JCPSLP Vol 19 No 1 March 2017

Communication and connection: Valuing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives

What is spoken, and what is heard Bridging the services gap via culturally safe practice Robyn Sandri and Judith Gould

Most Aboriginal Australians now live in urban centres, and many Aboriginal children and families are not recognisable to mainstream service providers as they are fair skinned. This article tells what lived Aboriginal reality, or world, is like for one Aboriginal educator living and working within an urban Aboriginal space. The authors, one an Indigenous educator and academic and the other a non-Indigenous speech pathologist who has been fortunate to have received guidance from many Aboriginal mentors including the first author, will discuss how respecting and understanding the offered lived experiences of Aboriginal peoples, when viewed from within a cultural safety framework, provides non-Indigenous speech-language pathologists with all they need in order to work ethically and effectively within the Indigenous space. So many professionals come into Aboriginal settings to make a difference. Understanding the lived experiences of Aboriginal peoples may enable this to difference to happen a little better. Robyn’s story Ten years ago, I established a number of Indigenous playgroups in mainstream schools in Queensland (Sandri, 2015). The playgroups were focused upon developing pre-literacy skills and acted as a transition to formal school agencies. I have worked in rural and remote locations, but on this occasion, as with most of my career, I worked in an urban mainstream setting. For those of us who do, our Country is urban concrete. Although I have Indigenous heritage, I had never worked in Indigenous settings or with Indigenous people prior to establishing the playgroups. In fact, I had lived overseas for most of my adult life, working and studying in England and America. I knew of my Aboriginal heritage, but it was rarely discussed or noticed by others for I was a fair-skinned Aboriginal woman. In other words, I look white and we fair-skinned Aboriginal people are legion in a time of dual cultural marriages.

When I began my research for my Indigenous PhD, I decided to use the setting of one of the playgroups I had established. I was no longer the facilitator, so with the permission of the playgroup families, I immersed myself in it for three years to undertake my collaborative research journey. I did not immediately become one of the mob. The young mothers I had worked with, had, for the most part, children in primary school, and very few of the families knew me. I appeared as a stranger to them. I was an educated, teacher-like authority person. I looked just like a white authority figure in their midst. I was treated with wariness for a long time, until they saw I was there to help the kids without judging or devaluing them. In my role, I came to see what is so discussed in the literature, but not often really understood by mainstream researchers and service providers. It was a revealing experience to me. I came to see that Australia has many worlds. Working in this context, I could clearly see that there is a mainstream, white, Eurocentric Australia and there is another place. This other place, the families called “Aboriginal world”. In the urban context, it was not a different traditional cultural space, but a colonised space shaped by daily lived experiences. I found the families’ narratives of their own school experiences full of experiences of exclusion, racism, discrimination and fear. Much of this manifests into anxiety and mental health issues (Malin, 2003). Aboriginal world is not a lesser space to its inhabitants; it has a very different tone and sensibility to mainstream world. It has its own culture, its own history, its own language, ways of knowing, fears and most of all the participants know it is a place oppressed by the elite world of white authorities and experts. Aboriginal Australians live in this colonised space on a daily basis. I am an Aboriginal woman, but have very little tradition or language with which to identify. All that is left of my language is a list of nouns and some recordings in the State Library of Queensland. I was not brought up traditionally, as my tribal lands, people and knowings were gone. Nonetheless, I was brought up as a colonised Indigenous woman with a colonised history. My grandmother was a stolen child, taken on a shopping outing in St George, despite her family being exempt from removal as station workers. When she turned 21 she was granted a Certificate of Exemption, which meant she could live as a white woman provided she adhered to the conditions specified in her certificate. She was not allowed to drink alcohol, nor mix with any Aboriginal people – even her own family – and finally, she was not allowed to speak her own language.

KEYWORDS ABORIGINAL PLAYGROUPS PRIVILEGE STOLEN GENERATIONS URBAN THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER- REVIEWED

Robyn Sandri (top) and Judith Gould

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JCPSLP Volume 19, Number 1 2017

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology