His visit was barely documented or recorded but for those who met the boxer during his trip to Fitzroy the memories endure

Outside the Builders Arms Hotel on Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Gary Foley ties his pushbike to a post. “I never used to lock my bike up,” he says, “but it’s a white area now.”

From the ‘Parkies’ to the plaques, the Fitzroy of Gary Foley and Gary Murray’s youth is almost gone. The ‘Parkies’ sit, sing, yarn and drink around Smith Street, as they have done for decades, where small brown plaques have been affixed to buildings – brief and unremarkable reminders of the black history of the inner-city Melbourne suburb.

“This is symbolic of the gentrification of Fitzroy,” says Foley. “Blackfellas have been pushed out and physically dispersed yet again, and now we’re being erased from memory.”

An afternoon pub crawl along ‘The Dirty Mile’ with Murray, a former Fitzroy resident and Black Power activist, is illustrative. On the way from the Builders Arms to the Grace Darling Hotel, Murray pauses at 108 Smith Street. It was the parent organisation, explains Murray, where Bruce McGuinness’ National Aboriginal Conference met. In the old days, those who had a key and a few too many pints in them would crash here for the night. Now it’s a trendy cafe.



From the Grace Darling to the Union Club Hotel, Murray shows me Sir Doug Nicholls’ church on Gore Street. Nicholls is Murray’s matrilineal grandfather, and years ago, he says they tried to buy the family church back from Michael Caton, the actor in the iconic Australian film The Castle. The price was set at $1.2 million, well out of their range. The Castle, of course, is a film about a white Australian family’s fight for their humble home. Murray chuckles at the irony. “These are the battles,” he shrugs.



As we return from the Union to the Builders Arms, Murray leans in to push open the door of the Gore Street entrance, but we’re locked out. We enter at another door to find the Gore Street entrance has been boarded up on the inside by black tiles. Murray shakes his head, astounded. With it’s white walls and gourmet menu, this pub looks and feels nothing like the old days.

“It never ceases to amaze me that black people never owned a pub,” Murray says of the Builders Arms. “We had a sense of ownership – whitefellas knew that and respected it. There was a Croatian bouncer… I’ve never seen anyone with a head as big as his, he was a good fella and he always sorted us out. There was a good multicultural mix long before ‘reconciliation’ was invented.”

These facades, like the Gore Street entrance, serve as indulgent props for the people that have re-colonised Fitzroy, but they betray the memories of generations of Aboriginal activists, workers, writers and artists that grew up here. These memories connect place to family and culture, and I’m in Fitzroy to trace one in particular – the day Muhammad Ali came to visit the Aboriginal Health Service on Gertrude Street in 1979. “It’s a fuckin’ wine bar now,” says Foley plainly, pointing to the building where the Health Service used to be.

There are so few documented records of Ali ever visiting Fitzroy. A few short newspaper reports supplement the snippets and flashes of memory of those who bore witness to the boxing champion. When I first asked Murray about it, he put up a notice on Facebook, hoping for some leads. The comments flooded in, even from the young people who weren’t born at the time. The history has been passed down orally – “they can remember their mother and father telling them about it,” explains Murray.

Muhammad Ali came to Australia in March, 1979, the same year he retired from boxing. The public didn’t take to the exhibition fights – most of which were cancelled – but he was a special guest at the Logies television awards in Melbourne. In a moment that has gone down in Australian television history, host Bert Newton announced “I like the boy” to the captive audience. “Who’d you call boy?” asked a shocked Ali.

A pioneer of Australian television, Newton was born in Fitzroy. But Ali didn’t go to Fitzroy for Newton, or any other white celebrity. He came to see a Fitzroy emboldened by Black Power.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Muhammad Ali speaks with host Bert Newton at the 1979 Logies.

Aunty Alma Thorpe was born in Fitzroy in 1935. Her first job was at Dummett’s shoe factory. She was 12 years old, and she kept that job until she got married in 1953. Later, she worked at bars and pubs while raising her seven children. She now lives about 10km north in Reservoir. “Fitzroy has actually changed to me,” she says. “I was born in Fitzroy and I knew every lane, but if I walked Fitzroy now, I’d be scared.”



Aunty Alma’s earliest memories are of hardship. “You know, I’ve sort of grown up with a very hard life in Fitzroy,” she says. “I was lucky that I had cousins and uncles that I identified with, because I would have been very very lonely.”

Aunty Alma is the daughter of Aunty Edna and James Brown. Aunty Edna came off the Framlingham mission to Fitzroy in 1932, before setting up the Aboriginal funeral service. James was a worker and a communist. Aunty Alma says the communists were the first friends of the Aboriginal people. “The only times we received any type of help or mixing with other people, was with the Communist Party, the church and the Builders Labourers.”

Removed from their country and their culture, forced off the missions, the people of Fitzroy quickly formed a strong sense of community. “We didn’t know who we were,” she says. “Aboriginal people, to us, we didn’t even know about it because all that was taken and decimated, when they took our culture and killed our elders.

“I feel a bit upset because my great-grandmothers were killed. I’m a half-caste. I was forced into my situation by that act. I always wondered, all my life, who am I really? I always knew I was an Aboriginal person, but I wondered where I was going to fit in?”

The Aboriginal population was poor, continually harassed by the “black maria” police van, and beset by sickness. Aunty Alma remembers at least 30 of her family – grandfathers, aunties, cousins – dying from tuberculosis. “At the time, we started thinking something has gotta be done about this,” she remembers.

Influenced by the call for self-determination from the Black Power movement in America, Aunty Alma, along with her mother and other women in the community, set up the Aboriginal Health Service in 1973. The first centre was just over the road from the Builders Arms. “People like women’s groups, elders, the Briggs’,” she says. “It came out of Aboriginal women who fought the fight for many many years.”

From the beginning it was a revolutionary organisation, treating health not just as a medical issue but as a social, cultural and educative process. “It’s the whole humanity of a people that’s gone under in this country, because of the genocide,” Aunty Alma explains. Treating sickness at the Health Service was to soothe the intergenerational trauma of dispossession.

Her daughter, Glenda Thorpe, became a health worker. “Primary healthcare delivery,” says Glenda. “No good telling me that I need to eat well when I can’t afford to. No good telling me that I need a warm home when I haven’t got one. There’s all these things around health – legal, housing, emotional well-being.”

One of the main issues was that Aboriginal people wouldn’t go to see white doctors. In an interview with IndigenousX, Aboriginal health worker Lisa Briggs said that Glenda was the first Aboriginal person to treat her as a 12 year old. “I felt proud. From that day on, I wanted to be like her and do what she does: helping her people,” said Briggs.

“They didn’t give a damn about connection to country and culture,” says Glenda. “You were treated as a number.” The Aboriginal Health Service changed that. It became a safe space and a meeting place, a focal point for the community. Naturally, many of the staff had ASIO files. “They saw us as breeding activists,” says Glenda.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gary Murray (left) and Gary Foley (right) outside The Builders Arms Hotel, Fitzroy. “The Builders was 10 out of 10 for company, three out of 10 for facilities,” says Murray. Photograph: photo: supplied

In 1979 Sharon Thorpe was 19 and working as a receptionist for the Health Service. She was still relatively new to Fitzroy, coming up from Gippsland just a few years earlier. Now living in Sydney, she remembers the camaraderie among the community.

“Back in those days, everyone knew each other and we were all very close,” she says. “We used to party together and drink together, you know, and if another blackfella Aboriginal came into town we’d know about it. Everyone stuck together, you know, when there was an event on we’d all go and support one another… it’s so different now.”

Sharon remembers the group dinners, the evening get togethers, and the card games at Aunty Alma’s home in Emmaline Street. Bruce McGuinness was the inspiration, she says, leading people to the black is beautiful movement. McGuinness organised parties and nights out, often in large numbers in order to avoid harassment. “When you’ve got a big mob of blacks walk into a pub or restaurant, it was like, woah!” says Glenda.

For Marji Thorpe, Glenda’s sister, their interaction with other migrant groups – Greeks, Italians, Macedonians, Lebanese – was particularly powerful. They experienced a similar type of racism from white Australians, says Marji. “We were eating different foods, he [McGuinness] was exposing us to different cultures as well. Most of us had never had Indian curries before. We were coming out of the 1950s white Australia, eating mainly white Australian food, which was killing us.”

Mao Tse-Tung, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Franz Fanon and Roosevelt Brown were the political influences, and the African-American struggle was always in the picture. “We took courage, I believe, from the Black Panther movement,” says Aunty Alma. “We took up that theme, and I think a lot of the younger people, you know when you think about the time, it was a revolution.”

In the late 1960s, Aboriginal people seized control of their advancement organisations, and by 1972 the Tent Embassy was established on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra. Redfern, South Brisbane and Fitzroy became hotbeds of political activism. “The Australian version of Black Power, like its American counterpart, was essentially about the necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms, and to seek self-determination without white interference,” wrote Foley.

African-American visitors to Australia had always reached out to Aboriginal communities. As early as 1907, the famous boxer Jack Johnson – undoubtedly the Muhammad Ali of his era – met with Fred Maynard of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association. Later, entertainers such as Isaac Hayes, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five all met with Aboriginal people.

But Ali was the pinnacle. He was a Black Power luminary, a man who spoke up for oppressed people all over the world, probably the best known black man on the planet at the time. And he was a boxer. Boxing, says Aunty Alma, was a powerful force in the Aboriginal community, going back to the Sharman tent boxers. Bruce McGuinness was a boxer. So was Gary Murray. Aunty Alma’s favourite, Lionel Rose, was a world champion. “I used to love them, it was marvellous, there was all these men, these beautiful black men fighting,” she says.

So when Ali came to Melbourne, on Tuesday, March 20 a group of activists including Bindi Williams, Mick Edwards, Gary Murray and Kevin Smith decided to get him down to Fitzroy. “We grabbed a camera and went to the Hilton Hotel,” says Murray. “We put stickers on the camera and on our hats saying ‘Koori Press’ so they’d let us into the press conference. We got there at the end and we asked if he’d like to meet some black people. He said yes, and to meet him around the back in five minutes.”

Out the back of the Hilton, Murray and his cohort gave Ali’s minders directions to the Health Service, and not long after, Ali rolled up. “The word went around like electricity,” says Foley. “There was a block of trams, you couldn’t get near him. You couldn’t get in, the place was chock-a-block.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “All Ali wanted to do was to see how a black man lives and works in Australia” - Muhammad Ali visits the Aboriginal Health Services office in Fitzroy. Photograph: The Age

The women inside the Health Service got a close up. “I had a gold Torana, and he come out and signed my car,” says Aunty Alma. Marji says Ali cradled her baby, Lydia. “He related to us,” she explains, “I don’t remember words that he said, but he sat down inside the place. He sat down and had a conversation.”



Deborah Deacon, at the time a young assistant to Aunty Alma, remembers calling her brother, saying “get your black arse down here! Muhammad Ali is on his way.” According to a newspaper report from the time in the Age, Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavs and “a sprinkling of Timorese” came down to the Health Service to see “the world champion strolling in the shadow of the Housing Commission high-rise in Gertrude Street.” A “fair-headed Australian” in a Kombi van drove past, yelling “Australia for Australians!”.



But Ali was there to meet Aboriginal people. He surely would’ve recognised the social, cultural and political role of the Health Service. “These organisations were inspired by people in Ali’s home country,” says Foley, who played an instrumental role in setting up the Redfern Aboriginal Health Service in Sydney. According to Murray, Ali was impressed, and told the crowd gathered on the corner outside the Builders Arms: “Let religion be your shopfront and your business at the back.”



Deacon remembers Ali as charismatic, well spoken and handsome. “He’s got a very sharp mind and carefully chooses his words,” she says. “He just had this impact on all people, black, white, from different socio-economic backgrounds.”

Glenda and Sharon Thorpe got the closest. “I just remember the bodyguard,” says Sharon, “I don’t mean to big-note myself or anything, but he came over and said ‘Muhammad Ali wants to meet you.’ I said ‘sweet’, you know. He loved women.”

Sharon and Glenda played basketball for the all-Aboriginal Melbourne Blacks, and so after their game, they got changed and went in to the Hilton. They were invited upstairs to his penthouse suite, where they ate dinner and chatted about Aboriginal Affairs. Both women remember Ali as polite, respectful and curious about their aspirations. Sharon told him she wanted to be a model, Glenda a doctor.

“Oh look, it was absolutely amazing,” says Sharon, who, like Glenda, still works in Aboriginal health. “The best thing ever – we couldn’t believe that this powerful black man was there. I was overwhelmed and a little bit shy at the time. I just couldn’t get over how we just went and played basketball before going to meet him, you know?”

“He came to see blackfellas!” says Glenda. “It made people feel special – it said to the rest of the world, we got a story, we got something to say and it’s not good. That recognition, you know, it was listen to our story. We couldn’t get on the international arena anywhere.” Aunty Alma agrees. “It was a great day, it really lifted our spirits,” she says. “It became well known then, the Health Service. It was just a pokey little place.”

For Murray, a budding boxer at the time, it was an opportunity to meet an idol. As a young man he would watch Ali from afar, willing him on to win. “I’d just about make myself sick until he pulled out that knockout punch,” says Murray. “He’s the only one that could do that.”

But it wasn’t just sport. When Ali refused to fight in the Vietnam War – “man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Vietcong ever called me nigger,” Ali said – Murray took inspiration. “To see him beat the draft – that war had nothing to do with black people,” he says. “Same as here. He bought that political perspective. If anything we’d support the Viet Cong because they’re Indigenous.”

I ask Murray if he got anything on tape with the ‘Koori Press’ camera. Laughing uproariously, he shakes his head – “We had no film in the camera!” In the end, all that remains is memory.

“He was articulate, and as strong in his mind as his body,” says Murray. “He bewitched the crowd – he was the chosen one. They need to put a plaque where the Great Man planted his feet opposite the Builders Arms. It was like a meteorite had struck Fitzroy. There won’t be one ever again.”