Rob Riley - An Aboriginal Leader’s Quest for Justice. Quentin Beresford, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2006. ISBN: 0 85575 502 4 374 pages Website
There are times when I wonder if I have become immune to the deaths, violence and suffering of Aboriginal people. And then, often quite unexpectedly, something lifts me up to a new place of insight and range of emotions. I find my immunity, or perhaps it is my resistance, cannot last for very long. This describes something of my experience when reading this compelling book about Aboriginal leader and activist, Rob Riley.
I first met Rob in 1989 when he was working for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC). He was responsible for the Western Australian Issues Unit that came under Commissioner Pat Dodson’s brief to examine underlying issues. Since that time I have always valued his offer to take me into the world which I knew so little about, the place where he grew up, Sister Kate’s Children’s Home in Perth.
As the RCIADIC moved around us and its demands grew increasingly intense, he would find time to close his office door and share with me something of his early life. Sister Kate’s was the home where he was taken as a baby and where many other Aboriginal children were also taken. It was his ‘home’ for the first eleven years of his life.
Whether he felt that I would or needed to understand his story, because I had lived in Aboriginal communities and knew something of their dormitory stories, or whether he felt the need to work through the issues that were emerging as a result of the RCIADIC, I still am not sure. However, I sensed then, as Quentin Beresford reveals, Rob’s ambivalence about his ‘home’. It was a place of growing up and making lasting friends. It was also a place that deeply wounded him.
Rob’s life was certainly not dull or boring. The book captures well that particular slice of Australian history where Aboriginal leaders emerged in the 1970s and 80s with great energy and purpose. As a field officer for the Aboriginal Legal Service, then a leader of the protests at Noonkanbah and as Chair of the National Aboriginal Conference, Rob both led and acted in his own distinctive, direct style. His ability to address and focus on an issue was impressive. He was articulate and often fiercely outspoken.