Bundjalung man Sol Bellear had a dream that became a plan.

He wanted to get a boulder, so big that the authorities couldn’t easily shift it, and put it prominently in Redfern Park. He wanted to affix to the boulder a plaque inscribed with some of the words delivered by former prime minister Paul Keating at that park exactly a quarter of a century ago.

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.

Bellear died this week at 66, way too young by general Australian standards but old compared with the men in some Aboriginal communities, for whom he advocated, where male life expectancy hovers, a source of national shame, around the mid-forties. He introduced Keating onto the stage at Redfern in 1992 to deliver the speech that Sol, one of the leading Aboriginal activists of his generation and a rugby league legend, considered to be the most important gesture of black-white conciliation Australia has seen.

That is why he wanted the words on that boulder placed immovably in the park, despite the resistance he said his plan had always met from council and state government authorities.



We sat in the autumn sunshine at a café where Redfern Park intersects with the oval that remains the spiritual home of his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs, the club for which he played. It was almost half a century since the 1967 so-called “citizenship” referendum for Aboriginal people and, while he sipped Red Bull and English Breakfast tea, Sol, who lived just across the road, wondered aloud “how the fuck is it that the lot of my people has since improved so little”.

“Mate, it still makes me so angry,” he said. “And I’m not really an angry bloke.”

He recalled how the black crowd was initially pretty cynical about neophyte PM Keating, thinking he was probably “just another white politician come to deliver platitudes to the blackfellas”.

“As Keating started, he was a bit nervous, you know, and you could see the anguish on the faces of non-Aboriginal people ... and then the looks on the faces of Aboriginal people as he started to talk about the murders and the oppression. And you could see Aboriginal people in the park saying to each other, ‘fuck yeah – that’s right, that’s it – he’s nailed it’. Keating called it – the history – for what it was. And it all goes back to history in this country. All of it,” he said.

“It’s all about Australia not having the balls to get up there and admit what happened [to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people] in the past. They just want to forget about all of the atrocities. The reactionaries of the world say, ‘Well Aboriginal people want this and that, why can’t they just let go of the past?’ Well, for fuck’s sake, Anzac Day is coming up again and the commemorations for that go on and on and, well you lost that [the Gallipoli operation] so why the fuck don’t you let that one go, eh?”

History, he said, was important because its legacies – the trauma of massacres, stolen children, imprisonment and dispossession from traditional lands – reverberate generationally and manifest in entrenched poverty, disadvantage and third-world health outcomes.

Governments of all persuasions (including Keating’s) had sought and found – but all too often, because of realpolitik considerations including public opposition to “Aboriginal welfare”, refused to implement – the solutions.

“They did deaths in custody (royal commission), the national Aboriginal health strategy, then you had the royal commission into the stolen generation and it goes on and on. All these reports just sit there and gather dust. Now and then someone will pick one up and say: ‘Maybe we should implement such and such’ – or maybe not, because it’s all too hard.”

A string of Rabbitohs players, for whom he has been an informal mentor and confidant, greeted Sol. One of them, Greg Inglis – one of South’s greatest ever players – stopped by our table. The two men bear hugged, talked about the season’s mixed fortunes and the injuries besetting the squad.

We walked through Redfern streets that house the organisations he helped establish after moving from Mullumbimby in the late 1960s. They include the Aboriginal Legal Service (he was inaugural chairman), the community-run Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern, of which he was former chairman (his sister LaVerne Bellear is director), and the Aboriginal Housing Company. He was also deputy chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in the 1990s and, more recently, a delegate to the Uluru convention on constitutional recognition earlier this year.

People stopped him in the street. He knew everyone – including the beggars, to whom he often gave food – by name.

As we walked he talked about the emergence of white Australian activism in the late 1960s and how so much of it focused on human rights of dark-skinned people in other countries, not least those oppressed under South African apartheid.

“Some of us said, ‘Well that’s all well and good but what you are fighting for over there is what we are suffering from here’. Then the students were right behind us but we made it clear that it had to be abut Aboriginal people – we didn’t want someone else coming in and telling us what we should be doing. Over all they listened to what we wanted.”

The cooperation with – and support from – non-Indigenous, educated people (doctors, lawyers, people with, for example, board experience) helped make possible the establishment of organisations such as the medical, housing and legal services.

Sol Bellear’s life, ended way too early, made a difference to so many others.

His strategy for Indigenous advancement was predicated on his belief that every incremental improvement for Indigenous lives would have to be hard won.

“Things should be so much better for Aboriginal people. I think the country saw 1967 as the end of the fight. Before 1967, we weren’t counted in the census or anything as people. Dogs and cats and pigs and sheep were counted in Australia before Aboriginal people,” he said.

“After the referendum, though, it was like the work was done for the rest of the country and governments – when it was actually just the bloody beginning. Every little thing we’ve won since, we’ve had to fight for.”

He was still steadfast in his intent on seeing that boulder placed in Redfern Park, where he was such a fixture, when last we spoke.



He bequeaths a legacy as large as he was in life. But unfortunately it doesn’t include that immovable boulder, which really ought to serve as a monument to Sol, too, in Redfern Park.

Not yet anyway.