Lowitja O’Donoghue

Lowitja O’Donoghue (born August 1, 1932, Indulkana, South Australia) is an Australian activist whose lifelong advocacy for Aboriginal rights and reconciliation made her one of the most respected and influential Aboriginal people in Australian history.

O’Donoghue was the fifth of six children born to an Irish pastoralist (rancher) father, whom she never knew, and a Yunkunytjatjara mother in Indulkana, a remote Aboriginal community in northwestern South Australia that was later recognized as part of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Lands. At age two, O’Donoghue and two of her sisters were removed from her family by the South Australian Aboriginal Protection Board and placed in the Colebrook Children’s Home in Quorn. There her given name, Lowitja, was anglicized to Lois by the missionaries who raised her and steered her through the “white” education system. She did not see her mother again for more than 30 years. O’Donoghue’s experience mirrored that of tens of thousands of other members of the “Stolen Generations,” the mixed-race children (most of them the progeny of fathers of European descent and Aboriginal mothers) whom the Australian government forcibly removed from their families from 1910 to 1970 and resettled in orphanages, missions, and non-Indigenous foster homes as part of a strategy of Anglo-Australian (“white”) cultural assimilation.

Aboriginal girls brought up in the missions were trained in domestic service with the expectation that at age 16 they would seek employment as domestics. Having attended Unley Girls Technical High School in Adelaide, O’Donoghue, at age 16, went to work for a family at Victor Harbour. She was determined, however, to become a nurse, a career choice that was blocked for Indigenous Australians by institutionalized racism. When her application to pursue nursing training at the Royal Adelaide Hospital was refused because she was of Aboriginal descent, O’Donoghue’s feelings of resentment and determination to gain admission to the program led her to join the Aborigines’ Advancement League, which, in the early 1950s, had made the fight to allow Aboriginal women to enter the nursing profession one of its main causes. In 1954 O’Donoghue became the first Aboriginal trainee nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in its history. During her decade-long tenure at the hospital, O’Donoghue was promoted to charge sister (nurse in charge of a ward).

In the early 1960s, O’Donoghue travelled to Assam, in northern India, to work as a nurse with the Baptist Overseas Mission. There she gained a broader perspective on indigenous cultures after realizing that Australian Aboriginal peoples were not “the only people that had been colonised” or “the only people who were dispossessed.” This revelation made her more determined than ever to work to change the Australian government’s policies toward Indigenous peoples. After she returned to Australia in 1962, she joined the South Australian public service as an Aboriginal liaison and welfare officer. In 1967 she joined the newly established Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Three years later she was appointed the regional director of the organization’s Adelaide office, becoming the first woman to be the regional director of an Australian federal department. In this role she was responsible for the local implementation of national Aboriginal welfare policy. From 1970 to 1972, O’Donoghue was a member of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement.

At age 47, O’Donoghue met Gordon Smart, a medical orderly from the Adelaide Repatriation Hospital, whom she married in 1979. Her fierce determination to improve the lives of Australia’s Indigenous peoples earned her the distinction in 1976 of being the first Aboriginal woman to be made a Member of the prestigious Order of Australia (OA). In 1977, she was elected chairperson of the National Aboriginal Conference, a forum for the expression of Aboriginal views that had been established by the federal government as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee 1973.

In March 1990, O’Donoghue was appointed the founding chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). In that capacity she played a key role in drafting the Native Title legislation that arose in response to the High Court‘s 1992 decision in the Mabo case, an effort led by activist Eddie Koiki Mabo that enabled Torres Strait Islander peoples and Aboriginal peoples to regain their traditional lands. O’Donoghue remained with ATSIC until 1996, during which time she also became a member of the Australian Republic Advisory Committee (1993). Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st O’Donoghue continued her tireless work with different Indigenous organizations and became a patron of many health, welfare, and social justice organizations. In 1997 the Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal and Tropical Health (CRCATH) was established with O’Donoghue as its chairperson. In 2010 the Lowitja Institute was founded in her honour. Its Lowitja Institute Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cooperative Research Centre (a successor to CRCATH) is funded by the Australian government.

O’Donoghue’s lifetime of work on issues related to the health, housing, community development, and land rights of Indigenous Australians earned her a long list of accolades and awards, including the Advance Australia Award in 1982. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1983 and named Australian of the Year in 1984. In 1998, O’Donoghue was named a National Living Treasure, and the following year she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. She was also the recipient of honorary doctorates from five Australian universities. Additionally, O’Donoghue was named an honorary fellow of both the Royal Australian College of Physicians and the Royal College of Nursing. In 2005 she was made Dame of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (DSG) by Pope John Paul II, and in 2009 she received the NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Lifetime Achievement Award.

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