The harrowing event is now told at the Freedom Rides Museum, located in Montgomery’s former Greyhound station, where visitors can hear testimonials … Charles Rowley, Outcasts in White Australia, Penguin, Sydney, 1972, p. 388. Change that was the direct result of the 1961 Freedom Rides. Darce Cassidy recorded the angry conversations and filed a report to the ABC.Captured on tape was the vice-president of the Walgett Returned Service League Club who said he would never allow an Aboriginal to become a member. Here they met a violent mob intent on maintaining segregation. Film footage shocked city viewers, adding to the mounting pressure on the government.The central role of the film camera in this campaign demonstrated the growing sophistication of activists who recognised the need to show city dwellers what was happening in country towns.The campaigners drew parallels with civil rights movements elsewhere in the world, especially the United States. The site was leased by the The bus station is significant only in its relationship to the events of the single day of May 20, 1961. It was fifty years to the minute after 21 young Freedom Riders arrived at this station. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride, Sydney, 2002. In February 1965 a group of University of Sydney students organised a bus tour of western and coastal New South Wales towns.Their purpose was threefold. Nina Simone was a victim of racial discrimination, but instead of retreating, she wrote songs about her experiences, frustrations, thoughts, and hopes in the struggle for # equality. Perkins and others did return to help in Walgett.The Freedom Ride through New South Wales towns and the publicity it gained raised consciousness of racial discrimination in Australia and strengthened the campaigns to eradicate it which followed.Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, See also Peter Read, 'Darce Cassidy's Freedom Ride', Further information on the documents referred to in the Civil Rights sectionsThe National Museum of Australia acknowledges First Australians and recognises their continuous connection to country, community and culture.This website contains names, images and voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.ABN 70 592 297 967 | The National Museum of Australia is an Australian Government AgencyThe Untold Stories of Cook and the First Australians We support the Freedom Rides Museum and help connect it to the places that tell this American story. In May 2011, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the riot at the bus station, a 3,000-square-foot (280 m In images and text, the fifteen panels illustrated the events of May 1961, but the interior remained inaccessible.In 2009, the services of Cohen Carnaggio Reynolds, architects out of Birmingham, AL, were retained by the Alabama Historical Commission to rehabilitate and refurbish the interior of the bus station into The Freedom Rides Museum. The students demonstrated against racial discrimination practised at the Walgett Returned Services League, the Moree Baths, the Kempsey Baths and the Boraville picture theatre.They not only challenged these practices, but they ensured that reports of their demonstrations and local townspeople's hostile responses were available for news broadcasts on radio and television.Outside Walgett Jim Spigelman trained his home movie camera on the hostile convoy of cars which followed the bus out of town at night and ran it off the road.
The pool became a scene of tension and aggression as they attempted to assist Aboriginal children from the reserve outside town to enter the pool while locals angrily defended the race-based ban.Charles Perkins reported these events to a crowd of 200 attending the 1965 Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) conference in Canberra.Conference goers heard that one positive result of the students' activities was that the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board publicly announced that it would spend 65,000 pounds on housing in Moree.Later in the year Harry Hall, president of the Walgett Aborigines' Progessive Association, appealed to Perkins and other Aboriginal activists to return to Walgett to assist in the fight against the colour bar applied at the Oasis Hotel.