On the morning of 26 January 1938, while official celebrations of the 150th anniversary of British settlement filled Sydney's streets, a group of Aboriginal men and women walked into the Australian Hall on Elizabeth Street for a very different kind of gathering. They called it the Day of Mourning and Protest. The hall was full — approximately 100 Aboriginal people from across New South Wales — alongside sympathetic non-Aboriginal supporters. It was the first national conference of Aboriginal people ever held in Australia.
The date was chosen deliberately. The sesquicentenary celebrations — the parades, the re-enactments, the official speeches about 150 years of progress — provided both an occasion and an audience. While Australia celebrated its colonial founding, Aboriginal Australians publicly mourned what that founding had done to them and demanded that it be undone. The juxtaposition was intentional and powerful.
The word "turning point" is used often in history and often carelessly. A genuine turning point is not simply a dramatic moment — it is a moment after which things that were impossible become possible, or things that were inevitable become avoidable. The Day of Mourning was a turning point in this precise sense: it established the model of organised, national Aboriginal political activism that would eventually produce the 1967 Referendum, the Land Rights Act, and the Uluru Statement. But the path between 1938 and those later achievements was long, difficult, and incomplete. Understanding what the Day of Mourning actually changed — and what it did not immediately change — is the central task of this article.
Aboriginal life under the protection system
To understand the Day of Mourning, you need to understand what Aboriginal people in Australia were actually living through in 1938. The frontier wars had ended — the last officially sanctioned large-scale killings occurred in the late 1920s — but their aftermath had produced a system of control that was, in many ways, just as destructive.
The people who made the Day of Mourning
The Day of Mourning was organised primarily by the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA), founded in 1937 by Jack Patten and Pearl Gibbs. But it was the culmination of activist work by a wider network of Aboriginal leaders who had been building the case for Aboriginal rights for years.
What the Day of Mourning actually achieved
The conference produced a formal resolution — a document of protest and demand — that articulated for the first time a comprehensive Aboriginal political agenda. Its key demands were: full citizenship rights for all Aboriginal people; an end to the powers of the Aborigines Protection Board; and the establishment of a Commonwealth Ministry responsible for Aboriginal affairs.
The Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights — the pamphlet produced by the APA for the occasion — was widely distributed and marked the beginning of a public advocacy campaign that would continue for the next three decades.
None of the conference's immediate demands were met by the government. The Curtin government did not abolish the Protection Board; the Constitution was not amended; Aboriginal people were not given the vote in all jurisdictions; children continued to be removed. The Day of Mourning produced no immediate policy change. What it produced instead was a model — a demonstration that organised national political activism by Aboriginal people was possible — and a set of political demands that would animate the empowerment movement for the next three decades.
Why 1938 was a turning point — and why that needs careful argument
Calling the Day of Mourning a "turning point" requires explanation — because in the immediate term, nothing changed. The government did not respond to the conference's demands. Aboriginal people continued to be removed from reserves, children continued to be taken, the vote remained restricted. A turning point that produces no immediate change needs a more nuanced account than simply asserting its importance.
William Cooper and the Kristallnacht protest
On 6 December 1938 — six weeks after Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom in which Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues across Germany and Austria were attacked and destroyed, and 91 Jewish people were killed — William Cooper led a delegation from the Australian Aborigines' League to the German Consulate in Melbourne. They delivered a letter of protest against the persecution of Jewish people in Germany, condemning it as a violation of human rights and an act of racial violence.
Cooper's protest was remarkable on multiple levels. First, it was almost certainly the only formal protest by any civil society organisation in Australia against Kristallnacht — a fact that illuminates how little mainstream Australian society was prepared to publicly challenge Nazi racial policies at the time. Second, it was made by a man who had spent decades fighting against racial persecution in Australia, whose petitions to his own government had been ignored, and whose people were living under a system of legal control as severe as anything in apartheid South Africa. Third, Cooper explicitly drew the connection — to protest racial persecution in Germany was, implicitly, to insist that the same principle applied at home.
Cooper's Kristallnacht protest is now recognised by the Jewish community in Australia as an act of extraordinary solidarity. The Australian Aborigines' League and Cooper himself are commemorated at the Jewish Holocaust Museum in Melbourne. The protest also illustrates a principle that runs through the entire history of the Aboriginal empowerment movement: that the language of universal human rights, applied consistently, has no geographic limits. Aboriginal rights advocates who protested racial persecution in Germany were simultaneously — and consciously — protesting racial persecution in Australia.
From 1938 to 1967 — the arc of the empowerment movement
The Day of Mourning was the beginning, not the culmination. The demands it made — citizenship rights, the abolition of protection legislation, Commonwealth responsibility for Aboriginal affairs — would take nearly three more decades to partially realise. The path from 1938 to the 1967 Referendum (F2) ran through World War Two (in which Aboriginal men served in the Australian armed forces, which many activists argued gave an unanswerable claim to citizenship), through the establishment of FCAATSI in 1958, through the Freedom Rides of 1965 (which exposed continuing discrimination in NSW to a national television audience), and finally to the overwhelming 90.77% vote in favour of the constitutional referendum that counted Aboriginal people in the census and gave the Commonwealth power to make laws for them.
The Day of Mourning did not cause these changes — but it established the political framework within which they occurred. Every subsequent step in the empowerment movement was argued in the language of rights and citizenship that the Day of Mourning introduced into Aboriginal political discourse in 1938.
Australia Day — the contemporary resonance
The Day of Mourning's deliberate choice of 26 January as its date has become increasingly resonant as the Australia Day debate has intensified. The day Aboriginal Australians called a day of mourning in 1938 is the same day that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — and a growing number of non-Aboriginal Australians — describe as "Invasion Day" and oppose as a date for national celebration. The contemporary debate about changing the date of Australia Day connects directly to the political argument the Day of Mourning made in 1938: that the date of British settlement is not a date all Australians can celebrate without erasure of what that settlement did.