O’Donoghue brought together a representative voice through ATSIC role

ATSIC chair Lowitja O'Donoghue in 1996.

It was a different time, before high levels of security were standard in all office buildings.

Almost every week, a man would take the lift up to the offices of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission at the MLC building in Canberra to stand in front of the desk of its chairwoman Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG. Then he would start singing operas.

O’Donoghue did not know him. As a former senior nurse, there was not much that shocked her. However, it was very noisy. ATSIC got some advice about how to make him leave.

“Police told us we literally had to read him the riot act,” said Mick Gooda, her former colleague. “Can you imagine? We did it.”

The opera pest turned out to be the least of O’Donoghue’s challenges at ATSIC, where she was the inaugural chair from 1990 to 1996. The national body’s mere existence was a red flag to some of the most unhinged minds. She was soon receiving death threats.

Despite all this, O’Donoghue oversaw a fruitful, stable period at ATSIC. She led the national response to the black deaths in custody royal commission. She led the negotiations over native title legislation. She pioneered a new concept of shared responsibility between the states and the commonwealth. Things went south some time after her term finished.

Former ATSIC member Mick Gooda.

O’Donoghue was a government appointment who brought together a representative voice. There has not been one like it since. “I really believe she was the strength behind ATSIC at the national level and she had that propriety,” Gooda said.

“If she had stayed around at ATSIC we wouldn’t have ended up where we ended up because she was such a great leader and that sense of morality was just embedded in everything she did. We have lost someone very important to this country.”

Ironically, it was O’Donoghue who made some of the most strident criticisms towards the end of ATSIC’s life. For example, she did not believe it should have a program delivery function. She also rather presciently said that the organisation’s final chairman, Geoff Clark, was imperilling any chance of a future voice. “He has to think about whether his actions had put the organisation into such disrepute it causes it to fold up. That is something he has to live with,“ she said. “I feel he has let himself down. He has let his people down and brought them to a situation where we find we may not have a national voice in the future.”