Robert Charles Bropho (9 February 1930 – 24 October 2011) was a Ballardong Noongar Australian Aboriginal, rights activist and convicted serial child sex offender from Perth, Western Australia.
His father was Tommy Nyinda Bropho (1899–1972), who was born at Argyle Downs Station on the Durack pastoral lease and was taken from his mother under the 1905 Aborigines Act and sent to an orphanage on the Swan River at the age of 7.
His family spent the next decade living in humpies on the edge of John Forrest National Park and around the rubbish dumps and swamps and waterways of South Guildford, Caversham and Success Hill.
[5] Success Hill, on the edge of Bennett Brook, was a traditional campsite and was where the Irish journalist and amateur anthropologist Daisy Bates had gathered information for her books and articles on Nyungah culture.
On their return the Bropho family set up a public protest camp in the grounds of St Matthews Anglican Church in Guildford, a registered Aboriginal site.
[8] In January 1989 Bropho led a protest against the State Government's deal with Multiplex to develop on a sacred Aboriginal site at the Old Swan Brewery on Mounts Bay Road.
[9] Bropho challenged the development in the Supreme Court of Western Australia, which held that the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972-1980 did not apply to the state government.
In 2008, he was found guilty of five counts of carnal knowledge of a girl under 13, to whom he began giving money for sex when she was 11 years old at the height of the Swan Brewery legal battle in 1990.