Fair Dinkum Philosemites

In 1938 William Cooper, of Victoria, Australia, was 77 years of age.  He was an indigenous Australian, a member of the Yorta Yorta people, and as secretary of the Australian Aborigines' League he was a veteran of the protracted struggle to win justice for his people, a goal that would not be achieved in his lifetime - nor for decades afterwards.   Stirred by reports of Kristallnacht in November 1938, Mr Cooper organised a petition of protest against "the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany", and on 6 December 1938 he led a delegation of his members on foot to the German Consulate in order to present it. There, these oppressed Australians who took time out from their own priorities to remember a tormented people on the other side of the world were rebuffed.

Seventy years later it was announced that 70 trees would be planted in Israel in honour of William Cooper.  Ceremonies have been held in Melbourne to mark his noble deed, and it has just been decided that he will be further honoured in December this year with a memorial garden at the entrance to Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

His story is a touching one, and has naturally elicited a great deal of interest in Australia and in the Jewish world.  Yet I can't help thinking that more should be known of one of his contemporaries, an Australian of a very different milieu, who also strove on behalf of persecuted German Jewry.

Critchley Parker, a young Melbourne man of solid middle class background, advocated a flourishing Jewish refugee settlement in Tasmania, the island south of the Australian mainland across the Bass Strait.  He envisaged the involvement of the settlement's members in mining, fishing, fruit-growing, wine-making, perfume production, and the manufacture of cotton goods and woollens, and had all sorts of grandiose expectations for it.  While scouting bushland near the proposed location, situated in Tasmania's remote and rugged south-west, he became ill and perished.  As he lay in his sleeping bag, with death approaching, he wrote "To die in the service of so noble a cause is to me a great satisfaction."

His story was told in an issue of the Australian Jewish Historical Society's Journal in 1990, and is known to Jewish history buffs in Australia.  It deserves to be more familiar to the public at large, and Parker's philosemitic act honoured as William Cooper's has been, if only by a plaque at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in his home city.