Chicka Dixon

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Charles Chicka Dixon (b. 1928) is an Australian Aboriginal activist and leader.

He was active in campaigns around the 1967 referendum and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, dedicating his life to the fight for basic human rights and justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In 1970 Chicka was instrumental in establishing Australia's first Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern; he co-founded the Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972. He was the first Aboriginal person to be appointed as a Councillor on the Australia Council and is a former Chairman of the Council's Aboriginal Arts Board. In 1983 Chicka was named the first Aboriginal of the Year.

Chicka attended his first political meeting on his 18th birthday in 1946. Inspired by Jack Patten, an organiser of the 1938 Day of Mourning and the Aborigines Progressive Association, he has been politically active ever since. During the 1960s he was spokesperson for the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

In 1972 he travelled to China to highlight the Aboriginal struggle in an attempt to shame the Australian Government into action. QANTAS wouldn't fly the group, so Chicka found an airline that would.

In 2006 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters for his eminent service to the community by the University of New South Wales.

In his seventies now, he is dealing with asbestos poisoning, a legacy from his working days on the Sydney docks as a wharfie.

On November 5, 2007, reports appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane Times claiming Chicka Dixon had obtained 150 pages of his ASIO File. The files are, Mr Dixon says, wildly inaccurate. Chicka Dixon joins activists Charles Perkins, Faith Bandler, Melbourne academic Gary Foley, author Michael Hyde and ABC's Phillip Adams in being among those who have obtained their ASIO files and openly spoken about their files in mainstream media. Part of Chicka's story can be read in the Brisbane Times article and listened to in an SMH multimedia clip, which shows images of the files themselves.

Others known to have obtained parts of their security assessments from ASIO include US peace activist Scott Parkin and Iraqi asylum seekers Mohammed Sagar and Muhammad Faisal.