Arabic version: عرض صور نادرة لمعسكرات إضراب بيلبارا

According to ABC News, dozens of photographs documenting historic Pilbara strike camps are being shown publicly for the first time at the University of Western Australia’s Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Perth. The images, taken in the 1950s and 1960s by anthropologist John Wilson, were found in an attic in Fremantle more than 1,500 kilometres from Captain Wilson’s Roebourne nursing home.

The photographs record communities formed by Aboriginal people after hundreds of stockmen and women walked off Pilbara pastoral stations in 1946. Workers protested poor wages and unfair conditions after carving sheep-grazing country from the arid region for little more than rations of tea, tobacco or sugar. The rebellion lasted three years and is described as helping to launch the Indigenous rights movement two decades before the Wave Hill walk-offs.

Many strikers did not return to the stations. They formed mining cooperatives and pearl shell farms with communist organiser Don McLeod, creating some of the first operations of their kind in what is now an industry-heavy Pilbara. UWA art history professor Darren Jorgensen said the groups were economically independent and that the movement had unfolded far from Australia’s cities.

One image shows Nyamal elder Captain Wilson at Gorge Creek camp near Marble Bar around 1959, preparing to lift an air compressor. His daughter Ursula Wilson, a co-curator of the exhibition, said the pictures showed Indigenous people were hard-working and had endured a tough time. Another daughter, Sharon Coppin, said she was emotional and proud that her father would travel south for the opening.

John Wilson’s daughter, Bu Wilson, discovered the original slides in boxes beneath a wardrobe in her parents’ home. She said her father had been fascinated by how people organised artisanal mining and shell camps, and had formed close connections in the Pilbara. The exhibition, Strike Camps: The Photographs of John Wilson, opens on Wednesday, September 2.