Lowitja O’Donoghue

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.

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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.

“I am sometimes identified as one of the ‘success stories’ of the policies of removal of Aboriginal children. But for much of my childhood I was deeply unhappy. I feel I had been deprived of love and the ability to love in return. Like Lily, my mother, I felt totally powerless. And I think this is where the seeds of my commitment to human rights and social justice were sown.” – Lowitja O’Donogue

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... At the end of November 1996, exhausted, in ill-health and suffering a heart condition, Lowitja issues a parting plea as she prepares to leave ATSIC after six tumultuous years. She calls on the federal government to take action on several shelved social justice reports, by ATSIC, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, that might allow Aboriginal people to ‘take their place in the community as equal partners’. On 25 November, launching a report on black deaths in custody, 1989–1996, she laments that five years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, there are more, not fewer deaths. ‘Five years on, governments continue to regard indigenous lives as having less value—or less relevance—than others,’ she says. On 27 November, she attacks the government’s proposed changes to the native title laws. She says the number and complexity of its proposed changes is staggering— more than two hundred pages of amendments and explanatory documents—and Aboriginal people have been ‘excluded from the negotiating table’. She laments that in Indigenous affairs, there is ‘a passing of the buck almost always to the victim’. At the beginning of December, she retires as head of ATSIC and is replaced by Gatjil Djerrkura, born at Yirrkala of the Yolŋu Wangurri and founding chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commercial Development Corporation. Tributes flow. Labor leader Kim Beazley calls her a great Australian. He says Australians owe her a vote of thanks for her contribution to reconciliation, her selflessness, her dignity and astute judgement. In the parliament, Labor MP Daryl Melham says she guided ATSIC through a tortuous inception and a harrowing change of government. ‘It is not easy to hold the position that she has held,’ he tells the House of Representatives. ‘If you think it is hard politics in this chamber in mainstream Australia, there are no tougher politics than indigenous politics in this country . . . Lois O’Donoghue is someone special. She enriches this country. She enriches all of us. She enriches her people. She is not a bitter person. She has been subjected to some terrible things over the years—and yet she carries herself with distinction and without malice, without ill-feeling.’ Leigh Clifford, managing director of mining company CRA, writes to her: ‘Your lifetime of work for your people and particularly the work for ATSIC has been marked by your courage and dignity. You have left a legacy that will endure.’ In March the previous year, CRA, after a history of hostile indifference to Aboriginal interests, dramatically changed tack with chief executive Leon Davis declaring the company was satisfied with the central tenet of the Native Title Act, which had laid the basis for cooperation and partnership with Aboriginal people.18 In August 1996, CRA executive Paul Wand said p. 286 the company regretted its chequered history in the Kimberley, Pilbara and Cape York. On 6 December, within the walls of the ATSIC tower, Lowitja makes her farewell speech. She says the months that have passed since the election of the Howard government have been ‘a nightmare’, but that time is a good healer. She describes the government as mean-spirited. ‘I have run the race, I have fought the fight, I have kept the faith and I have finished the course—albeit the worse for wear,’ she says. Later, she will say she leaves Canberra feeling ‘beaten to a pulp by a new government seemingly hell-bent on removing every advance we had made for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’. On 9 December, she is admitted to hospital with bronchitis. Her visitors include John Herron. The former surgeon and the former nurse argue about her diagnosis. In an editorial, the Sydney Morning Herald says that she has guided ATSIC with patience and wisdom: ‘Ms O’Donoghue’s life is an inspiration to many Australians—not only to Aboriginal Australians—for having overcome the disadvantages of her forcible removal from her mother at an early age and blatant discrimination against her in her attempts to train as a nurse. She has served her people, and her nation, well.’ In Adelaide, her hometown newspaper, The Advertiser, editorialises that she has led her people in extraordinary times, which have included the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and the High Court’s Mabo decision. ‘Through it all she has behaved with dignity and compassion,’ it says. ‘Her voice of reason in that role will be missed.’

On 18 December, John Howard writes, thanking her for her service:

Dear Miss O’Donoghue, On behalf of the Government,

I would like to thank you for the contribution you have made in your position as Chairman of ATSIC in representing and furthering the position of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia.

There were occasions when you had cause to disagree with the government of day [sic], but no one could ever doubt your deep commitment to your people, and in particular to improvements in those areas where indigenous Australians sadly continue to suffer profound disadvantage.

I wish you well for the future Lowitja leaves Canberra, but not the stage. For the next sixteen years—until she is eighty and reluctantly agrees to send the dusty boxes containing the record of her life to libraries and museums, ‘the little stock-pile of memories I don’t want to let go of’—she continues to speak out as a leader of her people, an Aboriginal matriarch. And she makes a decision. She will not be called Lois for much longer. Soon, it will only be Lowitja.

Edited extracts from Lowitja The authorised biography of Lowitja O’Donoghue by Stuart Rintoul, Published by Allen & Unwin.