Faith Bandler

Faith Bandler, AC (27 September 1918 – 13 February 2015; née Ida Lessing Faith Mussing) was an Australian civil rights activist of South Sea Islander and Scottish-Indian heritage. She was a campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders. Bandler was best known for her leadership in the campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal Australians.

Bandler was born in Tumbulgum, New South Wales and raised on a farm near Murwillumbah. Her father had been blackbirded from Ambrym Island, Vanuatu, in 1883, at the age of about 13. He was then sent to Mackay, Queensland before being sent to work on a sugar cane plantation. He later escaped and married Bandler's mother, a Scottish-Indian woman from New South Wales.

Her father, Wacvie Mussingkon, son of Baddick and Lessing Mussingkon, was taken as a boy in 1883 from Biap, on the island of Ambrym in what is now Vanuatu. His abduction was part of blackbirding, the practice which brought cheap labour to help establish the Australian sugar industry. He was later known as Peter Mussing, a lay preacher and worked on a banana plantation outside Murwillumbah. He died when Bandler was five years old.

Bandler cited stories of her father's harsh experience as a slave labourer as a strong motivation for her activism. In 1934, Bandler left school and moved to Sydney, where she worked as a dressmaker's apprentice.

During World War II, Bandler and her sister Kath served in the Australian Women's Land Army, working on fruit farms. Bandler and Indigenous workers received less pay than white workers. After being discharged in 1945, she started to campaign for equal pay for Indigenous workers. After the war, Bandler moved to the Sydney suburb of Kings Cross.

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