Faith Bandler
Faith Bandler ( born September 27, 1920 in Tumbulgum, New South Wales), born Ida Lessing mussing, is a politician who campaigned for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Bandler has become known to the Australian referendum in 1967 in Australia by the led of her campaign and has received numerous honors for her services.
Biography
Bandler's father was an aboriginal named Peter mussing, who was kidnapped at the age of 13 years from the island of Ambrym and had to work without pay in the cane fields of Queensland. He later married a woman from New South Wales with Scots- Indian origin. Bandler was heavily influenced by the work of her father as a slave in their actions and thinking. She grew up with her family on a farm near Murwillumbah in New South Wales. Her father died when she was five years old. In 1934, she left school, went to Sydney and worked as a seamstress.
During the Second World War, she and her sister worked in the Australian Women Country Army on fruit farms. You and other indigenous workers received lower wages than white workers. When she left the Army in 1945, they launched a campaign for equal pay and went to the district of Kings Cross in Sydney. In 1952 she married Hans Bandler, a Jew from Vienna in Austria and lived in Frenchs Forest. During the war, Hans Brandler was in a concentration camp by the Nazis. The couple has a daughter, Lilon, who was born in 1854 and they moved to adopt a son, an Aborigine on.
Politician
1956 Bandler was a professional politician of the Aboriginal Australian Fellowship and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders ( FCAATSI ), which was formed in 1957. During this time she worked with Pearl Gibbs and Jessie Street. As general secretary of the FCAATSI she led the 1967 referendum against the discrimination of Aborigines in the Constitution of Australia. This campaign, which required numerous protest letters and hundreds of public events, led the Referendum in the government of Prime Minister Harold Holt to success with about 91 percent approval in all six states of Australia.
In 1974 she began to write and brought out four books, two essays on the 1967 Referendum, a report on her brother's life in New South Wales and a novel about the experiences of her father as Aborigines in Queensland. At the beginning of 1974 she launches a campaign for the rights of Torres Strait Islanders. According to the statements of the biography writer and historian Marilyn Lake, the campaign for the Torres Strait Islanders has changed more than the FCAATSI Campaign of the referendum that led Bandler on two fronts. She pushed back the influence of the Black Power ideology. 1975 Bandler visited the island on which her father was kidnapped 92 years ago. During the 1970s, Bandler was a prominent member of the Women's Electoral Lobby in New South Wales.
Bandler was appointed for their earned in the welfare of Aboriginal member of the Order of Australia (AM) on 11 June 1984. She received in 1994 an honorary doctorate degree from Macquarie University. In 1997, she was the Human Rights Medal awarded and she was named one of the 100 first living persons of the Australian Living Treasures by the National Trust of Australia. She received 29 January 2009 the Order of Australia (AC ), which was her presented on 29 April 2009.
Works
- Wacvie (1977). ISBN 0-7270-0446-8
- Marani in Australia ( 1980). ISBN 0-7270-1254-1
- The Time was Ripe: A History of the Aboriginal - Australian Fellowship ( 1983). ISBN 0-909188-78-5
- Welou, My Brother ( 1984). ISBN 0-909331-73-1