13-02-2015, 11:56 PM
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Vale Faith Bandler
I heard on the radio this morning that Faith Bandler has died aged 96.
Faith Bandler is well known for her active role in publicising the YES case for the Aboriginal question in the 1967 Referendum.
She was born in northern New South Wales in 1918, one of eight children. Her father, Peter Mussing, had been kidnapped from Ambryn, an island in what was known as the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and brought to Australia, enslaved, to work on sugar plantations. Awareness of her father's past experience exerted a strong influence on Bandler in her later political activism, as did her own experience of racial exclusion when she was growing up.
Faith met Lady Jessie Street through her involvement in the peace movement in the late 1940s. Jessie Street would later call on Faith to campaign for greater Commonwealth responsibility for Aboriginal Australians. Another key meeting with Aboriginal activist Pearl Gibbs in the early 1950s led to Faith Bandler's involvement in establishing, with Pearl and others, a new organisation to work for Aboriginal rights, the Sydney-based Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship.
In 1963, Faith Bandler became the New South Wales state secretary of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement representing the interests of Aboriginal people from New South Wales. In 1967, after the federal government had agreed to hold a referendum on the Aboriginal question, Bandler was appointed New South Wales campaign director, a position she fulfilled with energy, skill and enthusiasm. She argued that a YES vote was a vote for equal rights for Aboriginal citizens. Bandler wanted to see Aboriginal Australians accepted as equals, and as 'one people' with white Australians. While this was a strong argument in gaining support for the referendum in 1967, it was less popular after this landmark vote when Indigenous Australians strove to assert their right to cultural difference.
The next year Torres Strait Islanders were recognised as a separate group when the organisation became the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders
Vale Faith Bandler sounds like someone who achieve a great deal for the good of others ... 
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