Brian Manning recalls the Wave Hill walk-off, 2007

Transcript of the interview

I was involved in the organisation of the walk-off through the Northern Territory Council of Aboriginal Rights, which I was a founding member of. We started the Rights Council in 1961, and one of the issues that we took up, as well as other rights, was the issue of equal wages, with the North Australia Workers' Union. And we indicated to the Aborigines that if they walked off at Wave Hill, we'd support them. That was a very important issue because they had walked off in previous years and they'd been starved back because that was the attitude of pastoralists. They made it quite clear that if an Aboriginal, just a single person, walked off a station intending, you know, to cease work on one place and go and work on another, you invariably found that nobody would stop and give them a lift or support them. They'd virtually be forced to be starved back to work where they came from. And as it happened, I took the first load of food down to the strikers because I was between jobs and I had a vehicle - a 30 hundredweight Bedford truck. And we loaded it up with food and arrived in the bed of the Victoria River, because that's where they were camped, to much celebration by the Aborigines because they then realised that they were getting support. So that was the beginning of the support, which escalated from there, once that became public knowledge, support rolled in from all round the countryside.