Why identity matters: Skills to challenge unhelpful systems in practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families

Content Advice: Contains experiences and descriptions of racism

Dana Shen (00:00:01):

Good evening, everyone. My name is Dana Shen. Before we get started, I would like to do an acknowledgement of all the countries that we are on this evening. MHPN would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and waterways across Australia upon which our webinar presenters and participants are located. We wish to power respects to elders past and present and acknowledge the memories, traditions, culture, and hopes of Aboriginal and Torres Australian Ireland people. And on a personal level, as an Aboriginal person, I really want to acknowledge in particular the authority and cultural experiences, knowledge authority of the people on the panel tonight, but also every person on here that is a First Nations person and also all those that are on here tonight that are acting to be allies for us in this work. So welcome. Welcome all of you. So my name’s Dana Shen.

(00:01:00):

I’ll be moderating tonight’s session. I’m Aboriginal Chinese. I’m a descendant of the Ngarrindjeri peoples and a consultant in South Australia. I’ll be joined by an esteemed panel. Shirley Young, Aboriginal Social Worker, Grant Sarra, longstanding cultural advocate dedicated to truth-telling and justice, and Lou Turner, Pitjantjatjara Father. So we’re going to be going to them first, and then I’ll talk a little bit about the learning outcomes for tonight and provide a little bit more context on the social and emotional wellbeing will. But first, I’d love to hand over to them for you to hear a little bit more about them. So Shirl, I would love to hear from you. So the first question I just want to open up with, we’ll be, of course, focusing a lot more on identity tonight, but I wondered if you could share a little bit about where you come from before we get started.

Shirley Young (00:01:56):

Thanks, Dana. So I am a Nukunu woman. I am from South Australia, Southern Flinders Rangers. I am the second child to Eric Provis Branfield. He used to be called old Uncle Prob, and I am a mother of two amazing children. And I have the absolute honour and pleasure of actually working and living on Kaurna country. So I am currently in Adelaide. Just want to acknowledge the Kaurna people for the blessings that I have of actually being able to work from this location. And I just want to say I returned home about a week and a half ago into the Southern Flinders Ranges. We’d had a downpour of rain and there was water running through our creek system up there and it was just beautiful. So just feeling really refreshed and re-energized by that. So thanks, Dana.

Dana Shen (00:02:50):

Thank you so much, Shirl. Grant, I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about where you come

Grant Sarra (00:02:56):

From. Me, Nana, thank you. I’m from Gooreng Gooreng country through Mum, which is up around Bundaberg and through part Italian. And at an age of 66 this month, I probably learned more Italian than I learned Gooreng Gooreng because of the history of our country, which I can talk to as we talk through the social emotional wellbeing. But one of the things that I think about in the context of what I do now around truth, telling and justice is built out of what I experienced as a kid through racism, basically, and what I saw and observed of other kids who were socialised to think and feel and behave in a racial space. But I’ll talk about that as we evolve.

Dana Shen (00:03:48):

Beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us tonight, Grant. And Brother Lou, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you come from?

Lou Turner (00:03:56):

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Dana. Yeah, look, I’m a proud Anangu Pitjantjatjara fella. I hail from Darwin growing up, all my early childhood experiences of growing up within the community up there. I’m also a descendant of stolen generation survivors with mom and grandma and aunties being removed through past government policies and practises. And I’m also a Venn diagram of Scottish English people and Indonesian blood as well. So look, I bring all of that into myself and that just really enriches me on my journey of understanding, being a living artefact of experiences for my children and learning from others, everyone that I encounter.

Dana Shen (00:04:40):

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Lou. So this webinar is first of a two-part series, which focuses on strengthening practise with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families by deepening practitioners understanding of cultural identity, the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and the importance of culturally grounded support. The first webinar emphasises recognising diverse identities, and isn’t it wonderful what we’ve already heard from this panel and the diversity of this panel? And they’ll be talking a lot more about how meaningful that is for our peoples. So we’ll be focusing on that, navigating unhelpful systems, and also promoting social and emotional wellbeing through culturally affirming strategies. So right now you can see the learning outcomes. I’m not going to go through them in detail, but here they are just in case. Next slide, please. It’s also really important for this webinar series that I briefly introduce the social and emotional wellbeing framework or what’s called the Sub Wheel.

(00:05:46):

One of the things I want to describe about this is just some of the key aspects of this because it informs tonight’s webinar and also the next in the series. So this model is a holistic and collectivist approach to health and self that is held within family and community. The domains are seven quadrants. Whilst they look separate, they’re actually deeply interconnected and they are part of what is important to the depth and wellbeing of our peoples. These are surrounded by a circle of determinants of health and also how these domains can be expressed, recognising that through differing identities and differing experiences, these particular domains can look very, very different depending on who we are and where we come from.

(00:06:41):

So on that, I’d now like to really start having a conversation with our wonderful panellists. So we’ll be starting with cultural identities, thinking a little bit about colonisation and its impact, and also questions about navigating unhelpful systems. I’ve tried my best to respond to some of the questions that have come through prior to the webinar and hope to address some of those for you tonight, though it’d be difficult to address all of them, but we’ll do our best tonight. So first of all, I really want to think about cultural identity. The first question I’ve got is to really ask the panellists, and I’ll name the first person to start in a moment, but just the question, what does the spectrum of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identities look like? What does it look like? So even from the panel sharing tonight, we can see how diverse that is.

(00:07:36):

From each of your perspectives, I’d love to hear how you understand our diversity. So Grant, I wonder if I could have you start that conversation first.

Grant Sarra (00:07:48):

I think it’d probably start with the fact that the term Aboriginal was a pseudo-scientific Latinised term that was introduced by the British to define 250 plus different traditional custodian groups across Australia. So we’re continent, made up of many countries. And interestingly, when we introduced ourselves before Chinese, Scottish, Irish, Italian, all of that sort of stuff, the Australian society that I grew up in didn’t see the Italian in me. They saw the coon, the nigga, the boong, the abo in me, and I’ll cut straight to the chase when it comes to racist language. And that was the sort of language and feeling that made me become socialised to think and feel and behave based on where I was, being singled out as a grade one student by a teacher and told with smelling blacks because of the fact that I had a shirt that I wore the day before and then get called smelly black and coon and nigger and boong in the playground.

(00:08:55):

It didn’t feel good, it didn’t make you feel good, and you developed psychological trauma and damage that you didn’t even realise. The one thing I’m grateful for as a young person who was born into a family of 10 was I had strong mother and strong fathers, father figures. And that’s what kept me strong. So the identity, I think it’s an important recognition. As a young kid growing up, I thought we wanted to fight for justice and rights of our people thinking that we were all the same, but I remember an experience going into Water and I thought, “My God, this is a whole different mob of people. ” And then over time, I introduced cross-cultural trading into various government institutions and started to do my own research and got to recognise that we are not one, we are many. And as part of my acknowledgement, I always say upfront that I’m just one Aboriginal person and I don’t have the right and the responsibility and nor am I obligated to speak for all other Aboriginal Australia.

(00:10:01):

When I’m on lose country, I’m a little boy or when I’m on Shirley’s country, same with Dana, I’m a little boy. But the other extension of that cultural identity for me is to recognise that as a man, I’m born as born of a mother and cultural law dictates that I must always value and respect women in the journey and life that I travel.

Dana Shen (00:10:23):

Thank you so much, Grant. And so for those listening out there, Grant just gave a number of ways to really be thinking about this in the way you might practise. I just want to draw your attention to some of those things. There are at least four different things that he suggested about how you might look at this. Shirley, I wondered if you could now talk a little bit about, in whatever way you want to, the spectrum of identities that you’ve seen. Maybe it’s about you, but maybe also all of the families you’ve seen in your work.

Shirley Young (00:10:53):

Thanks, Dana. So I am a social worker and so I often spend time working with children and families. So I become very practise focused actually. But for personally, I was born to a much older father. My mom was very, very young. I was very blessed to have my formative years rooted in culture. And then unfortunately when my dad passed, I was actually taken out of that place of culture and moved around a lot as a young person. And so when I think about that experience and I think about the experience of the children, young people that I work with, there’s this spectrum of identities and connection to culture that’s occurred. I think about families who have had stolen generation experiences like what Lou was talking about, from being removed as babies from hospitals and all of those types of places, to children who have the blessing and honour to actually grow up in culture and the different experiences that those children get to experience, the understanding of why we do things and how important culture actually is.

(00:12:06):

So I’m thinking about that social emotional wellbeing will there. We’re all shaped by all of those things that actually exist on that will through social determinants and the historical determinants that have happened for us, as well as the experiences that we’ve either had in culture or outside of culture. And then the way I came back to living with connection to family again as I was a little bit older, as an adolescent, early adolescent, and then the experience of reconnecting and what that actually feels like to reconnect. So for our children who become disconnected really early, even as adults, they can experience feelings of shame and grief, or maybe right up to feeling very proud of being able to be connected to culture throughout that time, and as well as perhaps an experience of loss of identity. So I was, like I said, very blessed to actually have my very early years where you begin to learn experiences of culture, connection to culture, what things look like, how we’re expected to behave, what does culture mean to us to having a very important part of my life where I was removed, and then being reconnected and experiencing times of feeling like shame and feeling like do you have permission to be here, which is actually really, really sad to having an experience of an adult where I’ve found reconnection to be incredibly important to me for identity formation, basically.

(00:13:48):

So yeah, I hope that helps and makes sense.

Dana Shen (00:13:53):

And Shirl, before I come to Lou, because I’m really interested in his work and his explorations, I did want to ask you some questions so that we don’t lose this for the listeners tonight. Given the diversity that you just spoke about and also things like shame that you also mentioned, what are some advice that you would give people about how to meet this, meet these differences, meet this shame in ways that can really support Aboriginal people? What are some suggestions you might give?

Shirley Young (00:14:27):

Thanks, Dana. Sorry about that. I think about deep listening. It’s actually really important to hear what’s actually happening in the room. Often you can actually hear a different story to what’s really going on. Like for instance, if you think about the iceberg theory, often what you see at the top of the iceberg is what we define people as. So when I’m thinking and talking with children and young people and families, there’s often very distinct behaviours you see at the top of the iceberg, which are really obvious. But when you actually have a look at what’s really going on, it’s the thing that’s under the water that we don’t see that is really what’s happening. And often it’s the guilt and it’s the shame and feeling like you don’t belong and disconnection and all of those things. What you might see at the top of the earthsburg is anger or distress or a whole bunch of other things.

(00:15:17):

So I think it’s really important to listen. It’s really important to evaluate what it is you think is happening in the room, to be really reflective about what is actually going on and being able to hang in there and just listen to what somebody’s saying and stay really curious. And sometimes it’s actually okay to ask a question like, I’m wondering how you might really be feeling if you can create a sense of safety in the room because sometimes it’s not what’s actually showing up at the top of the iceberg that’s really going on because guilt, shame and those sorts of things, anger, they’re actually power emotions. So you may see them or you may see them actually hidden under the iceberg. So for me, it’s about just being present and not just thinking what’s right in front of you is what’s really going on. Does that make sense, Darma?

Dana Shen (00:16:15):

It does, Shirl. And I want to come back to working with anger, but I’ll come back to that because I think I want to hear from someone that has your skills and how you do that. I think practitioners will really appreciate that, but I’ll come back to that. Thank you, Shirl. Lou, so how about for you? Through you or through your work, really exploring identity, the spectrum of the identities with our people.

Lou Turner (00:16:40):

Yeah. Thanks, Dana. And look, what a great question to start off with to get us to reflect inwards to think about this steep question. And I think I would always reflect on and acknowledge the lived experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. And that’s what informs me in my, I guess, my perspective. That’s where I start off with. And then I go to understanding what that means in relation to intersectionality as well. When we talk to a spectrum, there’s the intersectionality of identities within those multiple identities, but we’re operating within a framework, a cultural framework of cultural identity and understanding that and embracing that and acclaiming that as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. And to me, I’m thinking about within that, reflecting on your thoughts and words there, Shirley, of the hopes and dreams, the worries, the traumas, the emotions, but underneath that, there’s this constant yearning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, yearning for connection and reconnection, what was possibly taken, what was stolen, I guess.

(00:17:55):

And what we really want to reconnect with, that’s a protective factor. Culture is a protective factor for our people. And when we fully embrace that, the wonders are untold. And I think for me, when I think about my own lived experience, that intergenerational aspect of it, certain things what we embrace is we are learning as we are going. We are learning what was before us. We’re learning those life lessons from our parents and our grandparents and what was provided to them and what was not provided to them. So in my journey here, it’s around understanding the storylines of intergenerational trauma disconnection and then working to create intergenerational healing and reconnection, not only for myself, my family, my children, and my fellow community members and Australia more broadly.

Dana Shen (00:18:58):

Thank you so much, Lou. And Shirly, I do want to come back to the concept of anger because I don’t want to lose that because I know people … You talked a bit about that importance of being able to see more deeply what’s really happening in front of you, but I imagine that anger can actually make people feel scared. So I’m not talking about where people are being violent or you feel genuinely unsafe, but I mean anger can still be something that makes people feel scared or worried about being with a person. And it means it can dictate some of the actions and practises that practitioners might have, I imagine. So I wondered whether you could talk about how you work with that. How do you work with anger and to be able to, as the experience of anger happens, still meet a family where they’re at?

(00:19:47):

How do you do that?

Shirley Young (00:19:49):

It’s really interesting, Dana, because if you’re not used to anger, you can have a very set thought process about how you’re going to manage anything. And so what that sees in practise is that people withdraw, they’re not able to listen, they’re not able to sit in that space. From a practise perspective, they’re making decisions about making notifications about what that actually means for safety of children and a whole bunch of things. And actually what it could just mean is I’m not coping with this conversation that’s happening in the room, it’s drawing upon experiences of trauma, my sadness. And so I think what we need to do is actually sit right back and have a really good think about what is this person actually trying to say? And often it’s way deeper than just what’s in the room. And to be able to sit with it and actually hear and listen through the story without jumping in your mind the next steps of what you’re going to do or what this means for a child or whatever, to actually be able to sit in it and actually hear what the person’s actually saying, to be able to ask really good questions about … And maybe even acknowledging that you don’t quite get it, but please help me to understand is actually really, really important because Aboriginal people are very gentle, generally wanting to help people understand.

(00:21:15):

But sometimes we’re put in positions where we’re asked to explain things or it raises things within us that make us actually feel like we’re not coping with those conversations because people often not coming from a place of understanding, it’s automatic jumping into perceptions and things like that. So it’s just really important to listen. Do not go into clinical rationale or whatever it is you think you need to do. You just need to listen and understand what’s really happening. Yeah.

Dana Shen (00:21:50):

Thank you so much, Phil. Grant, I wonder if I can ask you a question that’s sort of similar, but from a slightly different angle. So a lot of the work that you’ve done is as an advocate. It’s about speaking truth and speaking truth to different systems, what’s happening for us, et cetera. Two questions that I had for you. First of all, how do you work with or what would you encourage people to do in terms of thinking about working with diversity? First question. And second question is, how do you work to help systems hear what they need to hear about things? So first question first, what would you advise about working with the differences in our communities? Because they’re so different. So let’s just start with that one first, Grant.

Grant Sarra (00:22:39):

Yeah. Well, yes, our line’s a piece of strength. I think before we get to us, I think the first thing that practitioners need to think about is who they are, who are they? And I encourage people to go and recognise that every single person that we cross paths within our life is someone that’s unique and special, but they’re not perfect and neither are we. And therefore on that basis, you don’t come in with a preconceived idea or perception of what is right or what is wrong based on your own upbringing. The fact of the matter is that everyone is unique and special. None of us are perfect. And we all become socialised to think and feel and behave. So you’ve got your mind, your body, your soul, your brain, your heart, you feel with your hands, your feet, and your mouth, you act out. There’s an Aboriginal psychology.

(00:23:30):

And if you’re a stolen generation, you’ve got a different complex layer of psychological trauma. If you’ve been brought up in a Christian-based mission or a government-based reserve, you’ve got different concepts around psychology, sociology. If you’ve been called coon, nigga, boong, abo, ape, if you’ve been a survivor of sexual abuse or whatever, people got to understand that that person that sits before them in whatever clinical or whatever support service they’re providing, they’ve got to acknowledge the person sitting in front of them first as a human being, and they’ve got to try and put themselves in that person’s shoes. And that’s where empathy and being respectful and dignified in that conversation, you’ve got to start there. And you can’t sit in the presence of someone and start talking highfalutin language and all that sort of stuff because you’re going to lose them straight away. You’ve got to speak to the level of the age that the person in front of you is at.

(00:24:34):

And that’s where we talk about the importance of acting with cultural integrity and dignity, cultural integrity, honour and integrity, and cultural dignity and humility. People don’t want to hear all this flash highfalutin language and then just feel unacknowledged or feel shame. And that’s when I talked about racism before, I talked about racism at an individual level. What we also need to do is talk about racism from an institutional level in terms of policies, past policies, and processes, and we need to talk about racism in a structural context. People will feel shame and angry and frustrated because of those other components. So the advice I give people, to me, it’s very simple. I’m a bit of a deep thinker at different levels, but no problem’s too big. A hundred years from this day, us here today, we’re not going to be here. The very least that we can do is be the best possible versions of ourselves in the presence of all that we cross paths with.

(00:25:36):

So just naturally be yourself, demonstrate that you’ve got a good head and a good heart and you have empathy and compassion and kindness. Don’t come across as being paternalistic or judgmental because people see through their kids. When I was seven, I could see old people and I thought, no, this older gaming or this … So don’t assume that we have all the answers because those young people that come before us, they know a lot more that’s going on around them anyway. So we just need to tap into their hearts and souls and their minds. And so I encourage them to feel good about themselves. That’s an acknowledgement, positive reinforcement and empowering positive thinking and feeling in them as they come in.

(00:26:19):

And everyone’s unique and special. We’re all privileged. Start understanding our own privilege. We can see, and I’m making an assumption that everyone on this panel discussion can see. We can heal, we can read, we can write, we have a job, but every one of us are thinking and feeling and behaving based on where we come from. And sometimes that’s hard for some people. So when they come into your presence, if they’re hurting, you’ve got to feel that hurt and empathise with that person and try and encourage them to take the right steps they need to take to remove that hurt that they’re feeling. That was the first part. What was the second part?

Dana Shen (00:26:57):

Yeah, so that’s great to hear that version of it in terms of that practise, particularly on individual level two. And I also know you’ve done a lot of work around truth-telling and as an advocate. And so I wonder what is the advice you would give … Well, two things. First of all, how have you helped systems to listen to our people? How would you advise others to encourage them on helping to help our people be heard? So how have you done those things, Grant?

Grant Sarra (00:27:33):

Walk straight. Sense, common sense. As I said, everyone’s unique, everyone’s special, but I encourage people. When I talked about racism earlier, one of the things I worked out that not everybody was racist. Not every white person was racist. Racism is a reflection of other people’s ignorance, insecurity and fear. So for me to come out and think that everyone was racist and whatever was a poor reflection on me. So don’t come in with stereotypical views or assumptions and all that sort of stuff. And it’s getting people to understand who we are as human beings. We all connect back to humanity. We talk about an Australian society in a truthtelling context. As of this year, we’re talking 238 years of existence. You can then bring that to 1901 when a constitution was formed in around a white Australia policy, and that continued right through the 1948. So Australian society in itself is being socialised to think and feel and behave.

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And you see that happening right now with all the political ideologies where one ideological group is making out that they’re doing this for all the downtrodden Isies, Aussies, Aussies. If you ask an Australian person what the Australian values are that certain ideological parties talk about, they can’t tell you what they are. But we know as Aboriginal people that through our skin, our blood, our ancestry, we connect. We always belong to this country. What I encourage non-Aboriginal people to do is to recognise that they too, through their skin, their blood, the ancestry, and their birth, they belong here in this country. One partland belongs here. So let’s move beyond the fear, the dial, the guilt, and the blame. They’re not responsible for what’s happening today, but we’ve got to acknowledge the privileges that come with the colonisation process. What I encourage people to do is to recognise that, as I said, 238 years as of this year, if we go back 300 years, every Australian person that’s not born here belongs somewhere else.

(00:29:40):

And that’s where I embrace my Italian ancestry equally. And I’m proud of my Italian ancestry, and I’m proud of my father for who he was and what he did. And he himself had three children in Italy, and he came to Italy in 1952, came from Italy to Australia, and Unbeknownst to us as kids, he couldn’t come to Australia before that because of the white Australia policy. And for the first time I heard other terms like wog and day go, and it was all racist, rubbish. It was all racist, bullshit. And that’s that reflection of ignorance and insecurity and fear. And part of the encouragement, just know who we are and where we come from in the bigger picture of humanity and embrace each other as human beings. Don’t look at a person’s race, gender, sexuality, age. Just embrace everyone as just like yourself, unique and special.

(00:30:33):

And be good, kind, caring, compassionate human beings because not everybody has the luxuries that we take for granted. Just be a good version of yourself pretty much.

Dana Shen (00:30:46):

Thank you so much, Grant. Lou, I feel like I want to come to you and that you’ve got lots to talk about. It’s hard to know which question to ask, but I can see your thinking stuff. I just wanted, respond to this, respond to what you’re hearing and your views about diversity, the best ways to support that, the West ways to hear it, et cetera.

Lou Turner (00:31:06):

Yeah. Well, like Brand, that self-question, how long’s a piece of string? Or I’ll say, how deep do you want to go? And for me, it’s a remembering and it’s a remembering and recognising of us as people, as I’m hearing Grant and I’m hearing Shirley, when we’re coming into connecting with other people, we come in with our own preconceived lived experiences, our own biases, and we want to unburden that. We want to park that. We want to decenter that. And we want to dispel some of the assumptions that we carry as well to create the opportunity for new connections, new connectedness with those that we are trying to support in a therapeutic sense.

(00:31:56):

So for me, I was reminded on the weekend as well as sitting in a yarning circle space and that remembering story of as we are children, we know everything. We literally are just that connected. We are coming from the universe. We’re coming into the material world. We know, but as we grow older, we’re taught to unknow. We’re taught to reprogram ourselves. So it was a really good recognition of the importance of remembering and thinking about children and young people, thinking about our elders too. At that stage of life, there’s a lot of remembering going on. So for me, I’m getting lost in the words, but the questions I need a little bit of help with again there, Dana, but it’s recognising in someone’s identity ourself and those that we’re connecting with that there’s an opportunity for remembering and recognising, as Shirley said, that iceberg model, it’s not what we just see in the material world, but it’s what’s beneath and what’s beyond.

Dana Shen (00:33:12):

Yeah, it’s beautiful, Lou. And you remind me, something I didn’t mention earlier is that I’m also a meditation teacher, and the term mindfulness in the ancient Buddhist language, I won’t go in too much detail, but one of the translations in that is that mindfulness, another way of saying it is remembering. It’s remembering. So it’s actually being in the present moment, being with people, really listening to people, remembering who you are, spending time with your elders, spending time on country. So no, that’s lovely. Yeah.

Lou Turner (00:33:49):

Absolutely. And just another thought that’s popping in there around talking about identity as well and something that I’m claiming through just really embracing my children is neurodivergency, understanding that sort of connected thread to our storylines and where that comes from, if it’s always been here and it’s a human experience and equality that’s really, really unknown. So I think for me, my big journey in life is to understand that part of my children’s identity and that part of potentially my identity and how that interconnects and interrelates with everything else going on. And that’s the way that how I see the world, how I think about things, how I process information. And then when we go into the systems conversations, how I think about systems, how I see the flow of information and people all working together for people.

Dana Shen (00:34:48):

Thank you, Lou. I want to move on to an area that it’s hard to talk about because it feels quite painful, and that is that concept of colonisation. But I wondered if I could frame it in a slightly different way for us to talk about. So broadly, the questions I’m going to ask each of you is to name what you see as a key impact of colonisation. You’ve seen it. It could be something that you’ve experienced. It could be in your work, it could be a family, whatever. But I also wanted to hear, how did you see people awaken and remember culture and come back to it again? I wondered if we could talk about both of those things so that our listeners can experience an understanding of how it impacts us now, but also how we can find our way out of it as well.

(00:35:44):

So I wondered, Shirl, if it’s okay, I know it’s a big question, but I wondered if you would be willing to start yarning about that first.

Shirley Young (00:35:52):

Yeah, that is a big question, isn’t it, Dana? I’ve actually made myself a little bit of a list about some of these things because I think it’s really important to name things and then actually name how we can do things differently. But I just want to acknowledge that colonialism has an ongoing impact, that we find ourselves continuing things when we work from Westernised frameworks and we get caught in particular ways of working where we honour Westernised thought processes above cultural thought processes. When we apply frameworks that don’t quite fit to people, and I’m talking about all people, not all frameworks fit all people. It’s not one size fits all folks. I’m really sorry to acknowledge that. And so globalisation has meant that we’re moving away from diversity, that it is becoming that one size fits all stuff, and that we are ignoring systems of protective factors and strengths through not acknowledging Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing.

(00:36:59):

And we do things like ignore cultural authority, and we’ve moved away from community-driven practise and doing overall overarching practises these days, and we’re preferencing power and authority and controlled organisations in institutions, and that is always going to have an ongoing impact on people. But what can we do to awaken and remember? Well, we talked about listening to stories, and for me, it’s about honouring people’s stories, about hanging around and being curious in those stories, making space for Aboriginal voices and understanding what that means for them. Often what we do is we say that we want to hear the story of Aboriginal people, but you’ll find that there’s no time for that to happen because we get caught up in practise timeframes and all the rest of it. And that automatically shuts windows of being able to describe what our story means to us. Sometimes you have to earn time in order to hear particular parts of stories, and you can’t do that if you’re caught in timeframes of service delivery.

(00:38:13):

So making space and seeing strength that occurs within culture and making sure culture’s actually visible. So I think about how do we actually make systems that actually work around cultural stuff as opposed to around institutions. I also understand that things need to happen in timeframes in order to make sure that we get stuff done for court systems and all of those very tertiary systems. However, if we don’t actually spend time looking for things and actively seeking it out, we don’t see it. It doesn’t make it in our case files, and then we misunderstand what’s really going on. So for me, it’s about understanding that all those things around colonisation have had massive impacts for people, for our clients, for me, for Aboriginal staff. And if we just keep doing things in the way that we currently do, then we miss all these amazing opportunities and the strengths around what we’ve learned from our elders, what’s important around helping our children maintain connection, even right down to thinking about how we apply social emotional wellbeing families and ensure that they’re actually work through in the work that we do.

(00:39:30):

Because if we don’t do that, we end up colonising all over again and we continue to do very similar things, maybe just in different ways, but we actually, we continue to hold the power in ways that we ought not for our families and for our children and for our communities, for Aboriginal communities. So those

Dana Shen (00:39:52):

Things

Shirley Young (00:39:52):

Are important for me. And I could talk about that till the cows come home from how do we maintain … If we remove children from cultural systems, how do we support them to maintain culture? We can say that we do, but if we don’t have processes in ways that actually make that happen, then we don’t do that. And that’s really sad because what we’re doing is removing opportunities for growth in culture from the developmental ways that learning culture occurs in its natural form. So yeah.

Dana Shen (00:40:28):

And Shirl, I think you highlight something really important in what you just said. There’s a difference between saying something or saying something’s happening and what’s actually happening. And so I really want to invite practitioners on to be looking for that. There’s a difference between saying something and actually doing it and making it real. And I think you’re highlighting that in terms of connections for culture for our people.

Shirley Young (00:40:55):

Dana, can I just quickly say that I’ve worked with families who people have told me they’re not connected to culture. And as I sit there as an Aboriginal social worker and I listen to what they’re saying, culture is throughout everything they’re saying. It’s just that they’re not actually giving it that word, or they may have held guilt or shame about being disconnected, but everything they’re saying is actually from a cultural lens. And sometimes when you say to the family, “Do you realise what you’re actually saying as a cultural principle here?” They go, “Oh, really? I just grew up like that, Shirl.” And so all of a sudden we’re reauthoring the story of what they’ve actually heard about themselves and we’re writing it and actually connecting in different ways and that has a different outcome from the work that we do as practitioners. So if we don’t elicit the story or hear the story, we can’t even understand what’s going on.

(00:41:46):

So it’s really important to honour stories and make sure that they’re visible. Yeah.

Dana Shen (00:41:52):

Thank you. So Shirley’s really highlighting the importance of noticing when you hear people’s cultural stories, and that means doing a bit of our own personal learning to understand when we hear it and when we see it happening. So thank you, Shirl. That was really amazing. Grant, so similar to you, I know you have a very different take, but I’d love to hear your view about where do you see how colonisation still impacts us, but what do you feel, what have you seen where people have remembered and awakened and been supported to do that, or what would you advise? So in anything of that spectrum, I’d love to hear from you, Grant.

Grant Sarra (00:42:30):

I think holistically, like looking at colonisation and its origin in itself, you’ve got to go back to 1493 with the Roman Catholic Church and the European monarchs that wanted to formalise slavery, which had been practise. And from there, it comes into an Australian context. We talk about 1770, then we talk about 1788. And 1789, there’s an outbreak of smallpox, which just so it happened to be rolled out in blankets in America where the British were, was tried in New Zealand. It was tried in Canada. It was tried in India and it happened to roll out here. So the hypocrisy of this whole Western democracy and all that sort of stuff that goes on, and that’s the importance of truth challenges, own the truth. It’s not current generations. They didn’t create the problem. We’re part of the solution. So when you look at colonisation in the context of policy and you look at this social emotional wellbeing diagram, I can tell you which policy, well, preceding this social emotional wellbeing diagram, it was blatant premeditated genocide.

(00:43:39):

It was a deliberate act. People were to acquire land, commit genocide. It happened all over the world where the British and other colonisers went. They then started to formulate policies. Well, prior to that, they’d forcibly removed people to missions and reserves, government missions, sorry, Christian missions, government reserves, trying to … And if you look at the doctrine of discovery, they used the term barbaric. Barbaric people want to be brought to the religion itself. So we were deemed to be barbaric. You then start to look at a institutional process of policy. So your first policies beyond genocides and massacres and poisoning of water holes came into the protection and preservation of Aborigines. And under that particular act, your social emotional wellbeing determinants here were obliterated. The natural world, the physical world, the sacred world that Aboriginal people connected to and belonged to in terms of land, people and environment were obliterated deliberately.

(00:44:41):

So under the Protection Acts, you couldn’t marry unless it was agreed by a chief protector, you couldn’t speak your language, you couldn’t conduct culture, you couldn’t practise ceremony. So all of that, our connection to our land, our people, environment, language was obliterated, taken away, and it was a deliberate act. So then we come into the missions, the reserves, you see a breakdown of cultural law and custom, our ability to access sites of significance and waterways and whatever we had to survive were just taken away. When you fast forward now, you go from protection acts, you come into assimilation acts, you come into self-determination, you come into land rights, you come into cultural heritage, and they’re all sort of moderated by a dominant Western political system that doesn’t know who they are or where they come from. And that’s the sad reality. I call it the hypocrisy of democracy sustained by an ill-informed, incompetent, and uncaring bureaucracy.

(00:45:41):

That’s the reality for me personally. When you look at the fact now that you cannot round Black people up and put us in missions or reserves, what’s the next best alternative for this Western Democratic system to sustain its own viability? You look at the incarceration rates over three generations. You look at adult prisons, highest incarcerated people in this country, our people. You look at the next generation, juveniles, highest incarcerated juveniles in this country are our people. You look at children taken away of children in care, highest numbers of children in care are our children. So that’s the reality today. And it’s not to make people feel guilty or ashamed or whatever. It’s saying this is our reality. Let’s face this colonial trauma front on and change the institutional processes, change the individual ways that we perceive people and change the structural environments that we expect people to come into and develop kinship-led approaches where we value the knowledge, skills, the diversity of all that come in and provide that service.

(00:46:51):

And if we don’t do that, that whole model you got in front of you is not worth anything unless we understand why it needs to be there now. But part of this journey moving forward, people get obsessed with this Australian culture, this we’ve breaking down the Aussie way. People have just got to take the time to reflect on who they are and where they come from and the bigger picture of humanity and feel good about who they are. And I always tell people, go to a mirror in your time of feeling challenged and feel down and you look in that mirror and you connect to the windows of your own soul, look deep in your own eyes. And my simple advice is this, you must love, honour, cherish, value and respect the person that’s looking back at you. If you can’t do that, well, you’re no good to anybody in any clinical or other professional capacity.

(00:47:44):

If you don’t love yourself and feel good about yourself, you’re no good to anybody else, and that’s an important message. So to me, the positive way of looking forward, our cultural law and language and customs are all broken down. And you only have to look at it across the East Coast, the West, the coastal communities are obliterated. If you go from Larakian down to Ghana and all the community in between, that’s the last basket of traditional culture in its remnants. So even now, this Western system is trying to exploit that part.

(00:48:24):

There’s so many things that they can learn. The system can learn from Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people and Pacific Island people about culture and the importance of kinship and caring and sharing and respect, but they’ve just got to be prepared to sit and listen and learn to people in order to bring back ancient ways of knowing and modern ways of doing and just enjoy it. Look, I didn’t even travel in deaths in custody. That’s another, beside the three generations, we talk about a rule of law. Well, it doesn’t apply to the 700 plus Aboriginal Torres Island people have lost their life through a death in custody. Ask yourself around social emotional wellbeing what those individual families and clans feel when they have a family member that dies suspiciously as a result of being incarcerated and that they have to come and fight against a law system that’s alien to them.

(00:49:27):

And we also, on top of that, we have to go in as Black people in this country and stand in front of a judge when it comes to proving native title,

(00:49:40):

Prove uninterrupted cultural, spiritual connections to our land. Now, if I ever go into a federal court again, I will say this and I’ll tell them, because I’ve had the shits of it, to be quite honest, first question I will ask the judge is, “Thanks, Your Honour. I’ll tell you what. ” And I say, “Him, I already assume it’s going to be a white male.” I’ll say, “Yes, Your Honour, I’ll proceed to tell you who I am by skin, by blood, by interestry against the backdrop of colonisation. But before we proceed down that path, can you please tell me and my people, who the hell you are and where you come from and the bigger picture of humanity? Of course, as of this year, you’ve only been here for 238 years, so we’ve got to flip the script a bit and we’ve got to become more empowered to have our sake and have our voice heard.” In a positive sense, where we go from here, young people, unlike ourselves, my age group, they have access to language, they have access to archives, they have access to rebuild the storylines, the culture and all that as broken down as they are.

(00:50:42):

That’s a luxury that we’ve got to encourage them to embrace. But because of things like lateral violence and the lack of understanding about where people actually connect, it’s a very hard process for Aboriginal people to get back into that more smooth and fluent place and place. People like Nancy and I, we’re old school, and Lou, you’re the same. We surely be the same. We value and respect each other. Your children are my children, and they command my respect, your mothers, your fathers, and my mothers and fathers. And our psychological trauma is not just I, me, my, we’ve been socialised and think and feel and behave based on the trauma that our parents have been focused on and what they call. And in my case, I’ve been mindful enough to take a deep, deep breath and reflect on what it must have been like for my father to be called a wog in a day ago and be spat on by other white Australian people.

(00:51:40):

And then to see my mother frown upon because of her Aboriginality. And then you see different Italian families look down, they those are my father because he was married to an Aboriginal woman and all that sort of stuff. It’s just sad. And it’s a sad indictment on humanity, to be quite honest. And I think the world can be a better place. And it’s up to us to draw a light in the sand and focus on this next hundred years and don’t try and get one up on each other and value and be kind and caring and compassionate to what each other as human beings bring back some love.

Dana Shen (00:52:15):

Thank you, Grant. And a couple of things I really want to highlight for what you’ve just heard with Shirl and Grant, they really did step out key aspects of how colonisation operates now. So yeah, if you’ve got the chance, go back and have a listen, it stepped out for you about how it operates now, and just to really encourage people that you do look into history. History is very important, and particularly the history of empire and how empire and empire building has affected this planet and human beings and every other being. If you’re willing to and have the time, really look into that because there are many patterns that you will see across the world about what is being done to each other. So thank you, Grant. Lou, I want to come to you now and ask you a similar question. What has been examples of a colonising impact that you have seen, but also ways in which you’ve seen people really awaken, remember, connect again, whatever story you want to tell about that.

Lou Turner (00:53:19):

Thank you, Dana. Yeah, I love how you mentioned awakening because this is a moment that we’re having together right now of awakening, of awakening to opportunity. We’re in a period of time where we’ve got such rich opportunity. We can look back into the past and we can look to the future with hope and optimism with knowledge of, I guess, some of the challenges, problems. And if Grant says and yourself and Shirley, we take that time to understand the impacts of colonisation. So for me, when I think of that question, I think for me, the greatest impacts on colonisation, and everyone’s touched on it tonight, is the impacts on knowledge systems, on our pedagogy of our ways of being doing and knowing, which has been disrupted, which in some circumstances which has been lost, which is opportunities for reconnecting and recreating and re-embracing because we’ve got a connected pedagogy across First Nations peoples across this country, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander.

(00:54:24):

And thank you, Grant, for mentioning our Pacific Island, our brothers and sisters as well and cultures there. So for me, it’s those lost concepts in that knowledge, the concepts of time, which was mentioned as well. Shirley, you mentioned the time that’s taken and also the understanding how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people utilise time in our experience and in our knowledge and in our practise. The concepts of relationships is a big one. We’re talking to that, the interrelatedness, interconnectedness.

(00:55:04):

And I’ll just say the ecology of care. We’re talking to therapeutic ways of understanding, being, doing, and knowing, creating … So the opportunity for me, as I see it, is if we understand that, take that time, we’ve got the impact to create of new knowledge systems, new practises, and that’s really going back to that time before. And it’s blended. It’s creating for practitioners listening to this tonight, the opportunity is creating bridges, bridges of knowledge and practise. Walking as Aboriginal people, as the older we get, we’re living … We’ve developed the art of survival of walking between two worlds. So non-indigenous people as well, that’s an invitation to do the same. Understand how you can walk between two worlds and exist personally and professionally as well.

Dana Shen (00:56:13):

That’s beautifully said, Luan. So yeah, I just really want to kind of take that and invite people to think about that. How are you building bridges? How do you move between who you are to understand others? Also, what are places that are hearted across and how will you build the bridge to that? So thank you, Lou. That was lovely metaphors that you applied just then. So just to let our panellists know, we have under 10 minutes now to keep on with this yarn. So I’ve got a few more questions and then each of you are going to have a chance to round up. I want to talk a little bit about navigating unhelpful systems. So I think a couple of things that would be good, first of all, I’d really like to invite you and Shirl, I’d like you to start from you first, particularly from your social work background and all the work that you do with families.

(00:57:14):

What do you think are the most unhelpful systems for our people? What are the most unhelpful? And what are the characteristics of them? Tell us a little bit about the detail of what unhelpful system looks like.

Shirley Young (00:57:30):

I think for me, an unhelpful system is a system that remains colonised. That a helpful system is where we start to decolonize things actually, but where systems and thinking, individual ideologies and thinking and practises and environments are colonising. If we maintain that sense of practise, that is never going to help us. It’s never going to help Aboriginal people because we remain in that colonising process that’s been happening for a long time. If we do not understand that if we disconnect children, families, and communities from culture, that it’s actually detrimental to people. If we continue to do that, we are basically keeping people from being well. If you look at the social emotional wellbeing wheel, you can see that it’s all about staying connected to culture. So if we’re doing practises that are not helping that, then we are being harmful, in my opinion. If we don’t actually critically reflect on the work that we do as practitioners and have the opportunity to mull over and the time to spend and think and linger and actually challenge our own way of thinking and being and doing, then we continue to apply practises that are not helpful.

(00:58:48):

If we continue to apply practises that are westernised and we don’t acknowledge that there are Aboriginal ways of knowing being and doing, and there are Aboriginal frameworks that we can now apply, then we’re not being helpful. Can I just quickly say though, that if you’re looking at this social emotional wellbeing wheel and framework and you’re wondering and thinking to yourself, this is a fabulous framework, but how do I use it because it may not fit with me from my clinical perspective, can I just invite you to have a longer thought process about this? When I teach students in social work school around what they can do with that, I actually say to them, think about how you use it in practise, utilise all of the centre parts of the pie and have conversations with people, or keep those topics in the back of your mind when you’re speaking with families to know, are you talking about something that’s culturally driven here?

(00:59:48):

If they’re not talking about those things and they’re not describing them, I would wonder is there something that’s happening from a social determinant perspective or a historical perspective and How that is actually impacted on their experiences and the way they actually talk about their cultural connection. Because if you’re using this model right, you could actually be using it as an outline of actually doing your case notes and understanding what’s actually happening from your family’s perspective. This model could actually be part of changing the way that you actually practise. It could help you to frame the way you write about your family, the way you think about your family, and the way you conceptualise the way your case is going to look in the future. So if they’re not connected, why are they not connected? What’s happened historically for them not to be connected? That is part of their story.

(01:00:44):

It’s actually part of understanding why they’re in the place that they’re in now. It also helps you to pull out strengths and protective factors that your families might have. So if you’re talking about connection to kinship systems, there might be five other mothers or whatever that could be supporting this child. If you are not looking for that, you are not listening to that, you’re not actually drawing out the strengths and the protective factors of their family. If they’re saying to you they go back to country to regain strength and they take their children with them and you’re hearing what’s actually happening there, you’re actually hearing the strength of connection to culture. And what that does, it brings wellness. So I would suggest you actually think about this model deeply, think about how you can actually apply it to practise, think about how you can write about it.

(01:01:38):

And I can tell you, by doing this, cultural aspects will turn up in your file and in your case learning way more than if you just say, “That’s a really nice framework, but I don’t know how to use it or what to do with it. ” So I encourage you, think deeply about this process.

Dana Shen (01:01:55):

Beautiful. Thank you, Shirley. And this is lovely because what Shirl’s given is a taster of a much deeper work conversation we’re going to have in our next webinar. And that is how we ensure that cultural and clinical practise are balanced in the work and each are given the right kind of states required for healing. So we’ll come back to that. Thank you, Shirl. Grant, so from your perspective, in terms of unhelpful systems, if there was one thing that you would really want people to be thinking about and challenging, is there a system that you’d like to encourage people to think about and what do you think that they should do about it? Really interested in your perspective on that.

Grant Sarra (01:02:36):

I think people have just got to bite the bullet and interrogate racist systems and sexist misogynistic systems as well, and just call it out and just obliterate it basically and build inclusive anti-racist, anti-misogynistic, sexist institutions and practises and everything that we do, that’s important. Don’t be tokenistic and superficial. I’ve seen so many things in around reconciliation and people are just doing it to tick a box. It’s not about ticking a box. It’s about being authentic in this space and place and being flexible, not expecting people to just conform to what is the Western institutional way. Just be able to be adaptive. We talk about things. Think about the concept of reasonable adjustment. If you don’t think your service is being authentic and it’s not being upfront and then being prepared to challenge the status quo, make reasonable adjustments and be prepared to commit that. And that’s a reflection of the leadership of each organisation.

(01:03:48):

If it’s not working in the middle or the bottom, it’s not working at the top. So there’s that sort of stuff. And as we get into … We started on the conversation around diversity. My thoughts are as I look across the country and you get to travel all over the country. But one of the key things is we’ve got to localise the clinical sort, the types of support that’s required in location specific to people. And I use the example that if we as people embrace the concept of … When we talk about project parameters, we talk about scope and time and quality and cost and risk. Think about those parameters in the context of clinical care and look specifically at the concept of risk. If we don’t do the right thing at the local community, we aren’t prepared to sit and listen and learn from the local people.

(01:04:44):

We’re going to actually increase the level of risk associated with it. And I use the metaphor or the analogy, whatever you want to call it. If we want to pick up on quality, if we’re going to build a house, you’re going to go straight to a reputable builder because you’re going to guarantee that the quality of that house, it’s not at risk. It’s going to be good. If you’re going to get your car fixed, you’re going to go to a reputable mechanic. If you’re going to get electrical work, you go to reputable electrician. You’re not going to get your car serviced … Oh, sorry. You’re not going to get your car serviced by a builder who tinkers with cars on the weekends because the risk and the quality reduces. So that example, if you want to provide top-notch clinical care to ensure the cultural quality of that care, who you’re going to go and talk to.

(01:05:39):

You’re not going to come and talk to me sitting on the East Coast of Australia and Gorian country if you’re going to go and roll us out in Arunda country or Yamaji. You go and sit, listen, and learn from the local people and talk about what their history is, what they’re thinking, their psychology, their sociology, all of that sort of stuff, and then start to work with them and meld Western public policy ways around problem issues, solution, actions. Traditional law is the same where problem or issue occurs, it creates disharmony or imbalance. So the old people in those communities will sit and go through the problems and issues, and they’ll come up with their own solutions and actions, which they know will restore the balance and harmony. Ancient ways of knowing, modern ways of doing, but do that at the local level and invest and build and empower people to do that and learn.

(01:06:29):

And that’s the only way forward. The only other thing I will say is that outside of the historical overview briefly I gave before, when you look, you go into main cities in this country and you look at all the major buildings, 50 story high, I always sit there and I observe those things and I ask myself, how much revenue do these buildings generate? And the next question is, how much of the revenue generated goes to the actual traditional custodians of this land? The answer to the second part of that is zero, and that’s caught up in this westernised, paternalistic, closing the gap type mantra where the oldest continuous culture in this country are welfare bound in our own country. So the only way forward for first peoples in this country is give people a fair investment in all the developments from their land and be fair to income about that.

(01:07:27):

No more tokenistic rubbish. It’s the only way will change. And the only other thing with that is to see in a cultural law context, you don’t become a man in a day. It takes a lifetime to become a man. And you don’t become a woman in a day. And if we look back and we look at clinical care and children, look at their lives and our own individual lives in blocks of seven years. One to seven, we’re connected back to our mothers. We’re always connected to our mothers. Seven to 14, I’m now boy man. I look differently at things, including women and so forth. And that’s where sexuality and all that starts to evolve, 14 to 21, 21 to 28, 28 to 35, 35 to 42, 42, 49, 56, 63, 70, 77, 84. Who’s going to look after us at 84 if we have the luxury of getting there?

(01:08:21):

That’s kinship care at a holistic level. So we’ve just got to learn to be able to put our shoes in, put ourselves in the shoes of the client that we’re faced with or the person that we’re dealing with, embrace our cultural honour and integrity, and embrace also behave with cultural dignity and humility because young people won’t listen to old people that talk over them or above them or make out they don’t give us stuff about them. So just be you.

Dana Shen (01:08:50):

Thank you, Grant. Lou, we’re soon to come to getting a key takeaways from each of you, but I did want to ask you, is there a key thing that you’d like to touch on around unhelpful systems and how we might invite people to respond? How have you seen it respond? Have you seen people respond to it? Anything that you’d like to add first? And then I’ll be asking for each of your key takeaways.

Lou Turner (01:09:17):

Thanks, Dana. Yeah, look, what a rich conversation. And I went to that straight point that Shirley went to when she reflected, which was looking at colonial systems, the impact of colonial systems, and that the process of colonisation is ongoing. We have to remember that and recognise that. And it’s been held and it’s been fostered into the future. So I think for me, I look at systems that are unhelpful that are opposite to human-centered lived and living experience focused systems. And I look at systems when we think of systems, think of systems as ecologies of care, ecologies that support us as people, us as human beings exist. So how can we better, how can we understand better the systems that support us? So when I look at unhelpful systems and through that colonial lens, I look at the most unhelpful, which are justice, health, child protection, law.

(01:10:30):

And when we’re thinking about young people, family law, those legal systems and institutions. Yeah. So thinking about systems that work to support and enable a continuum of care, health, wellbeing, and healing.

Dana Shen (01:10:46):

Great. Thank you so much, Lou. Okay. I just want to give you each a minute now, and I want to ask you just to consider two things to invite people to think about. The first of all is, what is one thing, what’s a key takeaway that you’d like people to take from this, just in a sentence? And then finally, what is a question that you’d like to ask people to consider? What would you like them to think about after this? Shirl, can I come to you first? A key takeaway? So one sentence that’s a question. Yeah.

Shirley Young (01:11:28):

Sorry. My key takeaway is tonight we’ve talked about some tough stuff, and we have to do that in order to think about what we need to do moving forward. And my question is, how can we invite you into our next conversation about what it is you will do differently as a practitioner to make a change, to make a difference for Aboriginal people, children, young people, parents, communities moving forward from here? I’m going to invite you into a space of what can you do differently.

Dana Shen (01:12:04):

Thank you, Shirl. And how about you, Grant? Is there a key takeaway and a question you’d like to ask people?

Grant Sarra (01:12:10):

Key takeaway. Key takeaway would be goes back to the start of what we’re talking about. We started with acknowledgement of the country and get individuals to think about when they hear that concept, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of which we gathered, power respects to the elders, past, present, and emerging. Just imagine that there’s a little shithead like me sitting in that audience with all due respect. And I’m going to say, thank you very much for that acknowledgement. Can you now please tell me and everybody else here how you are authentically doing what you just said? That’s the challenge. What I encourage people to do is say, “Thanks, Grant. That’s a great question. What we are doing is one, two, three, four, and be proud of it, own it, and live it and breathe it and be good in that journey.” I encourage people to go and look in the mirror, as I said, at love and honour and cherish with value and respect.

(01:13:00):

He’s looking back at you because if you don’t do that, you’re no good to anybody. And the question I put to you each is, who are you and where do you come from?

Dana Shen (01:13:13):

Thank you so much, Grant. And how about you, Lou? Is there a final takeaway and question that you’d like to ask people before I begin closing?

Lou Turner (01:13:20):

Yeah, thank you, Dana. And thank you to my fellow analysts and teachers and community members and friends there who’ve spoken just so well in giving big, deep knowledge of lived and living experience that comes through practise, that comes through just being … For me, the key takeaways are how can we look at remembering and awakening? And that is waving into a question, what opportunities of change can you create through creating those bridges of knowledge and practise? So yeah, for me, a very, very significant yarn tonight, and I thank everyone for giving and also listening.

Dana Shen (01:14:12):

Thank you so much, Lou. Well, on that note, I’d like to thank all the panellists for their wonderful wisdom tonight and to really remind you of the invitation, the questions that they’ve asked you. Have a think about those things. So all of you, thank you. Let us know on the feedback survey via the button below the video. If we achieved what you expected and if it was helpful, we hope to see you all at the next webinar in this series, Clinical Application of Social and Emotional Wellbeing to Support Aboriginal and Twicet Islander Families. On Wednesday, April the 15th, the link to register is in the chat. So go well, everyone. We really, really hope and look forward to you being at the next webinar. Take care.

Grant Sarra (01:14:58):

Thanks, Dana.