Burnum Burnum

Featured on Late Night Live with Phillip Adams in 1999, the story of his early years graphically illustrates the brutality of the assimilation policy in the middle decades of the 20th century.

[2] In its magazine Dawn, the Aborigines Welfare Board promoted his achievements in rugby league and surf lifesaving at Kempsey, and reported that he left Kinchela to become a pioneer Aboriginal employee in the NSW Public Service, working for the Department of Agriculture, where he remained for 13 years.

He continued his activism after becoming a Bahá’í, and successfully campaigned for the skeleton of the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian woman, Truganini, to be removed from display in the Museum of Tasmania.

[5] He may be best remembered for planting the Aboriginal flag in front of the white cliffs of Dover on the Australian Bicentenary Day of 26 January 1988, to satirically claim England on behalf of the Aboriginal people of Australia, mirroring what Arthur Phillip had done in Burnum Burnum's homeland in 1788, after arriving with the First Fleet.

The first was Dark Age, a thriller set in outback and tropical Australia, which also starred David Gulpillil as Burnum's son.

The third was a satirical film, Marsupials: The Howling III, in which Burnum's character becomes a werewolf in the form of a Tasmanian tiger.

He was also an Australian Democrats candidate for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly in the 1988 North Shore state by-election.