Thomas Edwin Calma (born 1953) is an Aboriginal Australian academic and human rights advocate who served as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner from 2004 to 2009. He was the sixth chancellor of the University of Canberra from 2014 to 2023 and became the second Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person to serve as chancellor of an Australian university. Calma was designated as 2013 Australian Capital Territory Australian of the Year and 2023 Senior Australian of the Year.
Born in 1953 in Adelaide River in the Northern Territory, Calma had parents with ancestry from the Iwaidja and Kungarakany peoples. They also had Filipino and Dutch ancestors. He grew up in Darwin, where he was exposed to the strength of family and culture, difficult experiences of poverty, and an understanding of the consequences of dispossession and the Stolen Generation. Having completed his high school education in 1971, Calma relocated to Adelaide and attended the South Australian Institute of Technology, specialising in the areas of community development and social work.
Calma began his career in the Indigenous education and advocacy sphere, having worked on setting up the Aboriginal Task Force at the Darwin Community College in 1980. Later he was appointed as one of the first Indigenous academics who gained tenure in Australia. He also had a career in the Australian Public Service and worked as a diplomat for Australia in India and Vietnam. He was appointed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2004. While working at the commission, he became a member of the development team of the Close the Gap campaign, called for action on family violence among Indigenous population, reacted to the apology made by the Australian government to the Stolen Generations in 2008, and helped to create new Indigenous representation structures.
Calma became the national coordinator of the Tackling Indigenous Smoking campaign, co-chair of Reconciliation Australia, chair of Ninti One and an adjunct academic at the Australian National University. He was the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person to be selected as the Chancellor of the University of Canberra, serving from 2014 until 2023. During this time, he chaired the process of the Indigenous Voice federal advisory body with Marcia Langton, and participated in national debates on constitutional recognition and Voice to Parliament.
Early life and education Calma was born in 1953 at Adelaide River, near Darwin, to Tom Calma Senior and Ada Calma. Through his parents, he is connected to both regions of the Northern Territory, with his father belonging to the Iwaidja people of the Cobourg Peninsula and his mother being of Kungarakany descent from the Adelaide River region. His family heritage also includes Filipino ancestry through his paternal grandfather and Dutch ancestry through his maternal grandfather, both of whom married Aboriginal women. Calma's father began his career as a truck driver before later becoming a senior public service official within the federal government. His family experienced the effects of dispossession and policies associated with the Stolen Generations, contributing to a strong awareness during his childhood of the impacts of forced removal on Aboriginal families. Raised alongside his three sisters, Calma moved with his family to Darwin when he was three years old.
Growing up in Darwin, Calma spent much of his childhood fishing, hunting, and gathering food with his family, experiences shaped in part by the financial difficulties faced by his parents, who often struggled to make ends meet. He later described his upbringing as being strongly influenced by family relationships, Aboriginal culture, and a close connection to Country shaped his identity and values. Calma later discovered after his father's death that his parents had concealed many of their financial hardships from their children despite periods of significant economic strain. He also identified several turning points in his early life, including the realisation that few Indigenous students from his community completed secondary school or entered university, as well as the impact of Cyclone Tracy, which devastated Darwin in 1974.
Calma was compelled to enrol in college after graduating from high school in 1971. Encouraged by discussions at a community meeting in Darwin, Calma decided to pursue higher education and relocated to Adelaide, where he studied community development and social work at the South Australian Institute of Technology. He later noted that the program created an educational atmosphere conducive to Indigenous learners while expanding his national vision. Career Early career (1980–2003) The limited availability of secondary education opportunities in the Northern Territory prompted Calma to begin advocating for Indigenous education and social advancement. Following lobbying efforts by Calma and his colleagues, the Aboriginal Task Force was established at the Darwin Community College in 1980 to expand educational opportunities for Aboriginal students. That same year, Calma joined the college as a lecturer in the program before being appointed coordinator in 1981 and later worked as the head of the department which conducted the program. During this period, he became the first Indigenous Australian to gain tenure from a post-secondary institution in the Northern Territory as well as one of the first Indigenous academics in Australia to do so. Under his leadership, the Aboriginal Task Force expanded rapidly from a single class of 25 students to five full-time classes enrolling more than 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students by 1986.
In 1986, Calma returned to the Australian public service as director of the Aboriginal Employment and Training Branch within the Department of Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs in Darwin. After relocating to Canberra, he served as Executive Officer to the department secretary, where he coordinated and conducted a nationwide review of Aboriginal Education Units. Over the following years, Calma held a range of senior government positions with both national and international responsibilities. Between 1995 and 2002, he worked as an Australian diplomat in India and Vietnam, representing Australian interests in the education and training sectors. By 2003, he had become involved in reconciliation initiatives with the Prime Minister and was appointed Senior Adviser on Indigenous Affairs to Philip Ruddock, then Federal Minister for Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. Calma later served in a variety of policy development and program implementation roles, including as manager of the Community Development and Education Branch of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services.
Australian Human Rights Commission (2004–2010) On 12 July 2004, Calma succeeded William Jonas as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and National Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), positions established following the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to promote human rights and equality. He also served as national patron of the Wakakirri festival and as a White Ribbon Ambassador from 2005 to 2007. In his 2005 Social Justice Report, Calma had recommended that Australian governments needed to make a commitment for equality in terms of health status and life expectancy between indigenous people and other Australians within 25 years, which was a factor in the formulation of the Close the Gap initiative. The second report published by him in 2006 highlighted that family violence in indigenous communities was a matter of serious human rights abuse which required appropriate response from all stakeholders. In March 2007, Calma released the Voices of Australia education resource designed for secondary school students to explain Australian history of race relations, population diversity, and the functions of the AHRC. The Close the Gap initiative was publicly launched in April with support from patrons including Ian Thorpe and Cathy Freeman, while the Council of Australian Governments subsequently established measurable targets to improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health outcomes, including reducing child mortality and achieving life expectancy equality within a generation.
On 13 February 2008, Calma delivered a formal response to the national Apology to the Stolen Generations, issued by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in the Australian Parliament on behalf of the Australian government. In his address, Calma recounted the experience of his great-grandmother's removal, drawing on a historical government document dated 1899 to challenge claims that Aboriginal children were voluntarily released by their families, and emphasised truth-telling as a process of healing and reconciliation in addressing the colonisation of Australia. The apology itself formally acknowledged that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children had been forcibly removed under successive laws and policies, resulting in profound loss, grief, and intergenerational harm.
Earlier in 2008, Calma advocated for the creation of a commission to address disparities in life expectancy, education, and economic opportunity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. On 20 March, Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson signed the Close the Gap Statement of Intent, which committed Australian governments to achieving health equality for Indigenous Australians by 2030 through coordinated, evidence-based national strategies and improved Indigenous participation in policy development, building on recommendations made in Calma's 2005 Social Justice Report. On 21 October, he joined the University of Canberra Council. On 17 December, Calma was appointed to oversee the development of a new Indigenous advisory body to the Australian government, and later that month, he was appointed by Jenny Macklin to chair an Independent Steering Committee tasked with consulting communities and designing models for a national Indigenous representative organisation, work that ultimately informed the 2009 establishment of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples.
Since 2009, Calma has worked with the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation in early years language and literacy. In that same year, he delivered the Mabo Oration and also acted on behalf of the Stolen Generations in the parliamentary response to the national apology. The adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was regarded as a highly contested international document, with its legality and effectiveness debated in both Australia and New Zealand, although Calma described it as a "watershed moment" in Indigenous affairs. With his 2009 Social Justice Report, he has been a core advocate for justice reinvestment in Australia. Following his departure from the public sector later that year he described this phase of his career as a "pseudo retirement." His successor as Social Justice Commissioner was Mick Gooda, while the National Race Discrimination Commissioner role was filled by Graeme Innes.
Later career Reconciliation Australia (2010–2012)