Indigenous Australia

Noel (Nobby) Eatock (1912-2000?) labourer, clerk, Communist and gaoled protester 

Birth: 31 January 1912 at Euroa, Victoria, son of Queensland-born parents William Eatock (1869-1943), an Aboriginal stockman, later mail driver, and Lucy Harriett, née Wakenshaw (1874-1950). Marriage: 13 February 1932 in the District Registrar’s Office, Glebe, Sydney, to Elizabeth Holmes (Betty) Frame (1910-19xx), a waitress, born in Lanarksire, Scotland. They had two daughters. Death: possibly 2000 in Scotland. 

• Father’s details not stated on Noel’s birth certificate, but were given on his marriage certificate.
• Unemployed Workers’ Movement activist and Communist.
• With his mother, Lucy, he was active at dole protest at Glebe, in Sydney, in October 1932. Despite claim that he had been sent home to fetch a stool for the speakers, supported by witnesses, and an unblemished police record, he was arrested, charged and convicted with battering a police sergeant.
• Sentenced to two and a half year's gaol, 'the heaviest sentence ever inflicted on a "class-war" prisoner' in Australia. The Communist Party of Australia allowed Eatock to be gaoled, though it seems one 'Bluey' Barry or Sampson — subsequently a member of the International Brigade killed in Spain in January 1937 — was the culprit.
• Wrongful imprisonment became subject of energetic 'Free Eatock' campaign organised by Jack Sylvester and inspired separate Left opposition to emerge before there was an international Trotskyist movement.
• Served full gaol term. After leaving gaol he returned home briefly but then disappeared without trace.
• Described as 'shy and gentle . . . delicate'.
• Wife divorced him in 1940 and remarried.
• Family sources suggest that he died in Scotland about 2000.

Sources
Hall Greenland, Red Hot: The Life & Times of Nick Origlass 1908–1996 (Sydney, 1998).