Barbra Asplet

addresses the Gathering of Voices Conference
at Banyo in Queensland in 2001

That was very moving, Robyn. It was lovely. Well, good afternoon. It gives me great pleasure to be invited here today to share part of the story .Firstly let us acknowledge the traditional owners that walk this land and with great respect acknowledge the Elders and our traditional people present here today. As a Catholic, I acknowledge with great respect our Deacon , Deacon Boniface from Wadeye in the Northern Territory, who's with us today.

I would like to speak on a few points regarding our survival in this country. My name is Barbara Asplet I have a sister in the room named Brenda. We are two very very proud Kamiloroi women. We're also from the stolen generation.

The Bringing Them Home Report for me didn't do much for me. It opened up a can of worms though and we are still trying to get the worms back in that can. The Stolen Generations Report and the money that poured into the preparation of that paper did nothing to help us; it provided no support and no resources for people like my family and others to heal the pain.

Leaving aside though the horrendous things that happened to people who were taken from their families, I'd like now to tell you a little bit about myself. I've been a public servant most of my life. I started out with Mr Charles Perkin from the time of the Freedom Ride.I've been a State Policy Officer in New South Wales for various Government Departments and was very instrumental in setting up the National Aboriginal Conference for Australia.

At the moment I am the National Treasurer for NIAAA, the ANational Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association@. It is a body where we protect the rights of Aboriginal artists.

The copyrights have to be safeguarded and we provide labels to say that it's authentic art. It's not necessary for artists to have the label, but I think it's very important for people who want to purchase the art.

And in regard to another committee that I'm on, the St Vincent de Paul State Advisory Board. I have been very concerned about direction of the St Vincent de Paul for many, many years. So many I've lost count. And all that time we've been trying to get the social justice Statements happening. We've been trying to employ a person to travel around New South Wales to look at the needs of Aboriginal people. In the last month we've been able to do just that. This young lad is here with us today, Clarence Slockey. He is the State Coordinator for the St Vincent de Paul society.

So that's got rid of all the nitty?gritties.

So, let me say, that today I would like to take you on a journey with me. Twelve years ago I packed my bag and walked out of the public service, because I felt the public service people weren't listening to the needs, that I put forward from our communities. So I packed my bag and left. I ran into a very wonderful Priest, Father Frank Fletcher MSC, who was a Doctor of Theology, and who was starting up the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry in Erskineville which is near Redfern.

So I might be dead broke, but I'm very happy, walking away from about 70 ?80 thousand dollars a year job. It meant I got my soul back, and I got my dignity back.

So to tell you about the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry we've set up in Erskineville. Most people would say that we are a very rich Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. And looking around Australia, I would say that we are. But there's been a lot of hard work gone into the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry. Being employed there with Father Fletcher for the last twelve years has been really great for me too, and there's been a great change. Listening to Steve, I could relate to some of Steve's stuff. It has been a great change for me as a woman, which has been a very wonderful thing for me.

Brenda, my sister is the administrator/finance officer for the Aboriginal Women's Healing House, and is the Coordinator for the The Aboriginal Catholic Ministry in Sydney. At the Catholic Ministry , we work in the area of social justice. Also an important area of our work is the preparation and arranging funerals, and counseling bereaved families.

We also have a welfare component to our work. I strongly argue in favour of this; a lot of people criticize the 'welfare mentality'. There is a difference, a very fine line, between welfare mentality, and families in desperate need knocking on your door for a feed. Please let's not forget and get tied down with this >welfare mentality' thing. Jesus gave out bread and fish because the people were hungry. The Catholic Ministry must always be available to provide for community people when they are in need. So how is it set up? We give out food there, and again as I say, doing this well means a lot of hard work for the Welfare Officer. It means talking to people, counseling them, and sorting who are the most needy, because there is always a limit to our resources. This food we give out from the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry is provided by the St Vincent de Paul Society. They helped us set what is called the Mum Shirl Conference in the ACM.

Finally there is an Aboriginal Church that Elsie Heiss operates out of, at La Perouse, it has been renamed the Church of Reconciliation. There are Sunday Masses there, we also have baptisms, weddings confirmation and other ongoing Church activities there, and in other Churches such as Malabar, where Fr Pat Hurley gives Elsie strong support, Redfern and Erskineville.

One of the things that I'm particularly excited about is that we now have an Aboriginal Women's Healing House. You might want to look at the photographs outside. Let me now talk a little bit about the Healing House. It has been for me a dream, a dream of healing. But twenty years ago I guess everybody would just stare at me as if I was a witch if I ever mentioned that I wanted to go into Healing work.

Today things are different; it's very trendy. In the Departments of Health, all Departments, trendy groups now-a-days want to talk about healing all the time. It's a trendy word. But there was a lot of pain when we started out on the healing programs. At First we used to go, pack up our bags with men and women from any area, from Lismore right down to Sydney. We would just go and camp on a river bank, take our tucker, ( no name brand food) and we'd listen to each other's pain. And so it was great. But now fellas it's been a hard journey with our Healing place.

I'm not an old 'blackfella' that sits back and waits for things to happen. No one's going to wave a magic wand for Barbara, and tell me AHere Barbra, here's your dream.@. I have Jesus in my heart. But Jesus gave me tools. He gave me my body, my feet, my hands, my eyes, my ears and my brain. So I needed to be creative. And I needed to get right out there and build on my spirituality and make my dream come true. But I just didn't do that by myself, I had a wonderful lot of helpers. And I'm also now a very active person, as Robyn said, I'm a doer. I'm back here now doing all these sorts of things that I like doing.

This is how building my dream got started. It began when I met some very wonderful people from Germany and in fact, a particular German doctor came out to visit me, and she went back and wrote a report, we got $50 000 from Germany. She said, that's for you, or it's a salary for whomever you want to employ. But Father Frank and I said that's not going to be for a salary, that's going to be for starting the Healing House. So that's how we came by our money. We were given a house to use in Queen Street Newtown; it used to be the Golden Grove Convent; we had a lot of things happening from there, programs and discussions and activities like pottery and weaving. But we needed to get out into the bush, and that where the Sydney Archdiocese came in strongly to help, and a wonderful Committee of Nun's from around Sydney helped us. That place in Newtown was sold, and with the proceeds the people from Polding House bought us a beautiful property up on Mount Razorback, near Picton. Fr Brian Lucas had said to us, ' Go find the place of your dreams.' And we did that, my sister and I, we went looking, and we found this place. This property had the proper bush setting, trees, water, rolling hills, bird life and there was there a great feeling of Aboriginal Spirituality. It had a large two story homestead and a cottage as well as sheds, and 5 acres of beautiful grounds.

At the time of the setting up of the Healing House, I was seconded by the Sisters of St Joseph for 6 months to help them evaluate their work of ministry with Aboriginal people right across the Australian Continent. In my absence Brenda McDonnell assumed responsibility at this time for setting up the Healing House, along with taking responsibility for the maintenance and finances of the new property. When the house at Forbes St Newtown was sold the furniture, and office equipment had to be moved to Picton. My sister did all this; she slaved at it, day in and day out. She purchased all the furniture, the beds, the tables and chairs, everything you need in a place like this; all the furnishings, curtains, blinds, out-door furniture and the like. She fixed up the grounds, and did all the landscaping; it was all over-grown. She had to get the water pumped up from the dam. It was hard work, very hard. There was no phone for a long time, and she was up there on her own, and it is a lonely place surrounded by farms. She was slaving away at all this for 6 months, and running the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry at Erskineville for two days a week as well. She was all the time driving between Picton and Sydney.

This property was purchased in June 1999. From that time until the Official Opening on the 11th of March 2000. Brenda worked tirelessly to prepare everything for the big opening, and for its future use as the Aboriginal Women's Healing Center.

This Healing House is not completely funded for all of its programs, so we have to generate moneys to help make these programs happen.

Our new Healing House has been opened at Picton for over a year now. It's absolutely wonderful. There's people in this room, religious fellas here from Redfern who've been down there. It's a wonderful healing place. No politics are allowed. It's just healing. Even though it's a priority for women, we now have to be realistic. It has to work financially. So I've been leasing the place out to Health Departments to come there and do their planning days. And I allow Conferences there; I believe ATSIC will have their Conference there. NIAAA are having their Conference there. They pay money for it, which is good. They pay very good money. And this helps pay the electricity bills, and all the other bills and helps us to survive.

Aboriginal people, women especially, come but can only pay a very limited amount of money. Maybe they pay thirty bucks a day, and that entails the whole program, and their overnight accommodation, with food whatever, and all sharing together like we do here.

So we must never get away from why we're there; we are there for Aboriginal Women. The aim of the Healing House is really great. What we're aiming to achieve for Koori women is very unique. It has not been addressed by other healing places. Our gathering allows the everyday person to speak out and be heard. We do things like massaging, story?telling, yarning, addressing stress and how stress affects our body. Time is limited so I won't go too much into that, but if you'd like to talk to me later, that's fine.

I'd like to go on to talk about a part of our journey that we do need to address here, and I know that people say don't go quoting the statistics. But really, we need to understand where we're at if we are to move on, so I would like to speak on a couple of points regarding the survival, about mortality rates. Unfortunately the rates are 5 times higher in Aboriginal communities. And school participation rates too, they are very low, whilst again infant mortality rates are well above the National average. And what about life-expectancy? Life expectancy is fifteen to twenty years less than the general population. And we all know the un-employment and lack of skills. But I would like to say though, that for our people, or with our people, it is not always the financial difficulties that need to be alleviated the most in their lives. We need Healing; our spirits need Healing.

In order to break the cycle of poverty, and to establish our emotional well being, and our physical well-being (as in health), and to rediscover our spirituality , we need people in Government to help us address these issues. This has always been a difficult task and God I wish I had the answers.

One could say, we have one answer, we have Jesus and the Healing House. But I can only speak for myself, not for us Kooris in New South Wales, but I speak only for myself, and I see that in New South Wales it is a very, very hard road to get from A to B. It has always been a difficult task, solving the problem of the poverty among our people. All these issues are very complex and at times there are no simple answers or solutions.

In regard to these concerns, we have a lot of strategies in place. Like ATSIC, Land Councils, Health Department, Housing, and one could go on and on; but I believe, and I want to stick to what I say, I believe that some of our own people are sometimes empowering themselves and dis-empowering our communities, causing great disharmony in most places. And it's causing a State of hopelessness across many areas. There are a lot of great workers in Sydney, and a lot of great workers in Redfern. There is Ali and her mob in Redfern, and the girls up the back of this room from the North Coast. But people are burnt out; people are becoming very burnt out.

I want now to move on to what I believe are our concerns here today. We have been setting up the Catholic structure we now have in New South Wales, there are problems which I believe is on the agenda for New South Wales. Louise might explain that in a minute. But let me say this. I've recently travelled around Australia writing a report on such issues. It was the saddest six months of my life. Many religious people are working with us and just because they are people of the of the cloth, doesn't mean to say that they are always suitable for this work, or that they have much understanding in regard to Aboriginal people's issues. I'm going to explain my concerns. And I think I'd like to see some of these go into the recommendations tomorrow if possible.

In regard to religious working with Aboriginal people, there needs to be a change of attitude. It is to do with non?Aboriginal people working with us in our communities. There needs to be new guidelines, and I'm speaking here as a Catholic, so I'm talking about the Catholic structure. There needs to be fresh guidelines for the appointment of these religious people, who work in Aboriginal Ministry. Instead of just sending us someone to work with us, the religious order people need to go and consult with our communities. They should give us the chance to interview the religious people they want to send to us, so that we might be able to assess whether these people are suitable to work with us.

The religious order people need to recognise the right to self?determination for our people. They need to change the role of religious working with our people. They should come to work as assistants, not as directors; they should come humbly to learn, rather than telling us what to do. Sometimes they are even employed on CO-OP programs in remote areas, and they are even employed in Aboriginal organizations. I ask you, where does that leave the Aboriginal people? They desperately need those jobs; outsiders shouldn't be taking these jobs for themselves.

These sorts of things on my travels across Australia disturbed me greatly. Religious people need to work with us in a supporting role, not in decision making positions. Because we are quite able to make our own good decisions. And we heard plenty of talk that they will eventually leave Aboriginal communities and the Aboriginal ministries. But I ask you, "Will they leave their resources, their cars, their houses, their moneys?" Will they leave any of that to us? Will they leave any of it to the blackfellas? Or when they leave us, will they leave us with what we had before? Nothing!

Aboriginal people working in these Catholic organisations, I don't speak for myself, I talk about what I see in other places, they're not paid. Those days are surely gone. Our people need to have training, they need to have adequate salary. They need resources. They need respect. So that is my concern which I will be taking up. I say to these religious, when you do leave, please leave your resources behind.

And just lastly, the understanding of self?determination. We use this term all the time, we use it off the top of our head every time we talk. But do we ever really sit and reflect on self?determination? And I have said to religious people who work with me that they need to recognise Aboriginal people's right to self-determination, including our right to be in negotiation with them, not just consultation; Ravina just said this too. Blackfellas are the most consulted people in Australia; we are the most consulted people in the whole world.

Negotiation is the correct word. They need to negotiate with us, ( and not just consult with us ), and this allows us to be part of the decision making process. And our right to disagree needs to be respected. Just because we disagree with you, please don't nail us to the stake or something. Please hear us out and respect our different opinion.

In practice, this means working in such a very special way with our people. It means empowering our people; not just patronising and dis-empowering our people. We need to have responsibilities. We need to assume leadership roles. But it won't happen with just a wave of a magic wand by the Catholic mob. We need to claim respect, and we need to assume our responsibility. Again we need to move on, and we need to take leadership. We need to take control of our lives with dignity and confidence. This includes recognition of our culture, and spirituality - and for me, most importantly, our spirituality.

My spirituality is very important for me, and very powerful in my life. Most people who have known me throughout my life know that my spirituality keeps me going. And one of the things I notice with Aboriginal people, as well as with white-fellas too; we must always respect protocol. We must respect each other's protocol. That must always be done.

Finally in saying all of this today, let's be united and I think we are, and I've thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of you here. We are all one in God. Let's look at healing as the beginning of life. For all of us healing will be a dream come true. Thank you.

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