The Lone Protestor: A.M. Fernando in Australia and Europe by Fiona Paisley, 226 pp, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2012, ISBN 9781922059055 (pbk), $34.95.

This book is a fascinating and absorbing biography of a man who should be widely recognised as a leading Australian Aboriginal rights activist. It reconstructs the life of Anthony Martin Fernando an Aboriginal man who, deeply disturbed by the treatment and condition of Aboriginal people in Australia, took his grievances to the world stage. Paisley describes him as a political envoy who, in exposing Australian conditions, appealed to the world in a variety of forums in England and across Europe for their intervention in Aboriginal affairs. He wanted their help to push for a morally reformed and responsible Aboriginal administration in Australia answerable to the global community. Such a story, the depth of Fernando’s despair and the length and breadth of it, is an evocative saga. In its telling Paisley recreates important parts of the war and interwar world. It is a gritty story of the late nineteenth century brutal (and brutalising) Australian frontier, a divided Europe shaped by shards of race hate, impoverished urban pockets where itinerant workers, like Fernando, scratched out meagre existences or got caught up in the logistics of state-sanctioned disciplinary regimes. And there are glimpses of humanity not least in the two English men who housed, employed and looked after him intermittently till his death in 1949.

It is not just Fernando’s mobility that has transgressive effects in this complex mix, but his outsideness. While Paisley is at pains to demonstrate his fit with a wider national and global indigenous and Afro-American political movement, particularly around the ports and wharfs of the bustling imperial metropolis and its colonial peripheries, Fernando remains the lone protestor, as the title of the book suggests. The question of what his story can offer Aboriginal, Australian, imperial or world history for that matter hovers around the contours of its telling. As an Aboriginal man devoted to the Aboriginal cause, how does Fernando’s life illuminate the story of black-white relations both in Australia and outside of it? Although Paisley does not specifically ask this question her book provides a number of possibilities.

Anthony Martin Fernando was born in Wolloomooloo, Sydney, in 1864. He was taken from his mother as a child and raised by white missionaries, so Paisley surmises, ending up on the rough north-western mining frontier of Western Australia by his fifties. It was there that he witnessed police brutality to Aboriginal people and, barred a fair hearing, took to the world to expose Aboriginal conditions. Paisley maps his journey as a series of performances in London and throughout Europe, including Turkey and Rome, from 1913 to 1942, when he was finally committed to Claybury Hospital in Essex, London, aged and unwell. At every turn he uses his situation to advertise the Aboriginal condition in Australia, even during a period of internment in Austria in 1916. Some of his most dramatic performances were in London itself: his street protests outside Australia House or at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. Even during his three separate trials for assault in the Old Bailey between 1929 and 1938, he uses the courtroom as a stage to protest conditions in Australia.

Like a needy child seeking attention Fernando’s performances constantly rehearsed his sense of grievance. He was willing the world for change. Believing firmly in British culpability for Aboriginal demise what he ultimately wanted was international intervention in Australia. He imagined an international commission overseeing the management of Aboriginal Australians and reminding the world of British wrongdoing and incapacity for mandatory power over both Australia and any future colonies.

The book demonstrates what a world away Australia was from both Fernando’s crusade and the European world on which it was staged. But not completely. His ‘call for help from Australia’ to the people of Switzerland, via the Der Bund newspaper elicited some hostile responses which were echoed wherever Aboriginal claims to justice and fair play were made in Australia. His attempts to raise the issue before Catholics in Rome raised deep suspicion and hostility despite a Vatican exhibition celebrating Catholic missions which largely supported his conclusions of genocide in Australia’s colonial history. And his accusations of genocide in Australia outside Australia House in London saw a hostile response from the Australian rector of St Clement’s church opposite who had organised a patriotic Anzac Day service on the same day.

While the hard lines of race literally shaped his existence they also shaped those around him. Threaded through the book is the story of Fernando’s encounter with Mary Bennett, a leading advocate for Aboriginal rights in Australia and England. Alerted by her friends in the humanitarian network of Fernando’s impending trial, she visited him while he was awaiting trial at the Old Bailey in 1929. She was deeply moved by him and his story of loss and dislocation. She not only shared Fernando’s angst about Aboriginal people, she shared much of his vision for redress. Like him she was an internationalist. Like him she was advocating for self-administered and governed Aboriginal reserves, equal citizenship, education and legal equality. Paisley surmises that Bennett’s meeting with Fernando fuelled her own crusade for Aboriginal rights. Indeed, if Fernando died without redress his cause lived on in Bennett’s own lifelong efforts, in Australia, defending Aboriginal human rights.

The focus of the book is Fernando himself. Yet, the small handful of friends, supporters and humanitarians who were on his side, have a shadowy presence in the story. Two, in particular, stand out – Frank Crawshaw and Douglas Jones – who not only employed him but also intervened to help him at critical times. Without their constancy and support, as well as the assistance and knowledge of their descendants shared with Paisley herself, Fernando’s story would still not be properly known. Indeed, without their help one wonders what would have become of him. Yet, we know very little of them or their particular stories or investments, except in Fernando himself, by the end of the book. I finished the story and had many questions about them, particularly Douglas Jones who was a consistent supporter and friend to Fernando, apparently without paternalism or charity. In the world Paisley describes he was a rare beast but who was he and from where did such empathy spring?

Paisley makes the point in her acknowledgements that in writing the book she had to go beyond the usual limits of Aboriginal, Australian or British imperial history. This refers to the stretch of her own historical research as she tried to etch in, and make sense of, the story of Fernando’s life. I found this one of the great contributions of the book. Paisley digresses throughout to explain how Fernando’s story fits with myriad, often untold threads, of global history from policing in Fascist Italy to the medical examination of prisoners in Brixton, to the consumerist market culture of interwar Britain. Furthermore, at key moments in the book she fills in gaps in the story, Fernando’s origins, as expressed in his name, being the most obvious. While closely linked to his Catholicism she suspects South Asian background. This is less a story of ‘what if’ than ‘perhaps’. For some of her questions there are no clear answers such is the fragmentary nature of his life and the scattered archives on which it is based.

Yet the story Paisley weaves is anything but fragmentary. It is handsomely produced. The timeline at the beginning usefully plots, both temporally and geographically, Fernando’s journey. There are a series of wonderful black and white photographs in the book which also provide graphic detail and representation for the story. Many are referential. Included among them are images of Woolloomooloo and Peak Hill in Western Australia around the time Fernando lived there, photographs of concentration camp internees, key pieces of architecture central to the story and examples of Fernando’s own diary entries.

In the final analysis it was Fernando’s atypicality which makes his story important and suggestive as Paisley knows. His story works as a relief capable of throwing light on events at a critical time in world history, a sort of back-door view of the world. It was his capacity to slip through not only the hard edges of the early twentieth century world but through the historiography, too, which makes his story so powerful. As Paisley reflects, he has remained virtually unknown for decades. Thanks to her painstaking efforts and those of her researchers his anonymity is no more and we must all reflect a little harder, as Fernando implored, about the consequences of Australia’s imperial legacy.

Alison Holland

Macquarie University