Richard Phillips (Dick Blair)
Portrait of Richard Phillips by Mervyn Bishop, exhibited in the Sydney Elders exhibition.
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Paster Richard Phillips (known as Dick Blair) is an Aboriginal man from the Tweed Coast region of NSW. He was the Australian Middleweight Champion in 1972 and also played for the All Blacks Football team. Richard was one of the first coordinators for Aboriginal Housing and helped establish ‘The Block’ based at Redfern, an important community for Aboriginal people to live and socialise in inner Sydney.
Richard has been a Pastor with the local Pentecostal Church in Redfern, where the organisation Koori Lighthouse Youth he founded with his late wife Evonne Phillips had operated. Together with Evonne, he has raised nine of his own children and fostered many others.
He featured in the documentary “The Heart of the Fight" by directors Byron Arellano and Mark Taylor. Taylor has described Richard as “a fighter, both inside and outside the ring”.
© Australian Museum
