White Plague Strikes Black Elder

Chicka Dixon, Aboriginal of the Year, tent embassy activist, builders labourer, wharfie, university lecturer, recovered alcoholic and former chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board -- a man who has represented his people around the world, studied with the Canadian Native Americans, done a bit of gaol, been mates with prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and addressed 10,000 Chinese in the Great Hall of the People -- is dying.

Slowly.

Chicka, 74, worked on the wharves for a decade in the sixties and seventies loading asbestos.

"It would fly all over the place," he said. "Heaps of it. My gang, we'd sit on the bags and eat our lunch. Bags and bags of asbestos. No one knew. We usen't to take any notice. Forty years down the road, in 1997, I collapsed. When they examined me they said you've got dusted lungs. All those years I'd never been sick in my life. I've been 12 times in hospital in the last two years. Seven days to pump my lungs out. "

Chicka Dixon left Wallaga mission for the big city in 1945.

The big thing in those days for young Aboriginal boys was to go to Redfern or Kings Cross.

By 1946 Chicka's political career was getting started.

"I was sneaking off to meetings of the Aboriginal Progressive Association at the Ironworkers' Hall," he said

"'Oh Chicka, don't go down there, they'll be calling you Red', my mother said.

"Well, I said, they've been calling me black for years."

Chicka was a builders labourer before getting a job as a wharfie.

"I got on the waterfront and become a wharfie and that's where I learned the politics. The Communist Party Moscow liners were masters of organising. And I learned a lot about other people's struggles.

"See I was in a bit of a shell before that. I thought we were the only people in the world discriminated against. Then I started to hear about Greek political prisoners, (we walked off on that issue) the Vietnam war (repeatedly walked off on that) and South Africa, (walked off on that, too). Each issue was to do with the suffering of people. I learnt that working on the wharves. So you broaden your outlook."

"That was my best political education. No doubt about that. I was very politically naive when I started. I had ideas but didn't know how to put things together. They taught me how to organise. We'd be talking politics all the time. It was second nature."

Chicka has been around the world, each time representing his people. Canada six times, the US five times, Rome, Athens, Nigeria, India. "All over the place".

"It made me more determined to fight. But I have to slow up now. I'm too old. I get out of breath a lot.

Now with full blown asbestosis, Chicka has to have his lungs drained of fluid every three months. He must use a ventilator before he goes to bed and when he gets up. His breathing is laboured. His voice sometimes waterlogged.

In the Great Hall of the People Chicka talked about genocide in Tasmania and the infant mortality rate which was 1 in 7 in those days.

"It's an absolute scandal. I pulled out the health department figures and quoted them. When I came back in 1973 the government had changed hands. Gough Whitlam said 'We're going to do a catch up exercise for you, Chicka'. They channelled heaps of money to us. Gough did the lot."

Under the Whitlam Government Chicka was sent to Canada to study. Hawke appointed Chicka Chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board in 1983. The following year he was made Aboriginal of the Year.

"This award is a recognition of Mr Dixon's dedicated efforts and his achievements across a wide range of interests in service for the betterment of the Aboriginal people ranging from community service in employment, legal, health and rehabilitation areas to Aboriginal theatre, arts and music," the PM wrote. "We celebrate his commitment, his strength and his vision of what is possible to achieve for his people, and through that, for a better Australia."

But since the Howard Government came to office funding for Aboriginal Australians has been cut by $470 million. At the same time Chicka bitterly points out they've increased the diesel subsidy by $1.4 billion.

"Not million, billion! They're putting diesel before people," he said. "It's a breach of human rights. We should go them in the UN."

Chicka is also 'a bit worried about our so-called leadership' on the refugee crisis.

"I gave a lecture the other day and the students asked what do you think about the boat people? They worry you? Only the first ones, I said. I believe their visas may have run out by 231 years."

For white men not only took the land from Aboriginal Australians, they brought disease and pestilence -- typhoid, chicken pox, mesothelioma and asbestosis.

Chicka is just one of 44 successful cases handled by Sydney Branch lawyers Turner and Freeman since June 2000. One of 44 men who have won compensation payouts totalling around $2m. Fifteen of these men have since died. Chicka is one of the lucky ones - asbestosis can take years to kill you. Mesothelioma takes you out within months.

Assistant Branch Secretary Barry Robson worked alongside Chicka on the Sydney wharves. He has since worked with him to ensure he won his case. "We've got another seven cases starting before Christmas," he said. "I see one or two of my mates to the grave each month. And it's going to get worse. Our advice from experts in this field is asbestos deaths won't peak until around 2020."

Despite changes to the law which enable claims to be processed after the victim's death, bedside tribunals are sometimes still necessary. Days before their death the cancer victims give evidence gasping for breath slumped in a wheel chair or propped up on pillows in bed so their lungs don't drown them. Proceedings stop to give them time on oxygen ventilation.

"It's bloody shocking," said Barry. "One bloke had to talk through his oxygen mask. The hearing was on Christmas Eve, 2000. He was gone by boxing day."

Barry is now doing another bedside hearing with Phil Monroe, former wharfie and son of one time branch official Matt Monroe.

"You become a philosopher when you get older," said Chicka. "Young people come here and I advise them that they don't have to make the mistakes I made. You try to pass on that mistake ridden knowledge."

And Chicka will continue to do just that. Long after he's gone. His biography by Aboriginal activist, actor and writer Gary Foley is already under way.