ATLANTIC INSTITUTE
CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE PODCAST SERIES

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PODCAST 01 | HAROLD LUDWICK

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

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H Ludwick I threw my first punch at school at Year 4.  I was only about eight or nine.  I’d knocked this fella’s tooth out, because he said to me, “When you fall in mud, you’re supposed to wash it off,” because I was black. … That’s the way I articulated myself back then, throwing punches.  That happened all my life until 40… But now I do it through discussions or being more articulate when it comes to any form of racism or taunts or things like that.

F Sweeney: Harold Ludwick, an Aboriginal man speaking about how his response to provocation has changed over the years as he has become gradually more confident in himself. An Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity, Harold is now an advocate for Indigenous issues in Australia.

Welcome to CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE with clinical psychologist and neuroscientist Professor Ian Robertson from the Global Brain Health Institute in Dublin, and me, Fionnuala Sweeney.  Ian is the author of HOW CONFIDENCE WORKS: THE NEW SCIENCE OF SELF-BELIEF.  In this series, we speak to Fellows from the Global Atlantic community about the role of confidence (or lack of it) in their lives, both growing up, and in their work today as Atlantic Fellows advancing fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.
Now, back to Harold:       

H Ludwick: I’m a Guugu Yimithirr person, so I’ve learnt my language, the indigenous language.  Being born in ‘69 wasn’t far from when the 1967 referendum took place in Australia for the Aboriginal people to be recognised as part of Australia and the right to vote.  Before that, there was no equity when it came to jobs or even housing, and quite often we’d be subject to racism.  

It was hard to mix in with the non-indigenous people, although I had some really, really great friends that were non-indigenous.  They understood.  I think they came from a family that cared for each other as human beings, regardless of colour. But there was a majority of them that always wanted to make you aware that you were black.

Being a family that, I wouldn’t say poor, but we didn’t have money to throw around, we had clothes that were either second-hand, or out-of-date and the kids at school would laugh and that.  You just didn’t belong, and not being able to articulate yourself at that age ingrained in me that, “OK, if this has got to be life, I don’t want to be part of the schooling.  I didn’t want to go to school.”

F Sweeney: Those kind of experiences you’re talking about – not fitting in, not belonging – it’s very hard to forget those as you grow up.  So, if school didn’t mean much to you, what did mean something to you as you began to fight your way through life?

H Ludwick: Being in the bush, working with animals like horses, and chasing cattle.  I became even worse.  I’d break into the cars, I was stealing cars.  I got my first taste of alcohol at 13 because I was trying to grow up quick because I didn’t want to be in school.  I didn’t want to do this or that where I’d be subjected to racism or taunts from children because of my status in society itself.  When I grew up, the garbage man was a black man.  The people that held shovels was a black man.  There was no black man in the position of status anywhere in the town I grew up in, but they loved us playing football.  We were one of them then, but other than that, we’re nothing.  We’re just another black person.

When you pass them on the street, they’d look at your feet first because we’re supposed to fit that stereotype of a black person – barefoot, drunk, penniless, as well as dirty.  I can only date my family back to my great grandmother because the rest of them were massacred.  And yet I have non-indigenous people saying, “My family has been here for over seven generations.” They’re so proud of it, and they should be.  But they never think about us, how we suffered in this country.  It’s still the same today.  It’s just another form of racism and slavery.  You feel the tension.

I Robertson: Harold, to have people thinking of you like that, to know that there are these racist ideas and perceptions in other people’s minds.  What a terrible weight that is to bear and how difficult it is not to internalise them, to wear them yourselves.  I’m guessing, to avoid having to put on that uniform, that terrible uniform of other people’s perceptions of you, one response to that is rebelling and hitting out and refusing to conform., that that’s the only alternative to kind of accepting other people’s images of you.  

H Ludwick: That’s right.  I just played into the stereotype of what they thought of us – angry black man, angry person all the time.  And the sad thing about it is that we never had someone of intellect from our own family to speak these problems through and how to deal with it.  

We’ve been handicapped since the tall ships hit this continent.  I think we just didn’t have the strength in our community or our people to actually sit down and say, “OK, you’re gonna face this.  This is life.  People are going to start mimicking you because you’re a black man, or something about your colour.  Or you stink or you’re a bat-eating mob of people.”  And no-one was there to tell us, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.”  Because we’ve survived here for 40,000 years plus.  We didn’t rape this country, we did not dig up the soil and cause erosion and sediment runoff that’s now killing the reef or things.  We didn’t do that.  But yet, you still hate us for some reason.  We didn’t have anyone to tell us how to react on an intellectual basis, I guess.  And that’s why it was always the fisticuffs all the time.

I Robertson: Were you saying that even being able to name this, to be able to talk about it, to intellectually discuss what was going on, rather than being immersed in it, that that gave you a feeling of being able to have some control or a little bit empowered?

H Ludwick: That’s right.  It’s the insight to say, “Yeah, I am black, and my family have been here for 40,000 years plus.  How long have your family been here?”  Because they don’t understand the history of Australia themselves.  And they believe that they’re the dominant species, not considering that we existed here before Captain Cook came around the corner.  Even today, children in school don’t learn that.  And they never learn that the places that Captain Cook named like Mount Dromedary and all that, Endeavour River, had their own name long before Captain Cook renamed them.

Non-indigenous children have not been taught the history and that makes it a lot easier for them to make remarks that really hurt our feelings.  And our children as well have not understood how we are special to this country.  I mean, when we talk about Australia, you hear the didgeridoo blowing and the black man with the spear with one leg standing up, resting on the spear, and a fire.  But when you come to Australia, you don’t see that.  What you see is the domination of everything else but the indigenous.

So, I’m not saying for them to go out and flaunt their blackness and say, “Ah, I’m better than you,” but say, “I’m equally as good as you and I’m going to make a point of that by entering into a debate or working towards a position that’s of high status.”  Because it’s hard to have any confidence at all when you can’t even label your feelings, you can’t label what they’re doing to you.  

When I started with the Institute, I was part of a programme – Neuropower - with Shelley Evans from the Cape York Institute for the Cape York partnerships.  It’s like profiling in a way: understanding them and understanding your position and how you respond. She taught us we don’t really understand what we feel or what we say or how we hear things until you can put a label on it.  And she taught us how to label things.  

I Robertson: What you’re saying here is so profoundly important.  It sounds to me that you feel confident now, for instance, in debate, in being able to speak the case for your people in a way that you didn’t before.  You felt confident in terms of using your fists and in terms of your ability to rebel, but you didn’t feel confident in domains where you could interact in different ways with people.

H Ludwick: That’s right.  I wasn’t feeling ashamed when I used my fists, but there was no good outcomes.  We didn’t make any ground at all.  There was no discussion, it was a fight.  But now I do it through discussions or being more articulate when it comes to any form of racism or taunts or things like that.  And I don’t feel ashamed.  I didn’t feel ashamed when I threw a fist, but there was no outcomes on behalf of the one making the taunts or myself.  But now there are outcomes, because I can give then a bit of perspective from my point of view.

I Robertson: I’m indebted to you for talking from your own experience and your own heart, where I’m just someone that comes in from a research perspective with no experience of anything like you’ve had.  There’s two things you said that kind of match with what I know about the research in confidence, and which I think could be very, very useful for other people who are struggling with similar kind of burdens that you had to struggle with.

The first of these is the power of abstract thinking and the power of abstract language to actually make you feel empowered, and therefore confident.  You’ve said about being able to name something through your work in the Institute.  To be able to name it gives you a perspective and a sense of control, and therefore empowerment and therefore confidence.  

The second thing that’s of huge importance for other people who are struggling to find confidence in the face of such incredible adversity, is the affirming of values.  I was just so struck by you saying how affirming the values of your people, the values of looking after the land, the values that are now supremely important for the world.  Here you are, part of a people who has been cherishing and living these values for 40,000 years, as you say.  And the evidence is that if you get people to identify their values and affirm them to themselves – that’s called self-affirmation – it’s a major step towards becoming more confident because it gives you this base to allow you to avoid the shame, the negative stereotypes that other people try and impose on you.  

H Ludwick: I’ll give you a scenario.  Last year up in Cooktown, I walked into the RSL on Australia Day.  A good friend of mine – he’s a councillor and we call him ‘The Wog - he’s an Italian guy, a good bloke.  But he told everyone around the bar, “Oh, here comes Harold.  I’m going to have a go at him.”  So, I walk in.  He’s standing up there with a big Australian hat on, an Australian flag tied around his neck.  And when I walk in, he says, “Couldn’t you dress more Australian?”  I reckon, “Ha, ha, let me tell you this, my friend.  In 1901, they introduced the Immigration Act to keep you out of this country.  And they lock your people up down south in New South Wales as refugees in camps and things like that, and the White Australia Policy came out of that Immigration Act.  So, what are you talking about?”

And his face dropped because he didn’t know the history himself, and he says, “My father was here.”  Well, there you go.  And while I walked away, he says, “But I ate bat before!”  Everyone around the bar was killing themselves laughing because I’d just stopped him in his tracks.

I Robertson: I bet you felt amazing after doing that!  

H Ludwick: Well, I got the respect, not only from him, but a lot of those people that heard that exchange.  The power is knowledge and knowledge can be used in a way that’s educational, even though it could be something that’s a hot debate or a difference of opinion.  It educates someone that never thought about that perspective.  And this is what he came up against in saying that I can’t dress more Australian, because he knew I was black.  But no, I turned it around on him as being the Italian fella whose people had refugee status and were locked up in Australia.

This is the sort of thing that I tell my children now, to learn a lot of the history as well, because if you don’t know history, you don’t know how to come back and enter into a good debate.  Or don’t enter a debate if you don’t know the history.

I Robertson: You’ve been through some really tough times.  As you said earlier, it was quite late in life you came to this realisation that knowledge is power, that knowledge leads to confidence, that being able to name things in these sophisticated ways that you are is incredibly inspiring, and also the discovering of your values.  But with your people, say the young people, the young lads like you were, who are now 13 or 12, what you’ve discovered, does it resonate with them or is it a hard job for you to pass on your learnings to them?

H Ludwick: I see a lot of my youth in the youth of today.  They’re rebellious.  When they’re swearing, “Ah you white so and so,” or “Them white so and so,” I tell them not all white people are bad.  This is what they stereotype us with.  They think all black people are the same.  Not all black people are the same and not all white people are the same.  There’s really good friends I have who are non-indigenous and Italian and other nationalities, but they don’t see that because they lack what I lacked as a child – someone to sit down and discuss with them their fears of being called a ‘black bastard’ or something like that.  Because you can turn that around on them in a good way without throwing a punch.  

So, when I see this happening in the children today in my community of Hopevale, Aboriginal community, I feel very sad for the future because I think most of these children are going to end up abusing themselves with alcohol, just to mask the pain of being ridiculed.  Masking the pain with drugs.  They mask everything without confronting the taunts or the racist remarks and so on.  Even the children I teach cultural dancing with, I almost get so emotional, I want to cry.  Because these young girls and boys that are carrying on the culture – I’m teaching them their dances – one day, they’re going to grow up.  And I’d hate to see them being in domestic violence and things like that because no one’s there to take them by the hand and tell them, “Look, anger doesn’t get you anywhere.  Anger does not educate that person that’s making those remarks.  I know you want to throttle them, but you’re not educating them.  Educate them.  Don’t throw a punch.”

I Robertson: It was Maya Angelou who said that anger is a fire that burns the vessel clean, but bitterness is an acid that corrodes the vessel.  But Mark Twain says that anger is something that does more damage to the container than it does to the people outside the container, that it corrodes you inside, it’s a poison.  It seems to be the case that anger is a very powerful tool, but only if you have a specific target, a specific person or group of people to whom you direct the anger.  And also, a specific request or demand of these people to do something different - either to stop doing something or to do something.

When it’s expressed that way, it is actually empowering and confidence-building.  But when it’s a general resentment or a general anger, it actually causes internal pain and gets mixed up with anxiety and becomes part of a whole negative emotional state that has to be treated with alcohol or drugs or violence.  That’s the academic research perspective on anger.  Does that resonate at all with you?

H Ludwick: Ah, definitely, definitely.  I was that vessel that was burning, the bitterness was the acid.  I felt good, but I was not doing any good for myself and I still wasn’t educating these people.  Even though I felt good that moment when I threw that punch, that bitterness came back.  That anger came back straightaway for all these racist people and people making remarks and things like that.  But now I sort of laugh in the face of people now when they make these remarks because I can cut them down.  But I’m not hurting them, I’m educating them.  

I work in a museum; I teach non-indigenous people of their own history of Cook coming here.  They don’t know nothing about it.  And they say to me, “You know what?  That was beautiful.  We never heard anything about this when we grew up.”  Well, understand that your great grandchildren or your grandchildren today are still not learning this.  These are elderly people.  So, I’m telling the stories of perspectives.

And I find that educating people just builds so much confidence in myself now.  The confidence that I lacked over 40 years.  And in these 13 years since then, I’ve spoken in Geneva, Rio de Janeiro.  I’ve been to Burma.  I spoke in Hawaii.  And I’m thinking to myself, ‘Well, what would have happened if I would have listened at school?’  And people say to me, “No, don’t think about that.  It’s those life skills that now make you important now.  You’re not talking from theory.  You’re talking from lived experiences.”

I Robertson: And what would you say, Harold, to the 13-year-old Harold who is suffering this real pain of feeling the low status and the burden of these perceptions and the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness, and feeling bad inside and angry?  What would you say to the young Harold about what to do in order to harness that anger, so that it burns the pain clean, rather than corroding you inside?  

H Ludwick: Well, I’d ask him, “Who are you?  Tell me who you are,” and that young Harold would say, “I’m Harold Ludwick.”  “But that’s not who you are.  Who are you as a person?  What’s your foundation?  What makes you special?”  And if he doesn’t know, then I’d say, “Look around you.  Look at what’s happening with the environment.  Look what’s happening with your country, your species of animals that your people relied on.  Take away from what you see today what’s damaging the world and your country and say, ‘Well, hold on.  I wasn’t part of that.  We looked after that country.  We looked after those animals.  We didn’t have sediment runoff from hoofed animals and things like that.  But now it’s all happening.’  So, don’t get angry when they say, ‘You’re a black so and so.’   Say ‘Yes, I am.  And you know what?  I did not stuff this country up’.”

What I’d like to do is pull that Harold aside and say, “Listen, man, the more you clench your fists and clench your teeth, the less the words will come out.  The more the words come through and you speak to that person, the more you can speak to that person, the more he’ll understand or she’ll understand.  It takes time to get through to people, but if they take one little thing from that discussion from you, Harold, you’re educating them.  They’ve learnt something that no one else has learnt, and that’s because of you.”

I Robertson: What about the role of action?  The poet, Rumi, said that the road only appears with the first step.  Sometimes part of the antidote to feeling powerless and lacking confidence and all that pain is to take some specific action.  And often, a bit of targeted anger can help motivate you to do that.  

You’ve taken a number of steps in your amazing life, many of them to do with educating other people with learning about your history.  How important is it just taking action, taking a step forward, even though you may not know necessarily where that step’s going to arrive at, even if it’s doing something about the environment or doing something about the drugs problem or doing something about educating, have you found that that action has been important for you in building your confidence?

H Ludwick: Absolutely.  And I tell young people today, just join in a group or volunteering or things like that, because that one step in that direction will open up avenues to other things.  And before you know it, you’ve taken the second step and so on.  

I had a friend say to me, “Harold, do you remember, back in the ‘90s, you were bare-chested, walking up the road with a bar, blind drunk and you wanted to hit this person?”  And I said, “No, I can’t remember that.”  But this is the haze I lived through.  The haze of alcohol, the haze of drugs, the haze of anger.  It’s something I’m not proud of, but to for me to be here today, it’s a miracle really because a lot of people my age, even younger, in my community, have been dying.  Whether it be suicide-, whether it be alcohol-related, now they’re stuck on blood fusions and things like that, and it’s sad to see that now.  

My friends say, “You’re an inspiration that you came from where you were to where you are now!”  And to you I might be an inspiration.  But to myself, it’s just I wanted to be inquisitive.  I wanted to learn.  I wanted to know about things.  I’m always on Facebook.  If there’s a word comes up and I don’t know it, I’ll go to the dictionary, have a look into how you use it – “Oh, OK”.  So, I just want to learn now.  I just want to learn, learn, learn.  It’s not because I want to be smart.  It’s because I want to know.  My anger and my bitterness back in the younger days blocked that.  I didn’t want to know.  I didn’t want to learn because ‘I’m a black fella.  I’m going to knock your bloody teeth out if you start talking to me like that’.

I Robertson: We all have a theory about ourselves, particularly of how much who we are is fixed or to what extent who we are is up for change.  It strikes me that a lot of us get stuck because we feel that who we are is determined by our upbringing or our genes or our cultural background, whatever.  And that that is a bit of a prison, where we feel, ‘This is what I am, this is what I have to live with’ rather than, ‘I could be different from this’.  

The evidence from the research is that people who have what’s called a ‘change mindset’, who believe that change is possible – which we know to be the case, given how the brain works - once you have that kind of high level belief that change is possible, then it opens up all sorts of possibilities for taking action, for learning, that can change who you are, if you like.  Does that ring any bells for you?  And if so, what was it that took the young fist-fighting, alcohol-fuelled Harold, and gave you that sense that change was possible?

H Ludwick: Well, it was quite emotional really.  It was 2008 and I was sitting on the couch, stoned out of my head from the drugs.  My youngest son was just outside the door, playing with a stick and an empty can, a soft drink can.  And kids up the road had push bikes, they had little trucks.  They had all the toys in the world, and yet my child was playing with a stick and an empty can!  Why?  Because that Harold drank and smoked and shot up everything that came into the house.  Every money went on my drugs and alcohol.  I was thinking about myself and watching my child playing with the empty can and the stick was the emotional thing, I think, that kicked my ass.  My children were suffering because of me.  And from that day on, I just changed my life.

Then I had to deal with the people thinking, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ or saying that you can’t do it, or you haven’t got that education.  ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit too hard?’  I had to block all that out.  All my friends that thought, “Ah, no, not Harold, he can’t do that”.  I said, “Well, I’m going to give it a bloody good go though!”  I had hundreds of friends when I was on alcohol and drugs.  The day I gave it up, not one of them came to my house.  Only one person comes over now and again to say, “Hello, how are you?”  All my circle of friends were part of an alcohol and drug syndicate and I had to block out all the negative things that were being said.  I thought, ‘Well, I want to understand now because the less I understand, the more I’ll rebel’, and that was it.

I Robertson: The saboteurs around you, the people that don’t want you to change, the people that are threatened if you suddenly appear confident - and confidence, of course, is critical for making change happen - these people can sometimes, unconsciously, just because of their own pain, hold you back.  It seems to me that you’re describing exactly that with your friends, that they were trying to keep you without the confidence to learn, the confidence to grow, the confidence to change.  It was a huge threat to them and therefore they tried to sabotage it.  Is there any truth in that?

H Ludwick: I think they thought that he can’t do it because I can’t do it.  And tried to hold me back by saying, “Ah, no, no, no, that’s too difficult.  You can’t do it.”  Because they think that we’re one and the same person because we do everything the same and we think the same.  And if I go to do that, I’ll show that we’re not the same.  The saboteurs will think like that instead of understanding that anyone can do anything they want to do, if they want to really do it.  

I told my children that little story I read somewhere that there was a festival of all these little frogs.  They had to climb up this high pole, and the winner to reach the top would get all these wonderful gifts and that.  And no-one’s ever reached the top in their life.  So, when the time came with all these frogs ready to compete and climb this big pole, many of them started to stop and go back down.  But one little frog kept on going to the top and people were calling out down the bottom, “No, no, you can’t go any higher,” but he kept on going.  And what made that little frog special to reach the top?  He was deaf.  He did not listen to those people that are saying that you can’t make it.

I Robertson: What a brilliant story!  It can’t have been a straightforward path from that day you saw your little boy playing with his stick and can to where you are now.  There must have been setbacks.  There must have been times when you felt you had failed.  

H Ludwick: There was a lot of sacrifices.  My partner, she’s a strong lady, she doesn’t smoke or take drugs or drink, and she supported me, regardless of what other people thought.  And my mother is a rock.  She’s the cornerstone of the family and she shed many tears over the years for all of us kids – mainly me and my younger brother, because we were really, really rebellious people.  But she never gave up.  The mother’s love is so deep.  

Looking at her, a teacher for 30-odd years and now she’s 84, made me proud of who she was.  But I was ashamed of her coming to school because I was a little black fella; she was a big, black woman. And people might start talking about her because she was black.  My mother, my partner, even my siblings, they didn’t try to say, “Oh, that’s too difficult, Harold.”  They said, “Good on you, Harold.  Keep on going.  You can do it.”   Good, close friends that could help you out as well by spurring you on and saying, “Don’t be daunted about what comes.  If you can’t understand what’s being said, ask them to break it down a bit for you. It doesn’t mean you’re dumb if you say, ‘No, what do you mean by that?’ Because there’s another 10 people in that class that probably can’t understand it as well, but they’re frightened to admit that they can’t.”  

I’ve volunteered a lot of my time.  I started in Cape York, fighting against legislation against our people to take our rights away for our land and things like that, and I wasn’t getting paid.  I spent about a month and a half up in Cape York in [?], going to community, talking about what the legislation, how it’s going to take away the rights of what they do already.

Just doing things like that made me understand about politics, policies and so on.  I started getting to understand more of how this country is run, and the Lower and Upper House, the Cabinet, federal and the state policies and legislation.  That started moulding for me an understanding of where we sit as aboriginal people.  And when I used to go back home, a lot of my friends would ask me, “What about that legislation?” or “What about these acts that are coming out?”  I’d do a bit more research myself at home, and then I’d say, “Look, it’s going to be detrimental towards our people, our life, the way we do things now.”  Or I’d give them a bit of confidence in who they vote for, to understand that you could be part of supporting a party that’s going to destroy your way of life.  Or even, you might benefit from what a party has voted in.  

But you’ve got to look at the facts first.  Don’t just go off half-cocked and say, “Oh yeah, they’re supporting us black fellows.”  

I Robertson: You’re a confident, inspiring person, and that confidence has not come cheaply.  You’ve been through tough, tough times.  The research seems to suggest that coming through adversity, in spite of all the misery that you feel during the setbacks, that is a really strong source of confidence.  

The second thing is the sense of collective confidence, of collective action, of coming together with people.  What an empowering force for change that is!  Even though you weren’t being paid, here you were learning about the legislative system, you were campaigning.  There must have been times it felt futile.  But then you come together with other people and your confidence then spreads.  It’s contagious and there’s a sense of, ‘We are confident we can do this’.  Does any of that make sense to you?

H Ludwick: Yeah, yeah.  It also made me sad when I went to these communities, because the majority of the people that we speak to didn’t have access to real good education.  So, anyone up there could fly into the community wearing a suit, and bluff them all.  Go up there, show their face and promise them the world and offer them crumbs.  And people think that they’re the best thing since sliced bread, but they’re nothing but shysters.  

That made me sad, and it took a toll on me too.  I felt that I was carrying too much of a load.  I just feel overworked, I’m worn out, and I shouldn’t be.  Nowadays, I just want to disappear into the bush with my gold detector and not think about anything anymore.  I just want to melt away into the background now.  But something’s always telling me I’ve got unfinished work and that’s working with our children.  Because I don’t want them going through the troubles that I had and learn later in life that that’s not the way to do it.

If we want to get to a space where our children have confidence, they need to learn about themselves and then they’ll understand each other.  At the moment, the curriculum in Australia does not benefit the social behaviours that we are striving to reach.  Me and Dr Craig Cormick, we wrote a book, on alternative storytelling of Captain Cook coming to Australia.  Now we’re trying to write another book that can be adopted to the Australian curriculum where children learn about the perspectives of the indigenous and non-indigenous through the early years of exploration like Cook, that Endeavour River was named ‘Endeavour River’ by Cook, but its name is ‘Waalumbaal Birri’ and things like that.  

For some reason, we are hitting a brick wall with so many publishers frightened to take it on.  It as if there’s only one perspective of Australia, and that’s the one that the history says how it happened, not the perspective of an indigenous person.  So, it’s difficult, but I believe that’s what we need in this country, for young people from an early age to understand both sides of the story, or they grow up just knowing one side of the story, digging their heels in and becoming racist.  Both sides – the black fella will say it’s the white man, the white man will say it’s the back man.  So it’s all tit-for-tat, and we get nowhere.

I Robertson: Harold, it’s critical that you look after yourself in all of this, that you don’t allow yourself to burn out.  You’ve a duty to be kind and caring to yourself.  It’s such a big, big task you have ahead of you, such a huge set of goals you’re trying to achieve that your primary duty is to keep yourself well in order that you can then – when you feel better again – deliver on these critical things that you feel duty-bound to deliver on.

It’s so important that you always have this shadow goal of minding yourself, of caring for yourself, and taking a break from the grind of chipping away at these enormous forces you’re trying to combat.  

Harold, I really hope you manage to be the frog getting to the top of the pole.  I can’t tell you how much of a privilege it’s been, learning from you here and talking to you.  Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom.

F Sweeney: I just had a couple of questions before we wrap up if that’s OK?  What was it that attracted you to the Atlantic Fellows for Social Equity Fellowship?  

H Ludwick: Well, from what I understood and what I looked up, there was not many people from Aboriginal communities.  A few of them came probably from an Aboriginal community but grew up in the city and things like that.  I grew up in an Aboriginal community, I’m still in the Aboriginal community.  I speak my language.  I practise my dances.  I understand bits of other languages, and I sing some of their songs in their languages.  And I didn’t see many people from that domain, you know.  It was always people that already were settled and had the ways of a city person.  And I wanted to give my perspective as well.

Because a lot of times I talk to indigenous people in the city.  They have their perspective of things and I give them my perspective of things and we start to understand each other.  We have differences of opinion too because they’re trying to reconnect with their culture, they’re trying to learn their language again, and I’m a person that still practises and speaks it.  I just think that maybe I could help them in some small way and they could help me in some small way, because they have the nous of how to operate within a society like a city where I don’t.

F Sweeney: So, how has being an Atlantic Fellow informed the work that you do within your community, and has it given you a broader perspective, being part of the global community of Fellows?

H Ludwick: When I met with the guys down there – the ladies and the blokes – it was really good because we all seemed to have one specific objective.  And it comes back to educating and building a platform to have a voice.  I often say that we’ve never been invited to the table when decisions are made.  Decisions are made behind closed doors for us instead of asking us, “What do you think would work?”  More often than not, they get it wrong, and for so long we’ve suffered under this process of them thinking they’re knowing what’s best for us - whether it be in the education, the culture, society itself, social issues.  

We all have that same vision to pull our people out of the gutter, because we’re still in the gutter.  We’re still handicapped.  We still don’t have a voice.  But as I say, children are the way.

Music Thoughts in G by Cheyenne Mize.

F Sweeney: Indigenous activist Harold Ludwick, Atlantic Fellow for Social Equity, bringing us to the end of today’s CONVERSATION.

For more CONVERSATIONS ON CONFIDENCE, go to our website at www.atlanticfellows.org.  Here you can also learn more about the seven Atlantic Fellows programs empowering emerging leaders to advance fairer, healthier, more inclusive societies.  

I’m Fionnuala Sweeney. Thank you for listening.  I do hope you will join Ian and me for our next CONVERSATION with social justice advocate Lovelyn Nwadeyi, Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity.