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Men of Colour in a White World |
As told to Susanna Freymark by Greg Telford
I have Aboriginal blood, I have Islander blood and I have white blood so I have a mixed nationality really. I belong to the Midjuanbal clan up at Tweed.
We were the first black family to live in Kingscliff. I watched a lot of relationships between fathers and sons. At times I was envious of white kids because they were doing things with their dads I suppose that I would have liked to have done with my dad. You know, going fishing and that sort of thing, whereas my dad — he was doing the more commercial type fishing with nets and all of that, but that was about making money to keep our house. I was envious of watching fathers and sons going in their own little boat — going out to sea or going in the river, playing football. I felt encouraged watching dads supporting their kids to do the best they could on the field whereas my relationship with my dad was like, 'You get out there and f----in' hurt somebody and if you don't f----in' hurt somebody I'll hurt you'. That sort of thing.
I suppose I'm really grateful that, looking at my dad and my mother, is their work ethic — a really strong work ethic. That would come out in us even though there was lots of violence and abuse in our family. They said, 'If you want anything out of your life you know, get off your arse and get it 'cause nobody's going to give it to you.' To me it's a healthy thing, you know, it's been able to sustain me and keep me going through my life.
I left home at fourteen because of the violence that was occurring and sadly, you know, I couldn't handle it and if I stayed I'd have had to do something about stopping it and that may have been detrimental to everybody. I had people trying to help me along the way, different aunties and uncles who tried to influence my life a bit. I was on a path of self-destruction for a while and then slowly over time I became more aware that I needed to change my lifestyle.
I got into lots of relationships with people who had similar backgrounds to myself. Eventually I got into a relationship with this woman who didn't have a background like mine, a non-Aboriginal, non-Koori. She's actually a Kiwi girl, a blue-eyed blonde girl. I could tell the qualities of how she was brought up were different to the way I was brought up and wanted some of what she had, but just didn't know how to get it.
Over time I've learnt a lot from her and made changes. I've been lucky that I've had people put in my path that have been, I suppose, guides for what I needed to do to learn to make the change so that I didn't pass these same behaviours on to my children.
I've watched people like Stuey Anderson, watched him with his boys. I went around one day to see them while they were at camp. Stuart was sitting on the fence, it was a copper log fence and his three boys were sitting with him. He had his arms stretched right out either side and his boys were tucked into them and one of them had his arm across his dad's leg, they were all sort of entwined with each other. A lot of people could walk past and that would have no impact on them whereas for me it was just bang — it just hit me in the face. Like, shit, look at this father with his boys. That's what I want.
Anyway when we left there I said to a friend, 'Didn't you notice the way that guy was sitting on the fence with his sons?' She said, 'I didn't think much of it.'
The difference was because she was brough t up in a family where there was lots of love and that sort of thing shown. I just see white families grow up different to black families. Maybe white fellows are better at expressing their love for one another more so than we are.
If I see some kids, regardless of what colour the kids are, if they're doing something that I know is wrong that could get them into trouble or cause problems for somebody else more often than not I'd stop if I was driving past. If they're Koori, I make them aware that if you're doing something you shouldn't, you need to be aware it affects your mum, your dad, your uncles, your aunties, your grandparents, because it's whether we like it or not we get tarred with the one brush. We need to be aware that regardless of whether we're related to one another or not we still have a connection by the colour of our skin. And even that has repercussions on me as a father because one of my little boys is blonde with blue eyes.
He came home from school when he was six and said,'Dad, the kids at school have been teasing me.' I said, 'What about, son?' I knew it'd come sooner or later. I'm in the bath with him. He said, 'The kids at school they're teasing me because I don't look like you.' I wanted him to say black but he wouldn't say it. I said, 'What do you mean you don't look like me?' He said, 'You know, I don't look like you. When I get older and grow up will I look like you?' And I said, 'No, son, in the summer you'll go goldie but in the winter time you will fade. Your dad does too, but no, you're not going to look like dad. You just be proud of who you are.' I had tears in my eyes when he was speaking because I was thinking, 'Shit, here he is at this age feeling this already.' And then he turned around and he said, 'Dad.' And I said 'Yeah.' He said, 'I'm black inside.' The tears ran down my face. It just blew me away.
He's thirteen now. I talked at the NAIDOC celebration at his school last year. He came home and said to his mother, 'I've had the afternoon of a celebrity! Half the kids in my class didn't know I was Koori and the other half just had no idea what I was, really. They just thought I was one of them but they see dad there today and they see me carry the Koori flag. You know, they just treated me really different.'
My Pop [grandfather] died last year. Because of Dad's relationship [to him] you know, we never got close. My Pop actually apologised to me because of that. He said that he would have loved to have been closer to us but he never got the opportunity to because of his and my father's relationship.
I just said 'thanks Pop'. You know, I'd love to be able to share that stuff with my dad. I'll always live with a hope that someday it may happen but one of the things I've also become aware of is that through that negative relationship with dad, I have to keep working really hard on my own, so that I maintain that positive connection I have with my boys today. You know, we do lots of cuddling, lots of talking. Even tonight, you know, I had a little bit of a spin at home. My eldest fella actually challenged me about it. He said, 'You shouldn't bring your attitude home from work when you're stressed and take it out on mum, and take it out on us.' Anyway we had a bit of a blow-up but we've got a meeting planned for tonight so that mum and me and the two boys can talk. I never experienced anything like that growing up as a young fella, although I used to talk with my mum a lot about her living with the violence, and that sort of thing, and why we had to keep going down this track.
I always had a dream or an expectation that there's got to be more to life than this. You know I always say that what happened to me as a little fella, I'm pretty sure that we're not just put on this earth to just keep hurting one another and keep feeling hurt, you know, and sadness. I'm pretty sure that's not what life's about. There's got to be more to life than this. Today I'm lucky that I've been able to work through my stuff and find out what that actually is.
I am the co-ordinator of the Rekindling the Spirit Program (a Lismore, NSW, based program set up by the Aboriginal community). I like to feel that we have good and bad spirits within us all. What we try to work with is to bring the good spirit to the forefront, and if we can help that happen, everyone that comes into contact with you wants to be around you, wants to warm to you, especially your children.
When we work with men, sometimes we'll take them back to their childhood and start to get them to identify their feelings and emotions that were happening for them as a young person. It takes time because whether they're black men, white men, yellow men, it doesn't really matter, you ask them how they are and most of them will say 'good'. And then I say, 'Well good's not a feeling. What are you actually feeling right now?' They say, 'You know, I'm okay.' I say, 'Okay is not a feeling.' And then they say, 'Stuff you, Greg, I don't know!' I say to them we need to start to identify that we've all been sad, we've all been glad, we've all been mad, we've all been angry, we've all hurt.
What I talk to them about is if you don't like your life and where you're going at the moment, and you don't want your children to go down that same track, maybe you need to be looking at changing your behaviour, because what our kids see is what our kids will be.
I talk about how if they're [the children] watching violence, there's a good chance they're going to turn out violent. And if they're watching substance abuse, there's a chance they're going to abuse substances, if they're looking at really negative role modelling as far as parenting there's a good chance they're going to turn out shitty parents. So if we want good kids to happen we've all got to be aware of what we're doing because we can blame all of the systems out there, but when it comes down to it we're the first educators and what comes out of our homes is what's happening in our homes.
It could apply to anybody, but for us, as black people within this country, we have a bigger issue to tackle with trying to get accepted within the dominant culture. To do that, sometimes we've got to be aware of our own behaviours and how we can play into the game of discrimination by giving people ammunition to throw shit at us. We can blame colonisation, we can blame growing up in negative lifestyles, but while we continue to blame, we don't have to look at ourselves and our behaviour.
One of the things I talk to the guys about is we can make up nice glossy certificates that say I completed this course. But for me the benefits come when your kids reach up to you, they cuddle you and want to be around you. Having your children cuddle into you while they're beside you, then going to sleep, they're just like little snugly koalas on either side of you.
I shared that in a men's group one day and I wasn't aware that one of the guys there hadn't been out of jail long. He came in the next week and he said, 'Greg, you know how you talked about your kids snuggling in to you either side of you and how it's such a nice feeling? Well I tried that, and I never had a feeling like that.' The tears started rolling down my face.
That's why we keep encouraging one another. Because I think of that guy, you know, his dad died when he was quite young. Although he had uncles that took up a bit of that fathering for him, you know, this poor fella now, he shouldn't have been removed from their care. But having that experience with his kids, just for that little moment, and for those children to have that moment with their dad — they're memories that they'll never forget. And they may never have got the opportunity to feel that. That's really hard.
It's taken us 214 years to get here. If we think we're going to undo what's been done in a short time frame, you know, we're just talking shit to ourselves. Because it's going to take a long time to undo what's been done. And then to get people to come on board and look at how government has played roles within the breakdown of our culture.
And we can look at them and keep blaming and keep blaming, but, you know, while we do that, we're victimising ourselves more and more too. We've really got to step out of that and start encouraging one another, you know, to take on that role modelling to one another about how to be better fathers.
With our mob, I'm really hungry to see what can happen when you change your life around. Because I watch what comes out of homes today, and I talk about it in our men's groups, how when kids are loved and they're supported and they're encouraged, it just blows me away what they achieve. And for me, at times I get a bit sad and I think if we were loved… but we didn't get a lot of support and we didn't get a lot of encouragement. But if we had that, how would we have turned out?
The vision for me around our indigenous people within this country is to see dads take a lot more of a role with the evolvement of their kids, all the way through from their birth through to their death, really. And I suppose giving something to their kids that they're able to clutch on to.
I treat the work that we're doing, it's like we're going through a jungle and we're clearing a path. A lot of our elders in our time before us have cleared the path in front of us, but there's bits of debris still left. We're going through, finding that debris on the road. And even though we're finding that debris on the road, there's still a little bit more behind us. And if we continue to keep doing this and keep role modelling to one another, eventually we'll have a good path that our kids can go down and they won't have to deal with all the debris.
We need to get down to the core, to the guts of what our problems are. Some of it can be growing up in a home where there's violence; it can be emotional violence, or neglect, sometimes it may be sexual abuse. I hear people who talk about how not having violence or abuse in any way, but just not having physical connection with one another can be hurtful. I've heard other men share how at least getting a hiding was getting some attention, better than no attention.
I'm getting people to become more aware of that, to really keep working with one another around those issues. It's always going to be there, and slowly over time we're cleaning the debris out of the road. Eventually we'll have some good tracks but we need to be joining together to make that happen, because regardless of all the family turmoil you have, there's also the discrimination, the racism, the experiences.
It's a learning process that goes on. When we stop learning is when we stop breathing. I make a lot of mistakes along the way, but mistakes are about learning. If we don't learn from them we repeat them — the bigger the mistake, the bigger the learning. It took me a while to realise that sort of stuff. But I'm glad today, and what I do is I share it with others. The good part is I share it with my kids.
I've been lucky, like I say.
Greg Telford is co-ordinator of Rekindling the Spirit, a program set up by the Aboriginal community of Lismore to service Aboriginal people. He is a father of five children and three children currently live with him and his partner.
This article continues with Wayne and Melissa's stories
Waynes Story
Melissa's Story
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