Snake Dancing by Roberta Sykes

Author:Roberta Sykes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1998-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Hence I came to be wearing these boots at the Lionel Brockman support demonstration, and photos of me so attired were flashed to newspapers around the country. I was gaining a reputation for militancy, I felt, based, to some extent, on my footwear.

I cadged lifts and travelled around, attending conferences, speaking to groups and raising public awareness. During a conference in Canberra people were asked to participate in a ‘Free Angela Davis’ demonstration outside the US Embassy. (Angela Davis, a Black American, was being held in isolation in a US prison, charged with, and later acquitted of, kidnap and murder.) I attended along with everyone else, and a photographer, no doubt attracted by my afro hairstyle, snapped my picture as I held up a placard. This photo was published on the cover of Tribune, the Communist Party newspaper, leading many people to believe, erroneously, that I was a member of the Communist Party.

Around the same time, Denis Walker and others were in the process of setting up a group called the Australian Black Panther Party, modelled on the American Panthers whose militancy had dominated much of the television coverage from the US. As I had little to do with this, I don’t know if Denis’ group had an affiliation with its namesake or just adopted the name from the material the members were reading, although I suspect the latter. This development, which was trumpeted by the local media around the personae of Denis, Gary Foley and Billy Craigie, created a great deal of fear in the white community, and caused just about anyone involved in the struggle to be regarded as ‘Black Power’.

As I supported the philosophy of liberation by whatever means necessary, I did not divorce myself from the politics of Black Power, and I explained my understanding of this philosophy later in a published debate, ‘Black Power in Australia’, with the then Senator, Neville Bonner. Even Neville, in his counter-argument, wrote that there was ‘good Black Power’ and ‘bad Black Power’, and that he was for the former, demonstrating the difficulty which people had in allocating specific meaning to the concept.

My housemates in Melbourne began to report interference with the phone, and again I often felt that I was being followed. We would see men sitting in cars on the street outside the house. One rainy day we were sitting in the lounge, one of the housemates was playing the piano, when another who was looking out a window spied a man in a raincoat standing just outside the room. The house was set well back from the street and was almost completely concealed by a tall hedge right across the front, so no one would have been standing there by accident. One of the guys said the man was soaked through and looked miserable, and he thought he would invite him in for a cup of tea. When he opened the door, the raincoated man ran up the driveway, and shortly we heard a car taking off. After this incident we made sport of the probability of our being under surveillance.

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