Post by parkerdivine on Apr 4, 2008 2:53:06 GMT 9.5
www.abc.net.au/news/features/obits/bonner/bonner_bio.htm
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FIRST ABORIGINAL SENATOR
Neville Bonner AO
Walking between two worlds
In his own words New South Wales-born Neville Bonner was educated in the school of hard knocks and he certainly came up the hard way, with a minimum of formal schooling.
Yet the quietly spoken, articulate Neville Bonner became a polished speaker, a capable administer and a respected politician.
Bonner's mother was an Aborigine, and he never knew his father, an Englishman who went back to England before Bonner was born.
"I was born on Ukerebagh Island, in the mouth of the Tweed River because there was nowhere else for my mother to go. In those days, people won't know too much about it, but in those days, Aboriginal people had to be out of the towns before sunset," he said of his birth.
"And they couldn't get back into town again until sunrise the next day, my mother was not allowed to go to hospital to give birth to me. She gave birth to me in a little gunya under the palm tree, that still lives down there, on a government-issued blanket.
"Those are the kind of things that we had to cope with when I was born and when I was a small child, right up into my teenage years and into my manhood."
Grandparents
When Bonner was about five, the family left the island to live with his grandparents in a camp on the banks of the Richmond River, near Lismore in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales.
They had old bags and blankets, but no furniture and few possessions. Life was tough. When Bonner was only seven he had to help his stepfather and grandfather earn money by clearing the bush.
"...My job was to crawl underneath the lantana bushes and with a little tomahawk, cut the lantana off at the root," he said.
When his mother died, he and his brother Jimmy lived with their grandparents.
His grandmother spoke beautiful English and insisted on Neville speaking properly. She also insisted that he learn to read and write.
Aborigines at that time had to attend segregated schools. As there was none in the Lismore district, it wasn't until they moved to the Brisbane area that he had a chance to go to a state school in Beaudesert.
"We were never allowed to attend a normal state school...but my grandmother talked the head teacher into allowing me to go and I attended there from 14 to 15 years of age," he said.
"I actually reached third grade in that short period of time and that's the only formal education I've had."
Bonner loved school but when his grandmother died he was heartbroken and packed his swag and set off to find work.
In the 1930s in New South Wales, Neville Bonner worked around the Northern Rivers district on banana plantations and as a bean and corn picker. When he was 18 he joined ring-barking and scrub felling camps in Queensland.
He became well known as a rough-rider and took part in rodeos, buck-jumping and bullock riding.
He moved on, working as a stockman on stations in north-western Queensland and eventually became head stockman at the Mount Emu Plains station.
"For many years I was a bit of a loner. I was out on cattle stations, I became a head stockman. suppose I've done every labouring job known to man, cane cutting, scrub felling, timber cutting."
Marriage
It was at Mount Emu Plains that he met his first wife, Mona Banfield.
They married in 1943. The couple had five sons and two foster daughters.
When their first son became ill in 1946 Bonner decided to move the family to join his wife's people on the Palm Island Aboriginal settlement in north Queensland.
Along with his wife and five sons, Bonner lived on the island for 17 years.
It was during this time he took an interest in changing the way his people lived. He formed a number of committees and rose to the position of Assistant Settlement Overseer responsible for the administration of works.
In 1960 the Bonner family left Palm Island to settle in the Ipswich area in south-east Queensland.
An expert with a boomerang (he took fourth place in the 1966 Australian Boomerang-throwing titles in Melbourne), Bonner started a business, Bonnerang of Ipswich, but was forced to close after a couple of years, due a shortage of raw materials. He then went back to bridge-carpentary for the Moreton Shire Council.
In 1965 Bonner became a member of the board of directors of the One People of Australia League (OPAL), which helped Aborigines with welfare, housing and education. He was Queensland president of the organisation from 1970 to 1976. In 1979 OPAL awarded him life membership and he became president of the league in the early 1980s.
A major breakthrough came in 1967, when a referendum changed the way Aborigines were treated.
Australia's Aborigines were given the vote and allowed to be counted in the census.
Bonner decided it was time to enter politics and joined the Liberal Party.
He was for a time vice-chairman of the eastern suburbs branch of the party in the Oxley area, and was for a year on the Queensland State executive of the party.
"You've got to get into the system, work through the system and make the changes. If you say a law is a bad law, you don't break it, you try to change the law," he said.
In 1970 Bonner made history by becoming the first Aboriigine to contest a Senate election. He was number three on the joint Liberal-Country Party ticket but was not elected.
In June, 1971 he was picked by the Liberals to fill a Senate vacancy created by Dame Annabelle Rankin's resignation.
Politics
In August 1971 Neville Bonner was sworn in as Australia's first Aboriginal Senator.
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