Indigenous Australia has long experienced the frustration of trying to deliver its cries of pain and outrage to the royal family.

Just ask the family of the late Aboriginal activist, Yorta Yorta man William Cooper.

In 1933, Cooper and fellow members of the Australian Aborigines’ League began gathering signatures for a petition to be sent to King George V, asking him, among other things, to intervene to prevent the genocide of “the Aboriginal race” and to grant Indigenous people a voice in parliament.

William Cooper (centre) with the founding members of the Australian Aborigines’ League at the opening in Northcote, around 1934.Credit: Koori Heritage Trust

It took several years to gather more than 1800 signatures from Indigenous communities strung out across Australia.

In 1937, Cooper, aged in his 70s, finally sent the petition to then-prime minister Joseph Lyons with the polite request that he forward it to the King, George VI.

It asked that the King act “to prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race; to secure better living conditions for all; and to afford Aboriginal representation in parliament”.

Lyons’ cabinet took its leisurely time to consider the request.

And then, in 1938, it turned it down.

The cabinet ministers chose to take no action, they said, because parliament did not have the power to make a law for Aboriginal representation under the Constitution.

“No good purpose would be gained by submitting the petition to His Majesty the King,” Lyon’s ministers declared.

It took 87 years for one of Cooper’s grandsons, Uncle “Boydie” Turner, to arrange for a copy of the petition to be delivered to Buckingham Palace. It was handed to Queen Elizabeth II – George VI’s daughter – in 2014 by the then-governor general Sir Peter Cosgrove, at a ceremony in Scotland.

No one........

© WA Today