Robert William "Bob" Bellear (17 June 1944 – 15 March 2005) was an Australian social activist, lawyer and judge who was the first Aboriginal Australian judge. He served as a judge of the District Court of New South Wales from 1996 until his death in 2005. He was the brother of Sol Bellear. Early life Bellear was born in the far north-east of New South Wales, and grew up near the town of Mullumbimby. His grandfather was a Ni-Vanuatu man who was blackbirded to Australia to work on a sugar plantation, and his grandmother was an Aboriginal Australian woman from Minjerribah (also known as Stradbroke Island) in Queensland. His other grandfather had been blackbirded from the Solomon Islands. Bellear was one of nine children. Rights advocate Sol Bellear was his brother. He left school early, but could not get a job, a fact which Bellear often attributed to racism. Instead, he joined the Royal Australian Navy, where he was trained in mechanical engineering and clearance diving. He was a successful rugby union player for the Navy's representative side. He was the first Indigenous person to achieve the rank of petty officer. Bellear left the Navy in 1968, with several qualifications, including masonry and fitting and turning. He was then able to easily find a job. For some time Bellear lived in Redfern with his wife Kaye Williams, whom he had met while in the Navy. The suburb had a substantial Aboriginal population at the time. Bellear co-founded the Aboriginal Housing Company there in 1972 along with his wife Kaye and others, and throughout the 1970s was a director of both the Aboriginal Medical Service and the Aboriginal Legal Service. Bellear was the leader of a campaign to prevent landlords in Redfern from evicting Aboriginal tenants, and his work led to the Whitlam government transferring ownership of The Block to the Aboriginal Housing Corporation. Legal education and career Bellear would regularly see the patterns of intimidation and harassment which the New South Wales Police practised against the Aboriginal community in Redfern. In 1972, Bellear decided that he would study law. He completed his Higher School Certificate studies at Sydney Technical College, and entered a law course at the University of New South Wales. He became only the second Indigenous person to graduate from that university (after Pat O'Shane) when he graduated in 1978. He was admitted to the New South Wales