Faith Bandler AC

Faith Bandler AC (1920–2015), civil rights activist and writer, was born in Tumbulgum, New South Wales, to a Scottish-Indian mother and a cane-worker father from Ambrym Island, in what is now Vanuatu. While serving in the Australian Women's Land Army during the Second World War she observed the discrepancy in pay for Aboriginal people. Having married Hans Bandler, an Austrian Jewish refugee, in 1952 and settled on Sydney's North Shore, she began to work full time on Indigenous issues, co-founding the Australian-Aboriginal Fellowship in 1956. A year later Bandler was a founding member of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, becoming NSW State Secretary and then General Secretary. Within FCAATSI she directed the ten-year campaign towards the constitutional referendum of 1967. It is widely acknowledged that her charisma and public speaking skills were fundamental to the outcome of the referendum, in which more than 90 per cent of voters endorsed the removal of provisions from the Constitution that discriminated on the basis of race. After leaving FCAATSI in 1973, she devoted her energy to her father's people and was central to the foundation of the Australian South Sea Islanders United Council. Bandler also wrote five books, including Wacvie (1977), a biographical novel about her father, who was taken from his home and enslaved on a sugar plantation in Queensland at the age of twelve. Awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the community in 1976, she refused to accept it in protest against the dismissal of Gough Whitlam. Bandler gained an honorary doctorate in 1994 and received the Human Rights Medal in 1997.