Queensland Organisations and Activists

Joe McGinness

Joe McGinness was born into the Kungarakan or Paperbark People of the Greater Darwin area in 1914. After the death of his Irish immigrant father, the young Joe was raised by his Aboriginal family and was forced to endure the common indignities of life under the Aboriginal protection regime then in place in the Northern Territory. The Depression experience also left its mark as McGinness joined the ranks of the unemployed and was catapulted into the demonstrations and protests of the time. Following war service with the 2/13th Field Ambulance McGinness moved to Queensland where he eventually secured a job as a waterside worker on Thursday Island and then in Cairns.

Image 4A: Joe McGinness

Daily victimisation of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders around Cairns led McGinness and others to found the Cairns Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders' Advancement League (CATSIAL) in 1958, with McGinness as inaugural secretary.

The League came to national attention in 1961 after it took up the case of a young indigenous man caned by Pastor Kernich, the Superintendent of the Lutheran-run mission at Hope Vale, after the man and his girlfriend were caught consorting without permission. For her part in this misdemeanour the girl had her hair cut off and for good measure the boy was banished to Palm Island.

The League's success in publicising the "Hope Vale flogging" forced the State Government to hold an enquiry into the incident which found Kernich's behaviour inexcusable. The case helped expose the kind of treatment often meted out under the Aboriginal Protection Act in Queensland, and contributed to moves for reform.

In early 1961 McGinness was elected to the Cairns branch executive of the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF). Shortly after he was also elected federal president of the FCAA, a position he held for all but one of the next seventeen years.

McGinness' connection to the labour movement and in particular the leftwing WWF was important in building support for FCAA campaigns within trade unions. Through his trade union outlook he also brought a labour movement perspective into the FCAA, ensuring indigenous and wider campaigns for labour rights were supported within FCAA in addition to the demand for full citizenship. McGinness also consistently argued that no solution to the problems facing Aborigines could work without recognition of indigenous land rights.

In the lead up to the referendum McGinness was FCAATSI's joint national campaign director. Later he became a member of the National Aboriginal Consultative Council, the first federal government body of indigenous advisers. Known widely across northern Australia as "Uncle Joe", McGinness remained active in indigenous politics until his death in July 2003.

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