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In February 1965, a group of approximately thirty Sydney University students calling themselves "Students for Aboriginal Rights", led by Aboriginal students Charles Perkins and Gary Williams and by non-Aboriginal student Jim Spigelman, and supported by Rev Ted Noffs, from the Wayside Chapel, took a bus trip around northern NSW towns. The journey was both an attempt to emulate the US civil Rights Movement action of the early 1960s, and designed to expose the racist underbelly of Australian society.
The tour marked the beginning of substantial awakenment of the wider community to the conditions and restrictions under which most Aboriginal people were living.
(Ref: "Freedom Ride: a freedom rider remembers" by Ann Curthoys, Allen & Unwin 2002) and go to the Koori History website www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1960s/freedom/frdx.html for pictures and stories about the Freedom Ride.
Re-enactment - in February 2005, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original Freedom Ride, a busload of youth, members of ReconciliACTION, retraced the original route. They interviewed more than 300 people in NSW regional towns, asking them about the current level of racism, in order to gauge what changes had occured over the forty years.