Indigenous Australia

Lady Gladys and Sir Douglas Nicholls

Family photograph

Gladys Naby/Navy Muriel Nicholls (1906–1981), activist, property owner, community worker, and businesswoman, was born on 21 October 1906 at Cummeragunja Aboriginal station, Yorta Yorta Country, New South Wales. She was the third of six children of Meera Naby Baksch/Bux, an Indian-born hawker from Ludhiana, Punjab, and Alice Campbell (1875–1953), a Dja Dja Wurrung, Wamba Wemba (Wemba Wemba), and Barapa Barapa (Barababaraba) woman born at Coranderrk, Victoria, on Woiwurrung Country. Descended from the Platypus People of Barapa Barapa Country, she also came from the Wiran (red-tailed black cockatoo) of the Wamba Wemba and the Waa (crow) of Dja Dja Wurrung. Her maternal grandparents were Koombra Alexander Campbell (1851–1923) of Gannawarra station, and Emma Campbell, née Kerr (1859–1886), a Dja Dja Wurrung woman of Kelly’s station, Bendigo Creek.

Meera Bux owned the general store at Barmah, opposite the Cummeragunja school just across the Murray River in northern Victoria. Gladys and her siblings attended primary school at Cummeragunja, where they were taught by Thomas Shadrach James, and later worked in the family store. In the 1920s Gladys persuaded her father to let her go to Melbourne to train as a seamstress. She had a daughter, Beryl Navy Bux, who died, aged three months, in 1926. On 7 October 1927 at St Martin’s Chapel, Carlton, she married Howard Herbert Nicholls (1905–1942), a deeply religious Yorta Yorta man from Cummeragunja, then working as a labourer and a footballer at North Melbourne and Northcote. They would have four children: Nora (b. 1928–2010), Betty (1930–1931), Bevan (b. 1933), and Lilian (b. 1935).

The couple moved to Cummeragunja where Gladys formed a close relationship with her mother-in-law Florence Atkinson (1876–1932). In February 1939, along with around two hundred other residents, Gladys, Howard, and their children walked off the station in protest over the poor living conditions and authoritarian management. The protestors set up camp at Barmah, crossing from New South Wales to Victoria, and from there the Nicholls family moved to Melbourne, where Gladys found work at a munitions factory.

In April 1942 Howard was struck by a car while mending a tyre on the side of the road between Murchison and Nagambie, sustaining fatal injuries and he passed away at Mooroopna Hospital. It was night-time and the wartime blackout conditions then prevailing likely contributed to his death. Gladys sued the other driver for damages and was awarded £1,000. On 26 December 1942, at the Methodist Church in Moama, New South Wales, she married Douglas Ralph (Doug) Nicholls (1906–1988), Howard’s younger brother. They would have two children: Pamela (b. 1943) and Ralph (b. 1950). A former Victorian Football League player, Doug was working as a greenkeeper at Fitzroy, an inner-Melbourne suburb, at the time of their marriage. He was ordained as a Churches of Christ pastor in 1945.

To help support the family, Gladys, who had inherited her father’s business acumen, established a tuckshop in a caravan at Glenroy, a northern suburb of Melbourne that was experiencing rapid growth. Between 1953 and 1958 the Victorian Housing Commission constructed around 1,700 new homes in Glenroy and Jacana. Gladys set up shop around the corner from her daughter Nora’s house, selling fresh sandwiches, pies, soups, and curries to construction workers. On Sundays she taught religious instruction at the Churches of Christ Aborigines Mission on Gore Street, Fitzroy, where Doug was the pastor.

Aboriginal people who came to Melbourne in search of work sometimes stayed at the Gore Street church until more permanent accommodation could be found. Others stayed with the Nicholls. Pamela Pederson, the Nicholls’s youngest daughter, recalled: ‘we had a lot of the young people come stay with us … I was always sharing my bedroom’ (Message Stick 2010). In 1956, recognising the desperate need for temporary accommodation in the city, Gladys and Doug set about establishing a hostel for Aboriginal girls in Northcote. Gladys opened opportunity shops in Fitzroy and North Fitzroy to raise funds. The newly formed Victorian Aborigines Advancement League lent its support, its women’s auxiliary, instigated by Gladys, focusing on fund-raising. The women knitted, crocheted, sewed, and baked cakes to sell at street stalls whenever the opportunity arose. The State government contributed £2,000 and the hostel was opened at 56 Cunningham Street, Northcote, in 1958. Initially called the Cummeragunja Hostel, its name was later changed to the Lady Gladys Nicholls Hostel. Gladys was its first matron.

Gladys continued to be involved in Aboriginal advancement and welfare activities during the 1960s, working with Doug and others to fight for equal rights for Indigenous people, including for the 1967 referendum. She supported the Harold Blair Aboriginal Children’s Holiday Project, which assisted Indigenous children from Victoria and Queensland to come to Victoria for holidays, and worked tirelessly on other community projects, such as the annual Aborigines Advancement League Christmas Tree for Indigenous children. For many years she helped to organise the Christmas carols at Cummeragunja.

On 29 January 1972, as Victorian State president of the National Council of Aboriginal and Islander Women, Gladys attended a conference in Canberra that called for Commonwealth legislation to ensure the preservation of Indigenous cultures, the employment of Aboriginal welfare workers, the granting of land ownership to Aboriginal people, and the immediate resignations of Prime Minister William McMahon and inaugural Minister for the Environment, Aborigines and Arts Peter Howson. Delegates visited the Aboriginal Tent Embassy that had been set up on the lawns of Parliament House following McMahon’s Australia Day–eve announcement rejecting land rights for Aboriginal people.

In June 1972 the Nicholls family travelled to England where Doug was appointed knight bachelor for his leadership in supporting the advancement of Aboriginal people. From December 1976 to April 1977 Lady Nicholls aided her husband, then governor of South Australia, with his vice-regal duties, including hosting Queen Elizabeth II’s visit. She more than assisted him in his work; she worked with him, travelling the same path and, through their leadership, creating a path for others to follow. In the Nicholls family it was well known that:

Gladys ran [Doug]. That’s a fact, we all know that. She wasn’t walking behind him, she was walking right next to him. And she was virtually his [personal assistant], and she ran him. She kept his diary and made sure he got his suits ready for his meetings and his church stuff and all that. She was the power behind that old fella. (Gary Murray, cited in Message Stick 2010)

Small statured and gentle natured, she was strong, stern, highly principled, and respected by all.

Survived by Doug and five of their six children, Gladys died of coronary artery disease on 28 January 1981 at Fairfield, Victoria, and was buried in Cummeragunja cemetery. In 2007 a sculpture of Pastor Sir Douglas and Lady Gladys Nicholls was unveiled at Spring Street, Parliament Gardens, East Melbourne. The first memorial sculpture in Melbourne dedicated to Aboriginal leaders, it commemorates their partnership as well as their commitment to Aboriginal rights. Gladys was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2008 and the Indigenous Honour Roll in 2012.

Gary Murray is Gladys Nicholls’s grandson.