I grew up in Darwin, attending Parap Preschool and Primary School, and then Darwin High School where I graduated in 1971 after finishing Year 12. When I was growing up, Darwin was still just a town of about 30,000 people. It was a small yet very multicultural community with a significant Aboriginal population. There were Aboriginal students in all the schools I attended so I didn’t feel alone.
When I was three our family moved to Darwin from my mother’s traditional Kungarakan lands near the Adelaide River, 100km south west of Darwin. My father was Iwaidja, whose lands lie north of Kakadu on the Cobourg Peninsula.
We weren’t rich and we lived from pay day to pay day. It was only in the latter years that we started to get ahead, although my father died of cancer at 55. This is one of the things that prompted me to pursue a human rights based approach to health equality for Indigenous people because we as a population group are still dying much younger than the rest of the population. I look forward to the day when all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are recognised as the First Australians, respected for being part of the world’s longest surviving culture and enjoy a long life as the mainstream Australian population does.
One of the questions I have often asked myself is why I was able to succeed versus many other Aboriginal people. I think it comes down to my three sisters and me having a solid family household where there was a strong insistence on doing homework.
There are strong values and practices I have observed at school and outside of school that contribute to the way I act now. I learnt to be inclusive and have respect for everyone, encouraging everyone to participate. That’s one of the qualities of good teaching as well. Looking back, I found the most effective teachers were those who could relate to students and encourage those who weren’t initially participants and achievers to be engaged.
I was the only one of my friends who finished Year 12. I joined the public service rather than going on to university because my father wanted to get me into a secure job. There were also limited offerings to study after Cyclone Tracy in 1974. After school I did part time study at Darwin Community College while in my job at the Department of Works and Housing. After Tracy, I went to the South Australian Institute of Technology to study community development and social work. I then returned to Darwin and helped set up the Aboriginal Task Force (ATF) at the Darwin Community College which was a second chance education facility. People who didn’t make it through high school could come back to study Year 11 and 12 equivalents so they could continue onto further study or enhance their employment opportunities. It created a lot of opportunity for people to restart their education journey. Our success was attributed to the ATF being a culturally safe and supportive environment where people were respected and their stories heard.
Closing the gap
In 2005, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, I wrote a report to the Australian Parliament about health equality that became known as the Close the Gap report. With a goal of reaching health equality by the year 2030, I managed to encourage a number of Indigenous and non Indigenous peak health bodies and human rights groups to come on the same journey as me. We formed the Close the Gap campaign that has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. It is a non government, self funded advocacy group with around 300,000 members fighting to bring the life expectancy gap down for Indigenous Australians. Theoretically we have had some progress as the gap was 17 years in 2005 and it is currently at 11 years.
One of the ways to close the gap is by addressing the social and cultural determinants of health and creating opportunities for people to be healthy. The most significant determinant is education. We know that the higher the level of education someone has, the better their health outcomes are. It is unfortunately those with less education who have the worst health outcomes. This is also attributed to poverty and an inability to self educate about health, which leads to a vicious cycle. Additionally, we need to address issues of employment, overcrowded housing, family violence, substance abuse and mental health which all contribute to poor health and can be associated with poor education.
The Close the Gap campaign is equally significant in addressing issues relating to high rates of incarceration, mental health and self harm, where Indigenous people are overrepresented. I am a very strong advocate for justice reinvestment, which means investing in the community before people commit crimes and reducing the disproportionate number of Indigenous people in our prisons. When you consider the cost of incarcerating one youth in NSW is over $230,000 per year, that’s a lot of money that could be invested to develop skills and training for young people as well as employing more teachers.
I believe there is great potential for justice reinvestment in Australia and the trials happening here prove that we can curb offending. It just requires a disciplined way of looking at the issues and solutions in collaboration with the people most affected. It is the same as education – we must start early and have the resources to invest into schools to make learning interesting and inviting for our future leaders.
Future vision
My vision for the future is for preservice and in service teachers to have English as a Second Language (ESL) and Narragunnawali training and to be exposed to a Reconciliation Action Plan and leadership that promotes high expectations. Australia is a multicultural society and many of our children will come from diverse ethnic and socio economic families, so teaching in a language that they can relate to and understand will only enhance their learning capacity and progress.
This is particularly important for teachers of Indigenous kids in rural and remote Australia, as ESL training will guide them to be better teachers. An exposure to Narragunnawali and the Reconciliation Action Plan framework will enable an accurate and compassionate teaching of our shared history and enable teachers to be more culturally competent.
I spoke recently at the Australian College of Deans of Education (ACDE) on the topic of Indigenous studies and how to address it in the curriculum. This delved into how teachers could become more culturally competent in introducing these studies into their classes. My advice is that they don’t have to always do it themselves; there are multitudes of resources and interested Indigenous people who can offer a different perspective that benefits all kids in the classroom.
One of these resources is available through Reconciliation Australia called the Narragunnawali program. It is designed for teachers in primary and secondary schools to develop an understanding about Australia’s history, Indigenous history and key attributes of working with Indigenous people. It has already been embraced by around 600 schools with many going to the next step of developing Reconciliation Action Plans. I would encourage all teachers to get across this material which meets curriculum requirements and is easy to adopt into everyday teaching.
High expectations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should be the norm, rather than the exception and the flow on impact will be wide ranging. I look forward to the day, as Martin Luther King Jr said, where people are judged not by the colour of their skin but the content of their character.