ahead of the 1988 Bicentenary, Alyawarre woman Pat Fowell (now........

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