 Before I begin, I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're gathering tonight, the Nambri and Ngunnawal people and pay my respects to their elders past and present. And I want to thank them for allowing me to speak on their country this evening. I also acknowledge all other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the room and especially if there are any elders. There are so many people to acknowledge, but can I also acknowledge the Danoone family and acknowledge Rachel Stevens-Smith, Minister for Health and Aboriginal Affairs and also Dr Heather Nankaro, CEO of Anrose. I am an Aboriginal woman. I was born in Victoria on Wurundjeri Country. I've lived in Victoria all of my life with my family. Our line is Cookie Yellingey in Far North Queensland. As an Aboriginal woman, coming as I am from a long, proud, resilient line of culturally strong and tenacious women, there seems precious little for me to celebrate on this week on International Women's Day. But I will take this opportunity to thank the organisers of this lecture for asking me to speak here this evening. It is indeed a privilege. Tonight, I want to take you into my world, my Aboriginal world, ever so briefly, fleetingly, to give you insights into how Aboriginal women's lives around this nation intersect with the mainstream world, of which many of you are a natural part of. A world which many of my Aboriginal sisters and I connect with intensely, occasionally or rarely, depending on our circumstances and our roles. I think many of you will have read the deeply disturbing stories of disadvantage and devastation our women experience. You are across the statistics. You have supported our campaigns. Maybe some of you will have worked in our organisations or in bureaucracies that engage with Aboriginal issues. But for me, the bleak reality of what so many of our women and children suffer is deeply personal. And it drives me and so many others to do the work of JIRA, of the National Forum. It drives other Aboriginal organisations, all with a common purpose, to demand change, to break through the barriers, to see our women succeed and to thrive in many fields of their choice in your world. And most importantly in our world, in our cultural way. While I am speaking, I ask you to watch the photos of the Aboriginal women rolling over on the screen above me. Each woman with her own story of strength, courage and resilience. Women who nurture, who are keepers of culture, givers of life, who are our silent, hidden, often invisible leaders of change. Tonight, I am speaking on Nambri and Nunnawal land. And that is significant because we also know it as Canberra. The centre of power where decisions are made which dramatically impact upon the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, our women, our men and our children. My work brings me here to Canberra regularly and has done so for years. I know how many of those decisions are made without the participation of our people and especially of our women and children. Critical decisions that continue to be made for our women and our children just as they have been since the invasion of our country, the arrival of the first fleet. So if you are looking for confirmation that sovereignty, self-determination is real for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people today, you won't find it in my words tonight. To put you in the picture, let me take you back to when I was a child. I was a keen student, very keen, but my family was the only Aboriginal family in a small Victorian town just outside of Melbourne. My brothers and I tolerated, lived with, bore the brunt of daily racism, not just from the kids and from the parents but also from our teachers as well. I was constantly told that I would never amount to anything because I was Aboriginal. There are some things that have stuck in my mind and travelled with me for all of my life. At primary school, my mum would come to the school fence and hide behind the trees to watch over me and my brother eating our lunch. She didn't know we saw her, we didn't know why she was there, but now I do. My mum was terrified. The white welfare would act on their threats to take us from her, so this was her way of protecting us. At secondary school, a kid on the school bus started taunting me and making didgeridoo sounds. He then spat on my school bag. All the kids on the school bus started spitting on my bag, which was in the middle of all of the seats with the other bags. Even some girls who I thought were my friends spat on my bag and laughed along with the others. When the bus stopped, I ran home crying. I found it hard to breathe. My brother was not far behind me. I ran into the house past my mum and dad, though sitting at the kitchen table and I locked myself in my bedroom. My dad took me to every kid's house that was on the bus and told their parents what their kids had done to me. Both mum and dad were up to school the very next morning trying to make sure things were put in place so my brother and I could be safe at school. It didn't change anything. We were not safe. We were still seen and treated as inferior, outcasts and outsiders. As we got older, we were targeted by the police, always picked up on the streets and I was charged with assault at 15 for hair pulling. My girlfriend was too. I had never been in trouble but I was charged, found guilty and put on 12 months probation and not allowed to see my best friend for 12 months for hair pulling. I guess she was punished also for mixing with the Aboriginal girl. Racism has many faces. My family appealed and the case was dismissed and thrown out of court. The judge was appalled it had got to that. I remember him making some strong statements to the police in open court about us being children. I suspect he saw the underlying racism but maybe didn't have quite enough courage to call it out then. My mum and dad fought hard and they saw the racism. Without my family driven by their devotion to us kids, their lived experience of historic oppression of our people and their sheer determination to protect us above all else. Well I don't know whether I would have survived my teenage years. What I do know is that I would not be standing here tonight if it wasn't for my mum and dad. So me at 15, school was hard. Wasn't hard sorry but the racism was hard. I just could not handle the relentless, soul-destroying pressure so I dropped out. I struggled with being unemployed, not knowing what I wanted to do in my life. I did odd jobs, traineeships, various Indigenous employment programs. The good news is I landed at TAFE as a query liaison officer and someone must have seen a spark in my heart. I told a teacher I had always wanted to be a lawyer and he said go and do your law degree, just go and do it now. It took me five years to summon up the guts to go but I ended up at the Institute of Career Education in Deakin University as a mature age student. Overwhelmed, unsure and a bit scared that having moved so far from my known world, my Aboriginal world, I might be swallowed up. I knew though once I started the law degree I would finish it, no matter what. Family support continued as always, especially from my mum but a whole lot of others joined in too. Friends, teachers, the CEO at the TAFE, leaders in our community and the Institute of Career Education at Deakin. The sort of personal and academic support that white students take for granted as they build their professional careers suddenly and unexpectedly turned up for me. When I finished my law degree I started work at the County Court as a judge's associate. With just a hint of innocence I imagined I wanted to work in criminal law, become a barrister, take pro bono cases for our mob, that sort of thing. A very experienced and wise judge took an interest in my career and one day said in a very judicial voice, let me tell you dear, you won't choose your area of legal specialisation, it will choose you and so it did. Advocating, fighting for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children. Keeping women's voices and experiences of family violence, incarceration, racism, child removal in front of white Australia. The politicians, the bureaucrats, the media, the judiciary to achieve systemic change. It did choose me and it has turned out to be bigger, more diverse, more challenging, politically dicey and culturally affirming than whatever it might have been with a classic legal specialisation. Now, here I am, standing in front of you, giving the Pamela Danoone lecture at ANU and I'm pretty chuffed with that. The chief executive officer of JIRA, lawyer, advocate, daughter, sister, auntie. Like all of our women, I too want to do my bit to secure a future for all First Nations women. A future that delivers opportunity and dignity and secures the full suite of human rights that most, if not all of you here tonight, take for granted. JIRA was the first of its kind in Victoria. A trickle of money landed in our state to establish a legal service for the safety of Aboriginal people experiencing family violence. And I, well, it chose me, took over and I landed the role in setting JIRA up. We started from scratch, finding office space, ABNs, incorporation, the whole thing. We pretty much knew that the vast majority of people accessing our service would be Aboriginal women. Today, 98% of our clients are women and children. There was a natural synergy between the JIRA board and me. We had a shared vision, a specialist legal service that was bolder than just triage. A holistic wraparound support that ensured dignity and cultural respect and safety for our clients. We knew we had to do more and be more than just legal. We knew early intervention and prevention programs would save lives. We wanted to be able to distill the essence of the stories and knowledge that our women shared with us through our on-the-ground programs. We wanted the voices of our women to resonate and strengthen our advocacy so that we could influence systemic change, big change, necessary change for our people, for our women and children. And here I am, 17 years later, and still the CEO of JIRA. JIRA is a wairung word for read. This read, JIRA, is used by Wurundjeri women both traditionally and presently to weave. Weaving is a time for producing all manner of useful and beautiful objects and for considering problems, concerns, issues when Aboriginal women come together to share their stories and find their solutions. JIRA, my experience over the 17 years at JIRA and before has taught me one central thing and it is this. Since white settlement, Aboriginal women have progressively, systematically and insidiously been rendered invisible to white Australia. This invisibility by its nature is barely noticed or recognised but it is alive today as it has been at any time in the past 200 plus years. But not just generally invisible to the white world but also invisible to me. I am an Aboriginal woman. I've experienced systemic failure, racism personally but the systemic failure impacting on Aboriginal women was invisible to me. Perhaps I was blinded because it was normalized. Here is one example. Over the past 20 years or so the narrative has been quite rightly around the high rates of imprisonment of our men. You see it in the 339 recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. 339 recommendations which were almost silent when it came to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Many of our social justice commissioners over the years since that time are on the record saying that this has rendered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women invisible to policy and decision makers. And so the tragic circumstances of our women, poverty, homelessness, family violence, sexual violence, stolen children to name just a few. All of these indicators that contribute to incarceration remain invisible to society. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are the fastest growing prison group in this country today. An unseen statistic in the plethora of data that is the Aboriginal problem. Do you know that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women make up about 2% of the Australian female population? Yet we comprise 34% of the Australian female prison population. Where is the outrage? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women must be brought into focus, must be visible, must be at, our voices must be heard and our voices must be at the table making decisions. Even when we are brought into consultations and negotiations we have to fight to be at the table. Where the policies are made and where the decision makers sit. Until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are genuinely included until we are leading we will be overlooked. It will still be white people making decisions imposing white solutions on us. It will still be the white systems controlling and targeting our people. Jira is determined to change the status quo. We operate to accelerate that change to amplify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women's voices. Our women struggle on a daily basis to get support for their safety. We become targets for racist police, the judiciary and we become targets for child protection workers. This targeting oppresses our people and it oppresses our mothers in a very particular way. It has a deepening and multiplier effect which is far reaching. Our children become the targets. Our future threatened. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are either overlooked or targeted. We become targets. I would like you to take a moment to imagine being in that world, our world, a First Nations woman's world. Watch the photos of the women. Imagine how much is hidden behind those smiles. Why is it that access to mainstream family violence services, to pregnancy and early childhood services, to legal services is so problematic for our women, so culturally unsafe? Access to services should be a right, not a privilege, overlooked or targeted, not by Jira. Jira is where Aboriginal women are the priority. It's as natural as breathing. We do it differently, women's business, Aboriginal women's business and that's our cultural way and that is what sets us apart from the mainstream sector. Jira is self-determination, Aboriginal women's self-determination and everything we do at Jira is designed and delivered by Aboriginal women and for Aboriginal women. We don't do cookie-cutter help programs that are designed by wide organisations or people trying to do their best for the Aboriginal cause. The white ones who believe that they are our saviours, the ones who don't understand how diverse our people are, how rich and sustaining our culture is. Jira delivers because we are determining our own solutions. We are the women. We have the lived experience of colonisation, of being Aboriginal women. We know. We know. Jira's legal practice works across four areas of law, four complex areas of law, child protection, intervention orders, family law, victims of crime. Our legal practice would not work without our culturally safe early intervention and prevention programs. Sisters Day Out, The Dilly Bag, Young Love and Our Kori Women's Place because the law and the legal system is and continues to be built on white privilege. Jira's strong foundation of culture and safety works to shield our women from the ramifications of that white privilege. Social isolation, racist judgements, controlling actions and systemic discrimination. Sisters Day Out is a day full of laughter and lots of pink, balloons, flowers, scented candles. Aboriginal women travel far and wide just to spend a day out with other Aboriginal women. Pampering is the hook which draws the women together so that messages about family violence and conversations about finding solutions can take place. There's massage and manicures and hairdressing and that was my idea. It's fun. It's restful and it's safe. Sisters Day Out breaks down social isolation, breaks down barriers to accessing services for safety and Sisters Day Out is about raising awareness about legal rights. It's about letting women know that the law isn't just about punishing. It's not something to fear. It's about letting women know that with the right advocate the law can help. Sisters Day Out takes Jira's services and our carefully chosen and most trusted mainstream services to the women. For those Aboriginal women who we know fear asking for help because their kids might be taken, no their kids will be taken. For those women who are blamed, for those women who are just trying to manage the violence in silence, for those women who feel shame, shame to break the silence because they will be judged. The odds are against our women in every way. It's so difficult, it's so unsafe, it's just devastating but for just one day at Sisters Day Out a space is created for Aboriginal women to just be women, to feel safe, strong, strong in identity, strong in their culture, visible and heard. Sisters Day Out is Jira's self-determined solution. Since 2007, 11,000 Aboriginal women in Victoria have participated. That's 11,000 Aboriginal women in Victoria alone. The Dilly Bag program was designed by my mum, Wanda Braybrook and another Aboriginal woman, Kelly Felden. Do you know what a Dilly Bag is? It's something that we as Aboriginal women use to hold, to keep, to safeguard our most precious positions, our secrets. The Dilly Bag program is about sharing cultural knowledge among Aboriginal women. It's about drawing on strength of identity to move us to the next part of our journey of healing. Jira's Young Love program is for young Aboriginal women between 13 and 17. Young Love was designed by two young Aboriginal women, Mariki and Nakalia, who worked with Jira at the time, and they felt that we weren't reaching out to younger women. Well, we do now. Young Love has been in existence for five years. It's young people, young women talking about healthy and safe relationships, not just relationships in community but with others in their world. Our Kuri Women's Place has been Jira's vision since inception 17 years ago. The Kuri Women's Place, where women walk through the door and feel safe, feel the warm energy, feel valued and are heard and their culture and identity is respected and validated. Our Kuri Women's Place supports women who wander in off the streets. Women who have just been released from prison have no accommodation or a change of clothes. Women who are heavily pregnant and need some nappies or clothes for when their baby arrives. Women who have just been discharged from hospital and need food or transport to get back to family. Our Kuri Women's Place goes further and delivers cultural activities, basket weaving, how to make bush medicines and what to use them for skills workshops, supporting women to get ready with a resume and job applications. This is another way that we break down social isolation, another way Jira invests in our women. Jira invests in Aboriginal women in every way. We refuse to see our women through a deficit lens, a distorted lens so often is given to us to view ourselves with. Provided at school, reinforced at work, displayed through the media, expected by the police, again a lens clouded and coloured by white privilege. Every Aboriginal woman who attends our programs younger or older goes home with a special hand painted rock with the women's spirit on it, painted by my mum. Women treasure their rocks, we treasure them. The women's spirit represents our strong spirit as Aboriginal women, our spirit which keeps us strong despite such overwhelming odds. Now, here's a positive story. Many of you would know of the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria. Well, following that Royal Commission, Jira has had a solid and long-term investment from the Victorian government for our programs. We celebrated Aboriginal women's visibility in the recommendations. We celebrated a commitment in Aboriginal community controlled organisations, self-determination. The Royal Commission made a special mention of our work Sisters Day Out in the Dilly Bag. The commission has said these programs we need to see more of, not less of. I am yet to see the same level of commitment from our federal government. I said earlier that our legal work covers four areas of law and how historically and still today the law is used as a tool of oppression against our people. So for our women it's hard to see the law as something that can help. But with every year we get the message out to women that we have their backs. Our women are starting to see how the law can be used to get a good outcome to keep their kids to find safety, be believed. Last year we saw over 600 legal clients. I'm not sure how many children are attached to those 600 clients today but a few years ago when we looked into our legal files of 800 women we were working with there were around 500 children. So in just one year we worked with around 1300 Aboriginal mums and their kids. I want to touch briefly now on some challenges we have nationally as Aboriginal women. I hold the elected position of Chairperson of the National Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Services Forum known as the National Forum. In that role I can tell you that I have not seen a real commitment to addressing violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women or significant increase in funding for the work our 13 member organisations do nationally. We have not seen an investment for more than six years close to seven years while we welcome the recent announcement of our funding for our frontline work. It's not enough. I ask you to look at our social media on this. It just seems that a lot of money is thrown at the Aboriginal problem with white solutions which don't solve anything. Health Justice Partnerships, this money goes to mainstream legal centres not Aboriginal community controlled legal services and then there's the Parents Next, a punitive program targeting single mothers, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Parents Next is driving women deeper and deeper into poverty and must be abolished. We have been calling on our federal government to invest in a dedicated national action plan to address violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women but we are not being heard. Our governments create the problems which we have to try to remedy, the ones that see lives lost, families destroyed and our communities devastated. Another example, the cashless debit card, how on earth would that ever reduce family violence? Women experience financial control and abuse by perpetrators from perpetrators now from our governments. Elise Klein took a deeper look at 2018 Western Australia police data and found that the implementation of the cashless debit card coincided with a rise in family violence, violent assaults and police attendances in some Kimberley communities and I am sure you have heard of co-design. I can't imagine you could live in Canberra without a bit of co-design in your life, it's all the rage. It might sound simple, collaborative, positive, heading in the right direction, well let me tell you this, from our perspective co-design does not equal self-determination. Co-design is just another form of control. Our national forum in its current form does not have any funding certainty beyond 30 June. It's our voice. We have been fighting so hard to get our government to invest in our national body in the same way it invests in other national bodies. Our small 244,000 dollars a year has kept the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children a part of the national conversation but as of 1st of July we can't say what will happen. Is this systemic silencing? Looks like it. I urge you to find out more on social media about our campaign to save FE Pellis. Now I want to touch on close the gap. We come to Canberra year after year and hear the same rhetoric around the government's commitment to closing the gap. We hear year after year how targets are not met and every year we say the targets are wrong. They are wrong. They are your targets, not ours. For many years we've been calling for a family violence and justice targets. Closing the gap means everything to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. Statistically as an Aboriginal woman I will live nine years less than other women in this room. Our women nationally are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence and we are 10 times more likely to die from a violent assault than other women. I said earlier how more and more of our women are landing in prison and more and more of our children are being taken from their mothers. So yes, family violence and justice targets mean everything and they're not negotiable. There is hope with the new partnership agreement with the government. It's a game changer but with the defunding of our national forum our continued participation in this partnership is compromised. So some more good news on the education front. It's not enough good news but it is some. Our women are increasingly engaging in formal education and are achieving higher academic levels than ever before. In 2014-15 almost half 47 percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women aged 15 and over had achieved a certificate diploma or a degree. That represents a 45 percent increase from 2008 up from 33 percent. There are success stories for our women from across the country but despite these gains too many of our women are invisible. Again, just look at the women on the screen. You may never hear their names, their stories but I can tell you each one has her own unique story, her own journey of success that contributes to keeping community strong and family safe. She may never be in the spotlight in your world but she is in ours. She is not invisible to us. In finishing up I want to again thank the organisers, the Janoon family for inviting me to speak here this evening. If you want to be an ally a supporter, a contributor to our cause where human rights and social justice is the foundation and where the particular focus is on the devastating experiences of our women, our children over time and across the nation. Here are some ideas for you to consider. Donations are easy and of course we need the money. You can give now to JIRA, just Google give now JIRA. You can follow Aboriginal women and Torres Strait Islander women on social media and amplify our voices. You can educate yourself on the real history of this country, white Australia has a black history. Challenge institutional racism, systemic violence, you don't have to be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander to do that. Work with us to break down those big white industries being built on our disadvantage, prisons, child protection systems. Stand with us and know that you are welcome to walk with us but never in front of us. Follow our campaign, save FEPLS and sign up as a supporter. Turn your International Women's Day and Week into a day of activism. Find the activists in you and join with us. Come to our National Gathering in December 2020, women's business, men's business, everyone's business, our cultural way. Brochures are being, I think, out on the front desk but thank you again for inviting me to give you a small glimpse of what our world looks like, what our world has become. From the moment the colonizers landed over 200 plus years ago, a hard ass to do in about 40 to 50 minutes. But tonight, as an Aboriginal woman, I am not invisible. I have a platform to give voice to others. And it is indeed an honour to be able to speak on behalf of the many women Jira works with, the women who are invisible, silence. It is these women who drive our passion. It is these women whose courage, strength, resilience, despite overwhelming odds is just more than inspirational. Thank you.