Neville
Bonner becomes the first ever Indigenous Australian to have a place
in the parliament while he was filling a senate vacancy.
He was poor and experienced unemployment and discrimination. As a politician he worked to improve conditions for Aborigines and became a voice for his people for twelve years.
He felt he was not treated as an equal to the other members of the parliament and left the Liberal Party in 1983. He ran for the Senate as an Independent but was unsuccessful.
"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 try to change the law."
"For the first time in the history of this country there was an aboriginal voice in the parliament and that gave me an enormous feeling of overwhelming responsibility. I made people aware, the lawmakers in this country, I made them aware of indigenous people. I think that was an achievement."