The 'Nigger' Brown Stand debate

The first thing the campaign forced my hand on was to write my story on this extraordinary case that made international headlines. I was always concerned that a PhD student would write a book about the saga such was its legal notoriety. So, from a background of limited literary skills I “had a go” and convinced Magabala Publishing that it was a good yarn worth printing. 

As they say, “the rest is history”: I won a Deadly award for outstanding achievement in literature for The N Word - One Man’s Stand, followed up by several other books; NAIDOC person of the year award for my campaign on the stand; and received multi-awards for the documentary Nigger Lovers, which I co-wrote and produced while Rhonda directed.

With confidence in my newfound writing skills expanding to writing articles for various magazines, I was pleasantly surprised one day to receive a call from editor Steve Gordon inviting me to join his Koori Mail team as their national columnist writing on social and political issues. Almost two years later I’ve still got the fire in my belly and I am happily submitting my articles every fortnight.

The down side of this storm was to see the intensity of ill feeling directed at me, and indirectly at my family, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike who didn’t quite know how to handle the public controversy I’d placed them in.

Maybe the Indigenous people who were aggrieved by my actions felt I had no place disrupting the racial harmony of the township of Toowoomba they had developed with non-Indigenous people over the past couple of decades.

I hope there are lessons that we can all take from this protracted public debate: principally that we should demonstrate our maturity as a nation by fully embracing social discourse on issues associated with race, specifically pertinent matters that involve Indigenous Australians.

We all need to begin by respecting and valuing each other’s points of views instead of sitting on the fence. We all have rights in a democratic country and part of having rights is the knowledge that we can express them without fear of recrimination from others, even if at times the law appears to favour the dominant group.