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— We're wandering through life not knowing who we are.

We feel a certain way, but we don't quite understand it.

We're so caught between the two worlds.

A world that's been here in the last 230 plus years

to a world that we think we know

that's been here for a hundred thousand.

We need to learn to walk in two worlds

where we're strong in the new world,

but we're strong in the old world.

Knowing who we are, knowing the stories of

how everything came to be

and how they impact us and our behaviors.

So to go forward, we need to learn about what happened.

— Imagine you are sitting in your house

where your generations and families have been

for thousands of years.

Then you wake up one morning and a country has invaded you

and they've killed 90% of your community.

90% of your people are dead

over three generations.

But you are left.

How would you feel if the country that invaded said,

"You should feel really happy."

"You're still alive."

"But from now on in you need to speak our language

and you need to live our way."

"Oh, by the way, you can't live in this house anymore, but be happy."

"We are gonna put you out in the backyard in a tent."

Then the people in the house from the conquering country come and say,

"Hey, we're gonna have a celebration."

"It's on the day we took your house."

Your family goes, "We don't wanna celebrate that

because we used to be in that house."

"What's wrong with you people?"

"We are giving you a chance to celebrate

what a beautiful house this is."

"Why can't you come up and join us?"

"You don't want unity, do you?"

"You're just a troublemaker."

And then it gets politicized.

— Let's acknowledge a fact.

Where we stand today is ground zero of a genocide

of First Nations peoples, lands, waters, and their future.

Australia day is dead.

We don't celebrate genocide.

— Always was, always will be.

— Aboriginal Land!

— A lot of Australia was celebrating

what they called Australia Day.

But then we've got pockets of resilience all over Australia

that still celebrates the strength of Aboriginal culture.

So they tried, but we're still standing here today.

It irritates the shit out of the Australian government

that we're still here and we're actually getting

louder and prouder.

— We speak truth to power every day and they don't like it.

— With this culture comes a lot of history

and a lot of dark history that has been unspoken

and not taught.

— For tens of thousands of years

Aboriginal people connected with country.

Spiritual practice was strong

and mental health was really strong

as was physical health.

We had over 500 nations or language groups in Australia,

— At least 2,500 different dialects,

at least 10,000 different groups

of pacific people living within very

connected parts of country.

Because there were big nations such as the Gamilaroi

and the Wiradjuri people in what is called New South Wales,

they took up two thirds of the state.

They could have conquered all of Australia.

But they didn't, because they honored

and respected protocol and culture.

— You will not find a burial site with hundreds of bodies

through the spear,

because even though there might have been anger and skirmishes,

we never had wars, because we had respect for each other,

and we honored each other.

In more than 200,000 years, no army was ever built.

We built relationships.

No fort was ever built,

no castle was ever built,

not because we never had the technology,

because we built this family kinship connection

with one another right across the country.

— So we didn't dominate it,

we didn't need to have ownership over it,

we worked simply with it.

And then the landscape was healthy, everyone got to feed

so we knew it wasn't just us who were feeding,

it was the dolphins, it was the eagles, it was the sharks.

All would wait for this great migration.

So we worked with them.

— In traditional Aboriginal times we knew country so well that we could harvest food

and still have the rest of the day to share story

because in a way, our boss was Mother Earth,

she told us where to go when.

— So my people were at the top of the great divide,

which is, you know, a mountainous range,

and it would take three weeks to walk from the top

of those mountains down to the coastline.

We actually waited for this indicator flower

that told us it was time for us to make our natural migration to the coastline.

But not only the flower, the insects that came with it,

that actually worked in tandem,

that helped that flower to bloom.

So our stories, our songs would first start with

how the insect makes its way to the flower,

then the flower indicates to us

the fish were coming.

But it would take us three weeks to get there.

And we would time it so that when they were ready to come through,

we would connect with the coastal people

and we would have this great celebration

because now there's an abundance of food.

So this was reinforced connection:

reinforced by these different tools of our trade,

the songs, the dances, the art, the story.

— We have a saying that the sky

is a reflection of the earth,

so all our stories here on earth

are also up there in the sky.

We're the same as the sun we're the same as the moon,

we're the same as the stars,

it's that same connection.

So when night comes and we can't see country,

we look up. We still see country,

and we still see story.

— We would see the mountain ranges, we would see the rivers,

we would see the trees that hold it all together,

and so those landscapes would tell those stories.

So if you know your songs

—in Australia, we call them song lines

and they would help us navigate across the landscape—

So if you know your songs, then you know your country

and if you know your country, you're never lost.

— But then came first contact in different parts of Australia.

In Sydney, it was 1788.

— James Cook sailed up the coast

and he came to the easternmost tip of Australia and called it Point Danger.

Really powerful.

— And then he looked over to what we call Wollumbin,

a big ceremonial mountain here and he called it Mount Warning

and it was like he was calling out to all the groups

that live on this continent now called Australia, all of the people,

and he said, "Danger, danger. I'm giving you a warning, something's happening."

— I know at some stage lots of our people would've known about these ships

because we have stories as well that other ships came in and left.

The Dutch came down the west coast,

they traded and they went.

— We had people coming from Indonesia

for hundreds and hundreds of years into the Northern Territory

and being taken into family and marrying, the Makassans.

— At the beginning, our people were trading fish for steel,

for spears because people were hunting using these spears

and then they could feed our people with it.

Maybe they thought, "Well, they'll trade and they'll go again."

They probably didn't realize that they were staying.

— The prisons in England were full of prisoners

and they were overflowing,

so they decided to bring 11 ships out to Australia.

The original penal colony

was established on what we call Australia Day

in what is Sydney Cove.

So we became a prison colony

and the prisoners were offloaded,

but they carried diseases that had never been in Australia,

like smallpox, the common cold, measles,

and within a few years there was a smallpox epidemic.

And there were people around the shores of

what is now Sydney Cove

who did not want those people coming here.

But they got smallpox, so they died.

An epidemic flowed then out with the measles, with the common cold,

they'd never been in this country.

The prison hulks generally were full of men, convict men

who then started to look for liaisons with women.

And so they took women, by force quite often.

There was no capacity to engage in any kind of dialogue

because people didn't speak the 600 different languages

of all of the First Nations peoples across this country.

And there was an attitude that came, with those invading forces,

of slavery, of subordination of lower classes,

but aboriginal people were not considered to be even—human.

— Unfortunately, those first interactions were very violent.

That is what the British did all over the world with Indigenous cultures.

My great-grandmothers were survivors of some of these massacres

so they were holding onto these stories

and it was so difficult for them to tell

because they were like four or five years old

and then watching the whole population of their communities

wiped out in a day or two.

There are stories about mothers

sticking their children into hollow logs to protect them

from the troopers who were coming through on horseback

and annihilating a whole population.

— Within three generations of first contact

in any part of Australia,

90% of the Aboriginal population were dead

from massacres and starvation and disease.

Imagine that you had an extended family of 100 people

and in three generations there'll only be 10 people left.

The question to ask is,

"How would I feel as one of the 10 people left?"

— When they came here, they needed to

disconnect people to the landscape.

And so how do you do that? You break down their culture.

The language, the food, the landscape,

the songs, the dances.

So if you start taking away little bits of those elements,

then you start to break down a person's culture.

— I'm speaking English because what happens when you are conquered

is the conqueror will take away anything you have

that enables you to connect to your original cultural identity

so the first thing to go will be language.

We'll be forced fed to speak English

and traditionally if you didn't speak English

you would be punished.

And in a lot of instances

that punishment was to take your children away,

if you practice culture in any way.

— "By the left... Eyes front!"

— My mom's family, all taken away.

They had to live there as little children —and some of them were babies—

until they were 18.

There was no love there when they needed love,

there was no one telling them who they actually were.

And they just learned to be laborers.

— My grandmother and her generation were the last

people that were living fully wild in the bush,

like fully connected to their country.

She got caught at the age of 17,

put onto a reservation.

that they called mission because the church had a lot to do with it.

My grandfather had already walked with his mother

from off the Culgoa River

because he was a Muruwarri man.

At the age of nine, in 1887, he walked down to the

mission when it first got established.

And one of the reasons was is because

in that area along the river systems,

they were still shooting a lot of our people, massacring a lot of our people,

and the mission was a safe place at least where you wouldn't get shot.

They'd Christianize you and make you believe in Jesus,

but at least he wasn't gonna get shot.

So he had gone there as a 9-year-old in 1887

and my grandmother was caught in 1900

by the mounted police and taken.

— And from that point onwards then Christianity

was really pushed onto our people forcefully,

not through love, but by saying,

if you don't do what you're told and don't believe in Jesus,

we won't give you rations, we won't feed you,

we won't give you any opportunity.

So people were encouraged, in a forceful way, to become Christians.

But it had a huge impact on our own belief system.

— Six generations from colonization

and in the first generation,

Indigenous men were killed

and women were sexually misused.

And in the second generation in Australia,

those people who were defined by that, who survived those massacres,

were forced to work for tea, flour, sugar and alcohol.

Alcohol was introduced in the second generation.

It was the drug of choice. It was how people traded.

And then in the third generation, spousal assault started to move in.

Some men started to hit women.

Who did they have to take their, their distress, their pain,

their rage, their anger out on except those around them?

Because they couldn't have taken it out on the colonizers:

they'd have been shot or they'd have been imprisoned.

Then there's the fourth generation.

Spousal assault started to move to children.

And that is move to children, those children grew up.

So then we had kind of like an epidemic of

us internalizing our pain, our distress.

And in the fifth and sixth generation it becomes cyclic.

There was no violence that I remember in my childhood between mom and dad.

My dad was an Aboriginal man, my mom had German ancestry.

And I can never remember him raising his fist.

My mom was religious. She sent me to a church.

Between the ages of six and eight, I was sexually abused in that church.

I grew up with a deep feeling of not being worthy.

I got together with a man who was violent.

— So my father's in his sixties.

He's lived through the understanding of

you have to live in the city, or else your children will get taken away.

— We had government policies that said that we had to assimilate.

We had to en-whiten our people

so that we would move from the past into their new future.

But the culture that they were introducing to us

was not a good culture,

it was all based on segregation.

And they enforced that onto the Indigenous population here,

— The ones that are no good to themselves,

who can't accept things,

the half-caste, and this is where most of the trouble comes,

I would dab the water up so that they were sterile

and would breed themselves out in the future

and that would solve the problem.

— My grandmother was not allowed to go to school after she was 10 years old

'cause they knew there was power in education.

White Australia's worst enemy was an educated Indigenous person.

So they kept us away from being educated.

— When I was five years old, I was taken from my family.

I lived with my father and my sister.

I've got a twin sister.

My parents had, they'd split up.

She left with somebody else.

So they said that, you know, it was moral danger,

we were in moral danger.

Uh, I mean you didn't have to in those days have much

for them to come and take us, you know?

And we did. We were in a humpy,

but we were happy.

We were swimming in a river over near Cowra.

And these two fellows came in suits.

Anyway, they took us.

And we were made wards of the state.

And wards of the state is, that means, that

they have care of us until we're 18.

I didn't see my father again until much later.

Or my mother.

That's me. This is it.

This is the one I want.

I'm in this one.

That's Sandra, my sister and that's me there.

I was placed in St. Joseph's girls' home here in Bathurst.

You know, I was brought up by nuns.

That's the only one of the, the orphanage.

What they do there is they teach you how to cook, sew,

'cause eventually they send you out to work.

They didn't care whether you could read and write or not.

That's back at the homes.

I didn't know how old I was until I was 14.

We never had birthdays or anything like that.

Even my name wasn't my name.

I was called Shirley.

But my real name was Cheryl.

When I was, I was 14, I got molested by a priest.

There was a bishop's house.

I used to go across there on a Saturday and clean it.

I was over there cleaning and this priest

came over and asked, could he have a look?

Priests to us were like gods, that's the way they,

the nuns bring, bring you up.

And he molested me.

And I remember what he said,

"Please don't tell anyone. We've got feelings like anyone else."

So...

And I knew who it was, Father Cunningham.

So I didn't say anything. And then I was having nightmares for a couple of weeks.

And so I got on really well with one nun.

And I told her.

The next thing I knew, I was on a plane to Hague,

which is right up the top, right out.

And I stayed with this old lady

and I lived with her until I was 15.

And then I was sent out to work in Carrathool,

which is another place right out, you know.

And I was a jillaroo.

And what jillaroos do, they look after the kids

and you know, they ride the horses

and help with the sheep, do the cooking.

You did a bit of everything.

So I stayed there until I was 18

then came back.

I saw my father

and he died just not long after.

This is my great-grandfather, Thomas Peckham.

Alias, Tom the native, and that's what they called him.

I had to find my family, you know,

I had to find out who I was related to.

And I had to chase my mum.

For years and years, all she did,

and I saw a lot of the letters,

she was trying to get us back.

It was some years later before I saw her again.

I found out where she was living

and I went there.

And she was drunk.

She didn't wanna know us at all, you know?

I just didn't know what to say to her.

— Good morning, brother.

— How's it going?

— Good bud, how's doing? Alright?

— My mom was so resilient to it.

She, she was so tough.

It was heartbreaking.

But I still didn't understand it much as a child

because we weren't taught at school about the stolen generation

or Aboriginal culture.

It was just all mainstream white, European settlement, discovery.

But there was a whole Aboriginal culture around me

that wasn't mentioned.

— My father died when I was 10 years old

and wasn't really around my mom much, yeah.

My auntie raised me.

A lot of violence was back home.

Used to be fights, alcohol, drugs, and stuff like that, yeah.

We all probably share the same story.

We all lived through trauma and

everyone connects to what happened in the past.

— There's times when we slept on the streets as kids.

There's times when we slept in refuges.

During those times, I've seen a lot of, you know, crime.

I've seen a lot of drugs.

I've seen a lot of domestic violence through that.

My mother, who was affected.

Yeah, as I got to about 18, 19, I was, I told myself,

I did a bad thing, and I thought I was going to jail.

And then I kind of got off, which is good.

And then at the time, I told myself I had to get away.

Because if I stayed, I'm just gonna get in trouble.

And I'm only gonna go to jail or I'm gonna end up dead.

I didn't have no one around me to help me break out of that.

— Yeah, we just grew up in the

suburbs trying to make ends meet.

Dad was hardly around.

Mom was a single mom.

Low income, tried her best.

One thing my mother had an abundance of was love.

She had the heart of an angel.

Dad,

very traumatized still to this day.

He showed me a lot of things

that I wasn't really interested in becoming.

Showed me that being Indigenous was

traumatized, angry, angry man

who disrespected himself and disrespected people around him.

So, I wasn't really interested in that.

— I think one of the hardest factors of growing up

First Nations in Australia is

we don't have inheritance.

We don't have

people before us who have, are like, have succeeded in this society

because we've been separated.

So I've grown up with, we were raised

by my mom, single mother.

She raised seven kids by herself, not having money, not having support

and not having, yeah,

that financial support that a lot

of families in Australia,

especially that I saw in school,

growing up that they have.

And that really separated us from, yeah,

the rest of Australia.

— Australia's very clever at fulfilling the destiny

that was set for them in 1788.

What we are doing is filling the juvenile detention centers

and adult prisons

with Aboriginal people and Aboriginal kids now.

The grandparents of these generations of children today are in despair

of the behavior of those children, their grandchildren,

and great-grandchildren because they

don't want them to go to prison.

They want them to have a future in this country.

But the kids are acting out the trauma.

The grown children of the conquerors

begin to live in fear

of the grown children of the conquered.

— I was about 14 when I first tried drugs.

Speed, getting on the speed and alcohol.

Just trying to, you know,

keep up smoking and stuff like that.

So committed crime

and things like that, you know.

That led me to go

to boys' homes and from there to

prison, yeah.

Probably when I first turned 18, I went to prison, yeah.

Been there for in and out all my life, yeah.

Been out for about five months now.

It's probably the longest I've ever been out.

Prison to me

all the time I've ever done in there

is sort of like my home.

I feel sorry for myself that it feels that way, but it's true.

And that's how a lot of others feel as well.

But I'm trying to break that cycle.

— What a lot of people don't understand is that

a lot of the challenging behaviors in our communities

that are around violence, that are around sexual abuse,

that are around dissociation from actually who we are,

are all a product of colonization.

So whilst we're all on a journey of just trying to learn

about not only the old behaviors,

but learn about who we are,

there's a hell of a lot of us that are still learning about that,

and are living constantly

in a place of disconnect.

— Joe Williams, the halfback, his partnership with

Jeremy Smith will be a key one...

— I was a professional athlete for a good part of my life.

I played in the NRL, National Rugby League.

And I thought my whole life was about sport.

I signed my first contract around the age of 13.

I was playing against men

at 13, 14, 15 years of age.

Using alcohol a lot.

Experimenting with drugs

and disappear into a crowd for days.

And I would go out and drink as much as I could.

'Till I'd fall over or pass out,

and then I'd take enough drugs to kill a

small elephant just to keep going.

— Whilst I knew that I was a First Nation man, I also didn't quite feel like one

because you couldn't be.

There were still products of racism in the change rooms, every week;

There were products of racism on the field.

The most disconnected I've ever been was

the 10 years that I was a professional sports person.

I wasn't living my true authentic self.

I got to a point where I realized

that all the negative behaviors that were going,

whether it was poor form on the footy field or,

or arguments at home or,

or disagreements with people,

there was one common theme,

and it was alcohol and drugs.

Then diagnosed with bipolar disorder,

marriage separation, separation from my next partner.

Three children now, not living with anyone.

There was a voice inside my head that told me

that I was worthless, that I would never amount to anything

and that I shouldn't be here anymore.

Take away the substance, the noise gets turned sky high

and planted thoughts, plans, and ideas of suicide every single day.

All of a sudden that conversation in the head gets louder and louder and

it led me to that path of,

of starting to believe what was happening inside my head.

You know, I always tell people that it wasn't that I wanted to die that day.

It's just that I needed the pain to end

and for me, I thought in the moment that the only way to end that pain

was to not be here anymore.

— On the day of my 35th birthday,

I collapsed where I was working.

Somehow got home and spent three months in bed

in a fetal position, crying to sleep every night,

not being able to eat, having anxiety attacks

and I became agoraphobic and couldn't leave the house, couldn't talk on the phone.

When I reached out to the medical profession, the profession told me

that I had major depression and anxiety disorder.

And I said, well, how do I heal? And they said, you can't.

You'll be like this for the rest of your life.

I've got a young wife and three kids.

They don't deserve this life sentence.

So I walked down the road to kill myself.

— We often will have wailing sessions where we go and cry for ancestors.

When people do pass away, we normally have a place

where we all gather and cry together.

When Christianity came over, we still came together

and mourned the way our old people did

and cried and wailed,

but it was sort of governed by the church.

Some funerals I go to that are non-Aboriginal, they're very

well, they have no emotion.

People don't cry, people don't scream.

People just sit there

and sing a couple of songs

and then say goodbye and walk out.

Well, our funerals are

much more emotional than that.

You know, we cry, we wail.

It's really important to have that release.

— I got a call.

"We've just had a lot of suicides here

and in particular, we've had suicides of young,

some young men in a particular family.

"Would you come?"

So, I got on the plane

and I flew into this particular town.

The first thing that happened is when we got there,

the elder, who was 96 years of age,

and he came down to see me, to welcome me.

He said quietly, "But you can't stop them,

you know, these young men

from hanging themselves."

"We couldn't stop the white men when they came in with their guns."

And that stopped me in my tracks.

I realized that he was still carrying this story in this country.

So we did some really powerful work over that week.

And it was coming to the last day.

The father of the young boys

who had suicided had not spoken,

but I'd also heard during that time

that the mother of the young boys

had talked extensively

about the domestic violence.

So I went up to him,

I said, "Hey brother, I want to get everybody into a group

and we'll have a big circle

and we'll finish with the ceremony in the circle

with everybody saying something.

Would you be able to help me get everybody together?"

And he nodded his head, but he didn't speak.

So we went down together

and I put my hands on the ground

and I brought it up and from right down.

And that place where I was feeling with,

when the women were talking about the abuse, that pain,

I brought this energy up out of my throat.

And he came up and not made a sound.

And we went down again.

And as I brought this, this sound out

of my body from the pain that I was carrying,

what came out of his throat was the most incredible wailing

pain I have ever heard in my life.

And he wailed and he wailed in his grief.

And then he started to talk.

And he talked about his sons and feeling what he felt

when he saw his bodies, the sons of his bodies hanging,

and how he felt when he cut them down.

And how he felt when he sat listening

to everybody talk during the workshop.

And how he felt when he heard the women talking about the domestic violence.

And acknowledged that his sons had seen that,

had seen the fist on their mother.

And then he made a commitment that he would do this work,

that he would do his healing work with his wife,

that he would speak out about the domestic violence,

that he would speak out about how the children experienced it and

its harmful effects on them.

And that the suicides we were seeing

had meaning in their lives

because they felt they couldn't live with themselves any more

because of the pain that was in them.

And it was up to us as adults to break that cycle,

to own it in us, and to do something about it.

And he wept and he made that commitment.

— I now know coming through

that suicide attempt is that

with time, perseverance and,

and starting to learn about who you are

and not just who you are, but why you are,

there's a real path to healing.

I was working in the space of mental health

and suicide prevention, traveling around our country.

And I was one of the keynotes to the World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference

back in 2016.

And conversation around that room was different.

You know, it wasn't about mental illness, it wasn't about mental health.

It was a story that

all of the behaviors that we're having was

a product of not living the way that we used to live

for thousands of years, and,

for me it was,

it was like the penny drop moment.

I realized that it's not

the mind that's not well.

We were struggling with the behaviors that were here

as an implementation of colonization.

The fact that

we are some of the most marginalized and impoverished people in the world.

Huge incarceration rates,

huge suicide rates.

It's all a flow-on effect from

the years of being constantly pushed down and

told to live a certain way of life

that didn't quite fit.

— As I was about to kill myself, a voice came to me and said, "Hey,

you don't have to listen

to what this white system has told you. You don't have to believe the labels."

And it took me years,

but by being taken bush with elders just after that,

because they're our teachers and so the old people say,

if you really wanna learn,

go and sit out in the bush and be still.

— As a Wiradjuri, Wolgalu man, I didn't quite know

who I was, who that was and so it started that journey

of learning about

who I am as a cultural man

and I also understood that I didn't know a great deal as a cultural man.

Down that path, I met a really special old man,

Paul Gordon.

— There was a time in our past we woke with the sun.

Birds were singing, the brook was babbling, the water was pure and sweet.

Our home was a stack of logs and bark, but it kept us dry when it rained.

The land gave us the food that we needed and the animals gave us their meat.

So I grew up out in the bush

right away from towns,

building rural fencing

for the people who actually stole our land from us.

And a lot of the fences were built by old Aboriginal men.

And by sitting out there around the fire,

just sleeping on the ground,

we were able to still keep learning about our culture and our ways

and our ceremonies

because we still had access to our country through work.

We are being tricked and misled.

It's time to stand up before all is dead.

For you see, our mother will survive,

but us humans will be memories of bygone days.

The way with children we forgot how to play.

And the lessons only take what your mother gave.

— All my life have been told that

I have a mental illness

and I need to be medicated to be,

to get well.

And he said to me,

"Brother, it's not your mind that's sick."

"It's your spirit."

"And when you heal your spirit, you'll get well."

And you can't heal your spirit sitting inside four walls.

You've gotta get out in country.

And you've gotta start to listen

to country.

You listen to country and country will tell you everything you need to know.

— The more you lose connection to your place,

the more you lose connection

from yourself.

— And just feel what's around you and look and listen

and then you'll feel the love of your family and then you will find true knowledge.

— So I thought, I wanna become the old me, the old laughing me, the happy me.

What happened was I never ever became the old me.

I became the real me.

From a scientific perspective, the definition of well-being is a lack of symptoms.

But that's a Western definition based on science.

But in Aboriginal cosmology, we go another level

and we say we must be well mind, body, and spirit

but all things must be well because we're all families.

I can't be well unless my community is well,

I can't be well unless my nation is well,

I can't be well unless the entire world is well.

— The medical system at the moment, well,

forever with mental health,

they have only addressed the symptoms.

It's medication, managed behaviors,

and, next person, we'll do the same.

I'm an Aboriginal mental health clinician,

registered nurse

and I work in a psychiatric institution.

There's been no in-depth approach

to how to improve someone's

understanding of their own past

which to me would improve the future

and improve the person internally.

— It's all seen as an outside approach.

We just wanna fix what we see as wrong,

which doesn't fit in the society,

but that doesn't help a person

feel good within themselves.

As soon as I became a nurse, straight away I was

drawn to the Barkindji people in Broken Hill.

— And a box of more toiletries.

Do you have the other bag?

— Yeah, yeah, thank you.

— So this will get you by.

You just need bread, milk.

— Yeah.

— And butter, that's it.

— My name is Ernest Smith.

A Wiradjuri man,

and this is a poem I wrote about me and my grandfather.

The first poem, my beautiful child.

Once I was a boy, so innocent and wild,

his mother sent him to school to learn for a while.

Peter gave him a book.

All he learned about was Captain Cook

invading his people's land.

So today he was taught by an old black man,

old black man took him across his land

and said to him, "Son, we now upon one sacred stand,

this my boy, just one of many,

one of many massacre sites

where our people have fought and died, day and night.

And the white man came,

took all their children away,

taught them this and that,

which really changed them from being black.

So today they run the land

looking for their mothers again.

What we have is a sacred pain

and for this, so many still so angry and so wild,

but for every law, I obey, my beautiful child.

— You're not born with a mental illness.

It's bestowed on you by adversity

and that's it,

full stop.

— Now there's some old video

clips taken

from our people's country, a long time ago.

And the old people are sitting the little babies

and they pass these little babies

from one to the other

and they rub them and they sing to them.

We're rubbing and singing in the lore

and the love of our country into these children.

All across the country this is what we used to do.

There's no need to get a whip

or a strap or a stick.

Just sit down, in love

with knowledge and share that story

and then kids get it. They're connected to country, you know?

— The Indigenous healing practices

stand in their own integrity.

The land hold stories,

the land holds memories,

the land holds the stories of the colonizations, the slaughters, the massacres

and we, from that land

heal when we claim those stories back.

Indigenous healing practices

are not that I've got the power to heal you,

but if I am willing to sit with you, you have the power

to heal yourself.

How do we truly listen?

— Somebody came to me and said,

"Have you read the words of Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann?"

I went back to those words and decided that I needed to use Dadirri,

deep listening,

one to another in reciprocal relationships,

for how I want to teach each other to listen deeply to ourselves and then others.

— How are you feeling now in your body?

— I feel loved in a way

— You feel loved.

Just remember that you are from

thousands of generations of women who've given birth.

So when you're breathing, just feel this, in here

and know that what you are doing as you go through that

ceremony, that smoking,

it also helps to heal

all of them who have been in connection with you here.

— The stories

of trauma are within you,

so the healing is also within you

and what we have to do

is take ourselves back to ceremony.

— As I imagine, I'm going to see my great-grandmothers

and I let that emotion rise.

Then as I feel them,

I imagine that I'm seeing through their eyes,

that my eyes are their eyes.

And then as I'm walking to that place,

it's like you're noticing something for the very first time

because nothing is ever the same,

everything is evolving.

So as we walk towards ceremony,

it's about actually

making sure you've got everyone with you.

This is what ceremony is about.

It's not actually about you.

It's about everything ahead of us,

honoring everything that was before us

and everything that is now.

— Fire is the one thing

that my grandmother, through spirit, showed me.

It was the only way we could get people to sit and listen.

And all I could feel from my grandmothers was,

you just need to sit and light the fire,

light the fire,

light the fire,

light the fire.

Day, night couldn't sleep.

Light the fire, light the fire, light your fire.

And I didn't wanna light fire because I didn't believe in humanity.

I didn't believe that humanity was going to listen,

not in time anyway.

And then my grandfather came, in spirit, as I was sitting

next to this beautiful fire

and he said,

"Don't get up if you're not ready."

"Lay there."

And I did.

I laid, I cried.

I placed my body on the earth and I was ready to go.

And then something so beautiful,

and sometimes insignificant, happened:

the tree just shook

and a leaf fell.

And then I realized that I'm actually... human,

that all of these things are gonna happen regardless of whether I'm here or not.

And do I believe that the tree needs me to see it?

Yes.

Do I believe that that leaf fell for me?

Yes.

Because I needed to get up.

So I made a promise to my grandfathers

and my grandmothers.

Okay, I will unconditionally love humanity

and I will light fire

and I will sit with them until they feel.

— Now, allow yourself to feel the presence of the ancestors here,

that ancient timeless energy,

solid and strong,

the energy of lifetime after lifetime of the same DNA codes

lives here,

in this place.

Now allow yourself to feel

the last law man or law woman from your original tribes,

the ones who still knew the old ways,

practiced the old culture,

the old laws taught to us by the earth.

to take this next step,

to heal your bloodlines

and reconnect to the earth

Connecting with your ancestry

who have been here and know your whole life story.

They know why they've actually dreamt you into existence

and they're holding space for the fire that is your existence.

To have... a culture is an

amazing thing because it was easier and it was simpler, because we knew

how to heal things,

how to bring things back to balance again.

Obviously, that's one of the main things they had to take away from us

in colonization.

Same all over the planet.

Take away our connection to the earth, that takes away our safety.

— Light the fire

and just allow yourself to go.

— Every time I saw us on television,

it was something that was wrong with us.

In 2004, riots broke out

after a 17-year-old aboriginal boy died

while being chased by the police.

At school, they had a very poor

perspective and understanding of who we were.

And I just made it my goal as a young, young fella, to learn

to move the lens away from the deficits

and focus on all the things that our people are doing right.

We can't give children trauma

and expect them to launch themselves to strength.

They need to be given strength

and they need to be given a sense of belonging.

In 2009, a bunch of young men were committing robberies.

Our community was imploding with death, destruction, violence.

Our people were the drug dealers.

We struggled and we were

the epitome of what goes wrong in aboriginal communities.

One of the police officers came to us,

"We can keep arresting our way out

or we can do something together."

So what we said is,

"Alright, we're gonna do it our way."

— Fifteen young men from that community were committing lots of robberies nonstop.

We said, we're gonna teach you routine,

we're also gonna teach you about our people.

First off, you're gonna learn the routine,

you're gonna train with coppers, with police.

And everyone said, that's crazy.

You know, the first day we turned up,

we saw this copper go in who had a really bad name

of being a really violent racist.

They called him Damien, like from The Omen, the devil.

They go, there's Damien, the so and so.

I hate him, they said and I said, boys,

we're gonna go and train with these people.

And the most crazy thing happened.

We were all completely spent from the training session.

And for the first time we actually saw each other.

Now this went on for a couple of weeks.

These young men stopped offending

and started to feel like they belonged to something.

Now in the first three months, robberies went down 82%.

Them young men stopped committing offenses.

Some of them had to do two or three years

on the program

as a substitute of incarceration.

And what they did is they changed their lives.

Some of those young men are our leaders now.

This is important

and this is what's gonna fix us, us!

We don't have to look outside.

It's within our communities.

And there's hope and there's strength

and there's success

and there's healing.

And you hear him say the pledge,

the hard work we do here today replicates discipline,

the routine we carry out through the days,

the weeks, the months, and the years.

— If this is the hardest thing you do here today, we are gonna have good day.

— They say that every session

and they have to mean it, so

all of them together, it's a good recipe.

— We have a term called 'the law'.

In English, it means our value systems that we pass on

from generation to generation

that enable us to live a life of wellbeing

and tells us our rules.

All that law was being broken.

And that's when our people started to push back and say,

you are not respecting country.

— A lot of Indigenous people say that we move and adapt to our landscape,

whereas a lot of Western cultures move and adapt

the landscape to suit them.

Hence the reason to put a white picket fence

up around their newly claimed landscape.

And then they cut everything out of that landscape

and then start to put something that's more familiar to them.

So they're actually changing and manipulating that environment to go,

"Oh, I really like the English rose

and it, you know, it reminds me of home."

Introducing those kind of ways

has had big effects on

the natural environment here.

Once was, you know, something that was truly abundant,

natural food sources,

natural medicines are now gone

because they want to make a monocrop.

So what do they do then?

Pesticides to take care of the insects because they say,

"Wait, wait, we need this crop

and we've gotta get rid of that."

So they poison the landscape on top of that.

And then when it rains, the water just runs straight off the landscape,

it has not had a chance to absorb into the land.

And so when you manipulate country like that for a couple of hundred years,

there's obviously gonna be some backlash.

— That's what our lore is all about,

looking after our place.

So, a really simple thing is

if you keep putting poison in the river,

the next generation of children

who are born from that water will be sick.

You keep poisoning that country,

the next generation of children

will have poison

because we're made up of

that ground and we're made up of that water.

So our simple belief is that the earth

is our mother.

We were born from it.

So, looking after our country

is our biggest responsibility.

We've gotta get back to country,

we've gotta get back to those cultural practices.

We'll let Indigenous people go back on their

ceremonial countries and have that connection.

We connect to Mother Earth by putting the ocre on our bodies

to reinforce that connection,

and then we paint the story of our people

and our landscape.

— When we die, we go back to the Earth.

When we go back to the Earth,

we become the Earth.

So when we're crushing up that ochre

and we're putting it on our body,

we are wearing the blood and bones of our ancestors.

You're dancing

with people that have been here for thousands and thousands of years.

We become those people.

— And then we're going forward after that,

so it's a couple of steps forward, we go, "Yo!"

Everyone, real loud. Three, "Yo!"

Move your feet.

We're getting the beat now, we're ready to go in a minute, okay?

— And then when we stomp our feet,

we believe we are massaging that beautiful mother earth.

And when the dust flies up in the air, we believe that's Mother Nature's spirit.

We breathe it in, we taste it.

It's in every pore of our being.

— We have identity in our culture all the time.

It was not fully taken away from us.

We just want to keep that message alive and

and strong within Australia now.

We wanna show the world that we are still

part of the oldest living culture, and proud

to continue for as long as we can.

— Photo with all of you.

Parents.

Family photo.

Everyone, everyone.

— The younger generation,

they've got that strength

and they understand that there is beauty in

every part of their body,

there is beauty in who they are,

you know, to have that self-love.

Then they understand that there's wisdom and knowledge.

There's wisdom and education.

There is wisdom in that cultural connection.

And so they better themselves because we have given them the tools.

If our culture has lived for over 70,000 years

and we want it to live for another 70,000 years,

we've gotta give it to the living.

So, a living culture needs to be kept alive.

Uncle Dhinawan, I've known him forever

since I was a little baby.

For me, he's been the one

to teach us everything about culture.

He's always been there to rope us in to go dancing

or go out on country

and learn the songlines and all of that.

So he's always been there.

Whether we like it or not,

he's the one who holds our knowledge

and is passing it down to us.

To be able to just

always have a tie to a country, a place a people

and a community

is something that I can never let go of.

If you give someone the strength of identity,

cultural reinforcement and empowerment,

then it allows them to simply be them

so they grow up knowing who they are.

— It is critical for First Nations people all over the world

who have been colonized to claim back

those things that have separated them from themselves.

So, culture, and the depth and beauty of culture

and what it says

and how we looked after our children,

how we cared for our old people.

We revered our old people and knew they held the stories across generations.

And we have to grieve

because in the ceremonies, the mourning rituals, the grieving rituals,

we reconnect to each other, we reconnect to our country.

— We have to take the journey back to reconnection.

And on that journey we've got to realize

that we have to do it together.

We can't keep this divisive thing of, "Oh, you don't belong here."

"You don't come from here. You are a different clan. You're a different tribe."

— Part of our law says

if you come from somewhere else and you're on this land,

then you can be part of this land too.

We need to hold our hand out and enable those that eat of this country

to be part of this country regardless

of their bloodlines.

All of those bloodlines that are here now have come here to learn

and learn how to reconnect.

They're not here to learn how to play the didgeridoo,

they're not here to learn how to play clap sticks or sing our songs.

They're here to actually learn

what it is to be an embodied spirit

connected here.

If I heal

my Indigenous connection to the Earth,

the DNA strand that comes from this place,

if I heal that, I also heal whatever else is in here.

If I heal the English, I heal the Irish.

— We're all the same.

Me and you been going round and round and round

in the circle of life

forever.

You was me, I was you.

We was that tree. We was that rock. We was that bird.

We're all the same.

— Every breath of air and oxygen on this planet has always been here.

I hear every living thing that ever lived

has breathed the same air that I'm breathing now.

And that through that I can connect

to everything.

— We've been here many times before

and we'll be here many times after,

not always in human form.

And so, everything is an ancestor.

I'm the same as you, brother.

I'm the same as you, sister.

Let's reconnect together

and get back on country, back in country

and share story again.

And I think that will heal us.

Country, country will heal us if we allow country to do it.