Faith Bandler died on Thursday 12 February.
She was the daughter of a slave "black-birded" from the tiny South Sea Island of Ambryn and brought to Queensland to work in the sugar cane-fields. Her mother was of Scottish and Indian descent and imparted on Faith – and her brothers and sisters – a fierce independence.
In the Great Depression, their home opened its doors to everyone – no matter how poor, no matter what colour. Looking after each other was important.
Her childhood was spent in the family orchard listening to the men as they reminisced in Pidgin-English about lost Island homes, and bartered with the poor Irish farmers who lived nearby – exchanging fruit and vegetables for home-made tomato sauce.
Working class whites found their way to her family’s place often. They would sit together under the trees and eat persimmon, pineapple and mango. In exchange, they would chop fire wood for Faith’s mother. Her family did not believe in charity – dignity and self-respect were more important.
As a young woman, Faith joined a dance troupe that was invited to a Soviet youth festival and so, as the dust began to settle after World War II, she danced her way through Eastern and Western Europe. The “cultural delegation” she travelled with was, she said, a “strange combination of people”.
Faith was surrounded by communists, Christians, unionists and, of course, singers and dancers. Walking the streets of Berlin, Warsaw, and Budapest she wondered how many lives were buried under the rubble. Her visit to the Dachau concentration camp made a deep, horrifying and lasting impression. It was the beginning of Cold War McCarthyism, yet the troupe ignored the travel restrictions and went on to Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia – defiance and bravery was important.
Back in Australia, she drew the attention of ASIO. “[They were] interested in me and interested, I’m sure, in a million other Australians. Horrible little snoopers that they are”, she said in a 1993 interview. She and the others had had their passports confiscated by this time.
“None of this surprised me because I knew that great people in the world were suffering as a result of McCarthyism”, she said. “And there was Paul Robeson, who was really imprisoned in Harlem, without a passport for a long time and the author Cedrick Belfridge, and they were people who were called up before the Un-American Committee … and deprived of the right to travel. And it was the same here. And Australia was fast becoming a little America.” Sticking to her principles was important.
Travelling to Europe had been a turning point: she’d seen the barbarism of war and returned to Australia determined to fight for peace. She joined the New South Wales Peace Council and began speaking up at meetings – raising her voice against injustice was important.
Faith’s friend Jessie Street, a white woman inspired by the Suffragettes and the anti-slavery movement in Britain, convinced Faith to turn her attention to the plight of Aboriginals. Together they, Pearl Gibbs, Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) and Dulcie Flower started the Movement for the Advancement of Aborigines.
The tiny group met in the house of two poets. Pearl cohered and led the group, their first campaign was against the hated Aboriginal Welfare Board. “Pearl’s one ambition was to demolish that Board … I can remember her saying, ‘It’s May Day, come and walk, come and march on May Day’, and I said ‘Too right’. So she went down to the waterfront and got some of the wharfies to make a poster for her and it had a huge flame of fire and below was ‘Burn the Board’. And she said, ‘The Board should be destroyed because it controls my people’s lives.’” – organising and protesting was important.
Faith is most widely remembered for her role in bringing about the 1967 Referendum which resulted in Aboriginal people being included in the census, but this outcome was not the sole intent of the campaign. As Faith explained more than a decade ago: “The Referendum was very important to me. It was more important than any other issue that had to do with the Aboriginal people. I was never one to get involved with charity and to this day, I find it hard to accept that we have to have charities to solve our problems … prior to the Referendum, the Aboriginal people lived under six different laws.
“Each state had its own law, own set of governing laws of the people and if, say New South Wales was pushed to build a few houses, or something like that, they would say, ‘We haven’t got the finances’ … It had nothing to do with the right to vote, nothing at all, it had to do with making federal resources available … The matter of health was a major problem, the matter of housing, the need for education, and all these serious issues are linked.”
The referendum provided Aborigines the freedom to cross state borders unhindered, meant that families and friends could reunite and importantly, that people could seek out employment – economic justice and reparations was important.
The launch of the petition for the referendum was an ambitious affair. The tiny group decided to book the Town Hall, which had a capacity of 2,500 people and a steep fee of £80. They barely had 80 pennies to their name. They turned to the unions for support.
“We went to the wharfies and to the Seamen’s Union and a few other unions and said, ‘Would you circulate these, we’re going to have a public meeting at the Town Hall and we are launching a petition for a federal referendum, for the rights of Aborigines’, and the unions took them and took the petition and the handbills and particularly the Seamen’s Union. And they were marvellous because they were able to drop them at all the ports around Australia.” On the night of the launch, the hall was packed – solidarity was important.
Faith Bandler was a member of the Communist Party, the Union of Australian Women, the Aborigines Progressive Association, the Australian Aborigines League and co-founder of the Australian Aboriginal Fellowship. Her activism in the immediate post-war years coincided with a generalised upsurge in working class activity.
The Pilbara strike – the first Aboriginal industrial dispute to gain national prominence, and then the Gurindji strike drew support from unionists in the Eastern States. Faith worked together with these forces to provide concrete support for both groups of striking Aboriginal workers, without which the strikes would likely have failed. The issue of wages was front and centre and laid the basis for the demand for land rights – recognising the strength of the working class was important.
In many ways, what Abbott is doing – cutting millions from federal funding for Aboriginal programs, while re-negotiating with states over others – is reversing the intent of the 1967 referendum. As the commonwealth withdraws funding from Aboriginal programs and services, the states are required to pick up the slack.
However, with the states crying poor, premiers like Collin Barnett have found justification to shut down “expensive” remote communities and then claim to have no choice. The buck passing continues, as does the social and economic injustice. If we want to live in a world free of war, slavery, exploitation, poverty and oppression, Faith Bandler’s story remains important.
The final word belongs to Faith: “I’m a great believer in the power of people and I think, you know I’m a street woman, I believe we should make good use of our streets. They are not just there for motorcars, they’re there for us to get out and express our feelings of how we feel, particularly about war, about peace, the manufacturing of arms, the banning of the manufacturing of arms and so on. And so my faith is in people and I can’t say anything else other than that. It always has been and it always will be.”
Vale Faith Bandler.
