OLD MELBURNIAN STORY
The life of Peter Kanoa
D
uring last year’s highly successful March 50-year reunion of the 1969 cohort, amidst the chatter, one incessant question was also heard: “Where’s Kanoa?” That was fellow student Peter Kanoa (OM 1969), an Indigenous Australian from Heywood in southwest Victoria who spent seven years at Melbourne Grammar School. Tragically, no one knew that Peter had died a few months before in September 2018 from kidney failure, aged 66. Peter, believed to be the School’s first Indigenous student, was a forerunner of Melbourne Grammar’s Indigenous program. Universally popular, he was a superb athlete – unbeatable as a sprinter in his years at the School and a dynamic, charismatic footballer. Having completed Leaving, Peter left school after 1969 – and thus began his multi-directional life as social activist, community leader, musician, bicycle and motorbike fan, family man and patriarch, and Indigenous elder. An encounter with Jim Berg from the Aboriginal Legal Service led Peter to a field officer’s job with the service in Fitzroy in the early 1970s – and Peter’s life course was set. Mr Berg and then lawyer, The Honourable David Parsons (OM 1968), urged him to take an administrative position with the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Service in Alice Springs in 1975.
Peter Kanoa winning a sprint race at the 1966 House Sports (Archives image no. 000269) Right: Peter Kanoa holding the Indigenous flag, together with his wife, Linda, at a Land Rights March in 1976, the first of its kind in central Australia. Thank you to the Honourable David Parsons (OM 1968) and the Honourable Geoff Eames AM QC for their assistance with providing this image.
22 Melbourne Grammar School
For the young urban activist, it was a new experience, learning about his people’s “spiritual belonging to the land, not OWNING the land”, he told radio broadcaster, Jon Faine, in an ABC interview in 1993. He attended bush courts which were up to six hours flight from Alice Springs. “You felt you were in a different world,” he said. It was also a time of the growing land rights movement. Further jobs in Indigenous affairs came after his return to Melbourne. He was involved in setting up the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA) in the early 1980s, becoming program director/chief executive from 1987 to 1992.
