The last time I spoke to Noel Hazard was a couple of months ago at one of the weekly mass marches against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“Still marching, Comrade,” I said to him.
“Only just,” he replied, with a smile. Leaning on his walking stick, he reached for his wallet to pull out a $50 donation to the Socialist Alliance, of which he was a member until the end of his life.
Noel died on July 18 at the age of 88.
Noel was a battler for the socialist cause. A longtime photographer for Tribune, newspaper of the old Communist Party of Australia, he has left a rich trove of images of decades of progressive struggle in Australia at the New South Wales State Library.
Over the last few decades, Noel was a regular at many demonstrations and a supporter and subscriber to every socialist publication in the country. “The left needs to unite,” was his regular refrain.
Noel was born in remote Mount Isa in north Queensland, where his father was a miner.
It was a rough place to grow up in and, in his younger days, he took up boxing, first amateur and then professional.
After becoming Queensland and Australian featherweight champion, he was selected to compete for Australia in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. He was Mount Isa’s first Olympian, 19 years old, and the youngest in the Australian Olympic team.
Noel worked as a professional boxer in Britain in the 1950s and later in the United States. He also did a tour in the Soviet Union.
Later, he returned to live in Sydney where he worked as an electrician, having served an apprenticeship in Mount Isa Mines. Undoubtedly, he was teased more than once about Hazard being “a good name for an electrician”.
His political life took him into the heart of many of the great progressive struggles of the 1960s and 1970s.
Noel took part in the 1965 Freedom Ride against racism and helped with the setting up of the first Aboriginal Tent Embassy in 1972.
As the Museum of Democracy at Old Parliament House records: “The Tent Embassy began its public life on January 26, 1972. On that day, Michael Anderson, Billy Craigie, Bertie Williams and Tony Coorey left Redfern and drove to Ngunnawal Country (Canberra), where they planted a beach umbrella opposite Parliament House (now known as Old Parliament House).
“They erected a sign that said ‘Aboriginal Embassy’. With them on that day was their driver, Tribune photographer Noel Hazard, who captured the event in a series of photos.
“The term ‘embassy’ was used to bring attention to the fact Aboriginal people had never ceded sovereignty nor engaged in any treaty process with the Crown. As a collective, Aboriginal people were the only cultural group not represented with an embassy.”
Noel also took part in the Green Bans, led by Jack Mundey and the Builders Labourers Federation.
He was a stalwart of the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society and until he was taken to hospital with a final bout of illness, he was a regular participant in a weekly protest outside the US Consulate — against the illegal US blockade of Cuba.
Noel is a comrade who will be dearly missed right across the left.