Robert Joel (Joe) Cooper

Robert Joel Cooper (29 February 1860 – 7 August 1936), better known as Joe Cooper, was an Australian buffalo hunter in the Northern Territory who spent much of his life on Melville Island (Yermalner).

He was also known as 'Jokupper', ‘white Rajah of Melville Island' and 'The king of Melville Island.

Early life Joe Cooper was born in 1860 at Fairview, a property near Riverton in South Australia, he was the son of George and Harriet Cooper. Robinson left soon after, leaving Cooper in charge as manager. Cooper, finding thousands of buffalo there to shoot, established a camp there in 1895. Due to the Tiwi resistatnce, Robinson was forced to withdraw Cooper and his team by the end of 1896.

Armed invasion of Melville Island Cooper returned to the Coburg Peninsula with four Tiwi people that he had kidnapped while exiting the islands. Over the following years, he learned the Tiwi language from them and organised a plan to re-enter Melville Island. Despite this his listed cause of death was syphilis and this is supported by the obituaries published at the time of his death stating that he died suddenly of an illness.

In 1910 he befriended Francis Xavier Gsell, who established a mission on the nearby Bathurst Island (Nguyu). He also befriended the Commonwealth Administrator of the Northern Territory John Anderson Gilruth and biologist and anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer. Spencer stayed with Cooper in 1911 and 1912 while studying the Tiwi people; the results of this research are published in Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928). After Spencer's 1911 visit he described Cooper as:

It is perhaps based on these friendships that Cooper was made an honorary sub-protector of Aborigines in 1911 and the authorities began sending Aboriginal people from other parts of the Northern Territory who were addicted to alcohol or opium to Yermalner.

Cooper also left Yermalner and became associated with several pastoral leases in the Top End and in 1921 he was trepanging in Trepang Bay.

Family Cooper was in a relationship an Iwaidja woman, named Alice, who, although not legally married, was to all intents and purposes his wife and was treated as such. They had three children together; two daughters, Josephine and Ethel, and a son named Reuben. Josephine died at the age of 14 and Ethel married a part-Aboriginal man named William McLennan. Ethel and William had five children together with Ethel dying in childbirth in 1937. Reuben, was educated in Adelaide, but was rejected from colonial society as a "half-caste" when he returned to Darwin. He then joined his father as a buffalo shooter and timber miller on the Cobourg Peninsula. Reuben died in 1942.

Alice also had a son from an earlier relationship named Ted and he later worked for Joe Cooper.

Cooper is the great-grandfather of footballer Reuben Cooper Jnr.

The descendants of Joe Cooper and his Aboriginal wife, Alice, are now referred to as the Murran clan of the Iwaidja-Arrarrkbi people.