 Our next speaker is Lydia Miller. Lydia Miller is a cuckoo 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 O'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 are going to start by telling us a little bit about your mother. Please welcome Lydia Miller. Absolutely. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the cultural custodians and traditional owners of the lands of the Gadigal, of the Eora Nation, and pay homage to the ancestors who walk 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, then the Byzantium. 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 Kukiyalinji, and I am of the Kadanji clan. Our clan estates runs from the savannah behind the Great Dividing Range, through to the oldest rainforest in the world, the Daintree, and out to where the Great Barrier Reef is also part of our state. We knew this by virtue of marine archaeologists, 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 lived through the Ice Age some 70,000 years ago. Demographers predicted that it took 1,000 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, our men were great hunters, so we didn't eat a lot of beef. We ate dugong, and we ate 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. We knew we're not to touch food. And we knew how to share this. We knew parts of the turtle that only children could eat or any 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 and my mother had moved to Sydney, I came down and followed her. And I was in school, I think it was first form they used to call it, but 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 a minority, and white Australia, and I went, what? 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, no, no, no, no. I said, we're not the minority. This is our country. This is our country, 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. And we had this towing and froing 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 said, I cannot believe the nerve of this teacher. And she said, what happened? And she said, and I said, she told us that I was a minority in my country, and there's this 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 life of me, understood at that age how I could be a minority in my own country, because everything had told me that we inherently belong to our country. We could name our country, we knew the creatures of the sea, we ate 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 a 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, and when I was playing basketball. And my mother had, because it'd come from a country town, my mother had made me rehearse this speech. She said, Gwendoi, you're gonna probably need this. And it was like polycelebics. I'm like, okay, okay. I'm playing basketball in the court. And this girl said, hey, Abba, 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 this girl, well rehearsed I was, and I said, now, it's people like you who cause 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've learned 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 ask 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 built 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 out of 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 stronger in their identity, to understand their lineage, to understand their country, to understand how to exist in their country and how to exist with others. So this little lad, who is a little favorite lad of mine, who is Gadawi, Gada Mali, was born in February 2016. It's a marker in time for me, because that baby will, through the years, be an important touchstone for all that my generation have sought to achieve and transform in the cultural landscape of this country. He's already been shaped by a continuing line of 75,000 years, in which his identity will be a reflection of his Gamilaroi culture, heritage, language, country, and law, taught to him by his parents, grandparents, kin, community, and the collective. And I, as a cookie-yellengy woman, and that little one 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. So, thanks. Thank you. Thank you.