Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE (b. 1932), Indigenous rights campaigner, is a Yankunjatjara woman. Removed from her mother at the age of two, she was raised in a mission home and was a nurse before she joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1967. By 1975, she had become its regional director in South Australia. She was Foundation Chair of the National Aboriginal Conference in 1977 and chaired the Aboriginal Development Commission from 1989 to 1990. While Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission between 1990 and 1996, she helped to draft the Mabo legislation. She has five honorary doctorates and an honorary Professorial Fellowship, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Physicians. In 2005 she received the Papal honour of Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great. O’Donoghue was Australian of the Year in 1984.

 

Robert Hannaford was political cartoonist for the Adelaide Advertiser for three years, and took up portrait painting full-time following encouragement from the veteran South Australian portraitist, Sir Ivor Hele.  He has been a favourite in both the Archibald Prize - in which he has been a finalist seventeen times, and won the People’s Choice Award three times - and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, which he won in 1990.   

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