Roxley Foley: The Keeper of the Flame

– Gus McCubbing interviews Roxley Foley

Due to the work of Gary Foley, the Foley name is synonymous throughout Australia with Indigenous rights activism. However, at a touch over thirty years of age, Roxley Foley, the son of Gary Foley, was the official custodian of the Tent Embassy for over a year and is fast carving out a name for himself within the grassroots movement. Over lunch at the ANU Food Co-Op, Roxley shared with me his family’s background in activism and how this had a profound impact upon his worldview from an early age, as well as his own experiences in activism.

Early Exposure

Growing up around the time of Bicentennial protests in the late 1980s, Roxley says that his early exposure to grassroots activism instilled in him an appreciation for an element of insouciance within activism.

“Before I got to the age of kindergarten and primary school, I was just one of those activist babies, travelling all around the country, running up and down police lines on scooters.”

He believes this element of activism has dried up over time.

“It seems be much more an exercise of venting frustration, and the acceptable theatre of protest…there was a lot more creativity and sort of doing things in a way they weren’t expecting back then.”

His upbringing also provided him with a sense of self-esteem and independence which has never been lost.

“…Unlike a lot of my cousins and brothers and sisters, because I grew up with my Mum and Dad away for a lot of shit going on, I was brought up with a very strong sense of self. I was never given this image that there was anything negative to take as a connotation for being Aboriginal.”

Roxley’s long-held pride can be seen in one particularly nasty encounter with the man responsible for expelling him from school.

“I got kicked out of high school when I was about fourteen, and to quote my year level coordinator who kicked me out, ‘Your people are not academically inclined, and my school’s an academically inclined school, and I don’t want no bloody Abo’s [sic] in my school’.”

Roxley can look back and laugh at the incident, as at the time he simply responded, “My grandfather was a senior PhD chemistry lecturer and my father’s one of the most respected historians in the country, what’s your family’s academic history?”

So, despite a prickly high school experience, Roxley, under the care of his mother, enjoyed great exposure to activism during his early years. Throughout his youth, Roxley says he often worked as a figure of support for both his parents in their endeavours, as well as his maternal grandfather Dr. Dennis Matthews, who was both a chemistry professor at Flinders University and a leading anti-nuclear advocate involved in the shutting down of the Jabiluka uranium mine.

“So I have the upbringing of both Indigenous rights and environmentalism,” he says. “I think the focus on grassroots activism was always very strong, especially in both sides of those movements.”

“…In Indigenous rights one of the main things we were fighting was the ‘Aboriginal Industry’—this industry enveloped in paternalism, and this move towards self-determination, which of course has to be rooted in the grassroots direction of the community.”