Faith Blandler

Faith Blandler, 83, was born in 1920, the second youngest of eight children.

At the age of sixteen, Faith left school, completed a dressmaker's apprenticeship and moved to Sydney.

In 1952, Faith married an engineer named Hans Bandler and they raised a daughter named Lilon.

Faith's father worked in the cane fields for fourteen years. When he eventually escaped he married a Scottish-Indian woman. Faith's father died when Faith was only four, and was left to be raised in a large by her mother and aunts and uncles.

During WWII, when Faith served in the Australian Woman's Land Army and worked on farms growing food to feed the Australian's fighting overseas, it was then she realized that her people were not being treated equally.

Faith and the other Aboriginal women the same work as the white women but the were getting paid less, so it was the Faith started to fight for Aboriginal rights. Faith helped begin the Aboriginal Australian Fellowship, a group that aimed to gain Aboriginal rights. In the nineteen-fifties two women, Jesse Street and Pearl Gibbs joined Faith in turning the ignorance towards Indigenous Australians the other way. Evan though it was a slow process more people, black and white, were getting involved.

Faiths also help to start petitions calling on the government to hold a referendum. Thousands signed.

In 1967, the government finely decided to agree.

The referendum was asking people to vote Ð''yes' or Ð''no' to if they wanted the Australian Constitution changed so that Indigenous Australians had the same rights as everyone else. The votes were counted to find that ninety percent of the people voted Ð''yes' for the Indigenous Australians rights!