I met Faith Bandler in 2007. I was making a radio documentary for the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, when an overwhelming majority of Australians voted to change the constitution.

A lead campaigner for the "yes" vote, Faith was a radical in her own way: a socialist with an ASIO file, who with Aboriginal activist Pearl Gibbs and Jessie Street formed the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, an independent grassroots organisation that sold buttons to finance its activities.

Her ideas weren't radical enough for some, particularly after the historic vote in 1967.

We had something in common: she was born up my way, at Tumbulgum, on a bend in the Tweed River north of Murwillumbah and south of Tweed Heads, so I nervously asked her if she remembered the Brownings, in particular my great-great aunts. "Oh yes," she said, "they had beautiful singing voices." She elongated the "beautiful", holding the syllables like a musical note.

"Give us equality in all states": a demand that led to the historic vote. ( Supplied: Chicka Dixon Collection, AIATSIS )

We sat together in the front room of her home in Turramurra, set in the bush in Sydney's northern suburbs. She was dressed in a flowing muumuu, both imperious and magisterial in a reclining armchair. Her head quivered slightly when she spoke.

"The most difficult part about that campaign was to get people to support the idea and be involved in it," she told me.

"Very few people were involved in getting that legislative change — I'm speaking of Aboriginal people — because it was a matter of getting food on the table. It was a very bad time for the Aboriginal people prior to '67, very bad."

As I drew myself closer, I was struck by something: Faith was born in the same year as my grandmother, Mary Emzin. I have never met anyone so like my grandmother. They also shared a common heritage — in the traffic of human cargo from the islands of Vanuatu — without being burdened by it.

I knew I was imposing on her as she gave interviews quite rarely at this time. Her daughter Lilon, with whom I'd been in infrequent contact for a few years, had put in a good word for me.

Faith Bandler, Lilon Bandler, and Reverend George Garnsey at a Census Day demonstration. ( Supplied: Jack Horner Collection, AIATSIS )

In the late 90s, as a young triple j news reporter, I'd been drafted to produce obituaries for some leading Aboriginal people, and Faith was one of those nominated.

It was extremely presumptuous, because Faith lived on for at least another 15 years. And of course Faith wasn't Aboriginal — she was the daughter of a South Sea Islander, Wacvie Mussingkon, who as a 12-year-old was brought to Australia from Vanuatu to work as an indentured labourer in the Queensland canefields.

Faith offered me a cup of tea, and when I said yes, she bolted upright in that reclining armchair and called out to her husband Hans in that lilting soprano voice of hers: "Hans! Haaa-aaans!"

As the tea sat undrunk, I set up my equipment, toyed with the mic, cursorily explained my line of questioning, and hit record.

The ABC had just issued us with new digital recording devices, a box-fresh black Marantz. It was the first time I'd used a digital recorder. You had to hit save when you paused and it was halfway through the interview that I realised I'd lost most of what I'd recorded.

Faith Bandler attends a demonstration at Parliament House in 1965. ( Supplied: Chicka Dixon Collection, AIATSIS )

What I did capture was the drive for social justice that compelled this extraordinary woman. For Faith, the racism and the deliberate exclusion inherent in those two sections of the constitution was glaring.

"See, new people were coming in to Australia and were immediately acquiring all the rights of Australian citizenship and here you had the first people deprived of it. I mean — it was too ridiculous for words."

Her eyes flashed a few times during the interview. It didn't take much to light the activist fire, although here she was, in her 89th year.

"Well, the constitution had to be changed — there was no question about that."

Faith had helped established the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in 1956 to lobby for legislative change, and was secretary when the referendum campaign began.

"When I said to them: 'Well, we have to change the constitution,' I think they thought I was mad," she said.

"Here were we, about four or five people, the poorest little group functioning in Australia, I'm sure, talking about having to change the federal constitution."

The "yes" vote in 1967 secured two seemingly minor but fundamental changes: the repeal of a section which disallowed the reckoning, or counting, of Aboriginal people in the Commonwealth census, and the extension of the race power, which granted the Commonwealth the power to legislate on behalf of Aboriginal people, previously exercised by the states.

I could sense Faith's disappointment at the eventual outcome of the 1967 referendum — and her incredulity at the lack of political will to go beyond mere constitutional reform.

In the 1990s, when the Commonwealth was asked to intervene over the construction of a bridge near Goolwa in South Australia, to an island in the Murray said to be the site of sacred women's business, there was legal argument about the extent of the so-called "race power" granted to the Commonwealth after the 1967 referendum.

A battery of High Court judges decided that the race power did not limit the Commonwealth to legislating for the benefit of Aboriginal people — it could make special laws to their detriment.

The bitter, excoriating dispute went all the way to the High Court, with the Ngarrindjeri claimants in the case invoking the race power in their appeal, in a bid to stop the construction of the bridge.

That appeal was denied, and in 1997, the Howard government introduced its own legislation to allow the bridge to proceed, excising the island from the Racial Discrimination Act.

Lilon Bandler, the daughter of Faith and Hans, lectures at the University of Sydney. ( ABC RN: Roi Hubermann )

"For many people, including for her, that was a terrible betrayal," says her daughter Lilon.

"That was because there'd been an act of trust: we hand over power to people in an expectation that they will do the right thing by us. Those decisions that were clearly not in the best interests of Aboriginal people I think were seen as a betrayal not only of trust, but an obligation and a responsibility."

Faith had little time for the former prime minister, John Howard, who when I met her was in the final months of his last term. In the lead-up to the 40th anniversary of the referendum, a government-funded media campaign — and its slogan — urged Australians to think positively about the 1967 "yes" vote.

"'Recapturing the spirit of 1967' — well what does it mean?" Faith asked. "The power is in his hands, and he has the power to create the right changes.

"A prime minister should just get on with the job, and make sure people are treated fairly regardless of who they are."

As we spoke, the Howard government was preparing to introduce a controversial raft of legislation, the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which hinged on the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act in what the government termed "prescribed communities".

According to Faith's daughter, the old activist was disturbed by those events.

"It troubled her deeply," says Lilon, a doctor lecturing in Indigenous health at the University of Sydney.

"One is troubled because it is, in and of itself, poor decision-making, but also because it came out of those powers that were handed to the Federal Government through that referendum."

In 2007, I baldly asked Faith Bandler why — as a South Sea Islander woman — she felt compelled to speak out about Aboriginal rights, and to advocate for constitutional reform for the first people.

"It depends on a person's sense of justice."