Charlie Perkins was in many ways Australia's Nelson Mandela. Indeed, had the Australian racial composition been reversed, as in South Africa, he would surely have fulfilled that role. Instead, he struggled, right up to his death on October 18th aged 64, for justice and dignity for his people, the Aborigines, and to alert the white majority to the truth that unless they gave back nationhood to the first Australians, they could never claim their own.
Charlie Perkins's home was in Alice Springs. His mother Hetti, a queen of the Arrente people, gave birth to him on a tabletop in the disused Alice Springs telegraph office in 1936 or 1937; she was never sure which.
Growing up as a mixed-race Aborigine, he was "protected" so that he might be "assimilated" - the bureaucratic language that masked the suffering of the "stolen generation", now recognised as a form of genocide, in which children were taken from their mothers and sent to institutions and as bonded labour.
He remembered his grandmother only as a face behind barbed wire. One of his brothers killed himself, which was common among young Aborigines - and still is. Charlie Perkins was never stolen because Hetti never took her eyes off him.
"You learned from when you were a kid to stay out of the way of whites," he said later. "Our big treat was being taken to the pictures, sneaking in after the movie had started, and leaving before it ended, so that no one would object to us black kids being there. I grew up never knowing if the goodies or baddies won. Very frustrating."
Charlie Perkins was sent to mission school in Adelaide, where he discovered soccer, and at 16 was spotted by the then English first-division club Everton, which offered to pay his fare to England in the late 1950s. Later, he was invited by Matt Busby for a trial with Manchester United - and holds the distinction of turning the great man down.
"You know, I found a kind of racial dignity in England," he said. "But I was homesick."
Arriving back in Adelaide in 1959, he became only the second Aborigine to graduate from an Australian university. In the mid1960s, he led white students on freedom rides into the outback of New South Wales, with much the same objective as the freedom riders who began desegregation in the American south.
Charlie Perkins and his white comrades stood at the turnstile of public swimming pools and demanded that black children be allowed entry.
In the town of Moree, they were spat at and assaulted, and menaced by a crowd. "I thought we'd had it," he said. "Then this black woman stepped forward and made a courageous speech, in which she pointed to a white man who had gone secretly with black women and fathered black children.
" `Tell your wives what you've been doing, you bludgers,' she said. `Go on, they're just over there. Tell 'em!' " That evening, black kids were allowed into the pool for the first time. They had won the first "battle".
Charlie Perkins did much to change the conditions in places like the federal government reserve at Jay Creek, where 300 Aboriginal people were corralled in administered squalor, often without water - in 40-degree temperatures - and proper food or housing. He began to right Australia's great wrong by bringing the most basic human rights to Aboriginal people. On behalf of the most discarded minority of any white colonial country, his trail-blazing role was momentous, as was his courage.
Charlie Perkins went on to win - and lose - many battles. He was manager of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, which helped run the campaign that produced a resounding "yes" in a 1967 referendum, giving the federal government power to legislate justice for Aboriginals - a power so often neglected and misused.
He served in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra, rising to permanent secretary. He invariably spoke his mind, calling racist politicians racist. In a society renowned for its outspokeness, but in reality often embarrassed by it, he gathered enemies.
Even when Sydney University gave him an honorary doctorate recently, he used the occasion to attack John Howard's government for effectively taking away the common law rights that the high court had said belonged to Aborigines - an action the United Nations has condemned as racist. He would have exploded had he heard Howard last week paying tribute to him through clenched teeth.
Like so many Aborigines, Charlie Perkins was burdened by ill-health, although he regarded the gift of a kidney 28 years ago as a miracle. Most Aborigines can expect to die in their 40s and 50s. He drew lifelong strength from his remarkable wife Eileen, his children Hettie, Rachel and Adam, and his grandchildren.
More than most, Charlie Perkins was a true Australian hero.
Charles (Charlie) Nelson Perkins: born 1936; died, October 2000