Lowitja O'Donoghue - Personal Life

Personal Life

Lowitja O'Donoghue was the fifth of six children of the de facto marriage of Tom and Lily O'Donoghue. Her father was a stockman of Irish descent. Her mother, Lily (no known surname), was a member of the Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal tribe of northwest South Australia. Tom and Lily met while he was working at Everard Park cattle station which lay on traditional land of that clan. Lily had Luritja clan and language connections and late in life moved to their lands near Oodnadatta.

After living at Everard Park, where they had two children, the O'Donoghues moved in 1925 to Granite Downs, a large cattle property bordering the east of the Stuart Highway in the far north of South Australia. Their four youngest children were born here including Lowitja on 1 August 1932. Lowitja was baptised by a pastor from the United Aborigines' Mission. Her parents were concerned for the welfare and education of their children in such an isolated location as Granite Downs where there was no school, and at an early age the children were taken by their parents to the United Aborigines' Mission in Oodnadatta run by the Baptist Church. From here they were moved to the recently opened Colebrook Children's Home in Quorn run by the Mission. Lowitja was one of the five O'Donoghue children educated there. According to the Home's records she arrived just before the age of three.

In 1979, she married Gordon Smart, a medical orderly at the Repatriation Hospital whom she had first met in 1964. He died in 1992. Following her retirement O'Donoghue formally added the name Lowitja to her existing legal name to give emphasis to her Aboriginal Luritja clan descent.