The Story of Lowitja

Lowitja O´Donoghue was born in 1932 in an aboriginal community. She never knew her father, who was white, and when she was two years old, she was taken away from her mother, who she didn’t see for 33 years. She struggled a long time to win an admission to a training hospital, and all of the hard work paid of. She was the first black nurse in South Australia and in 1976 she was awarded an Order of Australia, she was the first Aboriginal woman to win the award. She has won a few other awards after this, and in 1984 she was made the Australian of the year. In 1990 she founded the Aboriginal an Torres Strait Islander Comission. After this she changed her name to Lowitja O´Donoghue.

Heres a short video about her life

http://fadlmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/austbiog/clips/odonrem_pr.mp4

When you ask her what has kept her going, she replies: 'Despite my Christian education when I was young, I'm not a church goer. But like most Aboriginals I feel in harmony with the land. There is a spirituality which flows from that and I draw on it when the going gets hard. It helps me to overcome despair in the same way, I suppose, as their faith helps practising Christians in the crises of their lives.' When I asked who had most influenced her life and her thinking. Lois' reply was swift 'Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu. They have always been a source of inspiration to me. I asked Lois how she thought individual white Australians could best participate in the reconciliation  process. 'I think', she said, 'that there's a basic goodness in the Australian community. I believe there is a widespread and genuine wish and willingness to come to grips with the process of reconciliation. One way of helping is for as many people as possible to join study groups - to study history and learn what Aboriginals have gone through and how the were dispossessed.'