I’m really tired of the story of us as the victim -
as if we are always the people being done unto
and not the people doing.
His speech about racism last year went viral
This has been burning in me from childhood.
I lived right at the coalface of Australian poverty and bigotry.
I saw what my parents had to go through
in what was a very segregated Australia.
I saw my parents turned away from shops
when they tried to go in to them.
I saw my grandfather jailed for things that no one should have a right to be jailed for.
The risk is in pathologising a people -
saying that you are bound to this fate
because you are X or Y.
The way you deal with that is you change the narrative,
you change the story.
Writing for me is a way of changing the story.
In your book you speak about Frank Foster,
your great-great -grandfather.
We'd known very little about him until just recently
when I discovered this lost story.
He is one of the most significant figures emerging out of Sydney
after dispossession and settlement.
This is a report by the NSW Education Department.
Frank Foster, 19 years of age,
gave a lesson in subtraction and arithmetic.
Frank Foster is an intelligent half-caste.
Intelligent half-caste!
And look at this - he reads and spells well. Apparently.
Frank's story is a very tragic story in many respects,
but you don't frame it that way in your essay.
I'm really tired
of the story of us as the victim.
As if we are always the people being done unto,
and not the people doing.
If I look at my great-great-grandfather's life,
what an extraordinary journey it was,
to be a boy huddled with his family at Circular Quay.
Banished from Sydney, his tradional homelands,
raised in the missions out west,
to always constantly find his life
shaped by the intervention of the state,
but aspire to be a schoolteacher,
aspire to something greater.
And this is the death notice in their newsletter.
And it says here a well known and respected entity has passed away in My Frank Foster.
He was a great sufferer.
He is surviving, he is a man of amibiton and aspiration,
and I think that is a story that is very common to us,
and it's a story we don't tell often enough.
You say that indigenous Australians have a lot in common
with the migrant experience.
How?
Yeah, if you look at the forces that were driving
post-World War II migration,
people were fleeing economic collapse,
tyranny, political upheaval, war, conflict.
The same forced that we had endured
and lived with here.
They came here looking for a new beginning,
and our people fanned out as well across Australia
looking for a new beginning.
This is in every respect a classic migration story.
Obviously there is a big difference,
in that the struggle with indigenous people
is over their own land,
and this has been inflicted by our own government.
Is this just in some way making this history less traumatic?
Oh no, I think trauma sits at the heart of migration.
Why were we moving?
We were moving because we’d been forced off our land.
We’re no different to what I’ve seen in other parts of the world.
We’re people we’ve had to respond and survive
against enormous odds.
You don't think that's taking away the role of the government
in our indigenous history at all?
There's a difference between policy and
and how people respond to policy.
Policy is only half of the story.
You can have a policy such as assimilation,
predicated on the idea of the time of
ridding Australia of the evil half-caste,
but what did our people see?
My grandfather saw an open door.
He went and fought in World War II,
he came back and walked his family off the mission.
He said I'm going to get a house uptown.
I'm going to get a job.
I'm going to get my kids in to school.
He never abandoned who he was.
In fact, our communities were strengthened by the resilience of our people.
A lot of news stories do focus on the bad statistics
of Indigenous Australia,
but as you say, you think there is another narrative
that's not being told?
The fastest growing sector of the Aboriginal population
is in fact, the middle class.
It's growing faster than the comprable
middle class of non-indigenous Australia.
We have more than tripled the number of Aboriginal university graduates
in a decade.
We are also a people who are predominantly
part-white, predominantly we are of mixed heritage.
I am critical of the idea
that people frame an identity
as an exclusive solitarist identity
that denies a common humanity with other people.
I just think it is ludicrous for me, or for you,
or for any other indigenous person to sit here
who is clearly of mixed ancestry
to deny that part of their ancestry.
That doesn’t challenge my conception of myself as an indigenous person – it enhances it.
At the start of your career, you avoided covering indigenous stories -
because you didn't want to be typecast or marginalised.
do you think that you made the right choice?
Definitely - my idea is that an Aboriginal person can be anything they want to be.
There is still a tendency to put us in that box -
you tick that box, you go on that side of the ledger.
You are the indigenous lawyer, the indigenous doctor, the indigenous teacher,
the indigenous journalist.
And inevitably people see you that way.
But if I walk thorugh the door,
if other indigenous people walk through the door,
through the sheer excellence of our work,
the force of our presence,
you change things.
Stan Grant, thanks for joining us today.