1946 Pilbara strike

The 1946 Pilbara strike was a landmark strike by Indigenous Australian pastoral workers in the Pilbara region of Western Australia for human rights recognition and payment of fair wages and working conditions. The strike involved at least 800 Aboriginal pastoral workers walking off the large Pastoral Stations in the Pilbara on 1 May 1946, and from employment in the two major towns of Port Hedland and Marble Bar. The strike did not end until August 1949 and even then many indigenous Australians refused to go back and work for white station owners.

It is regarded as one of the longest industrial strikes in Australia, and a landmark in indigenous Australians fighting for their human rights, cultural rights, and Native title.

For many years Aboriginal pastoral workers in the Pilbara were denied cash wages and were only paid in supplies of tobacco, flour and other necessities. The pastoral stations treated the Aboriginal workers as a cheap slave labour workforce to be exploited. If they tried to leave the station, they were found and brought back by the police, according to McLeod.

European attacks and brutal shootings of whole family groups of indigenous Australians are part of the history of the region, though often not well documented. One attack took place at Skull Creek near Barrow Creek in the 1870s, which resulted in the bleached bones and thus the name for the place There is a well documented report of a massacre in 1926 by a police party on the Forrest River Mission (now the Aboriginal community of Oombulgurri), in the East Kimberleys. Though there was a Royal commission into the reported killing and burning of Aborigines in East Kimberley, the police allegedly involved were brought to trial and acquitted. (see List of massacres of indigenous Australians).

...
Wikipedia