One memory of Catherine Liddle stands strong. Speaking on a playgroup panel about her culture as a An Arrernte/Luritja woman from Central Australia, she talks about children with disabilities, and how they are who they are, without labels: “For First Nations people we don’t identify disability, you just are. You just are. And our children are always treated equally in those environments so they are always responding to children who might have additional learning needs.”

In that moment, Catherine encouraged everyone to meet these families where they are. Welcoming them to be as they are. Which for anyone who feels different, at any given time, is a gift. To be accepted. Welcomed. Recognised.

Catherine has a way of bringing things back to her core values: family, Country, culture, stories. Having worked for many years as a journalist, foremostly capturing meaningful, sensory stories on NITV/SBS and Indigenous Community Television, she now carries those stories with her, sharing knowledge, sharing language, sharing the power of Acknowledgement, working for positive change, highlighting the beauty, depth and variety of experience for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Now the CEO of SNAICC, National Voice for Our Children, Catherine is telling the stories of First Nations children and families across Australia and the Torres Strait. As she speaks, it is apparent that early experiences have left indelible marks upon her, as they do upon us all, in subtle and profound ways.

As part of her role, Catherine illuminates the opportunities within the early years- if we choose to tune in, all senses immersed, we can help to make this time memorable, meaningful and self-determined.

Part of this, Catherine understands, is deeply rooted in play. Play that leads to a deep connection to the earth, the sky, the plants, the people, the stories of life. We spoke with Catherine, learning more about the stories of her own childhood, life and work:

What was it like growing in Central Australia? What kind of play adventures did you get up to as a child?

Growing up in Central Australia is very much larger than life. Everything is red, everything is red. We have these giant sandstorms and we have these incredible stories that our grandparents share with us and this incredible scope for imagining, for creating your own play. I think about it even now with my own children- you go out to your homeland and your children walk off with shovels and you ask them what they’re doing and they say, ‘We’re building, we’re building a motocross track.’ Who comes up with that? Children from Central Australia can come up with that.

I think it was also an incredible opportunity to spend time with my family and my cousins, to always know there was someone in your corner.

What does having a sense of place mean to you?

The first thing I do anywhere I go when doing an Acknowledgement of Country is to describe my own Country. Culturally, part of that is letting anyone who belongs to that Country in the room know who I am and who my family is. Culturally it lets the ancestors know where I’m from and again that Acknowledgement- we’re really clever when we do those things because when we talk about ourselves, and where we’re from, and where our families are from, we intuitively root ourselves to the ground and I do it every time I go into a room.

“I identify who I am and I imagine what my Country looks like and I describe Country for other people and that immediately gives me a sense of strength and a sense of security because I am able to identify where I’m from and what it is that I bring into the room as a result of who I am and where I come from.”

In what ways do you think playgroups and young families can connect with Country and First Nations culture?

I think even by the description- playgroup. A lot of the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people understand the world is to explore it, is to play in it, to build the story that is relevant to you at any given point in time. I think essentially that is what playgroups open the space to do. They say, hey, we know that this is a really valuable learning time for your children, let’s bring them in and let’s see how they want to craft their learning experience with a little bit of guidance- but it opens up an incredible possibility to say, what is it as this moment in time that opens up your child’s imagination and teaches them about who they are and where they’re from and how important they are in the world and what their roles are in the world.

You are a journalist by trade. When you are speaking and connecting with all sorts of people, telling stories- how does this help to forge deeper connections? In what ways does storytelling create opportunities?

Intuitively, part of that growing up in Central Australia and part of being surrounded by those giant ranges and the giant desert oaks and those blue skies was the storytelling that went along with it. When we were kids, if we went somewhere, whether we were hunting, or whether or not we were going to play in the rivers, every component of it would later be dissected by stories. You do what you are doing and you have your play and those types of things and then you sit down in the sand with the old people and you tell the story again in the sand. So you sit there and you draw the trees and in doing that, what you are doing is memorising the route that you took, so you are remembering every tree, you are remembering every hill, you are remembering who was sitting next to you, you are remembering what it smelt like, you are remembering what the colours were, you are remembering how you felt at that point in time. What I’ve come to understand in that is the beautiful gift in understanding how stories bring to life something long after it’s gone and certainly for me, particularly now that the old people are pretty much gone, I understand that when we bring to life those stories that were embedded many many years ago, you’re still with them and you’re still sharing and you’ll still have those highs and you can still share those learning lessons with your children even though they will never get the experience of living the way you lived because time has changed.

I think the other thing is, that peace when you sit around the campfire at the end of the night and you listen to your Uncles tell the most amazing stories and your Nanna’s tell the most amazing stories about the serpents in the sky, you realise that there is so much meaning in a story because it not only connects people to a point in time, it opens up the way they think and it opens up the way they think differently and the stories that I grew up with meant more than what you might first be thinking when you hear it.

“When we talk about stories relating to say the rainbow serpent which brings this incredible structural change with it, we are not only talking about weather patterns, we are talking about things in today’s world you would call transformation and we are also describing how you might feel during the process of  transformation, what you might look forward to once you get to the end of it and why you shouldn’t be afraid of it because while the landscape may never look the same again it will be refreshed and it will be renewed and it will be ready for a new journey and a new story.”

The pandemic sped up technological storytelling. We relied on it and were using it more. You have worked a lot in television. TV is something that can be a shared experience in a different way to being on your smartphone. If the family gathers around to watch a show, there is a different feeling watching something on TV together. What do you love about working in that medium?

I love broadcast news, always have done. It brings in a different skill set and in some ways, believe it or not, it’s even harder because you can have the most fantastic pictures in the world but if the story doesn’t fit the pictures, it doesn’t land. If the sound doesn’t immediately bring you into the landscape, you can’t connect with what’s happening. For example, if someone is walking on the sand and you can’t hear the sound of the feet as they walk through the sand, it’s not really happening, so you are not able to embed yourself into that level of story.

I have always loved television because it is that place where everyone sits around.

“My understanding of storytelling is that the storyteller, at any point in time, is the most powerful person in the world.”

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the stories that were told about us were very very rarely told by us and very very rarely framed in a way that showed the nuances or portrayed the strengths of our people. It showed us when we were in distress, it showed us when things were going wrong so I intuitively understood that in order to be able to change that story we needed to become the authors and we needed to be able to look at those pictures and interpret those pictures through our eyes, to hear the sounds through our ears and to be able to tell the story through our voice. I still love television and I still miss television but I have learnt to use other methodologies and storytelling as I have moved more into administration.

To people who may not be familiar with SNAICC, which stands for Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care- what is it all about? What’s the purpose, what’s the aim, what do you hope to achieve?

SNIACC is the National Body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Families. Our Vision is to ensure all children and families are safe and protected and that their stories and ambitions are ones set by us and not determined by other. I’m paraphrasing there, but is a variation of our vision.

We do a couple of things. We remove the structural barriers for the services that work for children and we create opportunities to bring the voice of our communities and our families and our children into unfriendly places like policy and we also ensure that we also work to change the way the stories of our children are framed.

The early years create so many opportunities. It is such a vital time in development. What do you enjoy about working in the early years space?

I absolutely love children, absolutely love them, always have done. For me, one of the things I enjoy- because a lot of what I do is very dry because it’s policy and it’s going into rooms that aren’t friendly, a lot of rooms I go into are distinctly unfriendly and a lot of the rooms I go into is with the sole purpose of having a really challenging and really hard conversation- in order to be able to do that, I do go back to what is it that we are working on and who is it that we’re working for. There isn’t a single day where I don’t bring out pictures of my own grandchildren who are one and three and look at them and resonate with the world they’re seeing right now and remind myself, this is why we are doing it.

I come from a really large family so it means I’m constantly in contact with young parents and young families or grandparents who might be looking after little grannies. It keeps me really rooted because I am constantly in contact, with, not only the sector and carrying their stories into rooms that are unfriendly, but having that opportunity to frame them from a really loving experience.

I think one of the stories that really got my through a tough time, we were really having a rough couple of weeks- I got to go home and my little granddaughter picks me up from the airport and she’s sitting in the back seat and I reach out and touch her hand and she said:
“You know what Nanna, I have a surprise for you.” And I said, “Do you?” and she said, “Do you know what we are going to do today” and I said, “No” and she said, “We are going to ride in a rocket ship and we are going to play in the mud.”

“At that moment in time I thought, oh my goodness, to be a child. To actually understand that when we see mud it’s a good thing and you should go and play in it and feel it and then your imagination should be so great that it is absolutely no challenge to understand that if you wanted to, you could fly in a rocket ship.”

One thing brought to the fore, coming off the back of the pandemic, are the things that were often thought of as incidental asides- such as running into people at the shops or meeting people at the library. How vital are these support networks, meeting people in-person?

Absolutely fundamental. My grandchildren were babies during the lockdowns and I used to often look at them and wonder how do they interpret what a smile means if they can’t see a smile. I also think, perhaps what it meant for children during that period of time, maybe they learnt how to use other senses in a way that we haven’t had to- but I do know, certainly as we were starting to lift, it was harder for my grandchildren and I’m sure anyone else’s children who lived through that period of time to actually go out in public and come into contact with other people. It has been wonderful watching children grow into those spaces, to play with other people and share the swims and laugh with other children, not just their parents. I think it did reinforce just how important play and contact is and certainly for people who couldn’t get to their families, how vital those structures are that enable us to be able to work with our friends and families to take a load off, to share your hopes and to share your fears with other people. I think we learnt a lot out of Covid. One is that we can survive anything. The second is never to take for granted how important it is to be able to connect to other people.

You are a keynote speaker at the Playgroup Victoria conference. This year’s theme is: Planting Today, Growing Tomorrow. At playgroup, we often talk about the village. It takes a village to raise a child. What do you think this village means to us now and for our future?

For Aboriginal people, for me as an Aboriginal person, that story is embedded in my own values and my own understanding of the world because our children don’t belong to us they belong to our families, they belong the our communities, not to the mother and father and that really is an acknowledgement that there are so many people able to help and love your children and help to nurture them and share their skills. Someone might be very good at singing, someone might be really good at sharing a story, someone might be really good at playing guitar- these things, if they are shared, all children can belong to them and all children can learn from them.

“For me planting the seeds is really making sure the earth is fertile enough and is getting everything it needs for our children to grow. You know what, this is who I am and I can be anything and I can do anything and I am loved by everyone.” 

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Discover more about SNAICC- National Voice for our Children

Article by Sinead Halliday