Call yourself an Australian? Cool. Does the name Vincent Lingiari mean anything? No? Well, OK, doesn’t to me either.
But, you know, I just heard Archie Roach and Sara Storer singing his story on RockWiz. And bugger me, it turns out he’s one of the country’s most important human rights activists.
Bloody embarrassing not to know that, eh?
I mean, you’re probably more likely to remember, oh, that woman on a bus, who was she again?
It\’s a well known and accepted fact that Australian history was (is? I don\’t know nowadays) taught crappily at schools. They did a bit more on the Australian civil rights movement when I was at high school in the late 90s. They taught the American and Australian civil rights movement in the same unit.
Funnily enough, I remember them teaching us about Rosa Parks, but don\’t remember them saying anything about this person. Whether that\’s because they didn\’t teach us about him or I have crappy memory retention may remain a mystery.