Obituaries Australia

He was born in a tent. As a child, he boxed in the sawdust with Australia’s travelling boxing troupe. But the biggest fight for Dick Henry, who has died aged 60, was for his people to be made citizens. He fought that fight from the back of a truck.

Herbert James Henry – Uncle Dick as he was widely known – was one of a band of Aboriginal activists who succeeded in persuading Australians 30 years ago on May 27 to vote overwhelmingly in a referendum to allow indigenous people to become citizens.

“We had 15 to 17 years to struggle before we got to the referendum in 1967,” recalled fellow campaigner Fred Moore. “Dick was always there, waving flags and talking to people from the back of a truck. We gathered 7,000 signatures on the South Coast.”

However, he is most remembered for his wicked sense of humour and his fight to get Aboriginal human remains returned to their lands.

As a soil conservation worker, he learnt of the destruction mining and development could wreak on old Aboriginal burial grounds. He went on to discover that many Aboriginal bones, which had been removed for experiment and display, lined museum shelves. The shock turned him into a crusader to bring the remains back to their resting places.

Once, returning by plane from Perth cradling a box on his knee, a fellow passenger asked what was in it. “Remains of our ancestors,” explained Uncle Dick. The distressed passenger demanded another seat. Instead, the airline upgraded Uncle Dick to business class and gave him a seat for the box.

Uncle Dick worked variously as a bulldozer operator, professional fisherman, abalone diver, dockworker, roustabout, stockman and building labourer and as a fruit-picker got about in a Mercury Ford V8.

He and his brother-in-law, Ossie Cruse, applied indigenous intenuity when a tyre blew about 70km from Narrandera on a fruitpicking trip.

They stuffed the tyre with a blanket, an old leather coat and gum-leaves and it got them into town.

When he was timber-cutting with Ossie Cruse on mountain slopes near Bellingen, Uncle Dick fell into the patu of a 15-metre timber pole, which nearly crushed him to death.

A further complication: he fell into a nest of snakes. He subsequently spent six months in hospital.

Considering himself a working-class lad, Uncle Dick got a lot of his political savvy from his long involvement with the union movement.

Although he was born at the Summervale Aboriginal Reserve at Walcha, the second oldest of 13 children, he married into the Jerrinja people of the NSW South Coast, where most of his work was focused.

His mother, Dolly Henry, was a founding member of the Aboriginal Advancement League and he was instrumental in setting up a South Coast wing in 1961.

A miners’ union official, he also became a lifetime member of the South Coast Trades and Labor Council.

He is survived by eight children and 14 grandchildren.

“His work . . . has led to hundreds of our ancestors’ remains being released from museums and returned to their lands,” a councillor with the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Robert Lester, said in a message to the indigenous community.

“Dick will be in good company now with the spirits of our ancestors that he helped to get home.