Aboriginal leader and civil rights activist Charles Perkins fifty years ago declared, "if we're not in Canberra, we're history".
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He had already led the Freedom Rides through NSW, forcing Australia to recognise its own racism, when he moved to Canberra in 1969 seeing a place to bring change for Aboriginal people nationally.
The public service career that followed - including a historic appointment as the first Aboriginal person to lead a federal department - has gained renewed recognition with the naming of the government's national office for Indigenous affairs in his honour on Thursday last week.
Charles Perkins House, in Woden, bears the name of a leader who once described the tension between his place as a bureaucrat, expected to be silent, and as a fiery advocate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, clashing with his seniors and ministers.
Nearly 19 years after his death, his daughter, Hetti Perkins, remembers him also saying that to change the system, he had to work inside it.
An Arrernte and Kalkadoon man, raised partly in Alice Springs, he may have preferred to live elsewhere but decided he needed to be closer to the centre of federal politics.
"He was very strategic, he really understood politics and the political process very well, and certainly he was a quick learner and that was where he felt his efforts would be best used," Ms Perkins said.
The federal government since the 1967 referendum had grown more involved in Indigenous affairs, and Perkins would work through evenings and weekends to bring change.
Under Gough Whitlam, the office Perkins joined grew into the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where he became the public service's first Indigenous secretary in 1984. He pushed to bring more Aboriginal people into the public service.
Perkins was forced to resign in 1988 amid accusations about his leadership and conduct, and after clashes with political enemies. He was later cleared, but his federal public service career was over.
His daughter said the naming of Charles Perkins House, formerly Centraplaza, went some way to rectifying that wrong.
"There is no way of sugar coating it, that political character assassination of our father," she said.
"We feel that this is some vindication."
The building name also recognised other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants and unsung heroes who worked to bring change from within, and would hopefully inspire more to fight for Indigenous people.
"We hope it becomes some sort of a constant reminder of the inalienable right of our people to be on the national agenda, to be centre stage of the national agenda," Ms Perkins said.
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet deputy secretary for indigenous affairs, Ian Anderson, said the building's name was not only recognition of Perkins' legacy, but looked forward to the rise of more Indigenous people to the public service's senior ranks.
