THE FUTURE DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN.
IT IS MADE.
AND WE ARE ITS AUTHORS.
The Ethics Centre (June 2023)
I have an enduring memory of my great Grandmother where I use to brush her long flowing hair as she sat in a cane chair watching the dirt path that led up to her house, to see who would be coming down that pathway. She would smile and her eyes would crinkle with delight, all the while talking in language, murmuring softly as her hair folded across my hand with each brushstroke. I never heard her talk in english. I was told by my Mother, that my great Grandmother one day decided never to talk again in the foreign language of english, and she didn’t. I only ever heard her talk in language.
She and my great Grandfather had a hard life. My great Grandfather remembered as a child, white people shooting his father dead including all the men of the clan. The women and children were rounded up and he was taken away from his homelands and sent to the Yarrabah mission, as it was at that time. He met my great Grandmother, and they married in Yarrabah. As a married couple, he sought an exemption certificate to leave Yarrabah and returned to his homelands, calling his countrymen and women to join him at the Mossman Gorge. He established a church and became a preacher, talking about how people could build a direction for
