Vincent Gilbert Copley OAM 24/12/1936–10/1/2022

Vincent (Vince) Copley Sr, a distinguished Elder of the Ngadjuri people of South Australia, passed away on 10 January 2022 at the age of 85. His passing was mourned nationally (e.g. Burnett 2022; Silva 2022). Vince Copley’s grandfather, Barney Waria, is thought to have been the last initiated Ngadjuri man (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Vincent Copley senior, on Ngadjuri lands near Burra, South Australia, 3 July 2018 (Photograph: Flinders University/CJ Taylor).

Vince Copley was awarded an OAM in 2014 in recognition of his service in promoting the social, legal, and economic rights and cultural identity of Indigenous Australians. He has made major contributions to Australia in three capacities: as a campaigner for Indigenous rights; as a sporting hero and leader in Australian Rules and cricket; and in leading the Ngadjuri nation to reclaim their knowledge of land and culture.

Born in 1936 in Point Pearce, South Australia, at a young age Vince moved to live at St Francis’ Anglican Home in Adelaide, where he was part of a cohort of young men who went on to become important campaigners for Indigenous rights. This cohort included luminaries such as civil rights activist Dr Charles Kumantjay Perkins AO; artist and footballer Dr John Kundereri Moriarty AM; and academic and activist Associate Professor Dr Gordon Briscoe AO. Vince Copley also worked closely with Malcom Cooper, George Tongory, Nancy and Alene Brumbie, Dr Lois Lowitja O’Donoghue AC, Geoffrey Barns, Dr Charles Duguid and the former South Australian Premier, Don Dunstan AC.

Aboriginal advocacy

Vince Copley was an important and successful advocate for the rights of Aboriginal people, working to improve their social, legal, and economic positions.

Over a lifetime of service, he visited almost every Aboriginal community in Australia. Together with Charles Kumantjay Perkins, John Moriarty, Gordon Briscoe, Don Dunstan, and Cameron Stuart (later Judge), Vince Copley helped change South Australian race legislation. He successfully lobbied to create the South Australian Lands Trust laws and to have the racially discriminant Welfare Board legislation repealed in South Australia. In addition, he campaigned to reform marriage laws which banned marriages between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people.

Six years after the 1967 Referendum to amend the Australian Constitution to allow the Commonwealth to make laws for Aboriginal people and to include them in the census, Vince started employment with the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs as a project officer compiling an Aboriginal electoral roll. This involved travelling throughout Australia talking with Aboriginal communities. During the 1970s and early 1980s he was instrumental in the establishment of Aboriginal hostels in many parts of Australia, including the first Aboriginal Community Centre in South Australia. The innovation here was providing Aboriginal people with dedicated health, housing, employment, education, and legal services outside of state services.

Working with John Moriarty, Vince Copley helped to establish the original National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC). As the first national secretary of NAIDOC, he was instrumental in developing and implementing the initial vision for this organisation. In South Australia, Vince Copley was involved in the establishment of South Australian legal aid for Indigenous people. He later worked as Executive Officer and later Regional Manager for Aboriginal Hostels Ltd until the 1980s. He also played a major role in creating the first Aboriginal education and training centre, which began at Adelaide University and later moved to the University of South Australia.

In addition to his service in Australia, Vince Copley has encouraged cooperation between Indigenous peoples internationally. In 1977 he organised a delegation of Aboriginal storytellers, artists, and dancers to attend the Festival of African Culture in Nigeria. From 1993 to 1995 he worked independently as a consultant in cultural awareness for schools and colleges. In the final decades of his life he worked closely with the World Archaeological Congress to promote Indigenous rights and empowerment internationally. This included his role as Indigenous host of the World Archaeological Congress symposium on Indigenous Cultural Heritage, held in Burra, South Australia in 2006, which supported Indigenous participation from throughout the world.

Sporting achievements

Vince Copley’s early career was as an accomplished footballer and cricketer. Later, he extended his skills through various roles in sports administration. His personal accomplishments as sportsman include several prestigious sporting awards, most notably the Port Adelaide Football Club’s Best and Fairest in 1954. Vince went on to play for Fitzroy in Victoria and to coach the Curramulka Football Club for over a decade. From 1982 to 1993 Vince worked for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission as sports officer. In this role, he travelled around the country, running competitions and carnivals to which state and national coaches of a range of sports were invited to identify new talent. He set up an annual awards sports night, which ran for about 10 years, to recognise the achievements of Aboriginal athletes. Only the best hotels or function centres were chosen as venues to underscore that celebration of Indigenous talent, and Vince provided oversight for the funding, planning and logistics for these events.

As a sports administrator and leader Vince Copley’s efforts provided hitherto unrecognised – and certainly uncelebrated – appreciation of the historical role of Aboriginal people in Australian cricket. He was a major contributor to the development of Cricket Australia’s Indigenous Strategy and in 2000 he was appointed as Co-Chair of the National Indigenous Cricket Advisory Council. Most recently, he fulfilled this role in tandem with Dr John Bannon, the former Premier of South Australia. In this capacity Vince organised various national and international programs for Indigenous cricketers including the 1988 tour of England, which commemorated the first Aboriginal Australian tour of England in 1868.

The significance of Vince Copley’s contribution to Australian cricket is acknowledged in the Vince Copley Medal, which recognises the ‘most outstanding cricketer’ at South Australia’s annual Lord Taverner’s Statewide Indigenous Carnival, as well as in obituaries written for major sporting organisations (e.g. Burnett 2022).

Ngadjuri leadership

Vince Copley has made important contributions to the reclamation and protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage. He worked for the well-being of Aboriginal people all over Australia, and had family links to the Narangga, Ngarrindjeri and Kaurna people. However, in the final decades of his life his focus was redressing colonial legacies that impacted on Ngadjuri people who were forcibly removed from their traditional lands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their relocation to missions where they were under colonial control led to a disruption – but not an obliteration – of Ngadjuri links to, and knowledge of, their heritage sites and traditional lands.

For much of the twentieth century, there was little acknowledgement of Ngadjuri people’s presence in historical narratives of the region. From the 1990s onwards Vincent Copley worked concertedly to change this (Birt and Copley 2005). He led Ngadjuri people in their efforts to reclaim cultural and physical knowledge of their traditional lands. After several years as Chair of the Ngadjuri Walpa Juri Land and Heritage Association Inc., Vince Copley became Chair of Ngadjuri Elders Heritage and Land Care Council. Through these organisations he worked in a sustained manner to strengthen Ngadjuri people’s knowledge of their lands and to develop community and government recognition of Ngadjuri people as Traditional Owners of Ngadjuri lands.

Vincent Copley valued research and he valued archaeology. In 1998, after a chance meeting in the township of Burra in the mid-north of South Australia, he established a research partnership with Claire Smith and Gary Jackson of Flinders University which has lasted 25 years, and which has continued beyond his passing. Vince worked closely with many postgraduate students, but particularly with Kylie Lower, who worked with him on both her Masters and Doctoral research. Archival, oral history and archaeological research became major tools for strengthening Ngadjuri knowledge of their cultural heritage. Vince Copley co-published on topics ranging from land use and contact rock art (Birt and Copley 2005; Smith et al. 2019), to the future of public archaeology (Pollard et al. 2021) and using archaeology to strengthen Indigenous social, emotional, and economic well-being (Smith et al. 2022). For many years, he co-taught a field school on Ngadjuri lands (Figure 2), shaping the thinking of many young archaeologists.

Figure 2. Ngadjuri Archaeology Fieldschool, Orroroo, South Australia. Vince Copley Senior in the back row, sixth from the left, 28 September 2013 (Photograph: Claire Smith).

In the early 2000s, along with his nephew Vincent Branson, Vince Copley worked with Flinders University to develop the Ngadjuri Heritage Project. This project identified over 600 sites on Ngadjuri lands, recorded oral histories and conducted extensive archival research. This information grew Ngadjuri capacity to care for Ngadjuri lands. On 6 July 2023, Ngadjuri people’s combined efforts culminated in the Federal Court’s recognition of the Native Title rights and interests of the Ngadjuri People on Ngadjuri lands.

Vince Copley established productive and mutually respectful relationships with non-Aboriginal people, local government, and state agencies. As part of a reindigenising of Ngadjuri lands in the mid-north of South Australia, he encouraged greater cooperation between Ngadjuri and non-Ngadjuri landowners. For example, after being approached by the Regional Council of Goyder he approached Flinders University to ensure the excavation and reburial of human skeletal remains at Redbanks Conservation Park (Smith et al. 2006). He responded positively to meetings with landowners, establishing long-term relationships with many of them. These relationships strengthened recognition of Ngadjuri people’s Traditional Ownership of their lands and facilitated new research on Ngadjuri lands. Practical actions such as these are small vital steps towards reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Vince Copley’s advocacy for Ngadjuri people produced a re-configuring of intellectual property relationships between researchers and Indigenous peoples through claiming a share of the intellectual property that was contained in the field notes of anthropologist Ronald Berndt. Vince Copley’s grandfather Barney Waria, who was born in 1873, befriended the trainee anthropologist Ronald Berndt, born in 1916. Over six years from 1939 to 1944, Waria, who was 43 years older than Berndt, worked with this young man to record Ngadjuri histories and cultural knowledge. Upon Berndt’s death in May 1990 an embargo was placed on his field notes until 2024. Vince Copley debated the legality of this embargo on the grounds that it deprived Ngadjuri people of an important source of knowledge about their cultural heritage, and that the information was, in fact, intellectual property that was shared between Waria and Berndt. This facilitated limited access to the archives by lawyers, but Vince did not gain access himself. He wrote about this injustice in both public and academic articles (Smith et al. 2018a, 2018b) and was supported by journalists, most notably Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Jan Mayman (2018), who passed away in 2021. Berndt’s field notes containing Mr Waria’s stories are currently stored at the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia. It is a travesty that Vince Copley was not able to fulfil his dying wish of accessing the diaries containing his grandfather’s teachings. Vince Copley’s actions here are significant not only in terms of Berndt’s field notes but they have implications for the ‘ownership’ of researchers’ field notes throughout Australia, and internationally.

Vince Copley has been an important campaigner for Indigenous rights, locally, nationally, and internationally; a star sportsman and committed sports administrator; and a leader for Indigenous people globally who are reclaiming their Country. His parting gift to the world was his book of wisdom, The Wonder of Little Things, which was published eight months after his passing (Copley and McInerney 2022). The public intellectual Phillip Adams has predicted that this book is ‘destined to become a classic’.

Vincent Gilbert Copley was 85 years old at the time of his passing. A family man, he was a husband to his wife Brenda, who passed in May 2020, and a father to Darran Magill, Kara McEwen and Vincent Copley Jnr.

Just prior to his death Vince said ‘All the other things in my life – like lunch with the Queen, and meeting Muhammad Ali, and Nelson Mandela – that’s all fine, but it’s not life. Life is being able to be with your family and friends, and to sit here and see all the birds and the trees’ (Burnett 2022).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.