Australian Dictionary of Biography

Isobelle Mary Ferguson (1926–2019), nurse and activist, was born on 18 February 1926 at Euabalong, New South Wales, seventh of twelve children of Wiradjuri man William (Bill) Ferguson, shearer (later activist), and his wife Margaret Mathieson, née Gowan. The family settled permanently at Dubbo from 1933 and Isobelle attended Dubbo High School. She moved to Sydney in 1944 to study nursing at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Camperdown, becoming the first known Aboriginal person to train there. Her father, as founder and president of the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) (1937–45) and member of the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board (1944–49), had advocated for the training of Aboriginal nurses. In 1945 he proudly reported that ‘there were six fine Aboriginal nurses in Sydney now, his own daughter among them’ (Macleay Chronicle 1945, 4).

On 27 November 1947 Isobelle married John McCallum at the district registrar’s office, Annadale. They would have one child, a son named Owen. Isobelle worked at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital for the last six months of her nursing training, becoming registered as a double-certificated nurse in March 1949. In June that year her father stood as an independent candidate in the State election but was not successful. At the time it was reported that Isobelle was ‘a fully qualified nursing sister employed at St Ives Hospital, Sydney’ (Smith’s Weekly 1949, 6). Seven months later, when her father died, she was reportedly living in Melbourne.

By 1954 Isobelle and John were back in New South Wales and living at Warragamba. In 1958 they moved to Centennial Park, Sydney. Taking up her father’s mantle, Isobelle became honorary secretary in 1963–64 of the newly formed Aboriginal Affairs Association (later known as the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs or ‘Foundo’) and the re-formed APA. The APA had been wound down in 1944 but was revived by Herbert (Bert) Groves, Pearl Gibbs, and others. Both organisations were affiliated with the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA). Isobelle attended the 1964 FCAA conference as honorary State secretary and read the APA report. Earlier that year she had run, unsuccessfully, as a candidate for ‘the part-Aboriginal position’ (Dawn 1964, 5) on the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board.

In late 1964 Isobelle and her friend, the fellow nurse Joyce Mercy (later Clague), a Yaegl (Yaygirr) woman and vice-president of the APA, joined a three-week, seven-thousand-mile (11,265 km) tour of outback New South Wales, Queensland, and the Northern Territory. Interviewed by the Australian Women’s Weekly on her return, Isobelle explained that she had not experienced any colour prejudice in her life: ‘I’ve had such a wonderful family life not much different from any other Australian kid that I didn’t stop to think others mightn’t be having it so good’ (Smith 1965, 12). An experience at a café in Mount Isa gave her a taste of discrimination: ‘we had to wait … while everyone else was served, though we had our order in first’ (Smith 1965, 12). At Alice Springs she met a grazier who, not recognising her as Aboriginal, ‘began to run the native down. I couldn’t allow this, of course. “I am an aboriginal,” I told him’ (Smith 1965, 12). She was buoyed by the knowledge that there was a ‘growing awareness of aborigines’ and that ‘now, as never before, the aboriginal people are behind all bids to gain real and complete emancipation’ (Smith 1965, 12).

In February 1965 a group of students from the University of Sydney undertook a fifteen-day bus tour of western and coastal New South Wales towns to draw attention to the poor state of Aboriginal housing, education, and health. The Freedom Ride, as it became known, also exposed the extent of discrimination experienced by Aboriginal people in small-town Australia. Later, students and other activists from Sydney made follow-up visits to some of the towns, lending support to local Aboriginal campaigners and shining a light on the colour bar that prevented Aboriginal people from enjoying equal access to theatres and hotels. On the weekend of 27–29 August Isobelle joined an all-Aboriginal delegation led by the Arrernte and Kalkadoon man Charles Perkins, vice-president of the Foundo, instigator of the Freedom Ride, and an increasingly important voice in Aboriginal politics, that journeyed north to attempt to break the colour bar at Walgett’s Oasis Hotel. At a public meeting at the Returned Serviceman’s League on 28 August, Isobelle spoke on the importance of Aboriginal people uniting to support integration. That evening Perkins and a local Aboriginal man, Harry Hall, attended the Oasis but were refused service. Perkins’s bitter disappointment would fuel his later political activity in support of equal rights for Aboriginal people.

Isobelle was convenor of social activities at the APA’s Day of Mourning protest in March 1966. She divorced John in 1968, and married Francis George Kent at the Wayside Chapel of the Cross, Potts Point, on 22 October 1971. That year she and her new husband purchased Aminya Nursing Home in Caloundra, Queensland. After expanding it, they sold it in 1974, but Isobelle stayed on as matron until her retirement in 1986. Her second marriage was dissolved in 1976. Survived by Owen, she died on 15 August 2019.