Isobelle Mary Ferguson
Australian nurse and activist (1926-2019)
Isobelle Mary Ferguson (18 February 1926 – 15 August 2019), also known as Isobelle McCallum and Isobelle Kent, was an Aboriginal Australian nurse and activist. She was the daughter of activist and leader Bill Ferguson, and was the first known Aboriginal person to train at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Camperdown, Sydney. She was active in the Aboriginal Affairs Association and the Aboriginal Affairs Association in the 1960s, and joined the Freedom Ride across regional New South Wales in 1965.
Early life and education
Isobelle Mary Ferguson was born on 18 February 1926 at Euabalong, New South Wales. She was the seventh of twelve children of Wiradjuri man William (Bill) Ferguson, shearer (later activist), and his wife Margaret Mathieson (née Gowan). Her father was a Wiradjuri man who worked as a sheep shearer and became a prominent activist, co-founding the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) along with Jack Patten in 1937.
The family moved to Dubbo in 1933, and Ferguson attended Dubbo High School.
Ferguson moved to Sydney in 1944, where she studied nursing at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in Camperdown. This made her the first known Aboriginal person to train there.
The Dubbo Liberal And Macquarie Advocate reported in August 1945 that Ferguson had completed the first year of her training as a nurse at Camperdown Children's Hospital, and was enjoying annual leave first with her mother at a holiday resort and then with her family at Dubbo.
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This entry incorporates text from “Isobelle Mary Ferguson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.