Title : Even Patrick Dodson is answering citizenship questions
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Even Patrick Dodson is answering citizenship questions
It has come to this. Even a First Australian, descendant of the oldest living culture on Earth, has faced questions about whether he is eligible under the constitution to sit in the national parliament.
Patrick Dodson, known by many as the father of reconciliation, is renowned for his work as an Aboriginal advocate.
He says he is an Australian through and through, but public references to his father John "Snowy" Dodson having Irish heritage saw the senator fielding questions this week about whether he too could be a dual-national by descent.
Six politicians have already fallen foul of the dual-national constitutional crisis, including the former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce and former president of the Senate Stephen Parry.
Others have a cloud over their citizenship or the time taken to renounce an overseas link.
Senator Dodson — also a former Roman Catholic priest — has released a statement to the ABC outlining his Australian roots.
"I am an Australian. My father was an Australian. He was born in Launceston, Tasmania," Mr Dodson wrote.
The ABC has seen marriage, birth and inquest documents that list Snowy Dodson's birthplace as Launceston.
One document does list him as British, but that document is dated July 1947, a year before the concept of Australian citizenship was conceived.
So why was his heritage unclear?
There are references to Senator Dodson's Irish background online and in Parliament.
When former WA premier Colin Barnett spoke at a joint sitting of the state parliament to endorse him as an incoming senator last year, he spoke about the perceived link.
"Patrick Lionel Djargun Dodson is a Yawuru man from Broome," Mr Barnett said.
"His father, Snowy, was an Irish Australian and his mother, Patricia, a Yawuru woman."
Senator Dodson has rejected this.
"The only known Irish connection in my family is my mother's mother's father," he wrote in the statement to ABC today.
A biography of Senator Dodson written by his chief of staff Kevin Keeffe more than a decade ago had also raised uncertainty.
"Supposedly from Launceston, Tasmania, Snowy has left no track of his birth, family or schooling," Mr Keeffe wrote in the 2003 book Paddy's Road: Life Stories of Patrick Dodson.
He wrote the family had "no clues and no family connection has come forward".
"One old Aboriginal man told Patrick Dodson in later years that his father Snowy has been a stowaway on a plane that landed in Darwin, jumping out of a wheel-carriage before landing," he wrote.
"Another has suggested he was a draft-dodger who changed his name on leaving Tasmania.
"The family wondered if he might have been a Tasmanian Aboriginal."
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