Cultural Resilience | Lydia Miller | Sydney MAD Mondays

our next speaker is Lydia Miller Lydia Miller is a kuku yalanji woman and the executive director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait island arts at Australia's national cultural funding body the Australia Council she's also a performer artistic director producer and advocate with extensive experience in the arts health and social justice and she also has an awesome mother Pat Oh Shane a trailblazer in justice and when it comes to resilience I think that a powerful mother is always a good thing and she's part of Lydia's strength and ability to share success with others so I hope Lydia that you were going to start by telling us a little bit about your mother please welcome Lydia Miller firstly I'd like to acknowledge the cultural custodians and traditional owners of the land of the gadigal of the urine nation and pay homage to the ancestors who walked these lands and whose spirits still reside here I also acknowledge elders past and present whose wisdom and strength enabled us all to be here in the present as beneficiaries of their legacy yes my mother yes absolutely if resilience is something that's given to you because you are not inherently born with it then indeed my mother provided that experience for me and I think there's a story I'm going to tell you about that because the cultural resilience or strength of First Nations people is forged by the knowledge that there is a continuing bloodline of some 80,000 years the world's oldest living continuous culture First Nations were here on this earth before during and after the civilizations and empires of the Minoans the Cretans the Greeks the Aztecs the Mayans the Romans in the to name a few we are still here we have thrived endured and survived this is the strength of our culture our society may change but our resilience never will my identity is cookie LNG and I am of the card Angie clam our clan estates runs from the Savannah behind the Great Dividing range through to the oldest world rain for us in the world the den tree and out to where the Great Barrier Reef is also part of our state we knew this by virtue of marine archeologists very fine that we have already been told that by our own people we know that 15,000 years ago we lived through the last ice age and saw sea levels rise and reclaim lands just as we live through the Ice Age some 70,000 years ago demographers predicted that it took a thousand years to rebuild our population they also predicted that over 1.6 billion First Nations people have reached their first birthday over the 70,000 years of human occupation of this great island I know this as well as a lived experience because when I grew up of men were great hunters so we didn't eat a lot of beef we ate Zhu Gong and we turtle and we ate oysters off the rocks and we actually harvested from our land we harvested from the Seas we knew the season breeding cycles when you when not to touch food and we knew how to share this we knew parts of the turtle that only children could eat or only old people or the younger more stronger people so with all of this knowledge of Who I am my understanding of myself when I was 12 years old my mother had moved to Sydney I came down and followed her and I was in school great I think it was first for me used to call it then I'm going back quite a few years and I was sitting in a social science class and the teacher was an ex missionary from Africa and there was this map of Australia up there and it was dotted with all these little coloured codes and she said now Aborigines are minority and white Australia our and I shot my hand up and I said excuse me and I was going excuse me excuse me because she wouldn't pay attention and I said um I'm I'm I said no no no no no I said we're not the minority this is our country this is our country and and you all came here but you don't own this country and you're the minority and she went no no you're the minority who we've had this chewing and frying about who was the minority in my country so I went home I was incensed and my mother said how was your day and I said I I said I cannot believe the nerve of this teacher and she said what happened and she said and I said she told us that that I was a minority in my country and this is dead silence and my mother said oh my darling I have to tell you that we are we are a minority and I could not for the last me understood at that age how I could be a minority in my own country because everything had told me that we inherently belonged to our country we could name our country we knew the creatures of the sea we out of our country and these were the visitors but what that meant was that I wanted to really know why we were the minority I wanted to know how this occurred and there's that little girl still to this day that pursues why in the course of history we've been rendered by minority in our land and what I understood over the period of time is why that's come about and I also understand that in order to combat some of the great devastation and the racism and degradation you have to develop an inner core and you have to be clear about that core and what you stand for what your principles are what you will tolerate and what you will not tolerate not only to protect yourself but to protect others to protect the decency of humanity there was another incident when I was 12 I was playing basketball and my mother had because it come from a country town my mother had made me rehearse this speech she said one day you're gonna probably need this and it was like polysyllabic so I'm like okay okay I'm playing basketball on the court and this girl said hey abode get rid of the ball and I stopped and I looked at the teacher and she looked at me and I looked at the girl and I went surely this teacher will say something and I had the ball so the game stopped and there was nothing that was happening I walked over to the school well-rehearsed I was and I said now it's people like you because discord and disharmony in the world and you really need to take care of your behaviors and attitudes because that will not lead us to have a very good relationship and then I looked at the teacher and the teacher looked at me and I thought I've got the ball this is my game I'll decide when we start and finish the game so these are lessons that you learn in a funny way about resilience my identity is embedded in this country I know this I know where I belong who I belong to and this has been passed on for thousands of generations this is who I am that is why as first nations peoples we are still here and present on the earth this is cultural resilience and the more we learn and the more we arcs why the more we understand that we are inheritors of some of the greatest estates that this civilization has ever seen human civilization we were the first bakers the first astronomers the first celestial navigators we build societies and this is our gift to this country and to the world but not only that when I think now what is a duty that arises over that resilience I think to myself it is to bring every single child from every First Nation across this country through this journey that will be our giving back that is the gift that we give to others to make them stronger to be strong in their identity to understand their lineage to understand their country to understand her to exist in the country and how to exist with others so this little lad who is a little favorite lad of mind here is gotta we gotta molly was born in February 2016 it's a marker in time for me because that baby will through the years be an important such a touchstone for all that my generation of sought to achieve and transforming the cultural landscape of this country he's already been shaped by continuing - 25,000 years in which his identity will be a reflection of his Camilla Roy culture heritage language country and law taught to him by his parents grandparents kin community and the collective and I as a cookie yelling G woman and that little one is is not from my nation but I am responsible for all nations and that's the resilience that is required to be imparted to the next generation so what have I learned I've learned that resilience makes you strong that it makes you have grace that it makes you think twice that it makes you choose your words carefully that it makes you hold other people accountable that it makes you be kind and it also provides a sustainable future for society [Applause]