Situated in Parliament Gardens, this memorial commemorates the lives of Douglas and Gladys Nicholls, two leading Aboriginal Australian rights activists from the Cummeragunja Mission in New South Wales. It is the first in the city to depict Aboriginal Australian leaders. Australian artist Louis Laume created the sculptures, which were unveiled on December 9, 2007.
Born in 1906, Douglas Nicholls became a prominent Australian rules football player. The only Aboriginal Australian player in the league, sports crowds called him the “flying Abo” and worse. He was the pastor of Australia’s first Aboriginal Church of Christ, in Fitzroy, Melbourne. By the mid-1930s, Nicholls became involved in Aboriginal Australian rights organizations eventually co-founding the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League in 1957. He led protests and fought against assimilation policies. In 1972, he became the first Aboriginal Australian to be knighted.
Gladys Nicholls was also born in 1906. At 19, she married Douglas Nicholls’s brother Howard. In 1942, Howard tragically died in a car accident, leaving Gladys with three children to care for. Less than a year later, she married Douglas. Throughout her life, Gladys was involved in many social reform projects that targeted poverty and social inequality, mostly in the Aboriginal Australian community across Melbourne. She later became secretary of the National Aboriginal and Islander Women’s Council and was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2008.
