Monday, February 8, 1999 The lonely road from condemned pauper to crowned prince OBITUARY: NEVILLE BONNER, AO, 1922 - 1999 HE was a Queensland senator for 12 years. Yet Neville Bonner, 76, who died in Brisbane on Friday, was unceremoniously dumped by his own party. It was a cynical manoeuvre, the reasons for which his Liberal colleagues steadfastly declined to discuss. His supporters, however, were under no such restraint. As Bonner moved toward political oblivion, they angrily denounced the Queensland Liberal Party machine as racist. Yet the party's repudiation of Bonner could not, happily, diminish the niche in Australian history he already occupied. He was the first Aborigine to be elected to Federal Parliament. Bonner was ousted by being dropped from first to third position on the Liberal Party's Queensland Senate ticket for the 1983 general election, thus effectively depriving him of any chance of success. He ran anyway, as an independent, but failed narrowly to win a seat. The newly-elected Hawke Government appointed him to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Bonner's political demise occurred after he had drawn fire from Coalition MPs for his increasingly unyielding posture on Aboriginal rights. They saw his closer identification with the views of some Aboriginal activists as a betrayal. Ironically, Bonner's earlier, more moderate, stance on these issues and related social questions had been similarly condemned by radical Aboriginal groups. As one measure of white society's feelings on the issue, the National Party's attitude was unambiguous. Joh Bjelke-Petersen, in his pomp as Queensland premier, praised the Liberals for their action on Bonner, declaring: "His position on Aboriginal issues had got right out of hand and he had to go". Certainly Bonner had been a persistent critic of the Bjelke-Petersen regime in 1978 as it sought to wrest control of some Aboriginal reserves from the Federal Government. Yet four years later he appeared to back away from his hard line, refusing to join illegal street marches against the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane. Instead, Bonner urged that Aboriginal agitation against the Games should be within the law-thus earning him the antipathy and scorn of many activists. It was far from the first occasion that Neville Thomas Bonner had suffered denigration. Born on Ukerabah Island in the Tweed River, northern NSW, he knew the inevitable humiliations of growing up as an Aboriginal person in a country town. In Bonner's case these included scanty education, rejection for wartime army service, discrimination in eating and sleeping facilities in mustering camps, and an Aboriginal reserve job at one eighth the pay of his immediate (white) boss. His interest in politics developed while he was based in Ipswich as a $67-a-week bridge carpenter. However, his decision to support the Liberals has been attributed to a chance remark by Bill Hayden, then Labor MP for Oxley. On referendum day, 1967, both major parties supported the proposal to count Aborigines in the Census. Bonner was helping a friend distribute how-to-vote cards when Mr Hayden suggested he was in the wrong team, adding: "You should be giving out cards for us." As his biographer, Angela Burger, has recorded, Bonner resented Mr Hayden telling him whom he should work for-and joined the Liberal Party. He was welcomed into the One Mile branch of the party on August 22, 1967, as "the first coloured member". After his election to the Liberal State Convention and the chairmanship of the Oxley area committee, Bonner was appointed to fill a Senate vacancy in 1971. He achieved the top spot on the ticket in 1978. As a senator, Bonner led a revolt calling for an independent inquiry into East Timor. He also toured Britain, visited Nigeria and, more than once, voted with the Opposition on Aboriginal issues. A backlash against him within the Queensland Liberal Party inevitably gained strength. After his departure from the Senate, Bonner continued to live in the Oxley electorate as an Aboriginal elder and a champion of Aboriginal causes. His voice was heard by a wider audience in 1996 after the election triumph in Oxley of the Independent candidate, Pauline Hanson, who had been disowned by the Liberals for alleged racist remarks. Bonner spoke on Aboriginal issues to a rally supported by Queensland's Catholic bishops. He recalled his early struggles and his service in the Senate. At the close of his remarks, his voice halting with emotion, he simply repeated the words: "This is a sad, sad day ..." There were to be other controversies. As an elected monarchist delegate to the Constitutional Convention in February 1998, Bonner made a forceful plea for Australia's system of government to be left untouched. He sang a "chant of regret" for his Jagera people at the small number of Aborigines attending the convention. And he declared that a change to a republic would do nothing for them. During the convention, Bonner showed his practical side by warning against allocating seats in Federal Parliament specifically to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. To him, the idea smacked of tokenism. It made more sense for all parties to recruit indigenous members and ensure they were selected for winnable seats. "There needs to be a greater Aboriginal presence in the country's parliaments," he said, adding, "There has only been an Aboriginal voice in 12 out of 200 years of white rule." For all his disappointments, there would also be Bonner's day of pride. Five months after the Constitutional Convention, in an historic first, the newly-elected Queensland Labor Premier, Peter Beattie, invited Bonner to address the opening of State Parliament. He spoke before the Governor because the Jagera tribe had been the traditional owners of the land on which Brisbane's Parliament House is built. Ms Hanson, who attended the opening, criticised Bonner's remarks because he had welcomed guests on behalf of his people. Yet there would be a late political reconciliation of a kind. On January 27 this year, Queensland's Labor Government honoured Bonner by naming a government office block after him. By then Bonner was too ill to attend the ceremony but his wife, Heather, was there with one of his sons, Alfred, and a grandson, Mitchell. Confirming that Bonner was slowly slipping away from her, she said: "My beloved has asked me to thank your Government ... from the depths of his aged and weary Aboriginal heart. It is obvious ... that your Government is aware of what has been achieved by this man from such a humble birth. "The life of my beloved husband from his birth in that blacks' camp, as it was so cruelly called, to the rank of senator of Queensland in the national parliament-he had only $5 in his wallet-is a splendid example of Australia's democracy." At the ceremony, Queensland's acting Premier, Mr David Hamill, recalled Bonner once saying that despite his "love of my race and my all-consuming desire to help my own people", his responsibility was for the whole of Queensland. "I wasn't a senator for whites. I wasn't a senator for blacks. I was a senator for Queensland and all its people," Bonner had said. The Queensland Labor Government's Minister for Public Works, Mr Robert Schwarten, said it spoke volumes for Bonner's reputation that his political foes were eager to cement his name in history. "I think in the cauldron of politics when one has the respect of one's peers it's wonderful. But when one has the respect of one's foes who sit across the chamber from you, I think that says it all." Bonner's first wife, Mona, died in 1969. He is survived by his second wife, Heather, four sons and two foster daughters from the first marriage.
