Australian Dictionary of Biography

Don McLeod, 1975

State Library of Western Australia, BA3521/7

Donald William McLeod (1908–1999), prospector and activist, was born on 8 May 1908 at Meekatharra, Western Australia, sixth of eight surviving children of Tasmanian-born William Henry McLeod, miner, and his Western Australian-born wife Hannah Jane, née Morrison. Don was said to have been among the first white children born in the remote mining settlement. His mother died when he was four, and his father would perish of thirst in 1932 while prospecting.

Educated at the Presentation convent school, Geraldton, and at Geraldton High School, McLeod left school at fifteen and worked as a prospector, mechanic, well-sinker, and miner. Contact with Aboriginal people was unavoidable and his sympathy for their plight gradually developed. In 1937 he crossed cultural and legal segregation boundaries by assisting and obtaining medical treatment for an Aboriginal man. From then on, he took part in discussions with senior Aboriginal men in the Pilbara over grievances, including the loss of land without compensation, failure of station owners to pay wages, and restrictions on freedom of movement. Having gained their confidence, he was the only non-Aboriginal man invited to a Law meeting of elders in 1942 at Skull Springs, near Nullagine. There is evidence that McLeod went through Aboriginal initiation during this time. The Law bosses assigned him a tract of land and prepared carved objects which established him as a 'law man of high degree' (McLeod 1972, 6). The meeting’s major purpose, however, was to plan for a postwar strike in the pastoral industry.

McLeod insisted that the strike—in support of a minimum payment of thirty shillings a week for Aboriginal station workers—should not take place until after World War II had ended, so the strikers could not be accused of sabotaging the efforts of Australian servicemen and women. On 16 April 1943 he enlisted at Marble Bar in the Volunteer Defence Corps, serving in 11th North-West Battalion until his discharge in December the next year. By this time he had formed left-wing political ideas. In 1946 he was briefly a member of the Communist Party of Australia, but he later told a journalist that he had left over failure to secure party nomination for election to parliament, having stood unsuccessfully as a progressive Labor independent for the State electorate of Pilbara in 1943. The writer Dorothy Hewett later recalled a Marxist study group meeting in Perth in 1946 ‘when bearded Don McLeod arrived from the north … to astound us all with his arguments and grasp of Marxist theory … and plans for an Aboriginal Nor’-West’ (Brown 1976, preface). McLeod remained grateful for support from the Communist Party and from ‘anywhere he could get it’ (Tebbutt 1953, 2).

With senior Aboriginal men led by Dooley Bin Bin (Winyirin) and Clancy McKenna (Warntupungarna), McLeod helped organise the Pilbara pastoral strike—the first of its kind and one of the longest in Australia—which began on International Labour Day, 1 May 1946. It involved more than six hundred Indigenous people on twenty-five stations and some employed at Port Hedland and Marble Bar. The three leaders were among many arrested who served short prison terms, including periods in chains for the Aboriginal leaders, before the strike partially ended in August 1949. Some financial assistance came from unions and other sympathisers, but the strikers sustained themselves by hunting, gathering pearl-shell, and setting up a buffel grass-seed market. On McLeod’s advice, a cooperative was established to provide for the strikers and their families.

As early as 1944, McLeod, McKenna, and others had discussed the idea of not returning to the stations but achieving self-determination through mining and using the profits to eventually obtain pastoral properties. The emergent Pindan group received mass approval in 1945 when Aboriginal people from throughout the Pilbara gathered at Port Hedland. In 1948 the Northern Development and Mining Company Ltd (NODAM) was established to manage the group’s business operations.

In April 1953, at a camp near Marble Bar, McLeod ‘discussed the aboriginal problem as he saw it’ with the South Australian Museum ethnologist Norman Tindale, who formed the opinion that: ‘Some of … [McLeod’s] ideas evidently appeal to the aborigines and his organisation is now so strong and so powerfully centred in the aborigines’ own councils that they must conform’ (Tindale 1953, 131–33). His camps were ‘the cleanest I have ever seen’ and ‘all matters are discussed in councils’ (Tindale 1953, 131–33). The Aboriginal participants were working tin, gold, columbite, and wolfram, and received their food and clothing from NODAM. Owing to a downturn in most metal prices, however, McLeod was attempting to concentrate the men on tin leases at Pilkingurra (Pilgangoora), about sixty kilometres west of Marble Bar, leaving only skeleton groups or families at the other sites in the east Pilbara (Tindale 1953, 131–33).

By the end of 1950 there had been more than two hundred men and women, later known as the Strelley mob, involved in mining ventures initiated by McLeod and the Aboriginal leaders. This number rose to at least six hundred two years later, by which time accumulated profits from mining with hand tools and then yandying mineral ores such as tanto-columbite and wolfram, had reached £500,000. That amount was sufficient to purchase Yandeyarra in 1951 and, by 1971, other Pilbara station properties, including Strelley, Warralong, Lalla Rookh, and Coongan. Aboriginal control of station properties was maintained into the twenty-first century, but the decision in 1960 by the Menzies government to lift the pre-war embargo on iron ore exports had the effect of squeezing Aboriginal people from the mining industry, as international capital flooded in to take advantage of the huge profits from iron ore sales, first to Japan and then China.

McLeod meanwhile had pursued a long-standing idea to obtain government redress for Western Australia's Aboriginal people through a Supreme Court challenge to the removal in 1897 by the then premier, Sir John Forrest, of section 70 of the Western Australia Constitution Act 1889. This section had been ‘the central instrument by which the Imperial Government sought to provide a minimum standard of legal protection for the indigenous population’ (McLeod 1984, 4). In financial terms, it had provided for a minimum grant of £5,000 per year, or―from 1901―1 per cent of the State annual gross income when it exceeded £500,000. Forrest’s government had expunged the section when it took control of Aboriginal affairs from the Imperial government. Had McLeod's challenge been upheld, successive governments would have been liable for millions of pounds, then dollars, accumulating to Western Australian Aboriginal people over nearly a century. His arguments were rejected by the full bench of the court in 1996, but he did manage to bring them to national and international attention (Richardson 2018, 75). In 1991, although he disdained such honours, he had accepted an OAM. Never having profited personally from his work on behalf of Aboriginal people, he died in virtual penury on 13 April 1999 at South Guildford, Perth, and was cremated. He never married.