Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's with a heavy heart that I rise to also make a contribution on this condolence motion marking the passing of an extraordinary woman, Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue. I add my voice to the outpouring of grief and the beautiful tributes to Dr Lowitja O'Donoghue AC, CBE, DSG, a trailblazing Aboriginal leader, who died on Kaurna country surrounded by her loved ones not so long ago. I think all of those distinguished letters at the end of Dr O'Donoghue's title give you some insight not just into how profoundly influential she was in First Nations communities in Australia but into how indebted Australia—and, indeed she had an impact on an international scale as well—is to her leadership. Her passing will be felt right across Australia.

Lowitja lived an extraordinary life. I spoke recently about her courage, her leadership and her determination when I rose in this House to speak on the national apology to the stolen generations on an important anniversary we just had. Dr O'Donoghue was born near Indulkana in the far north of South Australia in 1932. Lowitja's mother, Lily, was a Yankunytjatjara woman and her father, Tom O'Donoghue, was first-generation Irish Australian. The Coniston massacre, which was the last documented massacre of First Nations people in Australia, had occurred in the Northern Territory just a few years earlier. That's the historical context of her life.

At age two, she was taken from her mother and placed in a mission home in South Australia, like so many other First Nations people of her time. Her name was Anglicised. She was prohibited from speaking her own language and, along with her name and language, her family and identity were stolen from her. The mission—and this was the United Aborigines Mission, an order that I'm very familiar with through my own work in Fitzroy Crossing many years ago, as it was the UAM that also missionised and worked in the Kimberley region—was, for Lowitja, a very harsh experience. It was a very harsh disciplinary regime, without love and with frequent incidents of abuse, and I don't think we should ever sugarcoat that or gloss over that. She witnessed so many incidents of abuse that, of course, many, many decades later we would finally call to account through the royal commission into child sexual abuse in institutions in Australia. Many of these institutions were faith based religious organisations, the very institutions that people were asked to trust. That trust was profoundly betrayed. We know that now through the many volumes that the royal commission has left. So it was a pretty traumatic life for her and, of course, for her family and all of those kinship networks that are impacted when kids are ripped and forcibly removed from families. She was, like so many, without a birth certificate. The white missionaries gave her the birthdate of 1 August. Of course, we know that as the horse's birthday in Australia. I know, from my time as a young anthropologist working through many of the historical records that were held by the Aboriginal protection agencies across Australia, that literally thousands of Aboriginal kids were given this birthdate of 1 August, because they didn't have a birth certificate and that was as far as our imagination was able to stretch in those days, it would seem. It's a pretty heartbreaking thing for a lot of Aboriginal people to find out later on in life—why their birthday was 1 August. So even her birthday was stolen from her.

At age 16, Lowitja was sent to Victor Harbor as a servant for a very large family, a job which she did for two years until she fought ferociously to become a nurse. When the matron at the Royal Adelaide Hospital refused her because she was Aboriginal, she took her battle to the state Premier and anyone else in government who would listen to her case. Gosh, how thankful are we today for her determination and tenacity. She went on to become the first Aboriginal nurse in Australia.

She said in 1994:

… I'd resolved that one of the fights was to actually open the door for Aboriginal women to take up the nursing profession, and also for those young men to get into apprenticeships.

These were two really stark barriers and examples of discrimination that she had experienced and seen, and she was determined to rip those barriers away. That was, for her, the impetus for a lifelong dedication to activism and not just calling out discrimination but doing the really hard work of reform. For that, we are deeply indebted to Lowitja O'Donoghue.

When she left us, she had a very long list of amazing achievements and outstanding accomplishments, and I'm going to go through just some of those. She was Australian of the Year in 1984, in recognition of her work and her personal contribution to bridging the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. She was named a national living treasure in 1998 and appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia—that's the AC component of her title—the following year. She was also made an honorary fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, in 1998, and the Royal College of Nursing, Australia. That was, I'm sure, a really proud moment for a woman who had originally been refused entry. She holds multiple honorary doctorates and fellowships, and was patron of the Lowitja Institute, which of course will continue to do extraordinary work to ensure her legacy continues. In 1990, she became the founding chairperson of ATSIC, which was an extremely memorable moment. She had, indeed, been very instrumental in the establishment of ATSIC and the negotiations around that and then did our nation the great service of becoming the inaugural chairperson of ATSIC. Noel Pearson reflected on those times and wrote:

These were ATSIC's best years. They were years of great coherence in indigenous affairs …

I think he is absolutely spot on there.

She had an extraordinary capacity to bring people together both within and across First Nations communities in Australia, with the vastly different experiences of colonisation that occur in different states and territories. There were lots of common aims and objectives, of course, but she was able to navigate all of those meaningful differences that do exist, and she was, likewise, able to traverse all of those complex pathways through government, bureaucracy and the broader national population and speak to them with great meaning and gravitas. When Lowitja O'Donoghue spoke, people listened. Noel Pearson also reflected:

Without Lowitja's Atsic we would never have defended Eddie Mabo's great legacy and negotiated the Native Title Act and Indigenous Land Fund.

They are two profoundly important legacies that she has left.

Let's not forget, also, the critical role that she played in the National Apology to the Stolen Generations. One of the comments on her passing from the former prime minister Kevin Rudd was that she had, obviously, been knocking on doors and trying to advise about the importance of having a national apology to the stolen generations, but she went straight to Kevin Rudd upon his election and said it's time: 'This is your moment. This is your time to do this now.' That was one of the nation's most significant truth-telling events. She was able, as she always did, to transcend her own experiences through life—all of those hardships and all of her own and her family's pain and grief. She rose above all of that, reached out and could see the significance of an apology to this nation. It was something that she saw as embracing our opportunity to face squarely a really traumatic part of our nation's history. But the only way that we could all heal and move forward was to confront that history face on and have the apology.

There was lots of resistance at the time and lots of people who thought that this was an opening of the door to all sorts of litigation and all kinds of negative impacts—but she was able to prosecute—and I think history shows, very successfully, that that was indeed the wrong way to look at this and that this was a moment for our history to engage in some serious truth-telling. That is confronting and that is uncomfortable sometimes, but you come through that with a renewed sense of hope and possibility for just relationships going forward.

Sadly, Lowitja didn't get to see a national voice to parliament or her people formally recognised in the Constitution, which I know she would have liked to have seen established, but I suspect that, if she were with us now, she would be advising us all. It was not in her nature to just give up on fighting for justice, and it might take different forms and take different directions. We are yet to see what will happen for us as a nation there, how we will grapple with the ongoing nature of our relationship with First Nations people and what that just relationship is going to look like going forward.

Lowitja O'Donoghue didn't get to be reunited with her mother until she was more than 30 years of age, following a trip to Coober Pedy with South Australia's then Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Her biographer, Stuart Rintoul, describes how, not long after she arrived in Coober Pedy, Lowitja found a group of people sitting outside a store looking at her and saying, 'That's Lily's daughter.' From them, she learnt that her birth name was Lowitja and that her mother was a heartbroken woman living in poverty in Oodnadatta. In the weeks that followed, Lily waited for her daughter in the outback town of Oodnadatta, staring off into the desert. That reunion was not easy. There was tension. There was a language barrier: they couldn't talk to each other. I remember Lowitja explaining in one of her reconciliation lectures, if I'm not mistaken, that the only language she had was to look into her mother's eyes, and what she saw was a woman broken by grief. That was a very hard thing for both of them to reconcile. But Rintoul, Lowitja's biographer, writes that Lowitja would later talk of that reunion as a lesson in the limitlessness of hope and the strength of patience. Wow. I hope that I would have capacity to be that generous in my self-reflection had I been walking in the shoes of either Lowitja O'Donoghue or her mother, Lily, at that time.

When Rintoul asked Lowitja why she'd lived the life she had, she simply replied, 'Because I love my people.' Thank you, Lowitja, for your love, your humour, your strength, your determination, your perseverance and that limitless hope and strength of patience that you lived with every day. Thank you for teaching so many others to follow in your footsteps and for giving your country everything you had. Your legacy is immense. We are forever in your debt, and our hearts are at half mast today, but it is your time to rest now. You've done everything you can. The rest is for those of us who follow—to ensure that your legacy continues to grow and lives on. Vale, Lowitja O'Donoghue.

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