Enterprise and entrepreneurial thinking: It’s a black thing!

I was born on my mother’s traditional lands and raised as a child between two households. My first home was my parents’, situated in the suburban sprawl of fibro ovens in treeless estates in western Sydney where we lived with a mix of Koori families, imports from war-torn Europe and the debris of Sydney’s post-colonial white society under the banner of ‘housos’, residents of the public housing estates of Bass Hill and Chester Hill. My second home was the coolness, calmness and stability of the loving arms and hugs of my mother’s mother and her Koori family in Harbord, Curl Curl and the Manly–Narrabeen Lakes areas, all traditional country of the Gai-mariagal. We swam, fi shed, prawned, regularly harvested swan and duck eggs, and ate possum and the odd goanna to supplement a diet rich in chayote, rhubarb, warrigal greens or anything else that was easy to grow or scavenge or that fell off the back of a truck.

I had an idyllic childhood, exploring Cowan Creek and the Hawkesbury River, camping with my uncles and cousins and having no knowledge of poverty or racism; then my cousins started to vanish. One by one they were plucked away, and the adults never spoke of them. We stopped visiting each other’s houses: card games that would last all night, the laughter and warmth of wider family, with Dad sharing long necks and Gran her blackberry or rhubarb pies – this all ceased abruptly. Then in ‘59 the camp at Narrabeen was bulldozed and the Elders trucked off, some to a mission place at Rooty Hill that I visited when my big sister took supplies to one of our Elders.