Indigenous Australia

Aunty Veronica Brodie

Family photograph

Veronica Brodie (1941–2007), Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri community leader and activist, was born on 15 January 1941 on Ngarrindjeri Country at Raukkan (Point McLeay), an Aboriginal mission station on the southern shores of Lake Alexandrina, South Australia. She was the youngest of five surviving children of Dan Wilson and his wife Rebecca (1897–1973), née Harris, known as Koomi. Through her mother she was the great-granddaughter of Lartelare Rebecca Spender (1851–1916), a Kaurna matriarch known as a keeper of the black swans, and George Spender, a Ngarrindjeri man born at a ration station near the Kurrangk (Coorong). Veronica’s ngartjis (totems) were the nori (pelican) on her Ngarrindjeri side and the kudlyo (black swan) on her Kaurna side.

Lartelare was born at a campsite on the bank of Yerta Bulti (Port River, now Port Adelaide River) in 1851. Life on the peninsula between the river, mangroves, and the ocean was abundant with good food, water, shelter, and ceremony. In the late 1850s Europeans changed the flow of the river to suit their trade and commerce, flooding the campsite that had existed for thousands of years. Lartelare’s family was forced to move to Glanville on the other side of the river, a place of clear freshwater wells within the boundaries of Glanville Hall (also known as Hart’s Cottage), owned by Captain John Hart and his wife Margaret. As a young woman Lartelare worked as a domestic slave at Glanville Hall. She married George Spender; their daughter, Laura Glanville, was born in 1880, named after her Kaurna birthplace. Laura also worked for the Hart family, walking every day from their camp to Hart’s Cottage to cook, clean, and wash.

In 1891 the Glanville site was acquired by the Colonial Sugar Refinery Co. (CSR) and Lartelare’s family and other Aboriginal people were once again forced off their land. They were shunted between fringe camps, walking up and down the coast, and to and from the city of Adelaide, begging for food and rations. During this time Laura and her Ngarrindjeri husband, Jacob Harris, lived in a fringe camp at Colley Reserve, Glenelg, and in January 1897 Aunty Veronica’s mother, Rebecca Harris, was born. Eventually housing became available and the whole family were able to move to Raukkan, where they lived for many years.

The Aborigines’ Friends’ Association had established Raukkan as a mission station in 1859, and control passed to the State government in 1916. Veronica had fond memories of growing up in a house on ‘Top Row’ at Raukkan. Her mother worked as a domestic servant and her father worked in the government store. She was educated at the mission school and also attended Sturt Street Primary School, Adelaide, for short periods.

The school at Raukkan only went to Grade 7. For most children at the mission station that was the limit of their education, but Veronia was part of a small group sent to the city to continue their schooling. She did not want to leave her family, but the South Australian Aborigines Protection Board (APB) persuaded her parents that it was in her best interests. Aged fourteen she was sent to live at Tanderra, a girls’ home run by the United Aborigines Mission at Parkside, where she attended Unley Girls’ Technical High School. After gaining an Intermediate certificate in 1958, she commenced nursing training, but quickly decided it was not for her. The APB found work for her as a domestic servant, which she was compelled to take, but it did not suit her either. Following her own path, she trained as a telephonist and began working as a switchboard operator for the Postmaster-General’s Department in Adelaide in 1959.

During this time Veronica met her future husband, Jim Brodie. Brodie had an Aboriginal mother and a white father, but he was classified as a white person, having been exempted from the provisions of the South Australian Aborigines Act as a child. When they got married at the Adelaide Registry Office on 6 October 1961, Veronica, ‘with the mere stroke of a pen … [became] white’ (Brodie [2002] 2007, 89). As an exempted person she was no longer subject to control by the APB; however, to prove her status, she was required to carry her exemption certificate, known as a ‘dog-tag,’ at all times, a ‘humiliating’ (Brodie [2002] 2007, 87) experience. It also meant she could not ‘consort’ with Aboriginal people, including her family, or visit the mission without the APB’s special permission. When legislative reform in the mid-1960s dismantled the framework of APB control, she became ‘Aboriginal again’ (Brodie [2002] 2007, 99). Such experiences fed her determination to retain her Aboriginal culture and identity and fight against injustice.

Veronica and Jim had five children: Margaret (b. 1962), Colleen (b. 1963), Michael (b. 1965), Kathy (b. 1966), and Leona (b. 1968). They separated in 1968 but remained on good terms and resumed their relationship in the mid-1980s. Just as Veronica’s great-grandmother and grandmother had worked as domestics, so did her mother Koomi, including for the premier of South Australia, Don Dunstan. During the 1960s Koomi was an active member of the Council for Aboriginal Women in South Australia (CAWSA) alongside Kaurna and Ngadjuri leader Aunty Gladys Elphick, working tirelessly for rights and to raise the status of Aboriginal people in the community. Veronica was strongly influenced by the unwavering work of CAWSA. Her activism and advocacy ranged from social justice and rights-based campaigns for Aboriginal housing and education through to defending and reclaiming cultural heritage.

In 1970 Veronica became an Aboriginal education worker, confronting racism and teaching Aboriginal culture at Taperoo Primary School. With her sister, Dorothy Leila Rankine (1932–1993), she was a leading figure in the establishment of the Adelaide Aboriginal Orchestra (later the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide) in 1972. The next year she was among the first intake of students at the Aboriginal Community College (later Taoundi College), Port Adelaide. In 1975 she and Leila acted in the film Sister, If You Only Knew. Later they worked on Wrong Side of the Road (1981), a social-realist drama about two Aboriginal rock bands, highlighting the daily discrimination, harassment, and injustices endured by Aboriginal people at that time. They helped with scriptwriting, acting, and ‘generally [keeping] the whole production together’ (FilmNews 1981, 8).

During the 1980s Veronica worked as a coordinator and field officer for the Aboriginal Sobriety Group, running soup kitchens and looking after residents at the women’s rehabilitation hostel at Alberton and the men’s hostel at Glandore. She visited India in 1988 as part of a study tour funded by Community Aid Abroad. In the early 1990s she worked at Kura Yerlo, an Aboriginal community centre at Largs Bay, cooking meals for kindergarten children. Illness forced her to give up working there in around 1993; however, after a short break, she threw herself into committee work, helping to set up an Aboriginal health unit, serving on the Aboriginal Housing Board of South Australia (later the South Australian Aboriginal Housing Advisory Council), visiting Aboriginal prisoners in gaol, and helping Aboriginal people connect with their families.

In the mid-1990s Veronica played a central role in the struggle to stop the construction of a bridge linking the South Australian mainland to Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island). Alongside many Ngarrindjeri women, she fought to defend their sacred sites from being desecrated. The women were subjected to a vicious campaign of sexist and racist vilification from politicians, big business, and the media. This culminated in the controversial 1995 Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission into the validity of Ngarrindjeri women’s spiritual beliefs, which found the women to be fabricators. The bridge opened in 2001. That year the Federal Court, in Chapman v. Luminis Pty Ltd, rejected the findings of the royal commission, vindicating the women and validating their beliefs regarding the cultural and spiritual significance of the Kumarangk lands and waters.

Veronica was recognised as the NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islander Day Observance Committee) South Australian Aboriginal Elder of the Year in 2001. Her autobiographical oral history, told to Mary Anne Gale, My Side of the Bridge, was published the following year. In 2005 she formed the Lartelare Glanville Land Action Group in response to plans to build luxury apartments on the former CSR factory site at Glanville. Given the site’s cultural heritage significance, and to honour her great-grandmother’s birthplace, she campaigned for Lartelare’s descendants to be recognised as the custodians of the area, and for the development of a Kaurna community cultural centre, not private waterfront housing. Although unsuccessful, the protest resulted in the creation of Lartelare Reserve, a sculpture park honouring Lartelare’s birthplace with Veronica’s family story embedded in the landscape. It opened in 2009, two years after Veronica died in Adelaide on 31 May 2007. In June 2025 the Yitpi Yartapuultiku (Soul of Port Adelaide) Aboriginal Cultural Centre opened on the banks of the river in Port Adelaide at the original Kaurna campsite. The centre realises Veronica’s vision for a living cultural centre grounded in Kaurna country.

Survived by her husband and three daughters, Aunty Veronica is remembered as a fierce advocate and voice for Aboriginal justice, land rights, cultural heritage, and truth-telling. Her legacy lives on in the many communities and organisations she worked with and helped to establish throughout her decades of activism, and through her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, who carry on her teachings through weaving, language, and welcomes, standing strong in their Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri identity.

Natalie Harkin is Narungga and Denise Noack is of German descent. Both were born on Kaurna Yerta, the Country on which this article was written. Natalie and Denise consulted Aunty Veronica’s family in researching and writing this article.