On this blog, I’ve written about my own personal journey with depression, anxiety and stress disorder, I’ve also written about my thoughts on suicide, drug and alcohol use (mis-use) and the general dysfunction of Aboriginal families and communities. But this blog, well this is a bit closer to home. I work in an environment which deals with family dysfunction, part of this dysfunction can be atributed to alcohol and drug misuse, exposure to domestic and family violence, mental heath issues (both diagnosed and undiagnosed), exposure to physical and sexual abuse (sometimes as victims and as perpetrators) and the list can go one, these people are often involved with the criminal justice system, have been in and out of custody, are products of the child protection system and have lead a fairly dysfunctional lifestyle. But there are always the exceptions, the ones who have had a normal childhood, who present as normal, but are substance misusers who perpetrate violence on those who are close to them – their family.

These exceptions are the ones who no one can predict, their violence and intimidation is hidden behind closed doors, no one can see it, and they chose to perpetrate that violence on people who are unsuspecting victims – family, partners and chosen friends. The thing about these people is that their cowards who wait until they are behind closed doors to inflict their threats of violence and intimidation on family. Their persona is one of authoritarian, dictator, “Their always right”, they don’t like it when you challenge their authority nor do they like it when you make them accountable for their actions – how do I know this, I have one such lovely family member who displays all these characteristics. This family member also has an alcohol misuse issue and a former canabas misuse issue – this family member also has drug induced psychosis – which can take everything to a different level. People like this don’t take responsibility for the actions and their behaviours nor the consequences of these – they prefer to blame others for everything.

(there is a point to this blog, just bare with me) So the past few years have been up and down – depending on the behaviours of the individual. I’ve tolerated this behavour – as  most family/friends do – to minimise the damage to the wider family/friend network. People such as myself and others who are in situations like this just stay silent, we keep our own counsel – we become victims. We adopt a victim mentality – never saying anything just to keep the peace, learning the signs of when walk with caution, when things are ok, when to just leave! the never ending phone calls, emails  and text messages all filled with threats, intimidation and accusations – you never reply as it could lead to a showdown, more threats and more intimidation. But sometimes, sometimes enough is enough, you then get sick of being a victim and need to become a survivor – so you start to break away from the cycle – you find your own path, you start to gain confidence, you dismiss the threats, intimidation and the accusations and start to challenge, question and you start to tell. People who use violence in the home don’t like things like this, so they start to escalate in their behavious – because they see that they are no longer in control and they panic, you’re going to tell others about them, they lose face, they are shamed, and they hit back and hit back hard.(metaphorically speaking)

One of the last times I spoke with this family member – they sadistically told me that another family member had died – they enjoyed that for 2 hours I tried to substanciate the claim and when I realised that they were joking – they laughed at me. I call that sick – and I said so – but according to the  mentality of the person who uses violence – it was all my fault , because I refused to talk to them, refused to acknowledge them, refused to become a victim again. This further inflames the person who uses violence – but over time, their threats, intimidation and their accusations no longer impact on you and your emotions and you just learn to shut them out, you start  living the life that  you want and you start to protect that life because your now empowered, you like the freedom to do what you want and not be accountable to anyone for the decisions you make. The thing that makes this complicated is the relationship you have with those who are still emeshed in the cycle of abuse and violence. You want to help them, but they don’t see a way out, they become comfortable with their situation and like being the victim, they turn on you for having the strength to leave, they accuse you of being mean to them when you question why their still there, they scream and make hurtful comments to you – all because you left. This is the stuff that kills you inside, makes you want to go back, makes you want to stop being strong and become like them. But eventually, you have to let them go too – you have to come to the realisation that they are on their own path, and you’re on yours. There is nothing you can do for them, you can’t live their life and they have made a decision to stay. For your own sanity – you have to leave, and this makes a part of you die.

You go through a grief and loss cycle – you morn the loss of the person that you used to know (eg: perpetrator) the fun person who you used to know not the person they are now. To confound this you now have to morn the loss of the people who are the victims – you morn the person they used to be – not the person they are now. Its hard to morn for people who are still alive, but you do, you have to, to maintain your sainty. At your in denial, that somewhere they will come back – but they don’t. You then become angry at them, at the perpetrator at anyone because you can’t help them – then you come into acceptance, you accept that they are no longer the person that you knew, that their gone, that you no longer have a relationship wiht them – or a functional one. Then you just walk away.

There are times you look back on the happy times, the good times and wonder what happened, but thats in the past. There are times that you get sad at what you’ve lost and wonder how things became so dysfunctional in the first place. There are times that you get lonely as you miss the conversations and the companionship of your family. But then you look at their lives – the dysfunction, the destructiveness and the dispair and compare it to your own life – freedom, life, love and choice and you realise that your new life is what life is suppose to be.

Now getting to the point of this blog entry: being a victim is not a nice place to be. It makes you feel like crap! it takes courage and strength to leave and move on, to give up what you knew and to be able to walk away and start again. It’s not easy to do but you can do it, I did, and its that very reason that I am still alive today.

I’ve previously mentioned different aspects of Aboriginality and how I see things in relation to culture and identity and again, its hit the papers, the questions, demands of people to prove their Aboriginality and to condemn those who don’t fit the stereotyping of Aboriginal.

The National Congress of Australia’s First People has issued a statement which in part states ‘‘Let’s be clear, Aboriginal identity is defined by us, no one else. We are a diverse peoples reflecting the contemporary Australia we all inhabit.’ and for once, this is one statement that I agree with.

Much of the debate that is occurring within Australia around Aboriginal identity is based on looks and nothing else. If a person does not have the stereotypical “look” of an Aboriginal person then they are forever deemed by the dominant majority community as being “not-Aboriginal” they are condemned for identifying; promoted to identify as anything other than Aboriginal, and are questioned about how much “Aboriginal” they have in them.

The person that Bolt is targeting this time is Anita Heiss. A well accomplished Aboriginal woman who is proud of her Aboriginality as well as her Austrian heritage. Her mother is a woman who I love very much and is one of the strongest role model women that I know and yet, still Bolt continues to question their Aboriginality based on their looks. There should never be a debate on peoples cultural heritage which are based on their looks, thats not a debate thats an accusation/assumption.

I have friends who are Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal and all who know me know that I am a proud Aboriginal woman and I will take to task anyone who questions my identity (and I have numerous times) but that does not mean I don’t acknowledge my other cultures, I do, however I was raised as an Aboriginal person, I was raised in a culture which helped define me as a person and how I fit into general society, and general society has identified me as part of this cultural background. For better or for worse, we are now intertwined and our life paths are forever defined and that should never be up for debate.

My question is why do most Australians seem to think its ok to “debate” a person’s cultural heritage when if as Aboriginal people cast assumptions on others then we would be labled, but its ok for non-Aboriginals to do that to us? I think the majority of Australia have liked it for too long that Aboriginal people have sat back and took what they gave us, what they don’t like is us coming back at them with the very tools that they have in place to address issues like this. Be warned mainstream Australia – we Aboriginal people will no longer take sitting down your “debates” on our culture and our identity, we will challenge you in your own courts and we will win!

I’ve been on lite n’ easy for a week now and it’s not been that bad. While initially I didn’t want to eat the fruit, my friends told me that I should as its the best way to maintain the weightloss, so I have eaten the fruit. I did experiment with the fish meals but found that they were not suitable for me, the pastas were a bit dry but I guess thats to be expected from frozen foods. I’m looking forward to going home tonight to see what I have for this week! another thing about this lite n’ easy is that I don’t feel hungry either. I’m drinking more water so hydrating alot, but I’m not feeling hungry, which is a good thing.

This is an ugly word, one which defines the person who contemplated, attempted or even died by it as a coward who couldn’t fight their way to a better life. But by whatever definition that is applied to suicide, the end result is always the same – shock, disbelief, grief, anger and helplessness (amongst other feelings). This week our news media were all talking about the death of a Perth millionaires wife. They didn’t mention the word suicide, they stated a tragic death, a death, but not suicide. But that got me thinking, why didn’t they mention what had happened? Why didn’t they say that the person committed suicide. The follow up news reports were how she battled depression and anxiety and had previously tried to take her own life, but still, no word “suicide”. The word is a harsh word, its a condeming word, its a word that ends in a full stop.

While I have never wanted to take my own life – I think its more about my own insight into my depression and anxiety and my own belief systems – I know plenty of people who have and who think about it, they believe death will relieve them from the pressures of day to day life, that the world will be better off without them, that their families will be better off without them, however what they don’t realise is that this is not true. In Aboriginal Australia, more people commit suicide than those who are put in jail. Our statistics in relation to suicide in all age ranges are well over the national average, but what makes them want to do this? What makes people crawl into that dark space where they think the only way out is death? I guess all these questions can’t really be answered on this blog.

While I don’t know Alan Bond personally, I did live in the era of big money in WA, where Alan Bond funded and made the boat which won the America’s Cup and made the boxing Kangaroo a national emblem. My heart felt sympathies and condolences go out to Alan Bond and his family, and to all families who have suffered the loss of someone through suicide. A sad epidemic which permeates through all levels of society.

This year I made a couple of New Years resolutions which I am hoping will stick, one being to blog more than once every 3 months, the other is to get healthy. The healthy bit is due to a health scare over Christmas which kicked me into eathing healthy and generally being healthy.

So tonight, is the start of the eating healthy bit. I ordered Lite ‘n Easy and tonights dinner is a nice Apricot Chicken and Rice.(will post review later)

Apricot Chicken with Rice in package.

Apricot Chicken with Rice outside package

Verdict: yum!

Someone on my Facebook feed put a link to Kelton Pell singing Kev Carmody’s song “This land is mine” which was taken from the Rachel Perkins movie “One night the moon”

With Australia Day coming up and the nationalistic pride being overtaken by bogan/yobbo behaviours, where more people cringe at the southern cross tatoos and the Australian flags, and people like me just take it as an excuse to ignore whats going on, got me thinking of the two different ways people see Australia.

Most Australians see the land in which they own, they posess, they cultivate, grow and build. Their relationship with the land is different. In recent times we’ve seen demonstrations of ownership, of pride of being Australian, yet, they fail to tell us what it means.

As an Aboriginal person, I don’t own the land, I never did, the land was always and will always be mine as the land is me. I hear the land, I see the stories and I feel its presence. I know where I am, I know when I’m not suppose to be somewhere, the land talks to me.

Australia Day is coming up, this is the time when most proclaim their allegence to a country which was founded on convict labour and who they proclaim as theirs, but it doesn’t matter what they say or do, they will never truly own this land, as this land will always be mine.

Nicky Winmar stood up to a ferocious Collingwood supporters crowd and owned them! (yes, St. Kilda did win that game too!)

A friend of mine changed his FB pic to the pic of Nicky Winmar showing the Collingwood supporters that he was black and he was proud. To me, that pic marked the day that the AFL would forever change the way it viewed it Aboriginal players and embrace the change with courage in its convictions.

As most who have read this blog know, I am an AFL supporter, I have been a lifeline AFL supporter and I have a great respect for all those players who have paved the way for the young men of today to play a great game. However that being said, once upon a time, the game was not as open and accepting as it once was.

Back in the day of Graham “Polly” Farmer, Sid Jackson and Joe Johnson – Aboriginal people were still considered “protected” persons. They were not rightful citizens of a land in which they lived, they were living in second rate conditions and were openly discriminated due to their Aboriginality and the colour of their skin. Fair skinned Aboriginal people were being removed from darker skinned Aboriginal people, they were put in reserves, missions and were adopted out, to pretend that they were white and were never given information about their true heritage. The impact of this legislative genocide is still being felt, through many generations still missing and those who were taken some have never reconcilled themselves with their Aboriginal heritage.

How this relates to football is easy. Sport in Australia provides a mirror into the Australian psyche. Somehow what happens in the political arena is most often than not reflected in the sporting arena. The boycott of South Africa due to their ongoing policy of apartheid is one example, but in Australia, the acceptance of Aboriginal sports people being on equal par as non- Aboriginal sports people has always been a struggle.

In 2005 the AFL inducted into their Hall of Fame – a team of 26 Aboriginal players who were chosen to be their Indigenous Team of the Centuary. That team of players were chosen for their skill, their ability to be able to play football, but unwittingly they were also chosen as representatives of cultural and racial change in Australia. The growing acceptance of Aboriginal players being in representative football  has changed over the years, from the unspoken agreement between clubs by only fielding 4 Aboriginal players at one time, to the  cultural acknowledgement of Aboriginal heritage within the game has made the AFL a leader, not only in reconciliation but in sporting acceptance.

When we look at the picture of Nicky Winmar all talk about his stance against Collingwood and his “black power” stance, even those who don’t follow AFL, know this of this event. This event helped change the way that Australian sport and Australians in general viewed Aboriginal people, it also changed the way Aboriginal people viewed themselves, not as victims, but as survivors. Nicky Winmars name will always be associated with his challenge to Collingwood, but it will also be associated with his God given talent and ability to move a ball better than most. Nicky Winmar. Proud Noongyar man. Proud Footballer, forever legend.