Everything is possible, the impossible just takes longer

Albert’s youngest son Jim, my father, benefited from a good formal education before leaving school at 14 to be taken under the guiding arms of his mother’s brother, as was the tradition, to learn the ways of the pastoral industry.

When dad was in his early 20s he met and later married my mother Jean Mitchell, a proud Kooma woman, on the Cunnamulla fringe camp where she lived with her parents.

It is rather ironic that both dad and mum’s only form of income at that time was from the minimum wage earned by working cattle or toiling as a domestic servant scrubbing dirty floors, pots and pans in the sprawling homesteads of white landlords who grew fatter in wealth and girth by the hour - on the land that was once owned by their forebears.

Mum, after marriage, gave up her domestic job to raise a family while dad continued his calling in the cattle industry. There was no welfare income to speak of and all able-bodied men and women, who chose to, enjoyed full time or casual work in the pastoral industry or in and around the nearby township.

In 1967 dad sought a personal loan from his station manager for a deposit on a parcel of land in the township. With good references from the mayor and president of the local branch of the Labor Party he was successful with an application for a housing loan from the Commonwealth Bank.

Dad was the first Aboriginal to design and build his own house in Cunnamulla.

Following in the footsteps of his industrious father Albert, dad also demonstrated great leadership ability in setting up crucial Indigenous housing and legal services to provide better opportunities for his people to escape the appalling conditions experienced by them in that era.

Dad went from being a humble stockman, to holding the highest public office for Indigenous Australians, when in 1980 he became the Chairman of the National Aboriginal Conference.

In the same year he became the first Aboriginal to address the United Nations in Geneva when representing the Nookambah traditional owners in their fight to stop mining on their sacred lands in Western Australia.

So what are the lessons learnt today from my personal journey of discovery? Here are four issues that need to be addressed. Housing, alcohol and drug dependency, unemployment and education:

Housing as it was in my grandfather and father’s era, is still the principal concern for Indigenous families. Sadly it is commonplace today for as many as 20 people from three generations of the same family to live in a three-bedroom house sharing one toilet and shower.

A possible solution in the short term would be to prioritise funding for housing modelled around donga style accommodation (two to three air-conditioned bedrooms) which is offered and erected quickly on mining sites to house their hundreds of workers in remote areas. Land is often not an issue so if these were built on a minimum of five hectares per house per family it would allow for extensions or construction new homes as funds become available and when needed.