Lionel Rose Australian Boxing Legend

Lionel Rose the eldest of nine children and Australian Boxing Legend, died on 8 May 2011 aged 62 after an illness which lasted for several months.
Few Australian sportsmen captured the attention of the nation quite like Lionel Rose,  Lionel was a true legend of boxing, and a icon amongst the aboriginal community, and a hero to all Australians.

Lionel Rose grew up in hardship, learning to box from his father, Roy, a useful fighter on the tent-show circuit. According to the boxing historian Grantlee Kieza, Lionel Rose "sparred with rags on his hands in a ring made from fencing wire stretched between trees".

He came under the tutelage of Frank Oates, a Warragul trainer (whose daughter Jenny he later married). He won the Australian amateur flyweight title at age 15.


Lionel Rose began his professional boxing career, outpointing Mario Magriss over eight rounds. This fight was in Warragul, but the majority of Rose's fights were to be held in Melbourne. Along the way he was helped by Jack and Shirley Rennie, in whose Melbourne home he stayed, training every day in their backyard gym.

Lionel Rose challenged Fighting Harada for the world's bantamweight title (picture above) on 26 February 1968, in Tokyo. Rose made history by becoming the first Aboriginal to be a world champion boxer when he defeated Harada in a 15-round decision.. This win made Rose an instant national hero in Australia, and an icon among Aboriginals. A public reception at Melbourne Town Hall was witnessed by a crowd of more than 250,000. ( I dont think Anthony Mundine would get that kind of support, maybe 20 people at most)

On 2 July of that year, he returned to Tokyo to retain his title with a 15 round decision win over Takao Sakurai. 

On 6 December, he met Chucho Castillo at the Inglewood Forum in Inglewood, California. Rose beat Castillo by decision,( picture below) but the points verdict in favour of him infuriated many in the pro-Castillo crowd, and a riot began: 14 fans and fight referee Dick Young were hospitalised for injuries received.

Even Elvis Presley wanted to meet him, when Rose defended his title in California later that year, requesting to meet him.

"I was in awe of him, but he said he was in awe of me," Rose recounted of the meeting in an interview.

Lionel Rose compiled a record of 42 wins and 11 losses as a professional boxer, with 12 wins by knockout.


Lionel Rose was Australian of the Year in 1968, the first Aboriginal to be awarded the honour. The same year he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

In retirement, Lionel Rose became a successful businessman. He was able to manage his money and make good financial decisions, and he enjoyed the monetary benefits his career brought him. Rose was showcased in 2002 in the The Ring section 'Where are they now?'.


During his off time from boxing in the 1970s, Rose embarked on a successful singing career in Australia having hits with "I Thank You" ( Listen Here ) and "Please Remember Me" in 1970. The song "I Thank You" was a nationwide hit.

Rose remains one of only four Australian-born fighters to win a world title overseas.
Jeff Harding and Jimmy Carruthers also achieved the feat, while the latest came on the same day as Rose's death, with Daniel Geale defeating German champion Sebastian Sylvester for the IBF middleweight title.

A person like Lionel Rose, who becomes a hero and a legend in his sport is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

Indigenous Astronomy

Because the Australian Aboriginal culture is the oldest continuous culture in the world, it is possible that the Australian Aboriginal people may be the world's first astronomers.

One of the earliest records of indigenous astronomy was made by William Stanbridge, an Englishman who emigrated to Australia in 1841 and befriended the local Boorong people.

Some Aboriginal groups use the motions of celestial bodies for calendar purposes. Many attribute religious or mythological meanings to celestial bodies and phenomena. There is a diversity of astronomical traditions in Australia, each with its own particular expression of cosmology. However, there appear to be common themes and systems between the groups.

Duane Hamacher, a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sydney, found a bowl-shaped crater at Palm Valley, near Hermannsburg, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs, by searching for it on Google Earth - after being tipped off by Aboriginal dreaming stories.

"Indigenous Australians tell lots of stories about stars falling out of the sky with a noise like thunder - and one of the stories gave a location in the Northern Territory," the astronomer told the Northern Territory News.

"I searched for it on Google Earth, but when I really found something looking like a crater I couldn't believe it.
"I was very hesitant with excitement as I thought I would look like an idiot if it was just something simple - but it wasn't.
It was a crater."
When visiting the site with a team of geophysicists and astrophysicists, Mr Hamacher and his team found evidence of Palm Valley being an ancient meteorite crater.

"We found shocked quartz, which is only produced by a substantial impact and its presence in the rock samples and the morphology of the structure are the major indicators that Palm Valley is a crater."
Mr Hamacher said the discovery of a connection between dreamtime stories and reality was an exciting one.

"Lots of Aboriginal dreamtime stories are associated with craters, meteorites and cosmic impacts and although some craters are millions of years old and people would not have been able to witness the impact, it seems as if traditional dreaming stories know about the crater's origin."

One of the stories - the one that local Arrernte people tell about a star that fell into a waterhole called Puka in the valley, where Kulaia, the serpent, lived - had led to the discovery of the ancient crater, which the team proposed to name Puka, but there were "many, many more", Mr Hamacher said.

"We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land - we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet."

Artist: Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi

Milky Way Dreaming tells the mythological story of seven sisters, the stars of the constellation Taurus (Pleiades), being chased across the sky by a Jakamarra man

represented by the morning star in Orion’s Belt. He tries to catch them but the seven sisters continually elude him.

Stars and family relationships


Knowledge of the constellations or star formations also reflect the patterns for social relationships in some areas. Arrernte and Luritja 'skin groupings', which determine people's relationships to one another, are based on the constellations of the Southern Cross. The stars represent a man and a woman ideally suited in marriage, with their parents, children and other relations all marked out in the night sky.



For Warlpiri people, the ancestors broke the Milky Way (called Yiwarra) into individual stars that we see today. Some fragments fell to earth, creating sacred places. This story is re-told in paintings, song and dance as well as re-enacted in contemporary initiation ceremonies, where men wear white down on their bodies to represent the stars (Dianne Johnson, Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia).



Thus, connections are made on a daily basis between ancestors, people, stars and land. The telling of the Dreaming stories reinforces knowledge about the constellations, social behaviour, land formations and sacred places.