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manhood Greg’s Story As told to Susanna Freymark by Greg Telford I have Aboriginal blood, I have Islander blood and I have white blood so I have a mixed nationality really. I belong to the Midjuanbal clan up at Tweed. We were the first black family to live in Kingscliff. I watched a lot of relationships between fathers and sons. At times I was envious of white kids because they were doing things with their dads I suppose that I would have liked to have done with my dad. You know, going fishing and that sort of thing, whereas my dad — he was doing the more commercial type fishing with nets and all of that, but that was about making money to keep our house. I was envious of watching fathers and sons going in their own little boat — going out to sea or going in the river, playing football. I felt encouraged watching dads supporting their kids to do the best they could on the field whereas my relationship with my dad was like, ‘You get out there and f----in’ hurt somebody and if you don’t f----in’ hurt somebody I’ll hurt you’. That sort of thing. I suppose I’m really grateful that, looking at my dad and my mother, is their work ethic — a really strong work ethic. That would come out in us even though there was lots of violence and abuse in our family. They said, ‘If you want anything out of your life you know, get off your arse and get it ‘cause nobody’s going to give it to you.’ To me it’s a healthy thing, you know, it’s been able to sustain me and keep me going through my life. I left home at fourteen because of the violence that was occurring and sadly, you know, I couldn’t handle it and if I stayed I’d have had to do something about stopping it and that may have been detrimental to everybody. I had people trying to help me along the way, different aunties and uncles who tried to influence my life a bit. I was on a path of self-destruction for a while and then slowly over time I became more aware that I needed to change my lifestyle. I got into lots of relationships with people who had similar backgrounds to myself. Eventually I got into a relationship with this woman who didn’t have a background like mine, a non-Aboriginal, <strong>byronchild</strong> 36 non-Koori. She’s actually a Kiwi girl, a blue-eyed blonde girl. I could tell the qualities of how she was brought up were different to the way I was brought up and wanted some of what she had, but just didn’t know how to get it. Over time I’ve learnt a lot from her and made changes. I’ve been lucky that I’ve had people put in my path that have been, I suppose, guides for what I needed to do to learn to make the change so that I didn’t pass these same behaviours on to my children. I’ve watched people like Stuey Anderson, watched him with his boys. I went around one day to see them while they were at camp. Stuart was sitting on the fence, it was a copper log fence and his three boys were sitting with him. He had his arms stretched right out either side and his boys were tucked into them and one of them had his arm across his dad’s leg, they were all sort of entwined with each other. A lot of people could walk past and that would have no impact on them whereas for me it was just bang — it just hit me in the face. Like, shit, look at this father with his boys. That’s what I want. We can blame colonisation, we can blame growing up in negative lifestyles, but while we continue to blame, we don’t have to look at ourselves and our behaviour. Anyway when we left there I said to a friend, ‘Didn’t you notice the way that guy was sitting on the fence with his sons?’ She said, ‘I didn’t think much of it.’ The difference was because she was brought up in a family where there was lots of love and that sort of thing shown. I just see white families grow up different to black families. Maybe white fellows are better at expressing their love for one another more so than we are. If I see some kids, regardless of what colour the kids are, if they’re doing something that I know is wrong that could get them into trouble or cause problems for somebody else more often than not I’d stop if I was driving past. If they’re Koori, I make them aware that if you’re doing something you shouldn’t, you need to be aware it affects your mum, your dad, your uncles, your aunties, your grandparents, because it’s whether we like it or not we get tarred with the one brush. We need to be aware that regardless of whether we’re related to one another or not we still have a connection by the colour of our skin. And even that has repercussions on me as a father because one of my little boys is blonde with blue eyes. He came home from school when he was six and said,‘Dad, the kids at school have been teasing me.’ I said, ‘What about, son?’ I knew it’d come sooner or later. I’m in the bath with him. He said, ‘The kids at school they’re teasing me because I don’t look like you.’ I wanted him to say black but he wouldn’t say it. I said, ‘What do you mean you don’t look like me?’ He said, ‘You know, I don’t look like you. When I get older and grow up will I look like you?’ And I said, ‘No, son, in the summer you’ll go goldie but in the winter time you will fade. Your dad does too, but no, you’re not going to look like dad. You just be proud of who you are.’ I had tears in my eyes when he was speaking because I was thinking, ‘Shit, here he is at this age feeling this already.’ And then he turned around and he said, ‘Dad.’ And I said ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I’m black inside.’ The tears ran down my face. It just blew me away. He’s thirteen now. I talked at the NAIDOC celebration at his school last year. He came home and said to his mother, ‘I’ve had the afternoon of a celebrity! Half the kids in my class didn’t know I was Koori and the other half just had no idea what I was, really. They just thought I was one of them but they see dad there today and they see me carry the Koori flag. You know, they just treated me really different.’ My Pop [grandfather] died last year. Because of Dad’s relationship [to him] you know, we never got close. My Pop actually apologised to me because of
that. He said that he would have loved to have been closer to us but he never got the opportunity to because of his and my father’s relationship. I just said ‘thanks Pop’. You know, I’d love to be able to share that stuff with my dad. I’ll always live with a hope that someday it may happen but one of the things I’ve also become aware of is that through that negative relationship with dad, I have to keep working really hard on my own, so that I maintain that positive connection I have with my boys today. You know, we do lots of cuddling, lots of talking. Even tonight, you know, I had a little bit of a spin at home. My eldest fella actually challenged me about it. He said, ‘You shouldn’t bring your attitude home from work when you’re stressed and take it out on mum, and take it out on us.’ Anyway we had a bit of a blow-up but we’ve got a meeting planned for tonight so that mum and me and the two boys can talk. I never experienced anything like that growing up as a young fella, although I used to talk with my mum a lot about her living with the violence, and that sort of thing, and why we had to keep going down this track. I always had a dream or an expectation that there’s got to be more to life than this. You know I always say that what happened to me as a little fella, I’m pretty sure that we’re not just put on this earth to just keep hurting one another and keep feeling hurt, you know, and sadness. I’m pretty sure that’s not what life’s about. There’s got to be more to life than this. Today I’m lucky that I’ve been able to work through my stuff and find out what that actually is. I am the co-ordinator of the Rekindling the Spirit Program (a Lismore, NSW, based program set up by the Aboriginal community). I like to feel that we have good and bad spirits within us all. What we try to work with is to bring the good spirit to the forefront, and if we can help that happen, everyone that comes into contact with you wants to be around you, wants to warm to you, especially your children. When we work with men, sometimes we’ll take them back to their childhood and start to get them to identify their feelings and emotions that were happening for them as a young person. It takes time because whether they’re black men, white men, yellow men, it doesn’t really matter, you ask them how they are and most of them will say ‘good’. And then I say, ‘Well good’s not a feeling. What are you actually feeling right now?’ They say, ‘You know, I’m okay.’ I say, ‘Okay is not a feeling.’ And then they say, ‘Stuff you, Greg, I don’t know!’ I say to them we need to start to identify that we’ve all been sad, we’ve all been glad, we’ve all been mad, we’ve all been angry, we’ve all hurt. What I talk to them about is if you don’t like your life and where you’re going at the moment, and you don’t want your children to go down that same track, maybe you need to be looking at changing your behaviour, because what our kids see is what our kids will be. I talk about how if they’re [the children] watching violence, there’s a good ... if you don’t like your life and where you’re going at the moment, and you don’t want your children to go down that same track, maybe you need to be looking at changing your behaviour, because what our kids see is what our kids will be. chance they’re going to turn out violent. And if they’re watching substance abuse, there’s a chance they’re going to abuse substances, if they’re looking at really negative role modelling as far as parenting there’s a good chance they’re going to turn out shitty parents. So if we want good kids to happen we’ve all got to be aware of what we’re doing because we can blame all of the systems out there, but when it comes down to it we’re the first educators and what comes out of our homes is what’s happening in our homes. It could apply to anybody, but for us, as black people within this country, we have a bigger issue to tackle with trying to get accepted within the dominant culture. To do that, sometimes we’ve got to be aware of our own behaviours and how we can play into the game of discrimination by giving people ammunition to throw shit at us. We can blame colonisation, we can blame growing up in negative lifestyles, but while we continue to blame, we don’t have to look at ourselves and our behaviour. One of the things I talk to the guys about is we can make up nice glossy certificates that say I completed this course. But for me the benefits come when your kids reach up to you, they cuddle you and want to be around you. Having your children cuddle into you while they’re beside you, then going to sleep, they’re just like little snugly koalas on either side of you. I shared that in a men’s group one day and I wasn’t aware that one of the guys there hadn’t been out of jail long. He came in the next week and he said, ‘Greg, you know how you talked about your kids snuggling in to you either side of you and how it’s such a nice feeling? Well I tried that, and I never had a feeling like that.’ The tears started rolling down my face. That’s why we keep encouraging one another. Because I think of that guy, you know, his dad died when he was quite young. Although he had uncles that took up a bit of that fathering for him, you know, this poor fella now, he shouldn’t have been removed from their care. But having that experience with his kids, just for that little moment, and for those children to have that moment with their dad — they’re memories that they’ll never forget. And they may never have got the opportunity to feel that. That’s really hard. It’s taken us 214 years to get here. If we think we’re going to undo what’s been done in a short time frame, you know, we’re just talking shit to ourselves. Because it’s going to take a long time to undo what’s been done. And then to get people to come on board and look at how government has played roles within the breakdown of our culture. And we can look at them and keep blaming and keep blaming, but, you know, while we do that, we’re victimising ourselves more and more too. We’ve really got to step out of that and start encouraging one another, you know, to take on that role modelling to one another about how to be better fathers. With our mob, I’m really hungry to see what can happen when you change your life around. Because I watch what comes out of homes today, and I talk about it in our men’s groups, how when kids are loved and they’re supported and they’re encouraged, it just blows me away what they achieve. And for me, at times I get a bit sad and I think if we were loved… but we didn’t get a lot of support and we didn’t get a lot of <strong>byronchild</strong> 37
Page 1: t h e g l o b a l m a g a z i n e f
Page 5 and 6: Editor/Creative Director Kali Wendo
Page 7 and 8: At that age, experiences of loving
Page 9 and 10: Many structures seem to be created
Page 11 and 12: Circumcision Letters and Opinions I
Page 13 and 14: Once I met the mutilators and circu
Page 15 and 16: will grow to understand the importa
Page 17 and 18: Photo and artwork by Lisa Engeman .
Page 19 and 20: Down Syndrome: Is honest, accurate
Page 21 and 22: syndrome babies, for whom 1 in 4 (2
Page 23 and 24: this degree of ‘false positive’
Page 25 and 26: 9. Biggio JR et al. An outcomes ana
Page 27 and 28: The Healing By Scott Noelle Embraci
Page 29 and 30: As we free ourselves from the shack
Page 31 and 32: positive effects are on the compete
Page 33 and 34: in part, with acknowledgement. If y
Page 35 and 36: A Breech Birth at Home By Tania A K
Page 37: Photo by Lisa Engeman Compiled by S
Page 41 and 42: Wayne’s Story As told to Suzanna
Page 43 and 44: Commentary: Remember how to play? B
Page 45 and 46: as a springboard to annual festival
Page 47 and 48: Mother love keeps anger in check Go
Page 49 and 50: society society co-operative co-ope
Page 51 and 52: The solution to this crisis of lear
Page 53 and 54: unity St. Schools. Co-operative Com
Page 55 and 56: Transforming Relationships By Volke
Page 57 and 58: Immune system balance Spring has re
Page 59 and 60: contain pesticides, so always read
Page 61 and 62: From Magical Child to Magical Teen
Page 63 and 64: for food, no respect for food, usin
Page 65 and 66: IMAGE the fantasy of reality Story
Page 67 and 68: involved in the design and implemen
Page 69 and 70: RELAXATION CDs Relaxation CDs for e
Page 71: Fun, challenging and colourful non

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