Yandy

by Donald Stuart

The true story of a group of Aboriginal Australians in Western Australia who succeed in defying greedy station owners by staging a strike and proving that they can organize themselves and support their community, white-feller style.

156 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

Donald Robert Stuart spent most of his life in Western Australia. He left home at age 14 and began a career as a swagman, that is an itinerant who wandered the roads seeking casual work. He travelled through much of northern Western Australia finding work on cattle stations and it was during these years that he came into close contact with Aborigines.

Donald Stuart volunteered at the start of WWII for the 2nd AIF. He saw service in the Middle East as a 2/3rd Machine Gunner and then in Java, Indonesia, where he was captured by the Japanese. He then spent three and a half years as a POW and was sent to work on the infamous Burma Railway, a purgatory from which many did not return.

He published some fifteen books, including novels and memoirs, many of which are concerned with the lives of the Australian Aborigines with whom he came into close contact over many year.

Reviews

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Donald Stuart's classic recounting of the successful strike by Aborigines in north-western Western Australia. Stuart spent a significant amount of time getting to know Aboriginal people and some of the strikers involved in this story in particular. This was a momentous event in the history of black-white relations in Australians. Hitherto, white station owners had been known to freely abuse their Aboriginal station hands, refusing to pay them wages and ensuring that they had nought but a subsistence diet. The Pilbara strike blazed the way for fair wages and better working conditions for black Australians, upon whom it must be said, the station owners were completely reliant.