Lowitja O'Donoghue

• Born: 1932
• Birthplace: Indulkana, Australia
• Also known as:Lois O'Donoghue

Lowitja O'Donoghue is a pioneer in the struggle of Aboriginal Australians to redress injustices perpetrated against them by colonial settlers and their descendants in Australia. O'Donoghue's hard-fought struggle to win the right to train as South Australia's first non-White nurse provided the impetus for her political activism. O'Donoghue's political accomplishments as an administrator for Aboriginal affairs have garnered international admiration. When Australia's government honored O'Donoghue in 1998 as a Living National Treasure, it did so in recognition of her tireless efforts to bridge the cultural gap between Australia's Indigenous inhabitants and Australian society at large.

Representative of the "Stolen Generations"

Lowitja O'Donoghue was born in the summer of 1932 in Granite Downs (known to the Indigenous inhabitants as Indulkana), located on lands traditionally occupied by the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara peoples, in the North-West Aboriginal Reserve in South Australia. Her precise birth date remains unknown, as an official birth certificate was never issued.

O'Donoghue never knew her father, Tom O'Donoghue, an Irish Catholic immigrant, who had taken a job as a station (ranch) manager at Granite Downs. O'Donoghue's mother was an Anangu woman named Lily Woodford. O'Donoghue was the youngest of five children born to the couple, which also included three other daughters, Eileen, Amy, and Violet. Tom O'Donoghue led a double life, with a White wife and family in Adelaide, who remained unaware of his second family in Granite Downs.

When O'Donoghue was two years old, she was taken from her mother's care by members of the United Aborigines Mission (UAM). These missionaries had come to Indulkana for the purpose of attempting to convert the Anangu to Christianity. They had already taken away, years earlier, O'Donoghue's two older siblings, also children of Tom O'Donoghue, from their mother. The missionaries gave O'Donoghue the Christian name Lois. Many years later, O'Donoghue changed her name back to Lowitja.

O'Donoghue's removal from her family was not unusual in a time and place when missionaries regularly persuaded Aboriginal parents to give up their so-called half-caste children. The first separations of Aboriginal children from their parents had taken place during the early days of Australia's settlement by European outsiders, who exploited the children as a source of cheap labor. In 1869, the passage of the Australian Aborigines Protection Act created reservations to which many Indigenous people were relocated. Residents were under the authority of non-Indigenous government-appointed protectors, whose legal guardianship over children living on the reservation facilitated the missionaries' removal policies.

The missionaries acted in the belief that their removal of Aboriginal children served the children's best interests, and the practice was carried out with the complicity of the Australian government and police. By the early twentieth century, the full-blooded Aboriginal population was waning, while the population of people of mixed White and Indigenous blood was on the rise. Government officials saw the removals as furthering a long-term goal of assimilating mixed-blood people into white Australian society.

In later years, church officials publicly acknowledged the injustices they had done to Aboriginal families, the dispossessed children of whom came to be known as members of the "Stolen Generations."

Life at Colebrook

In 1934, O'Donoghue was taken to the Colebrook Home for Half-Caste Children, an institution located initially in the desert settlement of Oodnadatta. In 1927, five years before O'Donoghue's arrival at Colebrook, the women who ran the institution relocated it to the railway town of Quorn, in the Flinders Range, nearly 700 kilometers (435 miles) south of Oodnadatta. Their aim was to maximize the distance between the children in their charge and the children's relatives. The missionaries believed in severing all linguistic and cultural roots before the mixed-ancestry children turned five in order to maximize the ease of assimilation.

At Colebrook, O'Donoghue joined children from various Aboriginal groups such as the Aranda, Arabana, Antakarinja, and Pitjantjatjara peoples. There, she endured a strict and spartan upbringing at the hands of the two women who managed the institution, Miss Rutter, who was English, and Ruby May Hyde, who was Australian. Their mission was to prepare the children for life as good Christian citizens. O'Donoghue and her fellow Colebrook residents attended the Quorn public school until the age of sixteen. At that point, the young men were expected to find jobs as stockmen tending sheep and cattle on the local stations, and the young women to work as domestic servants.

A sixteen-year-old O'Donoghue got her first job in the coastal town of Victor Harbour, where she looked after a family that included six young children. She remained with the family for two years. During that time, she befriended, at church, the matron of the South Coast District Hospital and thus managed to place her name on a waiting list of girls aspiring to train as nurses.

O'Donoghue ultimately wanted to obtain her certificate in nursing from the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the only major teaching hospital in the area at that time. She knew that the hospital did not accept Aboriginal trainees, but she was also unafraid to defy convention.

O'Donoghue had already resisted pressures to relinquish her Aboriginal identity. She had refused to sign a document that would have declared her "exempt," or, from an official standpoint, White—even though doing so meant giving up many basic rights enjoyed exclusively by White Australians. She was determined to find another way to fulfill her goal.

Breaking the Race Barrier

O'Donoghue successfully completed two years of nursing training at the South Coast District Hospital. To graduate with a nursing certificate, however, she needed to transfer to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and complete an additional two years of training. When the matron at the Royal Adelaide Hospital refused to interview O'Donoghue, O'Donoghue convinced the matron at the South Coast District Hospital to allow her to stay there for another year.

During that time, O'Donoghue spent her free days traveling to Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, where she pressed her case with every politician willing to meet with her. There, she also became active in the newly formed Aborigines' Advancement League, which consisted primarily of union and church officials, including Dr. Charles Duguid, but included a few actual Aboriginal members, some of whom were former Colebrook residents. O'Donoghue dedicated herself to the cause of making the nursing profession accessible to young Aboriginal women.

When her extension year at the South Coast District Hospital ended, O'Donoghue moved to Adelaide, where she worked as a private nurse. She also poured her energy into Aboriginal rights activism. She helped organize a large rally of the League in the Adelaide Town Hall that generated significant attention to the injustices faced by Aboriginal people in Australian society.

In 1954, shortly after the rally, the matron at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, who had repeatedly rebuffed O'Donoghue's earlier attempts to train at the hospital, invited her to start her training. Unlike White transfer students from country hospitals, however, O'Donoghue did not receive credit for the years she had already completed and was forced to start her training from the beginning.

Despite the unfair treatment, she resolved to excel in every way possible at the hospital, and she came to be accepted by the patients and other nurses. O'Donoghue's success opened the doorway to other Aboriginal nurses in country hospitals, who were subsequently permitted to transfer automatically to the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Family Reunion

O'Donoghue remained on the nursing staff of the Royal Adelaide Hospital until 1961. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, she agreed to travel to Assam, India, with the Australian Baptist Mission as a relief nurse. The year she spent in India played a formative role in shaping O'Donoghue's perspective on postcolonial indigenous cultures in general and on her Aboriginal identity in particular.

Witnessing firsthand the struggles of the Santhali people in Assam made O'Donoghue all the more determined to address the injustices faced by her own Aboriginal people. Upon returning to Australia, O'Donoghue briefly returned to her old job at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. But she had already decided on a future of putting her training to use for the good of her own people.

O'Donoghue joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1967 with two goals in mind: to improve the lot of Indigenous people living in the Pitjantjatjara lands where she had been born and to find her birth mother. Her first nursing job with the department took her to the remote mining town of Coober Pedy, located on the outskirts of Pitjantjatjara lands.

It was not long after her arrival in Coober Pedy that a group of local Indigenous residents instantly recognized her as her mother's daughter based on the strong family resemblance. A reunion between O'Donoghue and her birth mother took place three months later in Oodnadatta. The reestablishment of a relationship between O'Donoghue and her mother made O'Donoghue all the more keenly aware of the difficulties faced by dispossessed people, such as her mother, living on the Aboriginal reserve in deep poverty and beset by social ills such as alcoholism. The encounter made O'Donoghue realize that she wanted to make the Aboriginal cause her life's work.

Justice at Last

O'Donoghue soon established herself as a leading activist committed to the improvement of Aboriginal lives. Despite a lack of federal funding for such initiatives—a handicap that persisted until 1973—she pushed hard for policy reform in many areas, such as education and housing, as well as health services on Aboriginal reserves. She was also instrumental in setting up the Aboriginal Legal Service and the Aboriginal Women's Council.

O'Donoghue's tireless advocacy led to a shift away from the historical neglect and assimilation suffered by Aboriginal peoples. Her efforts resulted in a greater governmental role in providing Aboriginal peoples with better health care, education, housing, social services, and employment opportunities. At the same time, O'Donoghue sought to help the Aboriginal community negotiate the responsibilities that came with a greater degree of self-determination.

In 1990, O'Donoghue was appointed as the inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a position she retained for six years. In 1993, she was a lead negotiator of an agreement between the Aboriginal community and Australia's federal government that led to the Native Title Act, a measure that paved the way for Indigenous people to make land claims under certain circumstances. That same year, O'Donoghue became the first and only Aboriginal person to address the United Nations (UN) General Assembly.

O'Donoghue went on to serve as the first chair of the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal and Tropical Health from 1996 to 2003. Her work in that capacity paved the way for the establishment of the Lowitja Institute, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research center named after her, in 2010.

In 1997, O'Donoghue's work with ATSIC also led to a formal inquiry into the legacy of the Stolen Generations. The Australian Human Rights Commission initiated the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, an important milestone along the path to reconciliation between Australia's Aboriginal inhabitants and the descendants of its colonial settlers.

In 2000, O'Donoghue was named a professorial fellow at Flinders University in Adelaide. In retirement, she remained active in Indigenous Australian causes.

In recognition of her distinguished leadership of the Aboriginal community, O'Donoghue has received numerous awards, including being the first Aboriginal woman to be inducted into the Order of Australia (1977), as well as being made a commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1983 by Queen Elizabeth II. O'Donoghue was named Australian of the Year in 1984. In 1998, the Australian government proclaimed her a Living National Treasure. She was also designated a dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 2005. O'Donoghue has received seven honorary degrees and honorary membership in the Royal Australian College of Physicians and the Royal College of Nursing.

On February 13, 2008, O'Donoghue stood at the side of then Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd as he publicly offered a National Sorry Day apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples. In January 2010, the Lowitja Institute was established to promote research into specific health problems affecting Indigenous peoples, and in the early 2020s, the Institute, comprised of twelve member institutions, continued its research into the well-being of Indigenous peoples.

At the age of forty-seven, in 1979, O'Donoghue married Gordon Smart, who worked as a medical orderly at Repatriation Hospital. Although O'Donoghue had decided earlier in life that she would never marry, she and Smart enjoyed a happy marriage together until Smart's death in 1991.

Bibliography

"About." Lowitja Institute, 2023, www.lowitja.org.au/page/about-us. Accessed 24 Apr. 2023.

“Lowitja O’Donoghue—Elder of Our Nation.” Women & Politics in South Australia, Government of South Australia, 1 Aug. 2019, women-and-politics.collections.slsa.sa.gov.au/abor1.htm. Accessed 30 Oct. 2020.‌

Money, Lawrence. “Lunch with Lowitja O’Donoghue.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 Sept. 2014, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/lunch-with-lowitja-odonoghue-20140929-10nsbb.html. Accessed 30 Oct. 2020.‌

O'Donoghue, Lowitja. Interview by Robin Hughes. Australian Biography, 22 Mar. 1994, www.australianbiography.gov.au/subjects/odonoghue/interview1.html. Accessed 30 Oct. 2020.

“Our Patron.” Lowitja Institute, www.lowitja.org.au/page/about-us/patron. Accessed 30 Oct. 2020.‌

Rintoul, Stuart. Lowitja: The Authorised Biography of Lowitja O'Donoghue. Allen & Unwin, 2020.