Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers: This story contains images and references to a deceased person.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has paid tribute to Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue at a state funeral held in Adelaide for the activist, academic and celebrated Indigenous leader, who died last month.

The crowd gathered at St Peter’s Cathedral in North Adelaide included federal Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, Governor-General David Hurley and South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.

Albanese remembered O’Donoghue as “one of the great rocks around which the river of our history has gently bent, persuaded to flow along a better course”.

He also noted she was the first chairperson of the National Aboriginal Conference, the first Aboriginal woman to be made a member of the Order of Australia, and the inaugural chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The prime minister continued:

As the world watched on, she stood at the forefront of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia an opportunity extended to all of us to accept and celebrate the world’s oldest continuous living culture as a fundamental part of who we are as a nation.

It is a journey we are still on, building on every moment of hard-won progress. It isn’t a journey we travel in a straight line, but with every step forward we remember it was so often Dr O’Donoghue who led the way.

She was proud of being first.

She was determined to not to be last.

When Dr O’Donoghue opened a door, she held it open for all who followed.

She made history but her focus was on giving people a future.