Neville Bonner

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Neville Thomas Bonner AO (28 March 1922-2005) was an Australian politician and the first Aboriginal Australian to become a member of the Parliament of Australia.

He was nominated by the Queensland Parliament to fill a vacancy in the Senate's representation of Queensland and later became the first Indigenous Australian to be elected by popular vote.

Neville Bonner, the Jagera's elder, was a member of the Sids.

Early life

Bonner was born on March 28th, 1922 on Ukerebagh Island, a small island in New South Wales' Tweed River, near the Queensland border. He was the son of Julia Bell, an Indigenous Australian, and Henry Kenneth Bonner, an English immigrant. Ida Sandy, his maternal grandmother, was a member of the Logan and Albert Rivers of the Ugara people, while his maternal grandfather Roger Bell (or Jung Jung) was a fully initiated member of the Yagara people of the Brisbane River. His grandfather was "sort of extracted [...] out of the tribe" as a young boy and given an English name, according to Bonner.

Bonner's parents met and married in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, where they met and married. When she was pregnant with him, his father abandoned his mother, leaving her destitute. She then moved to Ukerebagh Island, where she had another son. The family moved near Lismore, New South Wales, to be closer to Bonner's grandparents, living under a lantana bush on the banks of the Richmond River. Frank Randell, an Aboriginal man who was employed by the local police, later had three children with him. As an infant, one of his half-brothers died, and Randell "observed frequent acts of abuse against his mother."

Bonner's mother died in July 1932, when he was ten years old, and his grandmother then became his main caregiver. In 1935, she and her family moved to Beaudesert, Queensland, where he completed his only year of formal education at Beaudesert State Rural School. After finishing the school year, his grandmother died in June 1935 and he moved back to New South Wales. Bonner served as a bark barker, cane cutter, and stockman before settling on Palm Island, Queensland's southwest corner, where he rose to the position of Assistant Settlement Overseer.

Personal life

In 1943, Bonner married Mona Banfield at the Cathedral of Palm Island's mission. They had five sons and three daughters and fostered three children. Mona Bonner died in 1969. In 1972, Neville married Heather Ryan.

Bonner's grandfather taught him how to make boomerangs. He founded Bonnerang, a boomerang manufacturing company, in 1966, with the support of his family. The boomerangs were made from the roots of black wattle trees, as Bonner refused to use synthetic materials. His company produced up to 450 boomerangs per week, but eventually stopped growing due to a wood shortage. Bonner led a roarerang performance in Parliament's gardens. In his first address, he called on the cultural property of the boomerang to be reserved for Indigenous people as non-Indigenous people were producing cheap synthetic materials. The Museum of Australian Democracy holds one of his boomerangs.

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