Pat Eatock truly deserved the title “elder”. An elder passes on the lessons of the past to the next generation. This was her biggest activist contribution in the last years of her life.
So I'll call her Auntie Pat in this tribute out of respect, though in life she spurned any title, even the title “grandma” her family says. She was “Pat” to everyone, that was her egalitarian spirit and she addressed young and old as equals.
Auntie Pat helped educate new generations of activists in the struggle for Aboriginal rights and also in the rich interaction between between Aboriginal freedom fighters and the left in this country, an interaction in which the Eatock family, including Auntie Pat, have played an historic role that spans generations.
Lucy Eatock (1874-1950), Auntie Pat's grandmother, and her sons were communist activists who were targeted by the police.
Auntie Pat too was not only a fighter for Aboriginal rights but also a staunch feminist and a socialist. Her comrades in the Socialist Alliance will remember her with fondness and respect.
Auntie Pat was also “Comrade Pat” to us, so that makes her Comrade Auntie Pat — for she was an elder to her comrades as well.
The tenacity and bravery with which Comrade Auntie Pat has taken, time and time again, to the front lines of political struggles is memorable. Those historic images of her triumphantly holding aloft the first Aboriginal Tent Embassy sign amid the rampaging coppers in Canberra in 1972 should remain etched in our minds.
But so too the images of Auntie Pat, in her red motorised wheelchair, joining a sit-down outside a coalmine just south of Sydney in 2009, with Aboriginal flag flying at the earliest protests against the racist Northern Territory intervention and amidst the those who joined the Occupy Movement when it swept through Sydney.
Auntie Pat will also be remembered for standing up to the right-wing newspaper Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt's racist vilification of fair-skinned Aborigines. The victory in Eatock v Bolt has really stuck in the craw of the right-wing establishment as we all saw last year with Liberal Attorney General George “right-to-bigotry” Brandis' failed attempt to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act.
So Auntie Pat was a teacher who led from the front.
Most people don't know Auntie Pat was also a powerful, if yet-unpublished poet. I realised this one day when we were chatting to her in her little flat in Glebe about her life. She shuffled through her stuff and pulled out some loose pages of poems and recollections she had written.
Among these were a number of very strong poems she wrote in the midst of great sadness at different stages of her life, including after the untimely passing in 2010 of her son, Greg, at the age of 51. Greg Eatock was also an Aboriginal activist who left his mark in the movement.
Auntie Pat's poems were searing with raw emotion and brutal honesty. I remember feeling like I had been hit by a thunderbolt and made me understand something special about Auntie Pat. She was a person of strong opinions but she was also deeply self-critical.
One of her friends from the early days of the women's liberation movement in Canberra, said at Auntie Pat's memorial service that Pat was so self critical that almost all her writings remained in draft, forever open to being improved on.
Auntie Pat and her fellow activists and comrades agreed on many things but not everything. Political activists never do and nor should they. Discussion and debate can help us find the best ways forward.
But some lefties have a tendency to lose all sense of perspective when having differences among themselves and the even more unfortunate tendency to take their bat and ball and stomp off.
But not Comrade Auntie Pat. She was dogged in debate but she also listened, and, as her ruthlessly honest unpublished poetry will prove, she had the capacity to be brutally self-critical and honest. More of us should be like her in that regard.
Farewell Comrade Auntie Pat. You made a difference and you will not be forgotten.