Lowitja O’Donoghue: An extraordinary legacy

Lowitja O’Donoghue’s warm, kind eyes were a window to her generous soul. She also had plenty of steel in her backbone, and the necessary intelligence, to stand up for her people when the occasion demanded. And it often did. Dr O’Donoghue, 91, died in Adelaide on Sunday with her immediate family by her side. To Indigenous people, as Noel Pearson said, Dr O’Donoghue was “our grand lady … who gave our people everything she had’’. Her life was marked by unstinting service and dedication to her people and country, a “leaders’ leader’’ who chaired the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in its best years. “There were two ATSICs, one under Lowitja and the other after,’’ Mr Pearson said. “It failed at the national level after Lowitja’s term as chair expired.’’

Dr O’Donoghue led from experience, after personally overcoming the kinds of unfairness and obstacles that, tragically, wore down too many of her people. Born in central Australia to an Irish father and an Indigenous mother in 1932, she was delivered as a two-year-old to the Colebrook Home for Half Caste Children, run by a mission society, in 1934 with two of her sisters. Their two oldest siblings – a boy and a girl – were already there. It would be 33 years before she was reunited with her mother.

At 18, ready to start her nursing training, she went to the office of the United Aborigines Mission in Adelaide to collect the bulk of wages she had earned as a domestic servant for nine months. It was 1950 and one pound a week was held in trust for her, in line with the policies of the era. She needed it to buy shoes, stockings and uniforms for her new job, but was told she could not have her money until she turned 21. Undeterred, and showing the tenacity that later characterised her public life, she bought what she could and washed her uniform after each shift until she could afford to buy more. She was the first Indigenous nurse trained at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and later a charge sister. By 1975 she was the Adelaide regional director of the federal department of Aboriginal affairs.

Dr O’Donoghue, as Anthony Albanese said, was “a figure of grace, moral clarity and extraordinary inner strength … one of the most remarkable leaders this country has ever known”. That leadership came to the fore, Paige Taylor writes, when Dr O’Donoghue led talks with Paul Keating after the 1992 Mabo High Court decision. The resulting legislation created land rights and new opportunities for traditional owners. Dr O’Donoghue’s legacy was recognised in Australia and internationally. She was Australian of the Year in 1984, awarded several honorary doctorates and invested as a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II in 1986. May her soaring soul rest in peace.