Neville was to be publicly elected as a Queensland Senator in the four elections between 1972 and 1980. Reflecting on his career, he stated;

‘My first responsibility was to God, because I’m a Christian; my second responsibility was to my nation, because I’m an Australian; my third responsibility was to my state, because I’m a Queenslander; my fourth responsibility was to the party that I was a part of and who gave me the opportunity to get into Parliament.

But interwoven through the whole sequence was my almost all-consuming, burning desire to help my own people, the Aboriginal community, to become respected, responsible citizens within the broader Australian community, retaining, where desired, ethnic and cultural identity but having all of the opportunities that every Australian – other Australian – white Australian – takes for granted: education, employment, health, housing and social and economic standing within the community.’

It was a difficult combination of obligations,(5) and Neville was immediately placed in a position where his personal feelings must have conflicted with his public conduct. In July 1971, within weeks of his becoming a senator, the all-white South African rugby side, the Springboks, toured Australia. Impassioned anti-apartheid demonstrations took place everywhere they played. In Brisbane, hard on the heels of the third anti-Vietnam moratorium march that had taken place in the city at the end of June, then Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a state of emergency. This conferred extra powers on the city’s police in the leadup to the Brisbane clash on 31 July – to be played not at the usual Ballymore Oval, but the brick-walled Exhibition Grounds.

The Liberal government of William McMahon supported the tour. Neville could scarcely oppose it within weeks of his appointment. Soon after he left politics, however, he spoke of his detestation of apartheid and his personal experience of such a system in what he called the ‘penal settlement’ of Palm Island in the 1950s.(7)

NITV reported in 2021 that Neville said he knew he would be scrutinised for ‘the way I walked, the way I talked, the way I ate, the way I drank, everything . . . Everything I did was being judged, and the whole race was being judged on it . . . I felt I had a responsibility to prove that we Aboriginal people had the ability and the willpower to be able to handle any situation.’(8)

Between 1968 and 1971, as Neville was stepping up from a branch political membership level to the Federal level, a new group of Aboriginal activists emerged in Australia, advocating uncooperative strategies adapted from those of the American Black Power and Black Panther movements and informed by their readings of Malcolm X, Franz Fanon and others. It was to these people Nugget Coombs referred in early 1973, when he spoke of ‘the emergence of what might be called an Aboriginal intelligentsia . . . in Redfern and other urban centres’.(9)

Brisbane-based Noonuccal man Denis Walker, the charismatic leader of the Australian Black Panther chapter, was one of those who scorned the patient approach of well-known ‘older’ Australian Aboriginal leaders in favour of radical action.(10) In an article in the Bulletin in early 1972 Walker (later called Bejam Kunmunara Jarlow Nunukel Kabool) predicted that it was going to be a ‘far more militant’ year. ‘One thing that people haven’t done so far is challenge the laws . . . everything at every level of the system,’ he said. Neville, by contrast, was reported to have said ‘Unfortunately there are people who are impatient – who lean toward a more radical and violent policy . . . The Queensland Government is doing everything in its power to help the Aborigines . . . Of course there’s still plenty of room for improvement. I’m trying to do a lot in my own way through the right channels, through my parliamentary colleagues.’(1 1 and 12)

Fifty years later, it is clear that both measured and aggressive approaches contributed to positive change for First Nations people. But the 1970s was a difficult decade to be an Aboriginal person working collaboratively with powerful white conservatives. Neville was never the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, yet he was pursued for public comment on Aboriginal issues throughout his career. From January 1972, the media portrayed militant activists as the central figures at the Tent Embassy on Canberra’s King George Terrace, about fifty metres from the front steps of Neville’s workplace, Parliament House. Reporters delighted in winkling opposing comments out of the moderate Senator Bonner and the firebrands encamped across the road. In July 1972, a period of violent battles between the ACT police and occupants and demonstrators a Tent Embassy, Neville was reported as warning of an ‘upsurge of Black Power violence in Australia.(13) (Three years later, he spoke in the Senate of the ‘Trotskyists and other elements who have taken over the Aboriginal movement . . . [giving] firearms and hard drugs to young Aborigines.’)(14) Brisbane-based Pastor Don Brady, a Kuku Yalanji man and Neville’s close contemporary, encouraged young Queenslander Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to travel to the Embassy. Brady told the Bulletin ‘Look, about half a dozen Aborigines in Queensland have any confidence in [Neville Bonner]. He’s a party man.’