Delivered in Melbourne, November 2009.

I want to thank the Bennelong Society for giving me the opportunity to speak and to be able to give you an insight into how I think and feel about how our people see themselves. There are many more out there who are not given an opportunity like this to tell their story and how it is.

My name is Bess Nyirringali Nungarrayi Price, My first language is Warlpiri, English is my second and there are five other languages that I understand. I was born under a tree at a place called Yuendumu, where the airstrip now is. My father was 10 years old when he first saw a white man. My mother was a little bit younger. They were both born in the desert out of contact with the rest of the world.

I came from a family of eleven. My Mum has now outlived 8 of her children. We have lost eight, but I had a happy up bringing. I spent my childhood living in yujuku my father built, what whitefellas call ‘humpies’. I was always warm, dry and comfortable. We ate both whitefella food and our own bushtucker. We camped on my Dad’s country every weekend, walking a round trip of around thirty kilometers from Yuendumu and back, but we always got to school. When I was too young to go my older sister and brother rode to school on a donkey all that way. My teachers were good, hard working people. I had plenty of white friends as well as the company of my own extended Warlpiri family. I learnt both ways before we had what we now call bilingual/bicultural education at our school. My teachers and my parents taught me well.

I come today to talk to you about my people, and where they are in this land we call Australia. I have come to speak today hoping that you will listen to what I have to say.

People think Aboriginal people all think the same. They are wrong. We have Aboriginal people who live in cities, towns and in the remote parts of Australia and we all have different issues. The issues and needs are totally different. The politics in the bush are so different from the way southern blackfellas think. They, the yapa, are gullible at times and they accept anything that’s put in front of them, without a question. They are easily lead whether it’s in good faith or not. Others blame colonization for the reason that our people are the most disadvantaged group of people. But nobody can explain why that is…I don’t see it that way. All I see is that they are hunters and gatherers and they were vulnerable then and they are vulnerable now. They know nothing about how everything else operates outside of their communities and how they need to change in order to keep up with the rest of the outside world. They need to be given the tools and the mechanism to move forward.

We have had so many self-appointed people, black and white, who have decided to be our spokes people, who know nothing about us and our issues. They are the people who have been running the show all these years with out ever asking us whether it’s okay for them to do so. They are the ones who want to keep our people in the dark as if we are some sort of stone age people.

It had to take urgent measures by the government in order to help our people, for them to recognise what was happening to them, and to do something for themselves before it was too late.

I am one of those people who embraced the government’s move, what is now called the Intervention or the NTER, the Northern Territory Emergency Response. To me it meant at last somebody was acknowledging that there was a crisis and that it needed to be addressed, For a long time our peoples lives have been in a state of crisis, spiralling downwards, rapidly, uncontrollably.

The protestors and the media only seem to care when whitefellas kill blackfellas, or blackfellas kill whitefellas. They don’t seem to care when our kids are killed by their own people or they commit suicide.

Before the Intervention three of my brothers drank themselves to death on the Alice Springs town camps. Two nieces, one 21, one 26, did the same. My grand daughter was murdered on a town camp. She died because she was stabbed by her ex-husband, my cousin. The ambulance wouldn’t go in there without a police escort because the drunks attack them when they go there to save a life. So she died waiting for them. This is what the town camps have been for us, places of sickness and self-destruction. Yet there are those in Alice Springs who call it racism and an attack on human rights when the government tries to help us make the camps decent places to live and raise kids.

I could go on all day about the violence I have seen. It has happened to so many of my loved ones. My own body is decorated with scars. Yet the protestors, the whitefellas in Alice Springs and those who come from Down South, who think they are supporting my people, have treated me like an enemy. They have tried to tell the world through the internet that I am a drunk and that I only support the government because it pays me to do work for them. They aren’t interested in the truth. They aren’t willing to open their ears and listen.

They have never given me a chance to talk at their rallies. They bring white students and cranky kooris and murris up from Down South who know nothing about us and who hate whitefellas. They look for local people who think like they do and try to keep the rest quiet and away from the media. When the UN’s Special Rapporteur came to Alice my people were not told of the meetings. I was only invited the day before. The meetings were very carefully controlled and orchestrated. It was a joke. He didn’t hear from the people with the problems, the ones living with the violence and the misery. He heard from those with a vested interest in the present situation.

My people, the ones with the problems that the Intervention is designed to address, were deliberately excluded. They were lining up down at the pub and the bottle shops as they do everyday or sitting in filth in the camps worrying about their kids and waiting for the next round of grog fuelled violence. People are given a fairytale version of our culture by people who don’t live by our law. They want you to think that it is the government that causes all our problems. That is an outrageous lie. The government gets it wrong because it consults with the wrong people. It gets it wrong because it cannot help people who won’t, or don’t know how, to help themselves. We want to be able to help ourselves.

I know plenty of Aboriginal women here who want the Intervention because they can feed their kids now. The protestors treat them like enemies as well. They never support the old women who come in from bush to protest against the grog. They verbally attacked and insulted the women at the Women’s Centre at Yuendumu when they set up their own shop. They took the side of the violent men and the corrupt ones in our communities and refused to support the women worried about their kids, sick of being beaten up by drunks. They have never even tried to talk to us. We are very grateful to the government for keeping income management going.

My people don’t use money the way white people do. They don’t save, they don’t budget, they can’t say ‘no’ to relatives even when they are drunks and addicted to gambling and drugs. They need help in spending their money wisely. We are very happy that the government has decided to extend income management to everybody. That is what we have always asked for. Don’t stop doing it for us, do it to everybody who needs it if you are worried about racism. Even Warren Snowdon, our ALP Federal member admits now that it is working. That is a big change for Warren.

We still have a lot of other problems. Education is one of the biggest. Education has not worked for our mob for the last thirty years. White people told us that they wanted to preserve our language so now my people can’t express themselves to the rest of the world and rely on white people and city blackfellas, who know nothing about us, or who want to keep us in ignorance to do it for them. I went to school before the bilingual program started yet I speak both Warlpiri and English better than our kids and our grand kids. Our young people now need their grandparents to speak for them to the outside world. The old ones speak better English. Most of our kids now can’t read and write English or their own language. They are not learning to speak their own languages properly. They are losing the best of our culture but not learning the best of the whitefella’s culture. They are learning the worst instead. They are losing on both sides. Bilingual education is a wonderful idea but it seems to me that it has never been done properly. We want our kids to keep speaking our languages but we also want them to be able to speak and read and write English. My people are linguistically talented. Many speak several Aboriginal languages. Our kids are intelligent and want to learn. Why can’t whitefellas teach them English? It should be easy.

Teachers have never been trained properly. Our kids have never been taught English properly. Our schools don’t get the resources they need. The high truancy rates have been ignored. Education hasn’t been compulsory for our kids so they don’t bother turning up and parents don’t make sure they go and the government has ignored all this. We want the best of both world’s, not the worst, and we will need the government’s support to get it.

Our people need to be challenged. There needs to be an open and honest debate between ourselves, as people. We need to change in order to make it better for future for our children and our grandchildren.  These protestors have done their best to stop that from happening and yet they call it ‘solidarity’.

With all the money the government has poured into our self managed organisations and communities everything has gotten worse. Our organisations can put energy into campaigning against government policies and into getting the UN to take notice of their views but they don’t stop our men from murdering our women, our kids from killing themselves. They don’t make sure our kids get to school. They don’t keep our languages alive. All they can do is bleat for more money and complain every time the government tries to do something.

I’ve read the speech by Mary Victor O’Reeri from the Kimberley. Her family’s approach is exactly what is needed in our country. It was a woman who stood up and told the truth at last and the protestors and organisations can’t stop her. Yet my own uncle told the Wall Street Journal that women have no power in our culture. He is wrong. The media should stop listening to rubbish like that. We women are the main ones now trying to save our kids. There are men trying to get things right but they are quietly working away and the media don’t take any notice of them, their voices are drowned out by protestors and their white supporters.

Mary Victor is right. We are the only ones who can save ourselves and we don’t need the protestors from our southern cities to tell us what to think and say. We have the strength ourselves if we can only be honest for once. The Intervention started this debate. That is the best thing about it. It has made us think for the first time about what’s happened to us, where we are and where we want to go. More and more Aboriginal people are now getting up the courage to tell the world what is really happening. More and more are willing to take responsibility for our own problems.

The Racial Discrimination Act was there to protect us from white racism and we needed that protection. But it has not protected our people from ourselves. We need an act, we need laws that recognize that the problem now is blackfellas killing blackfellas and killing themselves. If a law like the Racial Discrimination Act gets in the way of doing that then it must be changed. We are different, we are special, we have special needs. We are caught in a trap. They want us to be citizens with the same rights but then they want us to keep our culture with no changes. How can we do both? We need to do some special things to solve our problems. Now we know that and can do something about it. Let’s roll forward instead of backwards.

We want leaders who will lead us out of our misery not sit around whingeing about how hard their lives are when they have the jobs and the power. We want leaders who tell us that we are not ‘Victims’ who can’t do a thing for ourselves but sit around dying while we wait for the government to get it right. We want leaders who will convince our own people to stop drinking, fighting and feuding, who will get our kids into school so that we can produce our own professors of indigenous rights who can go to other peoples country to listen to their stories.