One People of Australia League
The One People of Australia League was an Australian Aboriginal political grouping in the 1960s and the 1970s. In contrast to the more radical and left-wing bodies advocating for indigenous sovereignty at the time, OPAL was for most of its existence overtly assimilationist, advocating for the integration of Aboriginal Australians into mainstream white culture.History
OPAL was founded by white Australians in 1961 in order to facilitate the integration of Aboriginal people in Queensland into a single "multicultural" society. Conservative in outlook from the start, it declined to affiliate itself with the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, with which it had significant ideological differences. It also had a long standing rivalry with the Queensland Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, which it saw as subversive and communist. Senate Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous Australian elected to parliament, was president of OPAL from 1968 to 1974.
