 Our third speaker is Polisa Anderson. Thank you Caroline and my co-panelists. Thank you very much Kylie, Bella, Lisa and Akotika for welcoming us so brilliantly. Now my story is a parallel one to the Indigenous story. I'm Polisa Anderson. I'm a first-generation organic produce grower and a second-generation restaurateur. For the longest time, I have this recurring sequence in my mind's eye of being taken to the forest somewhere in the deep northern part of Thailand as a very young child, two or three years old, to forage for white ant larvae. I remember being lifted off the ground while the nest came down and the larvae was delicately plucked out, someone whispered in my ear that this had to be harvested now because it was the season. Now that seems like a very complex memory for a child so young and I always thought for the longest time that I'd imagined it, but recently at a family gathering it was confirmed to me by an aunt of marriage. She'd taken me into the forest, close to a village in Rul Rul Lampang which is near Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. This memory is for me so poignant because while my mother was not there, she's here now, it felt like a very maternal embrace. The texture of the ant's larvae in my mouth as I was fed this warm, nutritious, delicious creamy food and being held off the ground to stay safe. Where was my mother? Well, this is the crux of the story. She was here in Australia and I'm really only talking to you today because of her and her story. My mother Amy was born to Chinese immigrant parents who sought political asylum in Bangkok from the communist regime of the 1940s. Her parents established themselves very quickly in Bangkok, my grandfather, an engineer at a textile mill and my grandmother also worked for the same mill. With both parents working so hard, she was entrusted to an elderly Thai caretaker who took her home to a village and spent most of her toddler years until she was of school age being reared in the very traditional Thai way of life. Temple fairs, feeding stray dogs and feeding, sorry, giving arms to monks every morning, swimming in the river and eating a very Thai agrarian-based diet. When she started school, the loss of that idyllic way of life scored a deep mark within her and in some ways to this day, I think that is what she is constantly trying to recreate, that way of giving and feeding and the constant lookout for sanook, which means fun. My mother migrated to Australia from Bangkok at the age of 26 in 1984. Why did she choose Australia? Well, she had one brother in the States and one brother here in Sydney and she chose Australia, I think, for the proximity and she probably liked her younger brother better. And because the other thing was she didn't have to learn to drive on the other side of the road. Now, life was really complicated for her already. She had left an abusive husband and instantly became a social pariah for being a divorced single mother of two children. My brother Pat and I were left with our paternal grandparents in Bangkok such as the fate and sad, sad fate of many working immigrant parents who grow abroad to work just to be separated from their children. In our case, we were very lucky. It only lasted for two years. She was incredibly industrious, working multiple jobs, cleaning, sewing and eventually getting work at a renowned Thai restaurant in Sydney where his owner found her so indispensable in the kitchen that he sponsored her. Now, my mother has an amazing attitude for hard work. Despite coming from a solid middle-class background, she had gone to a private Catholic girl's school where she was taught by English nuns. When I ask her what she remembers of this period in her life, she says, well, as a five-year-old looking up and thinking how narrow their nostrils are. So to hear her tell of her struggles, her initial struggles in Sydney, just breaks my heart. She cleaned other people's homes. She sewed till her fingers bled. She'd never sewn anything in her life before. In Thailand, she'd grown up with help. She couldn't speak much English, so it was totally voiceless when racist insults were hurled her way. But her resolve was helped by the many, many kind people she came across, and there were very, very many. She endured all this so that my brother and I could come to be with her in Sydney and as every parent she hoped to give us a better life. Every single dollar she made, she saved and she saved and saved until she could open her own restaurant, which she did in 1989. She opened a fine dining establishment with a business partner who eventually left and became a flight attendant after two years. Chat Thai darling, that's how, you know, successful it was. Chat Thai darling, her shut at the store after only two years and having that initial failure put her in good stead to do things differently the next time around. In her heart, she'd always wanted to do a fast, casual diner type of restaurant. So, being ever practical, she went to work for McDonald's. She absorbed everything she could about the McDonald's management system in one year. She was so brilliant that the owners chose her to be in the photo op that appeared in the local daily in the inaugural opening of the drive-thru. I still have that picture. When she opened Chat Thai again, the food she cooked was of the time, namely very suited to what Australians knew about Thai food, not much. Except for the standard hallmarks of the Thai menu. A lot of it had to do with availability of Southeast Asian ingredients. So every weekend, she'd bundle us up in the car to make the 90-minute trek out to Cabra Matta, the centre of the Southeast Asian diaspora of the time. There, it was like entering another country. A bustling marketplace with ladies lining the plaza, selling tubs of homemade sauces and desserts, seedlings of edible exotic flora. Massive, massive bundles of herbs, unlike the $2 worth bundles, that they'd grown and harvested themselves. And awful, awful at the butchers. So while she raced around, buying her weekly quota for restaurant and home, I sat outside, minding the bags and eating dumplings. She was nostalgic for gutsy, spicy, and deep fermented layers of flavour, which ironically was what she and her one employee at the time would cook for staff meal. At that point, her staff included herself, her cousin, her one employee, and her children on the weekend. You'll be glad to know that that one employee, Nanoy, after 28 years, is still in the Chattai family. So this leads to my part of the story. At the ripe old age of nine, I had been initiated already into restaurant craft for almost two years. I started off peeling garlic and prepping herbs with my little nimble fingers and progressed on to chopping onions and shelling and deveining prawns. Literally doing all the fun jobs that were fun for about the first minute. My mother was excellent, is excellent at reverse psychology, as she will probably explain to you today, but how she got us to work. She essentially guilt tripped us into it. We were hers to shape, and shape she did. There wasn't a single station in the restaurant that we didn't know how to work. Undoubtedly, we learnt more maths there than at primary school. I learnt the meaning of true grit one service when at the age of nine, one Friday night, naturally, and we were under the pump. I ran front of house, there were eight tables, six inside, two outside, and I came in rushing in, demanding something from the kitchen, a main perhaps and probably most likely giving lip or probably where to stick it. Well, I felt affronted and went and soaked by the back stairs for all two minutes and thinking, oh, how do I get out of here? How do I run away from this place? Took a deep breath, and much straight back out to my table thinking of my waiting diners. The lesson was invaluable, as of course many lessons gleaned from the hospitality industry are. The humility, discipline and resilience needed to face the ebbs and flow of life can all be surely learnt from working in a restaurant. After studying liberal arts, I studied and worked and travelled and lived abroad for ten years, returning after the birth of my second son, sorry, my second child, who was a son, eight years ago. My mother had constantly kept up her offer of coming back to rejoin the family business, which by then had grown to four eateries around Sydney. She had grown the business organically and slowly. Her ethos, one of many, had grown low margins. All the while, she had massed a faithful clientele and an even more loyal body of staff. Her menu had evolved to something she was really proud of, true regional Thai dishes, alongside the more popular, often ordered corporates. The attitude was, we couldn't change palates and habits over the night, but we might as well try. Her kitchens became a collaboration between different stratas of people who in Thailand would never have worked together since being friends. Sons of farmers, blue collar workers, daughters of lawyers, people with kitchen experience and people without kitchen experience all had to band together day after day to carry each other through. LGBTQI existed in our restaurants before it was even a thing. Growing up in a restaurant, growing up in that environment, it didn't even occur to me that it was different. Something wonderful also happened in our kitchen. She highlighted everyone's ability to contribute to the menu. If you were the dishwasher and your mum had taught you how to make wedge up with all the offal and the innards, please proceed to the stove. If anyone had an opinion on how a dish could be made better than by all means, speak up. Nothing was too sacred that it couldn't be improved on by using different techniques or better ingredients to make an approach to running the creative aspect of a kitchen influenced me greatly. Another aspect of how our business is run differently is my mother's familial style. It sounds cheesy, but it is run like a big family kitchen, total chaos. By spending time with our people outside of work and also getting to know their families in Australia and Thailand, we cement a real bond. Their struggles are our struggles. Their victories and joys ours. In my opinion, it is not necessarily a feminine approach. It is the only one which my mum thought to operate because we cooked Thai food and that system of work reflected the Thai social mores. Another Thai social more is the deep respect for elders. Obviously when I started working in my mother's kitchen, I was the youngest and I called everyone by the elder prefix of pi na pa lung yai, so elder sibling, aunt, uncle, grandmother. As I've aged, I've risen through these ranks and it always still catches me by surprise to hear my name with an elder prefix attached to it. As a youngster naturally, I couldn't wait to fly the coop. I wanted to prove myself independent of this Thai restaurant universe which was my world. For a time, I rejected the language and though I found much beauty in the culture, I felt myself outside of it. It's the natural state of third culture kids like myself to feel alienated. I had the light bulb moment, no matter who you are, you're bound to feel that sense of loneliness and isolation. It's all part of the human experience, right? There's only one me and one you. So all that time I lived abroad. I couldn't escape my mother's phone calls asking for my help to translate this or that, contracts, menu items, for that was my role. Daughter equals translator, equals interpreter. Fixer. I couldn't even escape Chat Thai. I kid you not. In the gift store of the Prado in Madrid, the sales lady noticed my Australian accent and mentioned that she dreamily had done a student exchange and lived in Manly and of course that had led on to, and my favourite place to eat was Chat Thai. Famed for its student friendly prices. And everywhere I went, Hong Kong, London, New York, Tokyo, it was all the same. The coincidence was too much. I kept meeting people who were fans of Chat Thai and all had a fond memory of my mother and a kind word to say about her. Like what? How is it possible that so many people had eaten at our restaurants? We were just a little family-run business in the Lord's evening. How on earth do I feel those shoes? Or rather, how do I carve a role for myself within it? That question has led to me and my family down this path for our restaurants. The next step to growing the business was literally to start growing the food to become vertically integrated. My mother knew me well when she enticed me back to the country. She said, well, when you come back here you can have a garden, grow your own food knowing how much I love gardening. She was, I was living in Tokyo at the time with a young family and that was really tempting. Little did I know that the garden would be 107 acres. When I did come back we started doing the farm business, visiting our existing growers and seeking new farmers to work with up and down the Australian eastern seaboard all the way up to Darwin. What we found were small-scale producers, many of them Thai, who really were growing it for themselves to cook, but soon found that there was a market for it, market for it, among Southeast Asian restaurateurs and supermarkets and diaspora living in the city. For the scale we needed, we knew it was only a matter of time. We bought a farm in Arakul country that was known as Byron Shire three years ago. The place of plenty as it is known is at the foothills of a chain of dormant volcanic overflow of which many indigenous foods originated like the macadamia nut, finger limes, various species of nating fruit trees and medicinal herbs. And while still in New South Wales it's very close to the Queensland border and so it has a subtropical microclimate, lush terracotta, loamy, basalt based soil. The soil is so fertile, practically cheating you're right. We were able to harvest our first batch of herbs and vegetables in less than six months. We took another six months before that to rehabilitate the land after it had been overgrazed when we bought it. Becoming a producer has made me well aware of all the discrepancies and shortfalls between producer and end of line consumer. We were completely unprepared for how the shock that came with how much it cost to produce organic food with integrity uninterrupted by hormone stimulators to be completely pesticide and herbicide free, implementing responsible land stewardship importantly growing in a way that promotes soil biodiversity mindful management of the ecology. With that knowledge we've come to understand that part of the reason why people take up this type of farming or food production is purely for the lifestyle. No one's doing it to get rich. So in this sense it doesn't wonder at all far from what made my mother start Chat Thai and to keep it going. It is the knowledge that she's affecting the many and not the few. We serve up food that seems to have been growing in our backyard for your pleasure. Not unlike if you were to drop over to auntie's place on the way home from work and she's just going to pop on the back there and you know put a snack together for you and boom suddenly you've got a banquet. How is it possible that she's all out of her garden? That's how I've come to see what we're doing. We grow a diverse heirloom and lesser known varieties that is in our backyard and not commercial varieties that get grown for shelf life or popularity. That's the true beauty of our farm. We are able to select varieties and for flavours my mother grew up with in the happiest time when she lived with her Yai, her beloved Ketai caretaker. That's how she remembers Thai food and perhaps that's what I've been seeking all this time. A way, a wormhole to get back to the flavour, the white and salave. Something wild, natural and free. Thank you.