Faith Bandler was the daughter of a slave, who became the face of the 1967 referendum and a celebrity in the process. And she did it all while keeping house and raising kids. 

Few know her name now, yet Alecia argues that Faith is just as important to the fight for racial justice in Australia as Martin Luther King was to the USA. 

Despite many people’s assumptions, Faith was not a First Nations Australian. So how did a South Sea Islander woman, with Indian and Scottish heritage, become the face of one of Australia’s biggest Indigenous causes?   

Special thanks to ABC's senior cultural advisor Miriam Corowa and Waskam Emelda Davis. 

SOURCES

Marilyn Lake, Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, Allen and Unwin, 2002  Ryan Butta, Blackbirding, Black Inc, 2026 

Tracey Banivanuar Mar, Stabilising violence in colonial rule: Settlement and the indentured labour trade in Queensland in the 1870s, Liverpool University Press, 2017 

Tracey Banivanuar Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2016   Faith Bandler and Len Fox, The Time was ripe: a history of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship (1956-69), 1983 

Faith Bandler oral history interview by Carolyn Craig, MLOH 307, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales 

Faith Bandler, ASIO file: Mitchell Library 3/55. FCAATSI 

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