One morning in December 1938, Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper led a group of Australian First Nations activists, the Australian Aborigines’ League, on a two-hour march from Footscray to the German consulate on Collins Street. The wave of violence known as Kristallnacht had swept across Nazi Germany a month earlier and Cooper’s group planned to register their “strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people”. “Our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another people,” their resolution read. “The Nazi government has a consulate here on our land. Let us...