Thinkers Timeline

Oodgeroo Noonuccal was an Aboriginal Australian poet, activist, teacher, and artist. She was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of poetry. Her work helped shape modern Aboriginal political and cultural identity. She was born in 1920 on Stradbroke Island, off the coast of Queensland in eastern Australia. The island is called Minjerribah in her language. Her birth name was Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska. In 1988, the year of Australia's bicentennial, she changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal. 'Oodgeroo' is the Noonuccal word for 'paperbark', a tree common on her island. 'Noonuccal' is the name of her people. The name change was a public political act. She wanted a name that came from her own land, not from English colonisers. She grew up in poverty under harsh laws that controlled Aboriginal lives. Aboriginal Australians could not vote, marry without permission, or move freely. Her family lived on government rations. She left school at 13 to work as a domestic servant in white households. During World War II she joined the Australian Women's Army Service, one of the first Aboriginal women to do so. In 1964 she published her first poetry book, We Are Going. It sold out quickly. She became a major activist for Aboriginal rights. She helped lead the campaign for the 1967 referendum that finally allowed Aboriginal Australians to be counted as citizens. She wrote books for children, painted, and ran a cultural centre on her island. She died in 1993, aged 72. Her son Vivian taught and worked alongside her.

Peter Singer is an Australian philosopher. He is one of the most widely read living philosophers and one of the most controversial. He was born on 6 July 1946 in Melbourne, Australia. His parents were Austrian Jews who had escaped Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. Three of his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust. This family history shaped his lifelong concern with preventable suffering. He studied law, history, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, then went to Oxford for his graduate work. It was at Oxford in the early 1970s that he began serious work on the ethics of how humans treat animals. His 1975 book Animal Liberation became a founding text of the modern animal rights movement. It has sold over half a million copies and has been translated into many languages. He has taught at La Trobe University in Australia, Monash University, New York University, and since 1999 at Princeton University in the United States, where he holds the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics. His appointment at Princeton caused controversy. Disability rights activists protested some of his views on severely disabled newborns. He has written or edited more than forty books and hundreds of articles. His most influential are Animal Liberation (1975), Practical Ethics (1979), The Life You Can Save (2009), and The Most Good You Can Do (2015). He co-founded The Life You Can Save organisation, which encourages effective giving to reduce global poverty. He is one of the founding figures of the effective altruism movement. He is still active in his late seventies.