Editors --- "Obituary - First Aboriginal Senator Neville Bonner" [1999] IndigLawB 18; (1999) 4(18) Indigenous Law Bulletin 23

First Aboriginal Senator

Neville Bonner

Born March 28 1922 Ukerebagh Island, Tweed Heads, NSW.

Died 5 February 1999 at Ipswich, QId.

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 sty to change the law.

Neville Bonner made history in 1971 when he became the first Aborigine to be elected to Federal Parliament. He served as a Queensland Liberal Senator for twelve years until 1983, when he was dropped to the unwinnable third position on the Liberal Parry ticket, after party colleagues became disenchanted over his vocal support for land rights and his criticism of the Parry's State branch. As a senator, he led calls for an independent inquiry into East Timor and also crossed the floor on a number of occasions to vote with the labor Opposition on Aboriginal issues. He was a persistent critic of the Bjelke-Peterson Government, especially in its attempt in 1978 to take over Aboriginal reserves in Queensland.

At heart a political moderate, Bonner came under fire from the left as well as the right, especially during Aboriginal protests against the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane in 1982, when he refused to join illegal street marches and urged protesters to stay within the law. In the native tide era, he urged that negotiation and not confrontation was the key to reconciliation. In 1998, he participated in the Constitutional Convention as a monarchist delegate, arguing that Australia's system of Government should be left untouched.

During his career, Neville Bonner served as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in the 1970s, director on the ABC board of directors, Senior Official Visitor for Queensland Prisons and as head of the Indigenous Advisory Council-the peak body advising the Queensland Government on Indigenous issues. He became the first Aborigine to introduce legislation into the Australian Parliament when he introduced a Private Member's Bill - the Aborigines and Islanders (Admissibility of Confessions) Bill 1976. In 1979, he was named Australian of the Year.

In July 1998, the recently-elected Beattie Labor Government invited Bonner to address the opening of the forty-ninth session of State Parliament ahead of the Governor's speech. Neville Bonner was an elder of the Jagera tribe who are traditional owners of the land on which the Parliament in Brisbane was built.