“William Cooper’s protest ... was an extraordinary act of courage. It was an act of empathy,of moral clarity,and of profound humanity. It reminds us that we cannot stand silent in the face of injustice.”

Cooper’s story was first brought to the attention of the Melbourne Holocaust Museum by Foley and now forms part of permanent Holocaust exhibits in Melbourne,Sydney and Jerusalem.

McDonogh says that although his great,great-grandfather is rightly remembered for intervening on behalf of European Jews,he saw in their treatment by the Nazis echos of how Aboriginal people were still treated in Australia.

“He was watching his people being exterminated,” he said. “That was the correlation with what the Nazis were trying to do to the Jewish people.”

Cooper died before the establishment of Israel and the mass displacement of Arab Palestinians during the war in 1948. What would Cooper make of today’s conflict in the Middle East?

McDonogh offers this perspective:“I think he would still be standing up for all kinds of human rights. But if one side refuses to acknowledge the other side’s existence,what are they supposed to do? If you are on the side of human rights,how can you pick a side?”

There is dispute about some details of Cooper’s 1938 protest,which was sparsely documented in contemporaneous written records.

There is no surviving copy of the text he is said to have left with the German consulate. Monash historian Bain Attwood,a Cooper biographer,doubts whether he would have walked to Footscray from the city,given his advanced years and ill health at the time. He argues that elements of the story have morphed from history into myth.

Abe Schwarz,an interfaith and social justice campaigner who has spent 20 years raising public awareness of Cooper’s protest,said the accepted account was largely based on the oral testimony of witnesses to the event.

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