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Died 17 March 2015, Canberra, Australia | ||
June Patricia "Pat" Eatock (14 December 1937 – 17 March 2015) was an Australian indigenous activist and academic.
She was born in Redcliffe to Roderick Eatock, of Aboriginal and English descent, and Scottish migrant Elizabeth Stephenson Anderson. Having left school at the age of fourteen, she moved to Sydney at eighteen and married her cousin, Ron Eatock, with whom she had six children. In 1972 she attended a land rights conference in Alice Springs, after which she left her husband and moved to Canberra. In 1972 she was the first indigenous woman to stand for federal parliament, running unsuccessfully as an independent candidate for Australian Capital Territory. She was the first non-matriculated mature-aged student to study at the Australian National University in 1973, and graduated in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts. From 1978 to 1981 she was a project officer in the Aboriginal Unit of the Department of Social Security, and she was also a lecturer at Curtin University (1991–92, community development) and James Cook University (1997, Aboriginal studies). From 1992 to 1996 she established and managed Perleeka Aboriginal Television.
In 2011, Eatock was the lead litigant in a case against conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, in which she and others sued Bolt under the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) following a column alleging that fair-skinned indigenous Australians identified as Aboriginals for monetary gain. The court found for Eatock against Bolt, leading to widespread controversy and a campaign to amend the RDA. Eatock died in 2015.