 For many years, as I'm sure many of you know, Indira was a familiar and much-loved face on our screen reading the nightly news on SBS. Back then the world seemed a little bit less of a mess if Indira was telling you about it. In her personal life, Indira is a cricket tragic and a great home cook. Her journey of resilience came about through reinventing herself a fyddai'n mynd i'r fawr, y ffordd, a'r ysgawb i'r gweithio o'r rhai cymdeithas yma ar y cyfnod yma. Felly, rydyn ni'n rhaid i'r hyn oed. Diolch i'r wyf i'r gwrdd iawn. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i fynd i'w wneud y dweud o'r ysgrifennu gwahanol o'r llan o'r mynd i gael. a dwi'n rhaid i gael eu bod yn ysgolion, os ydw i'n mynd i'r ysgolion, ein bod yn meddwl i gael ei hunain. Yn ymwinech, rwyf i'w meddwl i'ch gael y cyffredinol i'r SBS yn Ynysgrifftol, yna wnaeth yma ar flwyddyn 20 yw. Yn ymgyrch. Rwyf wedi'i gael â'r ysgolion. Rwy'n meddwl i'w'n meddwl i'r hyn o'r teimlo i'r pryd, Ac dwi'n srindwch fel ei bod yn gwzir yw iawn. Ydw i wedi dwi'n meddwl sy'n rhoi pobl yn ei gweld trucs a gweldiau am ymlaen. Mae'r ffordd yn gweld yn ein bod yn ymlaenig, wedi'n jagonud i fynd i amlwgladol iawn, yr hynny'n fwy ffasiliaid gyda'u gweld. A fy nid yw'r hyn, mae cyfle i'r swyddiadau sydd rai wneud yn cydwbiadu sydd ar gyfer yghodol a maen nhw'n gweld o'ch wathio i chi ddim gael y pwysig. Fe yw ni'n ddiddordeb hefyd, sydd yn gweld cael ei wneud yn gyfweld gyda'r treimwag i gael allu, gofynohnol yn wir. Mae'n gwybod ni'n gweld lle'w bod yn ffyrdd ac mae'n gwybod a'r gwylod, gan gwybod ni'n gweld iechٍfa ydw i hefyd o'r gwybod a'r bydd Cymru, a'r cymdeithasol o'r gweithio'r gwybod, a'r cyflwyng ni chi rydyn ni'n bwysig i ddod i gyflwylio'n gw血gau, a chydyn nhw gwie arys ymgol Llywodraeth ei hyn sy'n gwybod. I decided to take some long service leave and explore the world as it really was, rather than the world through a journalist's eyes, which can be a little jaded at times. We're isolated too, physically in a lot of ways, where our news gathering services and buildings are. We really are very removed from the community that we're meant to be connected with and understanding. So I spent some time travelling through Asia and Europe, but not as a journalist. I changed the lens and I think that that's so important to do when we get stuck in looking at the world through one particular set of premises. And I just thought I'm going to try to be as normal as I can and just be like everyone else. So I hung out with farmers, I hung out in schools, school teachers, just trying to see what was really happening. And as I discovered, we were missing big parts of important stories in the news media. I decided when I came back to Australia that I wanted to explore world issues and conflicts, but not through the eyes of a journalist. And I got a posting with the UN Agency in Geneva and started looking at global food programmes because I could see that so many conflicts were happening around the world were being driven by food and water shortages more and more. And we're finding that obviously now, 20 years later, it's at the foundation of so many conflicts, even what's going on at Syria at the moment. We don't cover it very well in the news, but that conflict was driven a lot by serious drought that happened at the same time. As the rise of izes forcing farmers to leave their drought affected farms into the cities and into the hands of izes. But again, the media doesn't really cover that side of the story. And when I finished my time at the UN, I realised that this had to be the foundation of every news story that I told. It had to come from how we could fix the food and water shortages and try to find a peaceful solution to conflicts through those filters. And at the same time, the issue of climate change was becoming a lot more, people were aware of it. I was lucky enough to be selected by Al Gore as a climate change presenter, and that again was another big change in my awareness. I realised that now, as we are finding, that climate change was going to make those food and water crises even worse than we would ever imagine, and make those conflicts around them even worse as well. So when I came back to Australia after being armed with this new insight into what was driving conflicts, I stood on my little balcony and pots point on the 13th floor, 20 square metres. And intellectually, I felt I understood the drivers, but I didn't understand how this affected me as an individual, because as an urban dweller like a lot of us, we have lost contact with nature in our urban settings. I didn't know how food was grown. I didn't really have a lot of time to cook my own meals. I didn't know any farmers or growers in this urban environment. And in terms of growing food or being connected to birds and animals and insects, I mean that was something that I didn't think was possible in that environment. I went to a farmers market one day and the farmer offered me a delicious sweet tomato, and I popped it in my mouth and it was the most delicious tomato I have ever remembered eating. It was sweet and juicy with a crispy juicy shell, and I realised that that was what I needed to connect with. I went back to my balcony and I had this epiphany moment. I was going to turn that small balcony into a veggie patch. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never garden, I'd never grown anything before. My husband thought I was mad. Most of my friends thought I'd flipped a lid too. And I live above a Woolworth, so it just didn't make sense to my neighbours, why would you want to grow an eggplant that took three months to grow when you had them underneath for free almost, ten cents sometimes. But I realised that there was going to be some connection I was going to learn from the process. So I rang Peter Cundall of Gardening Australia and he told me about putting some manure and soil in pots and lugged it up there and put in a few seeds and honestly I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how successful it was going to be. But I was determined to be present and be connected and try to learn and understand as much about the process as my plants were willing to teach me. And shock horror in that first year I managed to grow 70 kilos of produce on that small balcony. 43 different herbs and vegetables. There's some sorrel that Kylie asked me to bring along tonight that we served from my balcony. Yeah, great fun. And everything I grew ended up tasting better than anything I had before in supermarkets, even some farmers markets because it was so fresh. I amazed myself probably more than anyone else because how was I able to do this? I didn't think I had the special skill set required, but then the more I watched and learned I realised that 100 years ago each and every one of us was doing this. We were growing our own food, cooking our own food and only in 100 years we'd moved away from this. How had we lost these very, very key important life skills? So it led me to write a book called The Edible Balcony about how to grow food in a small space. That became a bestseller. My beautiful publisher Julie Gibbs is here who guided me through that process. And it led to my second book, The Edible City, which is about my beautiful association largely with the Wayside Chapel and the lovely vegetable garden that we built on the rooftop of the Wayside Chapel. 200 square metres of beautiful fresh produce just up the road from where I live in Potts Point. And we also put in some beehives and that honey Kylie uses in her pork buns at Billy Kwong. So it's a beautiful community connection that all these growing adventures have had in my community. What I've learnt from it I think is my early life now I realise was one of extreme resilience really. I grew up in South Africa. My parents were Indian South Africans. We lived in five different countries before I was 13. And I realise now that a lot of what I'm applying to how I look at resolving and solving global conflicts is from that very early resilience that I was taught from moving countries and adapting to new environments and new countries and cultures since I was very young. So I'm very fortunate now that this garden has become a wonderful foundation for travelling the world and lecturing and talking and sharing skills with other people living in wasted urban spaces that don't think that they can grow their own food. We are helping refugees, indigenous communities, homeless communities around the world to convert these wasted spaces. So for me it's precious because it's ensuring resilience right at the core of the heart of every community because when you have a safe food supply that resilience is much more guaranteed. So it's a wonderful journey that I've been on and a wonderful journey that so many people that I've got in this room actually have shared with me and helped me and taught me along the way. So thank you very much. It's been a wonderful resilient journey. So thank you.