10. Frank Brennan SJ AO

Frank Brennan SJ AO

(Australian Jesuit Province Archives)

b. 6 March 1954; voted a National Living Treasure in 1997

Selected positions held

Australian Reconciliation Convention rapporteur

Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation ambassador

Australian Catholic University: Professor of Law

ANU College of Law adjunct professor

National Centre for Indigenous Studies adjunct professor

University of New South Wales visiting professional fellow

Selected awards and honours

1995 Officer of the Order of Australia (AO)

1996 Australian Council for Overseas Aid (AFCOA) Human Rights Award

2002 Humanitarian Overseas Service Medal

Prime Minister Paul Keating derided him as ‘that meddling priest’ because he dared to speak up for Indigenous land rights.  Kevin Rudd later praised him for being ‘an ethical burr in the nation’s saddle’.  As one of Australia’s leading human rights advocates and writers, Father Frank Brennan would probably plead guilty to being both of those.  Never one to hold back in speaking out for the marginalised, his work has helped shape the national agenda by furthering the legal and welfare concerns of Indigenous people, highlighting the plight of refugees and asylum seekers, and advocating in the areas of civil liberties and ethics.  He has advanced the caused of Indigenous policy, marriage equality, the ordination of women and the question of celibacy in the priesthood by speaking not only of his position but by explaining to the public at large the hurdles faced in both legal and religious frameworks.

Francis Tenison Brennan was born the eldest of seven children to parents Gerard, a barrister, and Patricia (nee O’Hara), an anesthetist, in Queensland.  The family were committed Catholics with an impressive pedigree in legal, church and public circles.  His grandfather Frank had been a Labor member of Parliament and a judge, and Gerard would later become the chief justice of the High Court of Australia and write the lead judgement in the Mabo case.  Brennan’s early childhood was a happy one; he admired his parents enormously and credits them with shaping his destiny.  Of his mother he has said, ‘I think she’s a woman who’s truly extraordinary…I remember once getting into serious trouble from a woman law professor because I’d given an interview pointing out that my mother was of course more intelligent than my father.  This professor said to me that this was not the done thing because my father was a High Court judge’. Of his father: ‘For me his real greatness was always in his absolute integrity, the extraordinary nature of his faith and his capacity to be able to see that the law had a role to play in enunciating justice, particularly for those on the edges.’

After finishing his schooling at Downlands Sacred Heart College in Toowoomba, Brennan studied arts and law at the University of Queensland, graduating with honours.  From an early age he had an idea of what he wanted to do: ‘For many years I thought about becoming a priest.  I mean even while I was going through school I thought that I eventually would become a priest…I’d always felt some calling in that way.’ He went on to graduate, also with honours, from the Melbourne College of Divinity and was ordained as a priest in 1985.  His choice to become a Jesuit lay with the order’s commitment to social justice: the importance placed on the relationship between faith and action resonated with him.  Brennan also gained a Master of Laws from the University of Melbourne.  For a year he worked as an associate for High Court Justice Sir William Deane, who was to become Australia’s twenty-second governor-general.

For the celebration of this first mass Brennan chose Brisbane’s Musgrave Park, a site well known as a gathering place for the local Indigenous people.  His first post was working in Redfern alongside activist Father Ted Kennedy and ‘Mum Shirl’ Smith.  Their focus was to improve Indigenous health conditions and access to legal advocacy services.  Brennan has never minced words on Indigenous disadvantage: ‘It’s still an appalling situation that there are health statistics where Aboriginal people live in Fourth World conditions in a First World country.  There are two key things that are needed.  One of course is participation with the local Indigenous community, but the second is resources and it means very big resources, far greater resources that have ever been committed by an Australian government, in order to delivery meaningful health services to very small, very remote communities.’  Brennan is also outspoken on the brutal reality of incarceration rates for Indigenous people: ‘The statistics are always horrifying in relation to Indigenous people in Australia and the criminal justice system.  Basically, you’ve still got to be a moral hero to survive as a young Indigenous person in contemporary Australia and, that being the case, they are people who are far more likely to run into trouble.  That then results, even though prison might be said to be a last resort, where you’ve got young people who feel very alienated from two societies.’

Brennan became the founding director of Uniya Jesuit Social Justice Centre in 1989.  The first of its kind in New South Wales, it was based in Sydney’s Kings Cross and conducted a range of research and advocacy efforts on behalf of marginalised groups.  From 1994 to 1996, he was a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University in the United States and the first visiting fellow at its Center for Australian, New Zealand & Pacific Studies.  This period included time in the Philippines, Cambodia and Uganda on study trips.  Starting in 2000, Brennan spent eighteen months as director of the Jesuit Refugee Services in East Timor, which aimed to repatriate East Timorese refugees from West Timor and to set up basic health and education services in the devastated fledgling nation.  Back in Australia, he chaired the National Human Rights Consultation committee, examining human rights and associated protections under the law and whether Australia needed a bill of rights.  Its report was handed to the federal government in 2009.  Brennan’s activism for Indigenous Australians is unremitting, in particular the need for constitutional recognition of the nation’s first people: ‘The constitution is our constitution, it’s the constitution of all Australians, and there can be no change unless we’re all at the table.’

The Queensland University of Technology and UNSW have both awarded Brennan honorary doctorates.  His 1995 AO was ‘for services to Aboriginal Australians, particularly as an advocate in the areas of law, social justice and reconciliation.’ In 2016, he became chief executive officer at Catholic Social Services Australia.

Brennan is the author of many books, which he says he have been driven to write largely ‘because I never know who will ultimately read my written words nor how they will be assisted by them in their search for justice.’