'Gandhi of the Pilbara' fought the good fight for justice Date: 03/05/99 By HAMISH McDONALD at Strelley Station, Pilbara They came from all over the Pilbara, family groups packed into dusty utes and minibuses crammed with their bedding, cooking gear and the odd puppy. Up from Roebourne, down from Broome and Noonkanbah in the Kimberley, in from Woodstock out past Mount Newman mine in the Pilbara interior. Even one bloke from the Broome prison, escorted by two warders. To a patch of red sand between the Marble Bar Road and Tabba Tabba Creek, where about 100 vehicles lined up and the people spilled out, and the old men with white hair and beards sat under one tree, and the old women in floral dresses under another, and the barefoot young boys kicked a footy around on the sand, and the big sisters passed the squirming babies among each other. It could have been the picnic races, except the adults were quiet and there were two big mounds of red earth beside an open new grave. And when the four-wheel-drive hearse from Hedland Funerals came, all the old people went to it, rested their heads on the windows and the bonnet, and let out a long, soft, high wail. And so the people buried "the old white fellow" whose name they could not mention under "nyapuru" law, which prohibits using the name of the dead. He was Donald William McLeod, self-styled adviser to the Pilbara's traditional Aborigines, who died in Perth on April 13. Bush lawyer, commo, ratbag, stirrer, white king of the blacks ... Don McLeod was called all of this and more across Western Australia. But when he died, aged 91, there were voices in Perth comparing this dedicated man, who died without possessions, to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. By sheer coincidence, the funeral on Saturday afternoon was the anniversary of that May Day in 1946 when Aboriginal stockmen, guided by the self-educated mineral prospector McLeod, walked off the north-west's pastoral stations in protest against payment of subsistence rations. The strike lasted three years, with McLeod and strike leaders like the late Dooley Bin-Bin in and out of the Port Hedland lockup. Most never went back to the stations. The group, sometimes known as McLeod's mob, took to working surface shows of rare minerals across the Pilbara. By the 1970s, they had the savings to buy up the Pilbara pastoral stations like Strelley, Lalla Rookh and Waralong that had failed under their white owners. At Strelley, they set up the bilingual community school that has helped their main language, Ngyangumarta, thrive. When McLeod's coffin was put into the ground, one of the senior law men, frail old Bandy Nair, got up to speak. His body rake-thin but showing the grace of his days as a great corroboree dancer, fine white hair blowing around his dark face, Nair spoke in his soft voice about the "old fellow". He spoke of how McLeod had fought everybody for them, how he had come to live among them, dressed in just a pair of shorts, sleeping rough like them, learning about their country, a great wedge of the Pilbara between the Fortescue and De Grey rivers. "I'm poor fellow. I lost my old man, best man," Nair said. Jack Williams, secretary of the companies set up by McLeod to use corporate law against meddling native welfare officials, spoke for the "whitefellows" at the funeral, the teachers, lawyers, miners and others who had helped out over the years. He told how Western Australia's Native Welfare Commissioner had told the group in 1955: "I'll see you starve." Yet, here they were. And in August, the Full Bench of the Western Australia Supreme Court will start hearing McLeod's great crusade: that Section 70 of Western Australia's original 1889 Constitution, giving 1 per cent of State revenue to the Aborigines, was illegally excised by the State's Parliament in 1905. About $600 million rides on the case, which is certain to move to the High Court. Then the young men took shovels and filled the grave in, and built up a mound of red earth lit by the sinking sun. And the people all came and put bright plastic flowers on it. The sky turned pink and green. As the cars all left, the whitefellows noted that no-one from the State Government had turned up. Tom Stevens, Labor Opposition leader in the State's Upper House was there, but no-one from ATSIC or other Canberra outfits. Would the bureaucracy, so long kept at bay by McLeod, now move in to take control? Down at their camp by Tabba Tabba Creek yesterday morning, some of the old law men - Nair, Fred Bradman, Monty Hale, Alex Sambo - sat sadly in the sand as the long "sorry time" for McLeod began. "We've got to be strong, the same way as the old fellow," said Bandy Nair. "We are not going to knuckle down to anybody," said Monty Hale. "The old fellow left plenty of tracks for us to follow." 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