Comrade Mabo Emerges from the Red Closet

How outrageous to suggest that Eddie Koiko Mabo was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of Australia! For starters, that would suggest that Australian Communists precipitated the subsequent takeover of the 2.5 million square kilometres or the third of this continent now under native title.

In any event, Eddie Mabo repeatedly denied he was a CPA ticket-holder. He wouldn’t have lied about that, surely?

We know Senator Arthur Gietzelt AO, Bob Hawke’s one-time Minister for Veterans Affairs, was a secret CPA member despite all sorts of denials, but he was a politician, after all, and even trousered $14,500 in libel damages from the ABC in 1976 for calling him a Red. The late Stuart Macintyre in his CPA history, The Party (2022) outs Gietzelt (p248) but that was already old news.[1]

Eddie Mabo, in contrast, was such a good chap that Sir Ronald Wilson at the Human Rights Commission in 1992 awarded him posthumously a Human Rights Medal for his work for Aboriginal…