Born in Moree: My Family, the Freedom Ride and the Hidden History of Aboriginal Australia
- Brian AJ Newman LLB
- Aug 24
- 11 min read
Updated: Aug 25
There is no mistake that I was born in Moree.
Moree is not simply the town printed on my birth certificate. It is a place connected to Aboriginal resistance, racial exclusion, family survival and one of the defining civil rights confrontations in Australian history.
It is the place where the 1965 Freedom Ride challenged the exclusion of Aboriginal children from the Moree swimming pool.
It is also the place where my own life began.
When I consider my Anaiwan, Ngarigo and Wiradjuri ancestry, the stories of Granny Duval, Mary Ann Quinn and Sarah Ann Duval, and the generations connected to Rita Alma Whitfield, and my father, Brian Alfred Newman, I do not see my birth in Moree as an accident.
I believe I was always meant to become the man I am today—a professional employment and human rights advocate committed to confronting discrimination, challenging power and standing with people who are excluded or silenced.
A précis of The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back
The YouTube documentary The Secret Country: The First Australians Fight Back is a 1985 documentary written and presented by John Pilger and directed by Alan Lowery. The National Library of Australia catalogue describes it as an examination of the hidden history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from colonisation to the present, with particular attention to land, dispossession and the Aboriginal land rights movement. The film is also catalogued by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
The documentary’s central argument is that Australia’s national story was built upon a secret: the violence and injustice inflicted upon the First Peoples of this continent were concealed behind the language of settlement, progress and national development.
Pilger’s documentary examines the invasion and occupation of Aboriginal lands, frontier violence, massacres, government control, discrimination, the destruction of cultural authority and the continuing refusal of governments and institutions to properly recognise Aboriginal land rights.
It does not present Aboriginal people as passive victims. It shows Aboriginal people resisting, organising, speaking for themselves and demanding justice. The film connects historical dispossession with contemporary activism, making clear that land rights are not simply about property. They are about culture, law, identity, responsibility and the right of Aboriginal peoples to remain connected to Country.
The documentary’s title is significant. The “secret country” is not secret because Aboriginal people failed to know it. It is secret because white Australia chose not to tell the truth about how it came to possess it.
Although the documentary was made in 1985 and some of its language and framing belong to that period, its central message remains powerful: Australia cannot claim to be a fair nation while hiding the violence that created its institutions and denied Aboriginal people equality.
The Moree Freedom Ride
In February 1965, around 29 University of Sydney students travelled through regional New South Wales on a bus organised by Student Action for Aborigines.
Led by Arrernte man Charles Perkins, the students set out to investigate and confront racial discrimination in towns where Aboriginal people were excluded from public facilities, refused service and denied equal opportunities.
The route included Wellington, Gulargambone, Walgett, Moree, Boggabilla, Bowraville and Kempsey. The NSW Aboriginal Land Council’s Freedom Ride fact sheet records that Aboriginal people were commonly excluded from swimming pools, clubs, cafés, cinemas and employment opportunities.
This was not a symbolic bus trip. It was a direct challenge to a system of racial segregation.
The students gathered evidence, supported local Aboriginal protest committees and deliberately attracted national media attention. They wanted Australians who lived comfortably within the system to see what was happening in their own country.
Moree became one of the most important stops on the journey.
The confrontation at the Moree pool
The Freedom Riders arrived in Moree on 19 February 1965.
At that time, a Moree Council by-law prevented Aboriginal people from entering the Moree Baths and Swimming Pool Complex. The Australian Government’s heritage listing identifies Moree as the first place on the Freedom Ride where the students encountered an official local law enforcing racial exclusion.
The rule was brutally simple: Aboriginal children could not enter the public pool because they were Aboriginal.
The Freedom Riders challenged the council and pool authorities. Aboriginal children were brought to the pool and, under public pressure, were eventually allowed to enter.
For a short time, it appeared that the barrier had been broken.
But after the Freedom Riders left Moree, they learned that Aboriginal children were again being refused entry. The discrimination had resumed as soon as the national attention moved away.
The students returned to Moree.
This time, the confrontation outside the baths was met with hostility and violence. The NSW Aboriginal Land Council records that the Freedom Riders faced hostility and violence when they returned to continue their protest.
The State Library of New South Wales collection preserves photographs of the demonstrations outside the Moree Artesian Baths, including images of protestors, police, the pool manager, onlookers and children inside the pool.
Those photographs are more than historical images. They show Australia being forced to confront the reality of its racism.
The issue was not complicated. Aboriginal children were being denied the right to swim in a public pool. Yet the local resistance demonstrated how deeply white supremacy had been embedded in ordinary institutions and everyday life.
Why Moree is part of who I am
I was born in Moree.
I was born in a town where Aboriginal children had recently been denied entry to a public swimming pool because of their Aboriginality.
I was born in a place where Charles Perkins and the Freedom Riders had stood against a council rule that attempted to define Aboriginal children as lesser human beings.
That history is part of my inheritance.
The Moree pool confrontation raised a question that still sits at the centre of my work:
Who is allowed to belong, and who has the power to decide?
That same question appears throughout my family history.
It appears in the experiences of my Anaiwan ancestors. It appears in the story of Granny Duval. It appears in the search for Mary Ann Quinn and Sarah Ann Duval. It appears in the family lines connected to Rita Alma Whitfield, and my own father, Brian Alfred Newman.
It also appears in the lives of Aboriginal people who were incarcerated, removed, confined, misrecorded, denied employment and pressured to conceal their identity.
My birth in Moree placed me within a history of resistance before I was old enough to understand it.
The Hidden Generations
The documentary The Secret Country helps explain the national conditions that created hidden Aboriginal family histories.
The documentary The Colleano Heart helps explain what that concealment could look like within an individual family.
The Colleano family, descended through Julia Robinson, an Aboriginal woman from Narrabri, became a world-famous circus family. SBS NITV reports that the family concealed its Aboriginal heritage while performing internationally under a different public identity.
The family’s public identity helped protect it from a society that was willing to celebrate its talent only if it did not have to acknowledge its Aboriginality.
That is the experience of the Hidden Generations.
Some Aboriginal families concealed their identity to avoid having their children taken. Some moved away from Country. Some changed their names. Some claimed another nationality. Some continued cultural practices quietly within the family.
These were not signs that Aboriginal people were ashamed of who they were.
They were survival strategies created by colonisation, racial violence, assimilation and government control.
The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home material documents the laws and practices that separated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The AIATSIS material on the Stolen Generations records the continuing impact of that loss of identity, kinship and cultural connection.
When I look at the gaps and contradictions in family records, I cannot simply assume that silence means there was no Aboriginal identity.
Silence may mean that someone was trying to keep a child safe.
A changed name may represent protection.
A missing record may reflect government interference, family movement or deliberate concealment.
A family story may have survived orally because writing it down was too dangerous.
Reading my own family records differently
My family story has come through records, oral histories, names, places and fragments of knowledge passed between generations.
It includes the search for Granny Duval and the question contained in the phrase, “She must have come from somewhere.”
That question is shared by many descendants of the Hidden Generations.
We inherit a person’s name, face, place in the family and unexplained history, but not always the full truth of where they came from.
We are then expected to prove what colonial systems deliberately obscured.
That is why I believe family research must involve more than a single certificate or government classification. It must consider genealogical evidence, oral history, photographs, community knowledge, institutional records, mission and reserve documents, newspaper reports and the historical reasons why an ancestor may have hidden their identity.
The records must be read alongside the silences.
From the Moree pool to human rights advocacy
The Freedom Riders challenged the Moree pool because discrimination had been normalised.
The council had turned exclusion into a by-law.
The crowd had turned cruelty into public behaviour.
The authorities had turned inequality into administration.
The Freedom Ride exposed the truth: a rule can be lawful and still be profoundly unjust.
That lesson informs the work I do today.
As a professional employment and human rights advocate, I represent people who face bullying, discrimination, sexual harassment, victimisation, unfair dismissal and institutional retaliation.
The institutions may be different from the Moree pool. The language may be more polished. The policies may appear neutral.
But the underlying question remains the same:
Who is being excluded, who is being believed and who has the power to decide?
A workplace policy does not become fair simply because it is written down.
A performance process does not become reasonable because it is labelled “coaching”.
An investigation does not become impartial because an employer calls it independent.A person does not lose their dignity because an institution describes them as difficult, troublesome or inconvenient.
The Moree pool teaches us to look beyond the official explanation and examine what the rule actually does to people.
My responsibility to my daughters
I have four daughters.
I want them to inherit more than family names and photographs. I want them to inherit truth.
I want them to know that if earlier generations concealed their Aboriginal identity, they did so in a society that made identity dangerous—not because they lacked pride.
I want them to understand the connection between Moree, our family history and the work I do today.
The Freedom Riders stood at the gates of the Moree pool.
My ancestors survived the systems that tried to confine, control and erase them.
The Hidden Generations carried their identity through silence, movement and adaptation.
I now carry that history into public advocacy.
There is no mistake that I was born in Moree.
There is no mistake that I became an employment and human rights advocate.
I was born into a history of resistance.
I was raised by the descendants of people who survived exclusion.
And I will continue the work they began.
Uncle Neville Bonner and Aboriginal Elders who influenced me
For a long time, Uncle Neville Bonner served as the official visitor at Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, where I was a young Prison Officer, and I was privileged to speak with him regularly, even if only for minutes at a time as we shared a morning tea and coffee, waiting for Prisoners to attend the recpetion store to speak with Uncle and Elders of influence about their plights.
Arthur Gorrie was the second Prison I worked at, having been originally trained at Borallon Correctional Centre as a first year recruit. Arthur Gorrie was by far the most challenging posting of all my service as a Prison Officer, but it did forge some values within me I still carry to this day. Most important of all;
"there but for the grace of God go I ..."
Those brief conversations had a profound influence on me. I remember being shamed into speaking with Uncle Neville and the other Aboriginal Elders who visited the prison, particularly because I was still learning how to openly acknowledge my own identity. Even while hiding in plain sight, however, I always found ways to show which way the blood flowed.
The Elders I was fortunate enough to call friends gave me strength and perspective. On many occasions, they helped carry me through the stress and pressure of overt racism within prison life.
They reminded me that I did not have to accept hostility as normal, remain silent in the face of injustice or lose sight of who I was. Uncle Neville encouraged me to speak up and to become a voice of reason in a hostile place. I could never have known that those short conversations and friendships would influence the direction of my entire career, ultimately leading me to become the professional employment and human rights advocate I am today.
We are still here
The Secret Country reminds us that Australia’s national story cannot be separated from invasion, dispossession, massacres, racial control and Aboriginal resistance.
The Freedom Ride reminds us that change occurs when people confront injustice publicly.
The Colleano Heart reminds us that some Aboriginal families survived by hiding in plain sight.
My own family history reminds me that the search for truth is personal.
I am searching for Granny Duval.
I am searching for Mary Ann Quinn and Sarah Ann Duval.
I am searching through the Anaiwan, Ngarigo and Wiradjuri lines that brought me here.
I am searching for the ancestors whose identities were concealed and whose stories were never safely written down.
I am searching so my daughters and the generations after them do not mistake silence for absence.
I am here because they survived.
I advocate because they endured.
I was born in Moree, a town where Aboriginal children once had to fight for the right to enter a public swimming pool.
That history is not separate from who I am.
It is part of the reason I am who I am.
I was always meant to become this man.
And I will not go quietly.
1965 Freedom Ride itinerary
In February 1965, the Freedom Ride bus visited Wellington, Gulargambone, Walgett, Moree, Boggabilla, Bowraville and Kempsey.
The demonstrations in Walgett and Moree created tension. National media coverage of the racism and hostility directed at Aboriginal people and the students shocked Australians and provided a reality check on the extreme inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.
Walgett
Demonstrations in Walgett were held outside the RSL which had refused membership for Aboriginal veterans, who were only allowed to enter on Anzac Day while a Walgett local used his track to ram Freedom Ride bus off the highway as the students left the town.
Moree
In Moree, the students focused on the artesian baths and swimming pools that were reserved for ‘whites’ only. While the local authorities’ response to the demonstrations encouraged the Freedom Riders to leave Moree satisfied that the situation had changed for the better, the students later learned that Aboriginal children were again being refused admission to the pool.
The Freedom Ride made a return to Moree where they faced hostility and violence outside the Moree baths as they continued their protest for change.
Bowraville
The students described the discrimination in the town as “absolutely shocking” – by far the worst they had encountered. The Picture Theatre was segregated by a partition. Aboriginal people had to buy their tickets separately and could only enter the theatre after the picture had started. Segregation was also practiced at pubs and cafes, and years earlier, in schools.
Legacy of the Freedom Ride
Many of the towns visited by the students already had an active Aboriginal protest committee.
The national media coverage generated by the Freedom Ride empowered Aboriginal people to resist discrimination with renewed confidence.
After the Freedom Ride bus left, communities showed incredible bravery and courage, in the face of hostile local reaction, to confront racism and discrimination.
The public debate that followed the Freedom Ride created pressure for change.
The Freedom Ride has often been credited for the 1967 Referendum that removed discriminatory references to Aboriginal people from the Constitution and allowed the Federal Government to pass legislation for the benefit of Aboriginal people.
The Freedom Ride was one of several precursors to the notion of Land Rights for Aboriginal people and by extension – the passing of the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983.
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Meta description: Born in Moree, Brian AJ Newman connects the 1965 Freedom Ride and the Moree pool confrontation with his Anaiwan family history, the Hidden Generations and his calling as a professional employment and human rights advocate.
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