Biraban and Threlkeld

Almost 200 years ago, in Newcastle, Australia’s most brutal colonial outpost, two men became this nation’s first civil rights activists. Biraban, a bilingual Aboriginal man and leader of Lake Macquarie’s first nations peoples, and the Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld became mates. They captured songs, poems, ceremonies and dreaming stories, and represented Aboriginal people in court; whose testimony could not be accepted because they could not swear an oath on the Bible.