Human rights and antiracism in Australia: Indigenising a movement, 1930-1950

Histories of human rights in Australia rarely understand them in terms of Aboriginal rights much less antiracism. Yet, Aboriginal Australians were among the first to utilise the language of human rights both prior to and immediately after the passing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This chapter explores that history, demonstrating the ways in which human rights were deployed as an Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal antiracist politics and resistance across the early to middle years of the twentieth century. Inspired by Priyamvada Gopal’s history of anticolonial resistance and British dissent in which she traces the way that metropolitan opposition to colonialism was shaped by anti-colonial insurgents and agents I theorise a revisionist account of non-Aboriginal antiracist activism and dissent in these years as more shaped and informed by Aboriginal resistance than the historiography suggests. The chapter argues that the framing of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal resistance as explicitly antiracist opens the interpretive possibilities for historicising both human rights history and the long arc of Aboriginal political resistance.