 I now have a wonderful double act, Christian Hampson and Clarence Lockie. We already saw Clarence give us. They too have had too many negronias as well, I can attest, but they seem to hold it better than I do. We've already seen Clarence Lockie give the most invigorating welcome to country. He is a Minjabal Bungalung man with a passion for Aboriginal cultural heritage and environment. He has a broad experience as a cultural environmental educator delivering a range of programs and community-based projects in the not-for-profit and public sector. Christian Hampson is a Waiwarung and Manoroo man with a strong, in a strong advocate for community custodianship of protecting, sharing and celebrating the diverse culture of New South Wales. He has extensive background in cultural heritage management and over 20 years of experience leading the design and delivery of heritage programs in the public sector. Together, they direct a program and an extraordinary organisation, Yerabingian, and it's won so many awards, unexpected to them, but not unexpected to other people. It weaves Indigenous knowledge and collaborative design. It stewards Australia's First Nations rooftop, First Native Rooftop Farm and some of the products of that farmer over in the corner. Please have a look at them. Among many other initiatives. I don't know who's going to speak first. You. Welcome, Christian. Thank you, Rebecca, or is that kitty fine again? Yes, I have also had two negronies. First of all, Wamanjika, Maupamalian Yalla, Christian, Manoroo, Waiwarung, Daga Bumianda, Garugul, Yorah. My name is Christian. As you heard, I am Manoroo, Waiwarung, Manoroo, not Manero. Many of you might have been to the Snowy Mountains. Manoroo is where one of my grandparents come from. As my uncle would always say, we are not the two-door Holden tribe. So it's great to come here and talk about leadership. Clarence and I embarked on a journey when we first met each other many years ago on a karaoke stage at an Aboriginal network meeting. We took some leadership. We were first up because we were very shy. But I think the key is for us, as we started on looking at how we could set on a path to take business and bring it together with what we wanted to do in our lives and what we wanted to achieve. And while we started in that place in business, we started to explore the idea of leadership. And we've already heard tonight about leadership. And I think there's a lot of definitions around leadership. There's probably, if you Google leadership, you'll get about 3.4 million results, which is a bit scary. But I mean, that just goes to show how much conjecture there is about leadership. You know, traditionally, societies choose their leadership, whether it be through lineage, such as kings and queens or divine custom. And in some instances, it was about people who were charismatic and inspired devotion and obedience of others in many ways. And then we have this definition that Max Weber offers around the bureaucracy that rather than that, it's a place of position of leadership. So there's legal rationality. And that is often where we sit today. So there are many offerings of what leadership is. What is it of concern to me? Is it often refers to influence or power over people? Followers and the ability to attract followership. Something that very much goes against the grain of what Clarence and I think about. So I think of this idea that today in the crowd, for those who are my age, no Marvin the Martian or like sci-fi, it's always that question, take me to your leader. What would we answer today? Scamo, Gladys, Clover. Interestingly enough, they are people who have a legal rational role as leaders. But I would not call them leaders. Who of us would stand next to them today? Who do we stand next to today? So we have this idea of legal rationality around leadership. But what is our other alternatives? So perhaps leaders we look at today may be the CEO of Google or Apple or Facebook. God, what a horrible thought. When I first looked at this idea, at that time we had a clash between political and business leadership, which ended up in us having the new leader of the free world, Donald, God. That's why we had that many integronies before I started to talk about this. So this, again, how do we think about it? Is corporate success where leadership comes from? If that's the case, so the economic world is at leading us, will nations under this leadership be formed and fulfill all's prophecy of 1984, albeit a bit late? So even our own indigenous leadership unfortunately is conforming to this approach of legal rational leadership instead of adopting our own cultural and diverse shared leadership approach. If we think about Lieutenant Cook, yes, he was a lieutenant when he came here. He's only been posthumously called captain. And I have a shout out to my Hawaiian mob who basically put on some hurt on Captain Cook on Valentine's Day many years ago. I always like to celebrate Valentine's Day. But if you think about that, what happened in those days was that they wanted to simplify our diversity by creating a leadership model that met a colonial and homogenized leadership model by using king and queen plates and hanging them around our people so that they had somebody to talk to. A leader, essentially, that was identifiable. So the word indigenous leader is often bestowed not by us as indigenous people, but often by others, such as the mainstream media. How many times do you look on TV and see indigenous leader? That's not my leader, that's not Clarence's leader. We have our own leaders. So given the social and environmental issues facing our kin and our country, where are our leaders for transformational change? Where is our Mandela? So what do we bring to the table other than wit and charm and boyish good looks, Clarence? There are two forms of knowledge that we bring to the table. They're equally founded in our explicit knowledge being that what we can teach. And then our tacit knowledge or our wisdom, which we can demonstrate, but not really describe or write down. Our collective wisdom accumulated over millennia and shaped by our personal experience. Firstly, we bring kinship and that is our relationship to each other. That is key. And the second is custodianship, which is our responsibility to our mother, our earth. Both are intrinsically linked and forged into our environmental consciousness, which is what our spirituality is. And given the current natural political, business, and economic environment, we need to share those values and that of many otherwise cultures to see them transform for the better. We are the ultimate long-term strategists. We are having to sustain our country and our culture for thousands of years, much longer than the reporting cycle for closing the gap. The key is, I'm not going to go to laugh, the key is that leadership must be shared and offered to all. The opportunity to bring knowledge to the discussion, to the decision is a power-to approach, not a power-over. Through design theory, we are moving to a new area of organisations that encourage a human-centred approach, an empathetic collaboration based in design thinking. This approach is the opportunity that created Jero Bingen. In my grandmother's language, we walk together to bring our knowledge and values and wisdom to be equally considered within the shared values of our world to be led by custodianship. Many models which see and influence authority as leadership still endure and dominate the landscape, even the dreaded bureaucracy of efficiency. Our own indigenous leadership must now affect change and bring power to our people to contribute our knowledge. The path of advocacy challenges us to care about the world we want to live in, engage with the critics and those that are indifferent to what we believe in, but not shy away or stay within our own like-minded cohorts. Leadership must be a voice, but also give a voice to others, a voice for change, be it with our family, community or our mob. By deepening and linking our understanding of how we can bring our values, our knowledge to contribute to the greater challenge of sustaining our planet and humanity in balance with economic, environment, social and political interests, because we must balance them. So human-sensitive leadership is something that I explored when I went back to uni with Clarence, and the idea of it is that we represent, is represented in many great leaders of the 20th century. Martin Luther King, who took his inspiration from Gandhi's passive resistance and who inspired a generation with his I Have a Dream speech and his Call to Let Freedom Ring, is an example of leaders who have transformed the world we live in. For myself, that leader is Nelson Mandela, a man jailed as a terrorist and emerged 27 years later to lead a nation through a huge transformation and to end apartheid. So the current world of leadership I feel is reflected in the analogy of a bucket of crabs, where everyone is struggling for power over, pulling down anyone daring to get out of the bucket. This leadership reflects economic rationality, individualism and social Darwinism, a top-down, hierarchical leadership. This model requires leaders to rise above others and are still chosen on these three approaches of tradition, charisma or rationality, whereas the humanity of our leadership. In contrast to the insidious bucket of crabs I offer the human pyramid. As an analogy of human-scented leadership that incorporates our philosophies and principles of kinship and custodian-ship. Leaders encourage others to lead, stand on their shoulders as our elders did before us. People move within the pyramid to share knowledge and leadership moves lower in to support others. During that time, you are both teacher and student, leader and follower, brother and sister. This power too, empowering all within the pyramid, allows leaders to be the glue and not the light. And also, depending on the context, this pyramid can rearrange itself to deal with any issue or problem, the challenge bringing knowledge and wisdom of the collaborative to lead and support others to flourish. Everyone is involved. The pyramid supports diversity of knowledge, a collective approach and a quality as a responsibility rather than equity as a right. Often we hear about rights. For us as Aboriginal people is about responsibility. Even things such as land rights and the words traditional owner are ones that personally I don't like. It doesn't reflect actually what our philosophy is. So we need new paths. There have been many of our people who have walked in the footsteps of Mandela and others creating new paths to bring about change and power too. We can transform ourselves, our organisations and our communities to bring a balance back to the world. Which is currently driven by economics, individualism and that consumes our mother earth. You may agree with all, thank you. You may agree with all, some or none of what I've proposed. But please care to think and think to care. Because in our pyramid, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, our elders and our families. We can now choose to stand on other shoulders to transform ourselves and lift others onto our shoulders to change the world for the better. Thank you very much. And without further ado, let me just continue on. So yes, the pyramid. If you push a pyramid over, it's still a pyramid. Think about that for a minute. So leadership for Aboriginal people is, as Christian mentioned, it's rather complex. It's very matriarchal. We look up to our women and our women really hold our communities together these days. Particularly given what's happened to us over the last 220-something years, I haven't done a maths and I've also had two negronies. But 1788, massive upheaval, as Christian mentioned. The King and Queen plates that were able to give the invading hordes the ability to understand who are the leaders. Not the actual leaders, but the people that they needed under the Westminster system to be able to identify leaders. Therefore, do a little exchange of goods and take some land. Because after all, Terranulias, land belonging to no one. They didn't do anything with this land. Can't be anything other than something that we can take and put it into our concept of the Anglo-centric paradigm. If you read Dark Emu, and I implore you to read Dark Emu, or also implore you to read many other tomes, people like David Unipon. These are leaders for us as Aboriginal people. One of my countrymen, born under a Lantana bush on one of the, in Stott Island, up on my home country, Neville Bonner, the first federal politician of this country, an incredibly articulate Aboriginal man. We have so many leaders in our communities, but they don't have a voice. And it's very difficult for us because a lot of the time, as Christian mentioned, you will see on the news community leader or indigenous leader. You can appoint yourself anything you want, especially in this day of social media. You can be, I won't use the term, but perhaps a mermaid facilitator. It's a thing, apparently. You can also be a lifehacker. I'm not sure what that is. Yeah, you can also give a, you know what I'm saying. I do give a, about everything that happens on our planet and particularly for what we leave behind. Our legacy, as human beings, will be inherited by our children, our grandchildren, their children, and so on and so forth. I look at what the world has become, and particularly around leadership. You're gonna hear this on and on. Where are our leaders? I was thinking about my personal story and I only have a very small microcosm of experience in the hospitality industry. But many years ago, I was, and I still don't like the term, but I was a dish pig. That's where I started in the hospitality industry and I realized, yes, I was wallowing in piles and piles of dirty dishes day in, day out, and they just didn't seem to end. There's more I washed and cleaned, there's more that just kept coming. But it was a hierarchical system in that kitchen. And the more I went and went back to study business, a lot of it comes from the military, business, politics, kitchens, military systems. Everyone has to have a place and there has to be that hierarchy. So it's very difficult for, yes, you can lead, and there are some leaders, thank you, Gordon, who they like to swear and yell and just get things done. And things do have to get done in the kitchen. If they don't, it all falls apart. The only system that works is the one above your toilet, but that breaks down all the time too. So this is what people say, that it's the weakest link in the chain, all of those things. And when you talk about leadership, very few people talk about followership. And well, followership, sorry, I missed out the ER bit. So the interesting thing I was preparing for tonight's talk and I actually did a paper when Chris and I went back to do our business degrees. And our paper was about leadership, but I thought, you know, how many people do followership? Very few. And like, I literally pulled back at my old paper. And the first one was in 1962 by Robert Prestus and he created the theory of organizational life that defined three unique types of workers. And this is in 1962. One of those types of workers was the upwardly mobile. Has he heard that term before? Yeah, 1962, the ambivalence and the indifference. They were the three types of workers back in 62 that they identified. So there was your followership, that's hard to say. But, you know, the next bit of work around followership was in 1988, this massive leg. But there are so many papers on leadership and it's very difficult. They talk about seven types of leadership and you could almost make a song out of it actually because, you know, it starts with the laser fare and then you've got the pace setters. But then this word becomes really lyrical because you've got the autocratic, the democratic and then you've got, of course, the charismatic. You've got the servant leader. But then in the hospitality industry there seems to be these two competing leadership styles of transformational and transactional. The transactional is quite literally, that's your job, you're gonna do it. And, you know, as I said, the system has to work, otherwise it all falls apart. Good mate of mine, Big Max, he's not here tonight, but, you know, if you ever are up his way, check out his restaurants, very good. I know we can't plug them here at May, but that's what I didn't say to you. Anyway, I have never seen anyone on pans. Nine pans, flying, mid-service, pumping out 100. It was a joy to watch, it was beautiful. Everything going out perfectly. As executive chef, he hasn't got time to make sure that somebody's plated properly. He's just saying, quick look, quick look. I don't have to tell Kylie that she knows it all. That's why she got out. She wants a bit of time to herself, bit of time to breathe and think. But as a leader, it's very hard, especially in a kitchen setting, not to be able to push, push, push because, man, it's high pressure. You've got to keep moving, you've got to keep moving. But for us, as Aboriginal people, the pressure's been on us since 1788. Before that, we had no pressure. It was cool, man, it was great. Well, it was good and tweed, not so good in the snowy mountains, I will admit, central desert, not so good either. But you moved around, you looked at the environment, you looked, you helped your elders. You took advice from your elders. You had that really collaborative effort of leadership. And you all work together for one purpose. And that's what leadership really is about. We all should be moving towards one purpose. And that purpose is the betterment of all. Sadly, leadership today is not about leadership for all. It's about who can get the most, who can die with the most toys. It's a very strange situation. Yeah, we are a private company, but we also are community members as Aboriginal men. We want good things for us, but we want good things for our people. And we hope to, through our own leadership, to be able to bring that to the table and to provide opportunities for young and not so young, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander men and women. So just think a little bit about leadership and a little quote that I did read today. If no one's following you and you think you're a leader, you're just taking a walk.