My research is documenting my families stories
my family are the D'harawal
people of the Sydney region here and
we've been here for as long as we know
My family are on the front line of
colonisation and a lot of our stories
have been silenced through colonisation
over the last 230 years
My research is decolonising those knowledges
I'm using Indigenous research
methodologies and D'harawal's storytelling
methodology to decolonise those
knowledges and to let everybody know
who we are and where we've been for so long
Tonight I'd like to tell you a
story that arises actually from my
initial findings and the story is about
my father who is that little boy that
you can see in the very front of that
photo behind me. My father was born in
the 1940s which is known now as the
assimilation period of colonisation here
in Sydney. He was born into La Perouse
community a mission to south of where we
are right now and he was raised around
aunties and uncles and cousins and
language and culture and stories and
knowledge. For my father, his father was
an Aboriginal man strong man in culture
and song but his mother was white. That
meant that in the eyes of the government
my father was a half-caste. He was a
mixed blood and the only outcome for him
was to assimilate into white society so
it was very unsafe for my father to be
in the La Perouse community, so the family
kept moving around and they found
themselves in Herne Bay, a mission on
Salt Pan Creek which is now known as
Riverwood. And that's where this photo's
been taken, sitting on the front steps
with his brother and sister, half-caste
commission house. You see the government
children waiting for a housing
wanted to entice Aboriginal families
into housing commission houses to keep
the eye on them and to watch what the
mixed bloods were doing to make sure
that the mixed bloods and the
half-castes were marrying other white
people and creating children that would
look like me. My father's family, having a
white mother and an Aboriginal father
were dumped in the middle of a white
suburb under a policy called the 'salt
and pepper technique' of assimilation.
If both of your parents were Aboriginal, you
were sent out to Blacktown, what we knew
then as 'The Black's Town', thus the name.
So, my father grew up amongst all
white people in intense racism and abuse, violence. He only lasted until year seven
at high school. His whole entire life was
spelt out because of what happened to
him through these process of
assimilation and I now have to explain
to him through my research that I've
found out that his whole entire life has
been orchestrated by those policies of
assimilation. That he unknowingly fed
right into their hands and married a
white woman so that they have children
that looked just like me. What the
government didn't count on was that you
can breed out the colour in our skin but
you cannot breed out the culture in our
hearts and minds. That there's no way our
stories will die while I stand here today.
Thank you
[applause]
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