While it may not be possible to claim that Aboriginal people in Australia shared definitions of blackness with African, African American and/or Caribbean groups, there were transnational alliances based on the fight for civil rights and self-determination. In the early twentieth century, Aboriginal activists such as Fred Maynard (2005), inspired by the Black Consciousness movements in the United States of America and the Caribbean, particularly Garveyism, formed the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association to fight racist policies. In Australia, Aboriginal people became citizens after the 1967 referendum, which gave rise to Black Power activism, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, and the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawn of Australia's Parliament House in Canberra (Goodall, 1996). This protest was the most effective political action in the history of Aboriginal activism and brought Aboriginal people's struggle to the world's attention. According to Gary Foley (2015b), one of the Black Power activists, Black Power in the United States of America provided a strategy for how to organize and effect change. In 1971 the Australian branch of the Black Panthers was formed, influenced by the American Black Panther Party (BPP), which was teaching black people 'to stand up and assert their rights' (Lothian, 2007, p. 21). Like their predecessors in early Aboriginal activist circles, the Black Power activists were influenced by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis (ibid., p. 23). Later, the fight for Indigenous land rights in countries such as New Zealand and in North America was perhaps a more important transnational alliance for the Aboriginal people of Australia.  
One example of the fight for self-determination is the use of the term 'blak', which has the same meaning as black but a deliberate difference in spelling. The term was used by the artist Destiny Deacon in 1991 in an exhibition called 'Blak lik mi' (www.blackhistorymonth.com). The word black, when referring