Bellear was born in the far north-east of
New South Wales, and grew up near the town of
Mullumbimby and he was a
Bundjalung man. 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 and, Aboriginal 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. 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==