Saunders, Justine Florence

▪ 2008

      Australian Aboriginal actress

born Feb. 20, 1953 , near Rockhampton, Queen., Australia

died April 15, 2007 , Windsor, near Sydney, Australia

rejected being typecast in stereotypical Aboriginal roles and instead played a wide range of strong women over a 30-year career (1974–2004). Her best-known characters were in the television miniseries Women of the Sun (1981) and the films The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and The Fringe Dwellers (1986); the latter earned her a best actress nomination from the Australian Film Institute. She was also a cofounder of the indigenous Black Theatre and the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust. Saunders, a member of the Woppaburra people, was forcibly removed from her home at age 11 and sent to a teaching convent for several years as part of a government resettlement program. She received the Order of Australia in 1991 for services to the performing arts, but in 2000 she reluctantly returned it to protest the federal government's insensitive handling of “the stolen generation” and the cruel treatment of her distraught mother, who had spent years searching for her “stolen” daughter.

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