2009 Australian of the Year Mick Dodson reflects on 12 months he will never forget.
Athing that has struck me during my time as Australian of the Year, as I've travelled widely, is that people seem genuinely unsurprised an Aborigine is Australian of the Year. They shouldn't be – I'm the eighth.
The first was the exceptional athlete Lionel Rose. When he was awarded the honour, in 1968, he said with characteristic humour: “One hundred and eighty-two years ago one of my mob would have been a dead cert for this.” We're not dead certs, but eight so far is not bad.
As I've moved around the country, people in all places have responded to me as an Australian. Yes, they know I'm Aboriginal, and they might think I'm a bit of a stirrer or disagree with my ideas, but there's no shock or surprise at who I am.
It's this increasingly casual reaction to indigenous achievement and success that is a marker of how far we've come. It's becoming unexceptional to have successful indigenous filmmakers, artists, doctors, academics, lawyers, nurses and politicians.
This is the other side, the often – and unfortunately – untold side, of the story we hear about indigenous Australia. The media story is largely one of failure, despair, violence and abuse. Perhaps the quiet successes are not front-page stories, but they ought to be recognised and celebrated.
The lists of state and territory nominees and finalists for Australian of the Year 2010 are once again rich with indigenous talent, from grassroots community workers to first-year AFL players, from leaders in education to emerging entrepreneurs.
As an AFL tragic, I was pleased to see Liam Jurrah, the Warlpiri player for the Melbourne Demons, get a nod in the NT line-up.
A few weeks back Jurrah was featured on the front page of The Age, standing on the red-dirt oval where he'd started his career as a barefoot superstar for the local footy team.
Jurrah's the first kid from remote central Australia to play in the AFL. There's something different in the way commentators and footy writers address him to the way, say, Aboriginal player Nicky Winmar was talked about in the 1990s. There's an emerging sense of pride in, and acknowledgment of, his cultural heritage and the fact that English is his third or fourth language. He's a young man steeped in his culture, part of a cycle of law going back thousands of years before Christianity. And he's a mean kick on goal.
Knowing the cultural emphasis on place and family, his trips home are supported by his club, which understands that he needs to attend to relationships and country. Jurrah's teaching not only the kids in his community to dream big, but fans in the cities to learn about an Australia they share with Jurrah and his people.
When Melbourne club president Jimmy Stynes visited Jurrah's home community of Yuendumu, a community worker said: “This visit is a display of respect. With respect comes relationship. With relationship, anything is possible.”
Respect and relationships. We can reinvent taglines and brands for our approaches to reconciliation and addressing the continuing disadvantage of many indigenous people but, at the end of the day, this is what it's about.
As I've travelled this year the things that I see working, particularly in schools, are working because of respect and relationships. I'm sure the new Australian of the Year nominees – black and white – who have been recognised for their excellent contributions to Australian life would readily acknowledge social change is impossible without showing respect and building and nurturing relationships.
Queensland's finalist Chris Sarra is working on an education revolution of his own by insisting that respect and relationships underpin a school's engagement with Aboriginal children and communities. As a principal in an Aboriginal school in Cherbourg these basic principles drove his approach and the community saw attendance and outcomes go through the roof.
He and I both want teachers and principals to think it's unexceptional for an Aboriginal kid to be a doctor or a lawyer, a nurse or a politician. Expectations have an impact on the dreams of children and their confidence to pursue them. They, and those around them with the power to influence them, need to know that there's every chance they could be Australian of the Year.
This year marks 10 years since another Aboriginal Australian of the Year – and another exceptional athlete, as it happens – created a nation-defining moment. Catherine Freeman's victory in the Sydney Olympics 400 metres, and her celebratory lap with the Aboriginal and Australian flags, which was seen by millions here and around the world, took Australia forward a big step towards the widespread casual acceptance of indigenous success that I've experienced this past 12 months.
Freeman was the third indigenous athlete, after Rose and Evonne Goolagong Cawley, to be honoured as Australian of the Year. Sport and indigenous success have had a long relationship. Sport was the only field, for a long time, where indigenous people could access opportunities to succeed. It's also an area that is at least partially blind to colour, or where you happen to have been born.
Sport requires natural ability but that natural ability is not innate to any race. It requires – above all else – self-discipline, self-respect and hard work. These last elements are what the Clontarf Foundation, with its academies, has hooked into as a key to keeping young Aboriginal men in school and placing them in employment.
When people ask me what's working, especially in indigenous education, I now have a whole store of great examples from my year visiting schools around Australia – Clontarf among them.
The Clontarf academies – also celebrating 10 years in 2010 – have worked with an awareness that to effectively engage with young Aboriginal men there has to be an acknowledgement of, and respect for, what they are interested in: footy.
What started in 2000 as a small-scale plan to engage young blokes in school through Australian Rules footy has become a string of 31 academies across three states with 2200 boys enrolled. The program, based on a mix of football, mentorship, guiding principles and academic encouragement, has seen higher than average attendance rates and, in 2009, 102 year 12 completions. Students receive individual support and employment and further training assistance and, in the past 10 years, about 75 per cent of their graduates have gone on to work or training. They've also had 20 young blokes drafted into the AFL.
The other thing I like about Clontarf is that they base their academies where the kids are, rather than set them up in capital cities where boys must board. By doing this they increase their ability to retain the kids while also keeping them closer to family and home. Looking through a list of the sites of Clontarf academies shows up many of Australia's most disadvantaged places, places where many – including governments – have chosen to give up.
When I made education central to my term as Australian of the Year I was thinking not only of the educational disadvantage of indigenous kids and their poor overall outcomes in comparison with other Australian students, but of kids of all stripes who aren't getting a good run at the education they deserve. And I didn't know then, as I know now, how often we're failing kids, especially in remote and regional areas, in the services we provide them in quality and quantity.
The inspiring chinks of light, like Clontarf and many others, are up against some appalling examples of forgotten kids, forgotten places.
Recently in WA a school in a remote community was being shut down, the children left with no option but another settlement 250 kilometres away. The Government's solution? Replace the school and teacher with laptops.
There's also the long-term underfunding of most community schools in the NT. These schools are often embarrassingly ramshackle, staffed by graduate teachers with no knowledge of the culture from which the kids they teach come.
The shocking attendance rates at so many of these schools should be a loud enough message to those in power that taking a leaf from the books of Clontarf and Chris Sarra, among many others, and respecting the children and their communities enough to engage them will reap better outcomes. These things work and they need ongoing financial support.
Respect. Relationships. Sport. Culture. This past year I have seen a country in which a boy from the red dirt who speaks an ancient tongue is embraced by a stadium of thousands. It's a country where the great honour of being named Australian of the Year has been bestowed on eight Aboriginal people, and in which citizens are slowly but surely moving towards an understanding of what we share and taking greater pride in it. It's a year I will never forget.
Professor Mick Dodson AM is a member of the Yawuru peoples. He is director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU and chairman of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.
