“I always think of that connectedness. In my acknowledgements I always talk about being somewhere existing between the air, the sky, the waterways, the ground and the soil beneath us. The knowledge keepers are the elders and I pay my respects to them, from wherever we are.”
Deep Connectedness
Finding a Sense of Belonging
Whenever Deb Lowah Clark hears a kookaburra, she takes pause. While she has a connection to Murray Island, which is Mer Island in the Torres Straits, and Moa Island which is St Pauls Island, where her family and father were born and grew up, Deb ended up down south. For her, the kookaburra is something of her totem.
“They’re everywhere here near where I live, you’ll just hear them and I breathe, ‘ahhhh’. Everything is okay.”
“There is something about it that makes the busy me stop, wait, smile, breathe. It shifts something.”
“That connectedness, we all have a connectedness to where we live, we just don’t often look to see it. We often think totems are for all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I think maybe not. I think Country speaks to us and leads us and guides us.”
Deb said that when she says Country, she is talking about the way that the plants embrace us, the relationship we have with the world around us.
“I’ve been to a place where the trees are like grandmas arms and they bend over, their big grey arms, where some of the trees drop nettles. In the many years before colonisation, the mothers would put their babies down under the trees because the snakes would never go near them because the nettles would stop them, they wouldn’t be able to slide through all the nettles. There is an understanding of the world that you’re in, knowing what you can do.”
Deb knows how busy life gets and pulls us in different directions, but she believes that opportunities to connect with the natural world and one another, with ourselves and our histories, while a skill, is something available to us all if we seek out the moments.
A skill that young children harness with their innate sense of curiosity, their senses alive and alert to the multifaceted ecosystems that weave and form the world.
“There is that time where the kids are all there and you become obsolete, because they are all engaged in that space, that connectedness to each other, to the task they are doing, to the process of learning that’s really raw and natural. They did it when they were one, they are doing it when they’re five and we get out of the way.”
Powerful: “That still awareness as an educator or as a person working in those spaces.”
Deb said of her experience at school:
“I never wanted anyone to see me as a black fella when I was a kid- I didn’t know why but I felt shame. I wanted to white out my hands when I was in year seven. I felt so much shame growing up. I always remember that when I saw my face, I used to be so unknowing about what to do about it - and I don’t walk around with a mirror in front of me so it was only when someone else said something that I was reminded that I was not a white fella; that I was not a non-Indigenous person. There was something different about me and so I suppose when I think about how important my culture and history is, when I became an adult I had to draw back, go back to the basics, to seek and find, to understand why the 80’s was so tricky.”
“I always kind of ducked and wove around answering questions until I realised that was not a way to contribute and it was not authentically me.”
Deb has been an educator for 27 years. She saw an opportunity to make a difference. She became a teacher. While spending much time in the early years space, she has taught up into the older years and enjoys teaching all ages.
“There is something about children, and the pedagogy and philosophy if you will, about us as a community. When we really look at the world through the eyes of a child, whether they are young, really little in the early years kinder space, or whether it is up there in year twelve and you can see the inhibitions that grow and then how we become the adults that we are.”
“I think for me, teaching is kind of about facilitating someone to see themselves and to understand themselves and to be themselves, even if they have to swim through some malaises to get there.”
Deb now has a Koorie education role with the Department of Education and Training, in the central highlands area in Victoria’s south-west region. Wadawurrung Country.
Here Deb said that she can reach a bigger audience and is enjoying provoking change for the future in these spaces.
Deb talks about the way that schools, kindergartens and playgroups can tune into those around them, and create warm spaces. Things such as someone welcoming families at the door. A sign saying welcome. Literature and language that reflects who people are and where they have come from.
Deb uses an analogy to explain: If someone comes to her house, and she doesn’t speak to them, and they have to find their own way around, and they’re really not sure what or where to find things - and if they want a cup of tea, they have to find their own way around her kitchen and she tells them nothing. There isn’t a sense of belonging.
“It sounds like a really raw version of what I’m saying, but that sense of welcoming when someone looks at your kinder space and learning environment- what do they see, what are they looking at, what do they see.”
“Mostly, where do our families, from many different spaces, many different cultural backgrounds, what do they see when they walk in. Is there an acknowledgement on the wall, is there an entrance. At my school ‘Welcome’ is at the entrance when you walk in with lots of different languages from across the world with Wadawurrung welcome at the very front when you walk in the door. It immediately tells you something. There is an art piece in there.”
Deb talks about being culturally responsive. Looking at the policies in place. Looking at the terminology statement you have in place. An acknowledgement of Country. What things you include in letters and emails, such as the aboriginal flag.
“I know a school that is very culturally responsive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander histories and cultures but they also learn mandarin so there is a very distinct sense of that in certain parts of the school where people can be very clear that there is a real connection of that Chinese heritage through the language because language is identity.”
“I think culturally responsiveness is about what people can do. In a safe place, culturally for everyone, non-indigenous and indigenous, being able to ask questions is really important, but then the questions is who do you ask that to? I like to be one of those people that people can ask something of.”
We talk about reconciliation. About the reconciliation journey. Deb thinks a big part of that reconciling comes from creating a sense of belonging and acknowledgement.
“The importance of reconciliation is about helping the historical discourse of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; helping it become a positive, celebratory, respected and recognised place, so our kids see themselves in their environments with their culture visible. So they can feel it in the way that they’re valued and treated and then they find their feet and they can be aspiring to be whoever they want. This is because there is a place for them to belong and they can belong in any space and any space will accept them.”
For Deb, some of the most important conversations happen around the kitchen table. While sharing a coffee or a piece of cake. Perhaps while at playgroup.
“That’s the kindness place. The cuppa around the table is the kindness space. It’s real. It’s yarning. Nobody is in control in a yarning circle, nobody has the floor, nothing that anyone says is anything other than an addition to the conversation. We weave this way, we weave that way, sometimes when we do that is means that we lean into a question and we tease it out a little deeper.”
“This is where the real conversations happen, over a cup of coffee with someone you feel safe with, where you really get to tease out the problems. The thing is, you have to bring the topics up. Maybe sit down with an Aboriginal person and have a conversation, find out what it is that you understand, in light of what they understand. For me, the truth telling comes from our space and from historical perspectives that haven’t been shared.”
Deb talks about embedding, how this simply means that it becomes part of our everyday. In the way that we don’t stand with the tap on, especially during drought.
“I think when we lay the foundations of normalising a conversation about our First Peoples, about the wonderful things to do, what the culture brings, the ways of knowing and being that connects us to Country and helps us to deal with sustainability- why we don’t just throw rubbish away because where does that paper go? Where does that chip packet go and how does it end up suffocating a dolphin in the ocean thousands of miles away? It could.”
“There’s a real sense of understanding that Country is what sustains us, it is the author of our lives and we are deeply connected to it, even when we don’t know we are.”
“How much difference does it make when we teach our kids about living alongside Country, being at peace in the environment that they are in and ways that they cannot overuse the products that are in their lives but to use what they need. There are so many beautiful things that come from what we are talking about.”
Deb doesn’t think that playgroup aged children need to know everything all at once about First Nations histories, but they need to understand tradition, family, country, connection- like we know Christmas, Easter and family holiday traditions. It is shared. People feel part of their community, their village.
“How the village that we talk about at playgroup is filled with significant people who they relate to and they can go to who support them and help them to belong.”
Deb talks about books. Podcasts. Stories. Parents, carers and teachers tuning into these stories, building awareness and passing them on. It is here that it becomes part of life.
“We should always have something to take away, from anything that you do. What’s the one thing you’ll do differently tomorrow after having a conversation with someone, that you haven’t done yet or that you weren’t sure if you should or could, what’s the one thing you could do. Maybe it is just making sure that you say hi to every family member in the drop off, maybe it’s just that one thing and see how those relationships and that reciprocity changes, just because you say hi and you’ve made a conscious effort to do it. Or maybe it is how you will read a story everyday that provokes thought from a First Nations space. What is that one thing.”
“We all know a child who is excited to be in a space because they have got something that they are doing and they want to go back to it everyday and they want to build on it. We all know what that looks like if we are aware and we want that for everyone. Then suddenly they become this contributing amazing person who changes the world.”
Deb completed a Master of Educational Leadership with an Indigenous leadership component.
“I got to go on Country with a whole bunch of sisters and some balas (brothers) and to share in conversations that were about our culture, cultures and histories. I kind of- grew. I think that’s what happens to a lot of us as we grow up, from whatever culture we are from. We grow up wondering about ourselves, finding ourselves and then being ourselves- isn’t that what we want for our kinder kids?”
Deb finds her connections and still awareness in the middle of busyness sometimes. She stops.
“When I hear my daughter giggling and I’m in another room and I just hear her, or I watch her in a relationship with our dog, there is this moment of connectedness. Or, we’re walking through the bush and we have nothing left to say to each other and we will just stop and listen to the birds because we will wonder what they are saying. Or, my dog will be walking beside me and I will gesture because the magpie is there and I tell him all the time, without speaking, you touch that magpie, you will never be forgiven, that family of magpies will be after you for the rest of your life, so he doesn’t. He goes around them that whole time. It is that deep connectedness that we see in the movies that we wonder if we can ever have it- and we can- if we kind of stop.”
“For me, the sound of the ocean does the same thing.”
“That for me, that inner quietness, comes so randomly and so particularly on purpose when I choose it and I think in our western way of living and the way we live our lives, we need to find spaces.”
Space and time. Friendship and understanding. A coffee around the table and eyes and ears open to the land and country. And when you hear the kookaburra sing- take pause, smile, breathe, connect. The day is here, asking us to be part of it- the weather, the water, the sky and the land- a part of us, and we are part of it.
Article by Sinead Halliday