“Having grown up in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, I never knowingly met anyone of Aboriginal descent and my only knowledge came from the extremely dated teachings of the 1950s, when we learned that Indigenous Australians lived primitively in the bush, and all images included boomerangs and kangaroos.
In the 1980s I was given the opportunity as a teacher at Sydney Teachers’ College to go on an Aboriginal culture course based in Alice Springs. We spent two nights sleeping out in the bush, learning about traditional culture, followed by five days visiting Aboriginal centres in Alice. That was the first time I realised that these were people, just like us, struggling to make the best lives for themselves and their children as they could under extremely difficult circumstances.
This started a period of exploration for me, pushed along by Linda Burney who, as a teacher herself, came regularly to the College to speak to our students. Our conversations totally changed my views as she assured me that the only thing Indigenous students needed to achieve in the same manner as non-Indigenous students was the opportunity. However, opportunity was not just equal access, as Indigenous students often had to contend with life issues that made staying at school and studying just too hard. She said that if these issues could be overcome, there was no reason they would not achieve parity with their non-Indigenous counterparts. I vowed then that, if there was ever an opportunity for me to assist indigenous students, I would do so.
This opportunity came to me in 2005 when, as president of Shalom, I met Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver, Head of the Indigenous Unit in the Faculty of Medicine at UNSW. From that meeting, the Shalom Gamarada Indigenous Scholarship Program was born which, over the last seventeen years has seen the graduation of 67 Indigenous students including 28 medical doctors. In fact 10% of all Indigenous medical doctors in Australia today are graduates of the Shalom Gamarada Program. I stood down as Chair of this program at the beginning of 2023 but, during my 17 years’ involvement, everything that Linda told me so many years ago was reinforced.”