The most famous married couple who worked towards Reconciliation were undoubtedly Hans and Faith Bandler.
Faith Bandler, whose original name was Ida Lessing Faith Mussing, was born in September 1918 in Tumbulgum NSW. Her Pasifika father Wacvie had been kidnapped from an island in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) when he was 12 years old and brought to Australia, where he was forced to work as an enslaved person in sugarcane fields. He met her mother, an Australian of Scottish and Indian descent, after he escaped slavery in 1897. Faith attended high school in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, where she encountered racial abuse from other students.
During World War II she joined the Australian Women’s Land Army and after the war worked in a shirt factory. She became involved with activist circles in Sydney’s Kings Cross and in 1951 participated in the Unity Dance Group, performing in Europe as the lead in “The Dance of the Aboriginal Girl”. This dance was based on a poem about racial discrimination in the South of the United States called ‘The Merry Go Round,’ by the popular Harlem Renaissance writer, Langston Hughes.
In 1952 Faith returned to Australia. She met Austrian Jewish refugee Hans Bandler at an Australian Peace Council musical evening, where she was a speaker and he, a member of the Sydney Film Society, screened documentaries about Aboriginal culture.
Hans had been born in Vienna in 1914. After graduating in mechanical engineering, he worked as an engineer and taught English as a sideline. He had joined the student Labour Club and the Socialist Youth Movement and the combination of his Jewish background and political activism made him a target when the Nazis were welcomed into Vienna in March 1938. He was ordered to scrub street walls and pavements, while caustic soda was poured over his hands. The same year he was taken to the concentration camp at Dachau. Later he was sent to Buchenwald.
Hans’ aunt paid a large bribe to obtain travel papers for his release and he never spoke of his time in the camps. He travelled to Australia by boat, carrying with him a German typewriter, a ring, and his education. In Australia he took jobs washing dishes before working on the design of a Holden car assembly plant in Sydney. When his Austrian qualifications were not recognised, he enrolled in a civil engineering diploma course at the Sydney Technical College.
Wanting to contribute personally to the fight against fascism, Hans tried to enlist in the Australian army, but was told he was classified as an ‘enemy alien’. His application to the RAAF was similarly rejected. He finally joined the Ministry of Munitions and became an Australian citizen, working for the Hydro-Electric Commission in Tasmania before Cold War persecution led to his sacking and return to Sydney.
The 1952 Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship brought Hans and Faith together again. They met at concerts at Sydney Town Hall and Hans showed Faith a block of land he had bought in Frenchs Forest, with architect’s plans. He started to build in his spare time; soon she joinined him. They married in 1952, with Margaret Fulton providing the wedding breakfast, and had a daughter, Lilon, in 1954.
Today Associate Professor Lilon Bandler introduces herself as the granddaughter of a slave and the daughter of a refugee. She says it was when her mother noticed that the women in the Land Army were paid less than men, and that Aboriginal labourers were paid less again, that her outrage at injustice and her political activism were ignited. She also credits her father’s role of breadwinner and his moral support of Faith’s activism as crucial underpinnings of her mother’s life-long political work.
Working with the Australian Peace Council Faith met the courageous Aboriginal activist, Pearl Gibbs and in 1956 formed with her the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship. In 1957 it launched a petition campaign to the federal government, requesting a referendum on the sections of the constitution that discriminated against Aborigines. It took ten years of advocacy, led largely by Faith, for the referendum to be put and when it was, in 1967, more than 90 per cent of Australians agreed to end constitutional discrimination against Indigenous peoples. Faith was instrumental in getting the Australian federal government to recognize Indigenous peoples in the national census and to remove language from the Australian constitution that discriminated against them.
By the 1970s, Faith was a much-loved public figure who testified to the long history of racist oppression in Australia. In later life she received many awards and honours including the Australian Human Rights Medal from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in 1997, and a ‘Meritorious Award in Honour and Gratitude for a Life of Courageous Advocacy for Justice and for Indigenous People, for Human Rights, for Love and Reconciliation’ in 2000 from the Sydney Peace Foundation, presented by Nelson Mandela. In 2009, she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, Australia’s highest honour.
Hans and Faith Bandler bore witness to two great struggles of the 20th century: the war against Nazism in Europe and the campaign in Australia for equality and justice for our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Hans passed away in 2009 and Faith in 2015.