Lowitja O’Donoghue
Lowitja O’Donoghue is a truly great Australian. She is arguably our nation’s most recognised Indigenous woman. A powerful and unrelenting advocate for her people, an inspiration for many, a former Australian of the Year, she sat opposite Prime Minister Paul Keating in the first negotiations between an Australian government and Aboriginal people and changed the course of the nation.
But when Lowitja was born in 1932 to an Aboriginal mother and a white father in the harsh and uncompromising landscape of Central Australia the expectations for her life could not have been more different. At the age of two, she was handed over to the missionaries of the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children and cut off completely from her people and her culture. She would not see her mother again for another thirty years and would have no memory of her father. In 2001 a bitter controversy arose over whether Lowitja was ‘stolen’ as a child. In search of a past she did not remember, Lowitja went back to Central Australia accompanied by journalist Stuart Rintoul. This ground-breaking and long-awaited biography completes that journey into Lowitja’s life and the challenging history of her times. It is a remarkable work about an extraordinary woman.
XXXIX Bonython Hall, Adelaide. Noel Pearson has delivered the Lowitja O’Donoghue Oration, in which he has called for constitutional reforms and described Lowitja as the greatest Aboriginal leader of the modern era. ‘For she gave her all in the service of our people the continent over,’ he said. ‘In the twilight of a life spent in long, selfless service, I know I speak for all of us whose gratitude flows brimming from our hearts, in telling her we love and honour her so.’ Lowitja walks slowly to the stage, old age upon her, and the night ends with the singing of an old song, ‘We Shall Overcome’. A gospel song that became a protest song, a protest song that became an anthem of the civil rights movement: We shall overcome We shall overcome We shall overcome, some day Oh, deep in my heart I do believe We shall overcome, some day Black and white together Black and white together Black and white together, some day Oh, deep in my heart I do believe We shall overcome, some day. The next day, in morning sunshine, she sits talking, flicking through old photographs And there she is—a little girl dressed in secondhand clothes, full of fight and character. And when she’s done, I ask her why she lived the life she lived.‘Because I loved my people,’ she says.
