First Voice to Parliament
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Neville Bonner’s arrival in the Senate as the first Indigenous Australian to enter Parliament. By David Furse-Roberts.
On 20 August 1971, a Jagera man born beneath a palm tree took his oath of office as the Liberal Senator for Queensland. Sensitive to the plight of his own people yet also forward-looking and devoted to Australia as a whole, Neville Bonner was a healer who strove to promote cooperation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians long before “reconciliation” entered the popular lexicon. In his twelve years as a senator from 1971-1983, Bonner championed the ideals of faith, family, patriotism, free enterprise and human dignity for all.
Neville Thomas Bonner was born on Ukerebagh Island in the far north of New South Wales on 28 March 1922. Receiving only one formal year of schooling in Queensland, Bonner took on various jobs as a ring-barker, canecutter and stockman. Exhibiting an entrepreneurial flair, Bonner even started his own Boomerang-making business, named “Bonnerang”, with one of his sons, Alfred.
Bonner was one of the great autodidacts of Australian public life. He was gifted with a zest for learning, once boasting of his education in the “university of hard knocks”. Yet he also remembered his grandmother’s advice that if you learn to handle the “Queens English”, people will not question your education. His oratorical skills were honed to great effect both inside and outside of parliament leading Bonner to admit to “fooling a lot of people for a long time!”
After living on Queensland’s Palm Island, Bonner moved to Ipswich in 1960 where he joined the One People of Australia League (OPAL). With its vision to “weld the coloured and white citizens of Australia into one people”, OPAL took an integrationist approach to incorporating Indigenous Australians into a single multicultural society. In practical terms, its main focus was on the provision of housing, education and training for Indigenous Australians in need. Bonner joined its state committee and served as President from 1968 to 1974.
During his time in Ipswich, Bonner campaigned for the 1967 referendum and joined the Liberal Party. Following the resignation of Liberal Senator Dame Anabelle Rankin in 1971, the Party selected Bonner to fill its casual vacancy where he became the first Indigenous Australian Member of Parliament.
When Bonner was escorted into the parliamentary chamber to be sworn in as a Senator on 20 August 1971, he heard the voice of his late grandfather who said: “It’s alright now boy, you are finally in the council of the Australian elders, everything now is going to be alright”.
As he embarked on his parliamentary career, Bonner reflected on what he saw as his four responsibilities:
“My first responsibility was to God, because I am a Christian, my second responsibility was to my nation, because I am an Australian, my third responsibility was to my state, because I am a Queenslander, and my fourth responsibility was to the party that I was a part of and who gave me the opportunity to get into parliament; but interwoven through the whole sequence was my almost, all-consuming, burning desire to help my own people, the Aboriginal community, to become respected, responsible citizens within the broader Australian community.”
Bonner delivered his maiden speech to the Senate on 8 September 1971 acknowledging his entrance to the chamber as a “unique event in Australian history” and pledged to serve all Australians. Decrying the historical mistreatment of his own people, the new senator also affirmed that Australia was a “Grand Country” that had “earned an honoured place in the world” through the valour and skill of its people in war and peace.
In his vision to advance the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians, Bonner repudiated the failed, paternalist approach of state welfarism: “I want to take this opportunity to point out that in common with all citizens, the Aborigines of Australia are most certainly not looking for handouts. They have suffered enough from the stigma of paternalism, however well-intentioned it may have been”.Instead, Bonner emphasised the urgency of fostering greater Aboriginal participation in social development, and also in vocational and general education from the preschool to tertiary levels. Appreciating firsthand the empowering force of private enterprise, Bonner called for policies to allow Aboriginal enterprises to thrive and flourish, particularly those involved in the production of boomerangs and other cultural artefacts.
For Bonner, his people would retain their ethnic and cultural identity but have all of the opportunities that every other Australian took for granted in education, employment, health, housing, social and economic standing within the community. In short, Australia’s First Peoples would be a distinctive yet integrated community in the nation’s social fabric. Rejecting the politics of shallow tokenism, he once asserted that “I am no token, I never was and never will be for anyone…I am Neville Bonner, proudly an Aborigine and proudly a member of this Australian community”.
Whilst faithful to the Liberal Party in which he served, Bonner’s first loyalty was always to his own conscience. He once remarked: “I suppose I was a bit of a rebel. I voted against my own party in and out of government on twenty-three occasions. I didn’t toe the party-line. I was a member of the party, fiercely, proudly a member of the party, but I was not blindly a member of the party, I had a conscience.”
After being elected to the Senate in his own right in the elections of 1972, 1974, 1975, 1977 and 1980, Bonner was demoted on the Liberal Party Senate ticket in what John Howard regretted as one of the party’s “more ignoble pre-selection decisions”. Greatly disillusioned by this rebuff, Bonner lamented that “the great Liberal principles that attracted me to this party, I believe, to some extent, have been destroyed by the powerbrokers within the Liberal Party. Despite a period of estrangement from the party, Bonner remained true to his Liberal principles and was welcomed back to the fold when Prime Minister John Howard conferred this trailblazer with life membership of the Liberal Party in 1996.
In his last public appearance, as a delegate to the 1998 Constitutional Convention to debate an Australian Republic, the distinguished elder rose to deliver a rousing speech with this ringing exhortation:
“From the bottom of my heart, I pray, stop this senseless division. Let us work together on the real issues, let us solve those problems which haunt my people, the problem of land, of health, unemployment, of the despair and hopelessness that leads even to suicide. Let us unite this country [and] not divide it ever!”
To honour this enduring vision of Neville Bonner, the Menzies Research Centre will stage a Gala Dinner to celebrate the legacy of the first Indigenous Australian to sit in Parliament. The Dinner will take place on Wednesday 11 August at Old Parliament House, the very building in which he served as Senator. His life and legacy will be celebrated in the presence of distinguished parliamentarians old and new.