[a][3][4][5][6] She was born on a cattle station later identified in her official biography as De Rose Hill[7] in the far north of South Australia (now in the APY Lands,[6] not far from Iwantja).
She was the fifth of six children of Tom O'Donoghue, a stockman and pastoral lease holder of Irish descent,[7] and Lily, an Aboriginal woman whose tribal name was Yunamba.
[9] Tom O'Donoghue had joined his older brother Mick in central Australia in 1920, and broke horses at Granite Downs until 1923 when he was granted a 1,166-square-kilometre (450 sq mi) pastoral lease at De Rose Hill.
Mick handed the boys over to missionaries of the United Aborigines Mission (UAM) at Oodnadatta before they turned four years of age.
[11] In March 1927, Tom O'Donoghue handed his first two children – three-year-old Eileen and the infant Geoffrey – to the UAM at Oodnadatta,[12] and the following month the mission moved 700 km (430 mi) south to Quorn in the Flinders Ranges, where the mission, named the Colebrook Home, was established in a cottage above the town.
After a long struggle to win admission to train at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH), including lobbying the premier of South Australia (Thomas Playford[16]) and others in government,[6] in 1954 she became a nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital (one source claims she was the first Aboriginal person to become such).
[15][16] In 1994 she said: "I'd resolved that one of the fights was to actually open the door for Aboriginal women to take up the nursing profession, and also for those young men to get into apprenticeships".
Due to the nearby Sino-Indian War she was advised by the Australian government to evacuate to Calcutta, from where she would depart for her return to Australia.
She later transferred to the SA Department of Aboriginal Affairs and was employed as a welfare officer[23] based mainly in the north of the state, in particular at Coober Pedy.
[16][27] In 1990, O'Donoghue was appointed Chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a position she held until 1996.
[28] Attending a cabinet meeting in 1991, she used the occasion to put forward ATSIC's position with regard to the government's response to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
[25] On 24 January 2000, O'Donoghue was the first Indigenous person to give the annual national address as part of Australia Day celebrations.
[24] She was the patron of a number of health, welfare, and social justice organisations over the years, including Reconciliation South Australia, the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre at the University of South Australia, the Don Dunstan Foundation, and CATSINaM (Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives).
[39] In 2005 or 2006,[16] O'Donoghue was invested as a Dame of the Order of St Gregory the Great (DSG) by Pope John Paul II.
[53] Both the Institute and the CRCs have led reform in Indigenous health research, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people determining the outcomes.
[55] The Institute provides project grants for up to three years to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations or groups undertaking research focused on improving Indigenous health and wellbeing.
The Foundation is a charitable organisation which seeks funding for scholarships to assist Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people to pursue nursing studies or to work in the public service sector; and to build an archive and educational resources relating to O'Donoghue's life and achievements.
[6] She cited Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu, Don Dunstan, and Paul Keating as having provided inspiration to her, and also praised the Fraser government for having passed the Land Rights Act in 1976.
[25] Featured on ABC Television's Compass in 1997, O'Donoghue said that she felt "angry about the policy that removed us and also took away our culture, took away our language and took away our families... [and] about the mission authorities for not in fact keeping in touch with my mother and at least sending her some photographs so she could know that we were OK and what we looked like".
[59] O'Donoghue retired from public life in 2008, and in her later years was cared for by her family on Kaurna land in South Australia.
[60][59][6] On 8 March 2024, a state funeral was held in St Peter’s Cathedral in North Adelaide, which was attended by prime minister Anthony Albanese,[61] Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, governor-general of Australia David Hurley, South Australian premier Peter Malinauskas, and governor of South Australia Frances Adamson, Lowitja Foundation chair Pat Anderson, and hundreds of relatives, friends, and supporters.