Kanishka Raffel recounted the striking and moving story of William Cooper–a story he learnt from The Centre for Public  Christianity website–during his third AFC Bible study.

William Cooper was an Aboriginal man of Yorta Yorta descent born in 1860 who grew up on the Maloga mission on the Murray River as a child. He became a Christian in his twenties.  His grandson, Alfred Turner  (‘Uncle Boydie’) is still living and recalls that his grandfather was a man who would read his Bible daily and had a great confidence in the resurrection, a great expectation of the new heavens and the new earth and a great sense of accountability for his life when the judgment came.

Cooper has become famous because in 2008 he was honoured by the State of Israel at the seventieth anniversary of Kristallnacht––the night in November 1938 when across Germany, Jewish home and businesses were trashed and burned, Jews were turned out into the streets mocked, beaten and killed.  About one month after Kristallnacht the 77 year old Cooper led what the Jerusalem holocaust museum Yad Vashem  describes as the only citizens’ protest anywhere in the world at the time against the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany.  

Cooper led a delegation of about twenty mainly Aboriginal people who marched from his home in Footscray to the offices of the Reich’s Consul in Collins St, Melbourne to present a letter protesting the treatment of the Jewish people by the Nazi government. The Consul General refused to meet the delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League that Cooper had helped create some years before, but the protest was reported in the Melbourne Argus newspaper.

Earlier in 1938 an international conference had met at Evian in Switzerland to discuss the issue of the flood of Jewish refugees escaping Germany.  The Australian government had inexplicably resolved at the Evian Conference that Australia would take no Jewish refugees from Germany or Austria, but two days after Cooper’s protest the Minister for the Interior, Jack McEwen announced that Australia had changed its position and would now take 15 000 Jewish refugees.  

At the time Cooper protested the treatment of the Jews in Germany he, along with all other Aboriginal people, were not citizens of Australia and would not become so until nearly thirty years after his death, but Cooper had advocated for the rights of his people since his twenties and in 1937 presented a  petition to the King seeking parliamentary representation, the vote and recognition of Aboriginal land holdings.

In 2010 Cooper’s great-grandson re-enacted the march from Cooper’s home to the German Consul General.  The letter was received this time and the German government invited his family members to present the letter in person to the Chancellor who held a reception in his honour and offered a formal apology to his family.  And the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel has established a Professorial Chair in Holocaust Studies that bears his name.  

An amazing story of a very ordinary man, who was seized by the story of the Exodus and lived in light of the new heaven and the new earth that he was eagerly looking forward to.  A remarkable Australian; living the life of an ordinary Christian.  He understood ‘living in between’—no triumphalist utopia, no miserly withdrawal. Creative humble advocacy.  I find that deeply impressive. What kind of people ought you to be since everything will be destroyed in this way?  You ought to live holy and godly lives.  (2 Pe 3:11)

References: Christianity, C. f. P. (2013a). Kristallnacht protest. 2015, from https://publicchristianity.org/library/kristallnacht-protest#.VSS81mOVq3d

Christianity, C. f. P. (2013b). Life and faith: William Cooper. 2015, from https://publicchristianity.org/library/life-and-faith-william-cooper#.VSS73WOVq3d