I asked Lowitja O’Donoghue why she’d lived the life she had. She replied, ‘Because I loved my people’
Lowitja O’Donoghue is gone and my mind is flooded with memories: of driving across dry paddocks together until we found an old bough shed where we had been told she was born; of a door being closed in her face by a woman who had long ago decided to take the secrets of their family to the grave; of her tears, even though she said she felt nothing, as she walked away from the grave of her father, who had abandoned her to missionaries at the age of two.
And of sitting with her the morning after a Lowitja O’Donoghue Oration in which Noel Pearson called her the greatest Aboriginal leader of the modern era.
As she flicked through old photographs that morning, pausing to look at the girl she no longer was, and the many champions of the Aboriginal struggle she fought alongside, I asked her why she had lived the life she lived.
She looked at me and said: “Because I loved my people.”
When she was born, near Indulkana in the far north of South Australia, sometime around 1 August 1932, Aboriginal people lived in shadows. The last massacre, at Coniston station in the Northern Territory, had occurred only a few years earlier, while a few years after her birth “protectors” from across the nation came together over three fine cool days to discuss the destiny of Aboriginal people, during which no Aboriginal voice was heard.
Lowitja’s mother, Lily, was a Yankunytjatjara woman. Her father, Tom O’Donoghue, was first-generation Irish Australian. In 1927 he handed his first two children to the missionaries of the United Aborigines Mission, zealous Christian women who were scouring the outback for “half-caste” children to bring to God. In 1934 he handed them three more, including Lowitja, who was two years old. In 1940, when he was charged and fined for cohabitating with an Aboriginal woman, which was a crime, he walked away.
If her mother called her Lowitja, it was not the name the missionaries gave her. They gave her a different, biblical name, and they gave her a birthdate, 1 August – the birthday of horses.
For Lowitja, the Colebrook children’s home was a place of rigid discipline and joyless religious observance, bad food, endless hymn singing and praising of the Lord. She did not feel loved. She was often in trouble. “I remember in my very earliest days standing up for what I believed in,” she said. “One of the earliest memories I have is of coming between the matron and the strap. I would often stand in the way when the strap was intended for others, with the result being that I, too, got a beating.”
She asked herself terrible questions: where is my mother, why doesn’t she come for me, doesn’t she love me?
But Lowitja’s mother did look for her – and for her other children.
Of all the records found during the writing of Lowitja’s biography, the most painful was of a woman who arrived in the Flinders Ranges town of Quorn just before Christmas in 1945, with two young children at her side. She had travelled more than 500km through desert country from the remote township of William Creek. She told the police sergeant, Bill Kitchin, that her name was Lily and she was making her way to the Port Augusta mission, where she believed she would find her five children who had been taken away.
If Kitchin, a police officer for 33 years, knew, or suspected, that Lily’s children were at Colebrook – which was at Quorn for 17 years but had moved the previous year to Eden Hills in the Adelaide foothills – he did not tell her. Instead he bought her a ticket to Port Augusta. Then he sat down and wrote to the chief protector of Aborigines, William Richard Penhall, and asked to be reimbursed for his costs.
Lowitja, like Aboriginal children the country over, was raised to be a servant. She wanted more. “I decided that I wanted to be ‘somebody’,” she said. “That God had given me intelligence and that I was going to use it.”
Fighting against discrimination and low expectations – the battle she fought all her life – she became one of the first Aboriginal nurses. She campaigned for
equal rights and bit her tongue when a patient said, “Don’t put your black hands on me.” In 1962 she went to India, working as a nurse among Baptist missionaries in the foothills of the Himalayas.
In 1967, the year of the referendum to count Aboriginal people in the census, she joined South Australia’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs and, always hoping to be reunited with her mother, was sent to the opal-mining town of Coober Pedy as a welfare officer. She had not long arrived when she heard a group of people sitting outside a store say, “That’s Lily’s daughter.” In the weeks that followed, Lily waited for her daughter in the outback town of Oodnadatta, staring off into the desert, waiting for her daughter to come home.
The reunion was not easy. They did not embrace. They did not know how to be with one another. Her mother did all that she could to hide the brokenness of her life and the poverty in which she was living. Lowitja’s mind was filled with questions and she asked none of them. “By the time I met my mother, of course, it was far too emotional to talk about,” she recalled.
In the years that followed Lowitja worked as an outback nurse, never being invited into the homes of the white people who had high tea in the afternoon, and then rose through an Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy in which she was one of few Aboriginal people. In 1990 she was appointed as the first chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which grew into a $1bn bureaucracy. In 1993, after the high court’s Mabo decision, she led complex native title negotiations with the then prime minister, Paul Keating, amid a firestorm of conservative opposition. Keating called her a remarkable Australian leader.
“To be a woman, to be an Aboriginal, and to want a decent living is a difficult path,” she once said. “Believe me, it’s all been uphill. As John Lennon once sang, woman is the nigger of the world. I am both, I’m proud of it and nobody is going to change that.”
Throughout her life, Lowitja received many honours: Order of Australia; Commander of the Order of the British Empire; Australian of the Year; Australian National Living Treasure; Companion of the Order of Australia; Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great – a papal honour even though she was not Catholic. She received many honorary doctorates from Australian universities. The Lowitja Institute, an Indigenous-controlled health research institute, was named in her honour.
A few years ago Lowitja told me she could feel “the old Lowitja” slipping away.
She hated it, that loss of herself. Sometimes her mind was tormented by the past and sometimes it was filled with hymns. At the end, her family and friends came just to sit with her, among them Indigenous leaders carrying the weight of the lost referendum, wishing she could have lived to see Aboriginal people recognised in Australia’s constitution.
Stuart Rintoul is the author of Lowitja – the authorised biography of Lowitja O’Donoghue (Allen & Unwin, 2020)