Faith bandler achievements
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During the 1960s, the world was in the grip of enormous ideological change. In Australia, there was public outcry against the Vietnam War and growing support for equal pay for women, free education, fair wages, and the abolishment of the White Australia Policy. There was also growing support for radical changes to the rights, or lack thereof, afforded to Indigenous Australians. Helping to drive this movement was a woman who was intimately familiar with what it felt like to face racial discrimination. The daughter of a slave “blackbirded” from the South Sea Islands in the 1880s, Faith Bandler was inspired by the injustices she saw around her to co-found the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and soon began the long fight that would eventually lead to a monumental referendum in 1967. But the referendum was only one part of a bigger whole, and in her latter life, Bandler continued to fight for those who were oppressed, eventually turning her attention towards her cultural roots in Vanuatu.
Join us as we grab our placards and take to the streets to celebrate Bandler̵
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Faith Bandler
Australian civil rights activist
Faith Bandler AC MBE | |
|---|---|
Bandler meeting with Gordon Bryant (left) and Prime Minister Harold Holt in the lead-up to the 1967 referendum | |
| Born | (1918-09-27)27 September 1918 |
| Died | 13 February 2015(2015-02-13) (aged 96) |
| Spouse | Hans Bandler |
| Children | Lilon Gretl Bandler, Peter Bandler |
| Awards | |
Faith BandlerAC MBE (27 September 1918 – 13 February 2015; née Ida Lessing Faith Mussing) was an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage. A campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders, she was best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians.
She was made a member of the order of Australia in 1984, and a companion of the Order of Australia in 2009, after turning down an appointment to be a member of the Order of the British Empire in 1976.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Maquarie University in 1994, a Human Rights medal from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissio
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People Australia
When Faith Bandler filled in her census form on Tuesday night, she identified herself as "Australian South Sea Islander". There was no provision in the form for such a response. Mrs Bandler did not expect one.
South Sea Islanders in Australia are a lost race. Faith Bandler calls them a forgotten people.
This splendid woman is not angry. Anger is not the sort of emotion to touch her heart and mind. She has a great faith in humanity. So she admits to feeling "a bit indignant", while describing the forgetting of her people as an"oversight".
Others see it as evidence of the dark side of the Australian soul. South Sea Islanders were brought to Australia as slaves. Slavery in this great, egalitarian south land. It is not a subject with which Australians feel comfortable.
Faith Bandler's father, Wacvie Mussingkon, was kidnapped in 1883 from the island of Ambrym in what is now Vanuatu. His kidnapping was part of an activity called blackbirding, which author Hector Holthouse has called "one of the most violent means of procuring labour by force". Blackbirding was a me
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