Veteran socialist activist and filmmaker Jill Hickson passed away on October 15 after months of struggle with declining health.
Her health took a sharp decline just after the last film she made with her partner John Reynolds, Palestinians Don’t Need Sidewalks, was completed. But even while she was confined to bed, she could see what a powerful asset this documentary was for the Palestine solidarity movement, as numerous screenings drew appreciative audiences and educated many about Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
Jill will be dearly missed by many and remembered for her fierce opposition to all oppressions and her unwavering commitment to the socialist movement.
Her comrades in the Socialist Alliance and, earlier, the Democratic Socialist Party, remember Jill as a staunch activist, a branch organiser in multiple cities and a kind and loyal friend.
But she won great respect and affection from many more people from across the broader left and progressive movement.
Jill served as a full-time organiser in the solidarity movements with the revolutionary struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, in Indonesia and Timor-Leste, and was an activist journalist for Green Left.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Jill spent endless hours writing submissions for funding grants when the Australian government had a 50:50 matching scheme. They were mostly successful, which meant the then Nicaraguan Assistance Fund aided many women-led projects in Nicaragua.
In the 1990s, Jill was organising solidarity events and conferences across Australia with Timor-Leste’s campaign for self-determination and the democracy movement in Indonesia. She knew that both arms of the movement were necessary to defeat the Australian-backed Suharto dictator.
In 2010, she went to the Ampilatwatja community in the Northern Territory to interview them after their walk-off from Ampilatwatja in July, 2009. The Kevin Rudd Labor government had continued John Howard’s colonialist Northern Territory intervention policy and she wanted to find out more about how First Nations people were resisting.
Jill helped start up Green Left TV, from the Addison Road Community Centre, where she and her partner and colleague John Reynolds were based for a couple of decades.
Some of the many documentary films she made with John include: Palestine Under Siege (2024), Dare to Struggle — the Life and Politics of Jack Mundey (2021), The Women Who Were Never There (2016), Radical Wollongong (2014), Alyawarr walk-off protest vs NT Intervention (2010), Supersize My Pay (2007), APEC 2007 — The Activist Film (2007), Pine Gap Exposed (2007), Aceh: The People’s Struggle (2001), M1: People Resist Corporate Globalisation (2001), S11: This is What Democracy Looks Like (2000), Indonesia in Revolt: democracy or death (1998), There is only one word, RESIST (1997) and Bougainville: Another Colonial War (1995).
Jill and John also pioneered Actively Radical TV (ARTV), at first as part of a community television station and later as an online video project, Art Resistance and, more recently, helped organise the Dare to Struggle Film festival. ARTV broadcast on Channel 31 for more than 10 years until the licence was withdrawn and the new licence holder made it difficult to continue to produce programs.
Jill was a staunch feminist, convinced that the patriarchal capitalism systemically held women back, loading them with all the unpaid labour society needed to create the next generation of workers. That understanding fuelled her drive to push all the boundaries.
Accolades for Jill have come in from around the world, particularly in countries whose struggles for liberation gained solidarity with the help of documentaries she made, often in dangerous conditions.
Jill was very brave, says Unite Union organiser Joe Carolan, who remembers her being assaulted and arrested in Aotearoa New Zealand while filming Supersize My Pay about the struggle for better wages and conditions by McDonald’s workers.
Perhaps the most dangerous film assignment she did was in Indonesia in 1996 in the period of intense popular struggle that eventually brought down the Suharto dictatorship.
Harris Sitorus (“Rizky”), a former activist of the Indonesian Student Solidarity for Democracy and leader of the People’s Democratic Party (PRD), who worked with Jill in this assignment, writes: “Just like the Australian labourers and revolutionaries during Indonesia’s struggle for independence, Jill Hickson and comrades from DSP and Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET) played a crucial role in the struggle to overthrow the New Order regime.
“Following the 1996 Kudatuli incident [a violent attack on the headquarters of the Indonesian Democratic Party instigated by the Suharto regime but blamed on the PRD], my comrades and I had the opportunity to meet her at Gadjah Mada University.
“She was visiting Yogyakarta to make the film, There is only one word, RESIST! This documentary showed that even though many leaders and members of the PRD became victims of persecution, were arrested and imprisoned, the PRD was not destroyed but continued to exist and struggle underground.
“The collective solidarity of our Australian comrades from the DSP, ASIET and Green Left in the struggle to topple Suharto and the New Order regime demonstrates that revolutionary solidarity and cooperation across nations mutually strengthen and pave the way for accelerated change. History has proven this, and Jill Hickson was a part of it.”
Farewell comrade Jill Hickson. Rest in power.