Executive Member Bart Shteinman recently spoke at interfaith panel on combatting racism hosted by the Anglican Church. Below is an excerpt from the start of his speech:
I’m going to ask you to imagine yourself in Footscray Melbourne, December 1938. A Yorta Yorta man, William Cooper, is leading a 10km march of his fellow Indigenous activists from the Aboriginal Advancement League across Melbourne.
Not in protest against the treatment of Aboriginals, and in 1930s Australia there was plenty to protest about on that front. In fact, William Cooper was leading a march to the German Consulate to, in their words, “protest…the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany”, which had culminated on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a month earlier.
Click here to read the full speech on the Anglican Focus website.
You can also watch the stream of the panel on Youtube or in the embedded video below.