It is now around 10 years since I started this blog about Jimmy Governor and I want to review it now. When it is a couple of days before Australia Day on 26 January 2020 or what Aboriginal people now call 'Survival Day' or 'Invasion Day'.
With the benefit of passing time, I now see him as quite an extraordinary individual who could run rings around anyone of his era, male or female, black or white.
He was smart, he was resilient, he was his own man, he knew the difference between right and wrong, he was steady, he cared for and provided for his white wife and Aboriginal kinsmen, and, yes, he had courage.

I do accept what he said that he was 'run into' the murders of four members of the Mawbey family and their schoolteacher by his wife and kinsmen.
I do not think he would have committed the murders of his own accord.
He was acting on their behalf, not his own.
They were clamouring for justice against injustices they thought had suffered at the hands of the Mawbey family.
They were challenging him to stand up and be a man and not to cow-tow to the white man's superior status.
He would have known that as soon as he did so he was a dead man, but nonetheless he did it.

MORE TO COME