WELCOME TO COUNTRY From The Inner-Strength Check Team.
Content Warning
Formal Acknowledgement of Country & Thanks/ Team Nation Lands.
Gaagal (Ocean) + Artist Feature: Tulli Stevens.
Boambee, Gaagal and Me.
First Nations/ATSI Resources, per-team-member Nation.
Epilogue.
Content Warning:
The contents of this post at times will discuss political and socioeconomic disadvantage as it relates to our First Nations peoples in Australia, and also has a thematic throughput where systemic overt/covert oppression, discrimination and racism are alluded to, defined or discussed. Please take mindful care of this upfront.
Additionally, in accessing some of the many resources available later, images and photos of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders may be present. The organisations in question have taken care to flag this, but I’d also just like to reiterate that.
‘Bundjil’ by First Nations Artist Kinya Lerrk, located in Naarm on Wurundjeri Lands. Link to available print/artist portfolio.
Welcome To Country, From The Stolen and Sovereign Lands of Each ISC Team Member:
‘Gaagal’ (Ocean) from Mid North-Coast NSW-based Gumbaynggirr artist Tulli Stevens, featured below.
Informal personal statement from me, Brady Irwin, first, then please see my formal statement italicised further below.
Dedicated to: Community members, Elders past/present/emerging.
This personal statement was inspired a personal experience. Of all things, a First Nation American’s inspiring words and performance during a thrash metal gig on Saturday 20th June! Necessary shoutout to the loud and proud Chuck Billy of Testament - your performance kicked this post into gear, so respects paid. Don’t mess with First Nations; I wouldn’t if you’ve seen Chuck in the flesh…
Personal Statement - Brady Irwin
We acknowledge an often dark and frankly oppressive past and present for our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations, and strongly, firmly reject the notion that Australia is Commonwealth-owned property. It is not. No stuffy European monarch or suited-up member of Australian Parliament can or ever will convince me otherwise. EVER. I’ll go to my grave with this clasped in both hands. And Australians writ large should too, in my personal opinion.
These are sovereign lands, and until the ATSI/First Nations community formally cede legal title to such a ‘claim’ (which is all it is sorry, a claim, pure conjecture with a few legislative bits of dressing), we will always firmly treat them as such. Irrespective of whatever governmental institutions lay their own claim via bricks-and-mortar, legislation, control, or any other such means.
I might be “renting a property in Greater Geelong under the Residential Tenancy Act”, but neither me, this physical building, my landlord, the real estate agent, Geelong City Council or anyone else holds true, actual ownership to the land on which this house sits. Mortgages, lease agreements, or not. And they never, ever will, as they are not the true owners. Those are the Wadawarrung people, and I thank them for my safety and personal security in a structure built upon land they never asked to be given up and cleared as residential space.
Heck. This might ruffle a few bogan’s nationalist feathers but as far as I am concerned, truly - I’m going to hit a nerve but don’t care - Australia exists as a ‘nation’ in concept only. The only true, actual, explicitly-geographic literal Nations on which we reside here, are First Nations. Until the Commonwealth Government, the United Kingdom and the like formally acknowledge this - I don’t care what the Federal or State Governments build, proclaim or legislate - they are not the sovereign governing entities of this land. We merely treat them as such. It’s a literal paper-tiger reinforced by our culture’s own system of economic meritocracy and currency exchange. It isn’t, in fact, after all that, despite four physical walls and floors around me, real. Not in a titular sense.
Therefore, in as hopefully the least-clunky/end of some white guy in DHHS’ boilerplate email energy I can muster, here is my Welcome to Country on behalf of myself and the ISC Team:
WELCOME TO COUNTRY
“Inner-Strength Check is a media entity owned and operated by myself, Brady Irwin, upon the sovereign lands of the Wadawarrung (Wathaurong) peoples of the Kulin Nation, a consolidated Indigenous Australian alliance of five proud Nation-States across Metropolitan Melbourne, The Greater Geelong Region and Regional South/South-West Victoria.
In addition, the lands upon which our team resides as of today are as such:
The Wurundjeri lands of the Kulin Nation (Dean Underhill, Elodie Orlando, Malachi Montisanti and Hamza Siddiqi) and the Latjilatji (Latji Latji) (Spiro). In addition, whilst we have not formally introduced our latest staff member, respects must be paid to the lands upon which he resides (Gumbaynngirr) in advance.
I was born and raised on the beautiful lands of the Gumbaynngirr peoples of Boambee (itself a traditional game-driving call-cry of Traditional Country Stewards), Sawtell and Coffs Harbour. I have also resided on the lands of the Kabi Kabi /Gubbi-Gubbi(Sunshine Coast) Turrbal & Jagera/Yaggera-Urupal (Brisbane - Metropolitan/Greater), Wallumedegal (Inner-West Sydney) Wurundjeri (Metropolitan Melbourne) Nations. Sovereign Nations, and stolen-land never formally ceded all.
We pay our respects to the Traditional Custodians and Stewards of each of these proud First Nations, acknowledging that sovereignty was never ceded and thus abjectly reject the notions of Terria Nullius, all ensuing property Commonwealth title ownership (save, at minimum, for the Native Title lands formally bestowed since). These lands will never be ownership of the Australian Federal Government or the Commonwealth in true legal form, in our opinion - they are sovereign First Nations/ATSI lands, stolen.
We pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging, and any other formally/informally identified community members, leaders, advocates and allies of such.
We acknowledge the formal restitution of Sorry Day, but live in earnest hope for greater and more thorough Reconciliation between our First Nations peoples and all Australians. We encourage all indirect, policy and direct-actions of all Australians towards this aim.
I am particularly presently inspired by the peoples of the Gumbaynggirr/Wadawawarrung Nations of my hometown and current residency to evoke this statement, and pay my own respects to the spiritual totems of my hometown and the Greater Geelong Region: Gaagal (Ocean), and Bundjil (Kareet Kareet).
Close The Gap. Pay The Rent. These Are First Nations Lands. Always Was, Always Will Be.
Respectfully,
Brady Irwin (Inner-Strength Check) & The ISC Team.
Side note: Boambee NSW, Conservation, and Jerrawa/Jerrawah:
The Wikipedia Page for Boambee, New South Wales. Just straight chilling out here bereft of one important piece of information - the etymological origins of the term as they factually originated. That is, the Gumbaynggirr peoples. Not ‘us’, us being local colonial ancestors.
Going a step further? Google ‘Boambee name origins’, several articles also come up which reference nicely and accurately where colonial Australians first ‘coined’ (no) the term. Specific persons, years and dates to boot.
You’ll find plenty of yarn straight-up on NACCHO/First Nations initiatives websites, but there’s a dearth of what’s one simple line/statement elsewhere, throughout websites and official media related to Boambee and indeed the greater Mid North Coast.
It’s not hard, guys.
Since it was drummed into my during my awkward-little-kid tenure at Boambee Primary School in Grades 3 - 6 from 1998 to 2001, here’s what we learnt and absorbed in one clean, quick piece of information you could easily copy and paste onto such a website (obviously, if you do, by the heavy-metal Gods please reference many ATSI sources out there, there’s heaps):
‘Boambee!’ is a traditional clarion-call verbal cry elicited by our Custodians whilst driving game on Country. It’s typically performed in rapid, repeated succession (“Boambee-Boambee”) to verbally drive game through Country.
That’s in my own words but c’mon. Might’ve been core-memory-unlocked energy, but if I can draw on an eight-year-old undiagnosed autistic/ADHD child’s past to provide that information, then we can stick it on a few more public-facing sites around the joint/Country.
I recall as said child, having a moment when hearing this. Little autistic Brady, soaking up facts and forgetting how to remember them at times (ADHD), remembered clearly in what’s a developmental-psychology din. Pre-Internet, pre fact-checking, pre social-media. Heck, we didn’t have a computer in the household until 2005.
Like I said before: 60,000 years of not needing European-influenced, resource-draining acrigulture, nor bricks-and-mortar to achieve a harmonious conservationist relationship with the land. No breaking artesian wells, fracking, land-clearing, importing thirsty animals that need a LOT of precious water and additional non-Native foodstock to grow, maintain, slaughter, utilise for resources, otherwise.
No earthly exploitation for capitalism, little to no habitat destruction of interference. Just human beings living in biological equality with the lands, mindfully ensuring they do not instigate many of the frankly environmentally-destructive ecological practices since colonial occupation.
From a dusty, far-out-of-date (point further reinforced!) textbook, and also ‘on Walkabout’ with an Elder who’s name (apologies, been a while) who’s name I cannot recall at present, I was able to draw the above memory of what “Boambee” is. The latter stuck with me and was more firmly entrenched in my memory than the written word, but that doesn’t mean we have to exclude important cultural information from our written word, as Westerners (Wikipedia).
Pretty easy to add that fact it in; I learnt it in my first week of school at BPS in 1998. If the under-funded New South Wales education system back in the technologically far-less-advanced 1990’s was able to manage that, maybe even just a footnote about this in a few more places. Such as oh, I don’t know - the biggest open-source human-knowledge project in history, Wikpedia?! Just a thought. Wikipedia editors, get on it! They’ll probably never see it, but I’ll reach out to the site myself methinks.
Money and delicious damper where the mouth is. (Side note - not one word of a lie, cooked witchetty-grub with a bit of bush honey (classic Boambee damper/tucker)? Looks like a science-fiction villain, legitimately tastes good!).
Just one of many, many small omissions which seem trite, but over time serve to perpetuate bigger problems.
Now, onto Jerrawa/Jerrawah. Another Gumbaynggirr term.
Maybe some kids’ Mum/Dad/teacher picks this up (by the way, strong content warning for the kids, this ain’t a family-friendly podcast, truthfully) and gives some kid props for Team Jerrawah, maybe they don’t.
It’s been decades since, but I’m also going to be cheeky for a moment and put the boot into my other Primary School Houses!
Hashtag #2452? Nah, bro. Got a better territorial unit to rouse the rabble against those Coffs Harbour louts who graffiti #2450 all over the water tower at Southies:
Go Team Jerrawah, Kids!
I’m a little bummed out that we didn’t cop the Gaagal blue of the other one, but I’m still iconically-yellow-coloured in our House where Boambee Primary School is concerned!
“Falling down a waterfall, landing on a cactus/We can beat anyone, even in our practice - Go, Jerrawah!”
Bonus points - we had the school uniform colour. So yeah, watch out, Jerrawa’s legit.
Scientific Nomenclature: Macropus giganteus (Eastern Grey Kangaroo), just one of many kangaroo species under which the term Jerrawa falls.
Pretty cute little guys, and plenty of them hopping about headlands from Bundagen up to Woolgoolga and beyond. Do us a favour though, don’t disturb the little guys. Treat ‘em with respect.
Bonus Content, Shamelessly Pilfered From Me Mum: The Yuggirr (Dolphin).
Image Credit: Mum! Taken whilst enjoying Gaagal on a crisp sunny Coffs day, 2023.
Reference Material: Coffs Coast - Indigenous Culture (a very good resource, I’ll add).
That hits right in the feelings. HARD. The good feelings. Nature. Yuggirr having a play and surfing together in Gaagal (the ocean). Feels so good to me it physically hurts. When I see this in real-life, it’s like a spiritual rod of lightning cracking down onto my otherwise athetistic, reductionist autism-head. Imagery like this lives rent-free in my head, and would often bubble to the surface and get me seriously down during the ten-year tenure I spent even-that’s-too-inland-for-this-Irwin Brisbane/Melbourne. In fact, it’s images like that this that inspired taking a millenial’s-forced-capitalism-reverse-Khmer-Rouge stint of urbanisation, probably a serious career kick in the guts too, and relocate closer to the beach.
Cute animals, these guys (especially the babies in the pod, oh my GOD) but tell you what - you get too close to these blokes out off Gallows, Southies or Sawty Island? Crew will happily show you what-for! (Core memory of peeling off a left-hander, getting slapped in my land-shark face on the lip by a passing dolphin. Freaked out, paddled into shore wondering if I just narrowly copped a Jaws enounter - dropped my Manta Ray bodyboard and hooted like a 15-year basketcase kookaburra when I realised I’d been accidentally/deliberately told to walk on home, boy).
‘nother core memory - nearly getting into a physical scrap out the back of Gallows as an at-the-time lid-rider/shark-biscuit (bodyboarder) with some nasal bogan on a stick/stand-up (surfboard). You want non First Nations cope-and-seethe ingroup-outgroup bias, banter and fun? Talk to a Coffs Harbour surfer and bodyboarder.
I hate team sports, but that caper was certainly proudly mine at the time. ‘2452! Coffs surfers [expletive] off! No tourists! Check out these [expletive]-riders (surfers!) etc’. Like pretty much any time I had a ‘boog on the Goldy, sometimes would get heated and lead to a scrap! Yeah, as a pimply, wiry conflict-avoidant teen already getting into enough biffs at Toormina High School
Side note - these populations are being devastated by local fisheries practices. Again, chalk one up to our Traditional Custodians for 60,000 years’ worth of being able to keep their own fisheries practices in check. See what I’m driving at?
Gaagal - Spiritual Totem of the Gumbaynggirr Peoples of my place-of-origin (Boambee/Sawtell, New South Wales):
My hometown locales of the Coffs Harbour region, where I grew up in the suburbs of Boambee, Toormina and Sawtell, all are celebrated by the Gumbaynggirr peoples around the totemic representation of spirit and ocean - Gaagal. See here for more information, care of Uncle Micko Jarrett, referenced within the article by the author as ‘gaggal’ (News Of The Area).
Quoting Uncle Micko directly, just some of the storytelling in his words about the Gumbaynggirr lore of Gaggal/Gaagal:
“Gaagal to Gumbaynggirr people brings the whole group together as one people.
“Because Gumbaynggirr people lived over 6000 square kilometres.
“Back in the day it was hard for them to walk all this distance.
“They were united by the fact that they all knew the Gaagal, the sea, was their totem.
They belonged to this thing, they did ceremony in this ocean.”
Author and interviewer Rachel McGregor-Allen has included an image of gaggal, via the otherwise titled Shelley Beach. I’m betting my cousin Sam got a life-lesson from some of the green-room pits here over his surfie-development; Gaggals knows I had some lessons paid on the bodyboard when I lived in Sapphire Beach 2010-2011:
Shelley Beach. A place where if you’re a punk adolescent who thinks they’ve mastered the ocean, will swiftly get a backside-whooping reminder about who’s boss if you’re not careful!
I’d like to take this moment, particularly as a man touting the importance of both promoting the arts themselves and their subsequent benefits and impacts on human society, so share and celebrate an artist who’s works are themed around the cool, calming, blue hues of Gaagal, but aren’t necessarily monochromic - local Mid North Coast Gumbaynggirr First Nations artist Tulli Stevens.
An artwork further up under the Welcome is derived from her website, of which you can view a stellar portfolio of works.
I’ve always loved the style of Indigenous artwork. It’s not focussed on oil-painting-styled portraits, but it’s as complex, skilful and detailed. It’s not self-aggrandising but rather focussed on spirit, nature and kinship. It’s not buildings, it’s not the weird mechs I used to draw as a kid that now make a recent autism-diagnosis AND a love of Battletech make sense. Ask Mum. She won’t know what the heck Battletech is, but I’ve got drawing books right behind me full of stompy mechs.
No, instead, First Nations art is a medium. It’s a medium through which literally the oldest cultural group of the entire planet, in human history, shares it’s history and development. Colonial oppression tried through heinous means, from Stolen/Forgotten generations, systemic oppression and sadly, not even quantifying our First Nations people as human beings, rather fauna (WHAT?! Source, it’s true). Any of that.
Folks like Tulli pierce the veil of intergenerational trauma and oppression and access something deeper, richer, more omnipresent, undefeatable and impermeable than any of that business. Something which is rich, comprehensive and cannot be taken from the collectivist spirit or cultural mediums of art.
If that isn’t the damndest-best proclamation of Inner-Strength Check’s central thesis? Truly, I don’t know what is. Power immeasurable, above and beyond heavy metal, tabletop gaming or most anything we’ll ever, ever post here.
Please see below for a link to the artists’ profile and social media.
It’s a celebration of Gaagal, which before I post some important direct-action resources, has itself inspired some meaningful words about my connection to the ocean i the epilogue. So thank you, Tulli. Words I’ve been wanting, meaning, itching to proclaim for years. I might post a lot of music stuff but sincerely - it is not as close to my mind and heart as the ocean is. Nothing can truly ever reach such literal or metaphorical depths and nothing in my life ever will.
So, thank you again Tulli - as our UK follower-contingent would say: lush! :)
Artist Website/Portfolio
Quoting Tulli’s ‘About’ section (I’d prefer you visited the site in first instance prior to socials, but hey, your choice as a reader):
“Tulli Stevens is a proud Aboriginal woman from Mullaway - Gumbaynggirr Country on the Mid North Coast of NSW. Her Bloodline is Boorooberongal clan of the Dharug Nation. Tullis roots are embedded in Gumbaynggirr Country, and she is recognised and embraced by local Elders and community as belonging to Gumbaynggirr land and mob.
Growing up on Gumbaynggirr Country, surrounded by both the beach and the bush, has been the main inspirations in her art. Tulli’s paintings tell her story, they are a reflection of family, community, and the complex, elemental beauty of patterns in nature. She uses art for meditation, a way to connect and explore within herself. ”
I wish I had a billboard for that but I don’t so a nice big Quote block on Squarespace will suffice, alack.
I often say “Support the Scene!”, but the scene includes First Nations creatives. Support them for a richer and less globally-torn Australian culture, and help promote what Australian culture truly is. That of our Custodians and Stewards as anything else.
RESOURCE-SHARING - FIRST NATIONS COMMUNITY INITIATIVES OF ISC LAND:
Now’s the time for me to include and incorporate resources for the public, mob, kin and Country alike.
As a pinko-leftie who vaguely subscribes to his own flavour of anarcho-syndicalist ??something?? (not going to pretend I’m the political theory flavour of autism, I don’t have time), I’m big on relevant, evidence-based, grassroots participatory action research and direct-action practice. Which us “social justice warriors” (BIG 2010’s online discourse cringe) would refer to as Praxis.
Do your own research on those terms that at your leisure, I’ve certainly written enough, and this isnt my political platform except to spit chips after these resources. A little bit. You’re on notice, Australia.
A firm word precursor - you want to support Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islanders in a real and meaningful sense? Don’t just click or reblog or reshare these or what-have-you. When I’ve got my own better time and energy for muster, I’ll be doing my own with the same, and I don’t feel the need to qualify that by posting about it. Just on my own, in my own time. So yeah, for now I’m a hypocrite so resource-sharing will need to do.
But if you want to awareness-raise, share, help ease the load - my strongest urgency is to consider NACCHO’s. Not just a tasty food of Mesoamerican First Nations, but a National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation.
Thoughts about the ironically bouerogoise nature of the Australian Association of Social Workers in current incarcantion aside, the AASW’s input into the Voices of the People Project (Dudgeon et al., 2024) was and is my profession’s proudest personal moment. And the best part about how that was conducted was, ironically, how little input the social-work establishment had outside of facilitating academic and institutional enshrinement. It was driven by the People, for the people. Not curative, but pretty damn metal if you ask this black-band-shirt-wearing Registered Member.
Power has been handed to the people in a way that none of my case-management roles or serving NFP/governmental orgs could ever hope to match in terms of cultural safety, efficacy or relevance. Doesn’t matter I’ve got a near-20-year regular rotation of Cultural Safety trainings and CPD under the belt.
Look, us social workers and helping professionals ALWAYS want to promote advocacy, inclusion and empowerment, sure. But I’d be frankly lying to you, were I to recommend a Commonwealth formal alternative ahead of any NACCHO or grassroots initiatives. Ones which, by the way are still under ‘regulation’, funding and professional scope. They’re not just loose market vendors but thoroughly-connected and appropriate services.
Support them. Any way you can. But, in earnest, support doesn’t even start in my mind with reposting to socials and patting ourselves on the back.
Not all of these are specifically NACCHO organisations. I strongly encourage you to hop on the NACCHO website linked above, Google etc, and find out your own. In my case, it’s the supremely-awesome team at Wathaurong (link below), who I have confidential and private social-work outcomes witnessed numerous times with my own eyes, as recently as 2022 to 2024. Rated, fiercely backed.
A clarion-call, briefly to current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. I’d love for the Federal Government to do a Pauline Hanson and ‘please explain’ why the grossly-underperforming results of most recent Close The Gap Reports aren’t being actioned more fiercely? More talked about and promoted, at the very least? I’ll never forget the meh-whatever news article or two I saw kinda-sorta limp-wristedly being like “oh yeah, by the way guys, the Closing the Gap Report 2015 states we’ve fundamentally failed to reach just about every aimed measure and outcome, so the problem’s effectively worse. In sports news…”
Beds are Burning, indeed.
Closing The Gap do fantastic work, but I can’t sit here and not say I don’t feel a sickening classical-conditioning association with the org due to the powers-that-be. Here’s their website and if we’re talking promotion on this podcast? Blast them across the Internet, give them your best hardcore-band-frontman shoutout, then get stuck in yourself.
The Australian Labor Party, LNP, Greens even and any of its' officials can say anything that they want - until we improve on the absolute hang-heads-together shame that is successive Close The Gap reports, it’s all hot air. For me, it accounts for as close to literally nothing as possible.
Do better, Anthony. Do better, Australia. Just because you reclassified human being as human beings in the 60’s and at least some of our pollies formally said “Sorry”, doesn’t mean we’re wildly, grossly, systemically, ethically, morally and personally culpable as Australians for this heinous ball-drop.
Want to actually ‘pay the rent’, yeah? Well, from my little position here on the Peninsula, my advocacy recommendation is to write to your local MP - local, State, Federal, and demand at the very least, a rationale, let alone a more urgent action-plan.
There’s 23 million Australians and growing. There’s enough of us to put a few hundreds suits in Canberra on notice.
WADAWARRUNG/WATHOUROUNG:
LAITJI-LAITJI
Mildura District Aboriginal Services
WURUNDJERI*
*- note, many of the below services are Melbourne-based, however also support First Nations persons Victoria-wide.
Props to these organisations; there are many more in Melbourne, but I’d like to specifically only include the ones I had direct, real-world social work experience with re: consumers. There’s many more, apropos paid to Victoria on that note. To quote the name of a music venue in Brunswick and to all staff - Stay Gold.
Victorian Aboriginal Health Service
Djirra Women’s Legal and Family Violence Service
Aborigines’ Advancement League
Victorian Aboriginal Child and Community Advancement
EPILOGUE. The Sea And The Spirit - A Caucasian Man’s Perspective:
I’m not a spiritual man. Truly, as much as my godparents might baulk at that fact, I aint. More a philosophical one (humanistic existentialism and Zen/Mahayana Buddhist principles being my closest analogue) and furthermore I ethnically am identified as Caucasian-originating.
The very last thing I want to do is wrest ATSI spirituality and claim for it my own.
But hot damn if the above artist hasn’t just inspired me to state my own piece on the closest thing to a spiritual relationship I own - that to the ocean, or Gaagal in my hometown.
First Nations cultures are some of the richest and most deeply spiritual cultures of the Australian continent. I’d argue the world too, but that’s both pre-emptive and likely incorrect - and I’m not here to points-score culture. Save that for many future scathing tirades against capitalism and global oppression which frankly, First Nations culture inspires me to write about on a day where my Gmail account is less flooded with other promotional material! Truth to power matters though, and I’ve lacked in here overall comparative to intent, time and energy.
Ergo, I would feel totally remiss not to acknowledge spiritual beliefs, which are thoroughly interwoven in the practices and daily lives of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.
An affirmation in these secular times, which I find both impressive, refreshing and proud vicariously to see. Certainly beats the vacuous, money-driven, anxiety-provoking capitalist cultural environment in which all Australians find themselves immersed in, more broadly and increasingly anxiously. (I’m including the faithful in this - it’s hard out there maintaining a grasp on culture in the throes of globalisation, Americanisation and other factors in everyday national life and discourse).
I also live where I live by choice, because I am forever compelled and called back to the closest thing to a God or spiritual entity that exists within my life, alongside music - the Ocean, which is identified in the Gumbaynggirr lands back in my hometown of Coffs Harbour as Gaagal, ocean. Thank you to Gumbaynggirr’s proud and devoted community for respecting and continued care of our coastal environments, it’s my hope other Australians can honour and validate this stewardship.
Brief aside - in drawing up my choices of where to study and what to study? I snubbed every offer from the capital cities.
Two things inspired me initially to have a crack at Business/Psychology (Human Resource Management; an ethical conflict of an undergraduate double-major I had fully lost by second semester of first-year uni, 2008, TBH):
a) The help I got from various union reps, and advice from a union delegate that if I truly wanted to work in industrial relations, knowing your enemy helps, so I’d go for HR rather than marketing; and
b) How far can I get the hell out of Coffs Harbour northwards but still be able to surf?!
The University of the Sunshine Coast offered such an opportunity, and thus I took that admission without knowing the half of it about the place. She’ll be right mate - I’ll be able to spend time amonst Gaagal whilst I study.
I later epiphanied my way out of financial prospects and into a LOT of distress, nixed the Business degree altogether and battled like mad through Undergraduate Psychology, Honours in Psychology (a deeply, deeply traumatising tale I won’t tell on ISC, but rather a psychologist honestly - NO shoutouts to ACU from this black duck, long tale) and later, a Master of Social Work.
The latter two degrees saw me a little older, a lot more human-services-experienced via support work et al, but constantly, chronically woeful in not having the same experience as USC. The beach made the entire difference. Days I still look on with some melancholy (I was VERY unwell, mentally, at the end of undergrad) but some of my fondest.
I then battled aforementioned cognitive-dissonance, urbanised employment opportunities and the like until I couldn’t take it anymore. And thus, here I am recently unemployed, broke, having another go of small business entrepeneurship and stressed out - but content. Content because I’m in sane driving distance of Gaagal, of the ocean. I’ll take a career-L for that, for sure.
Every time I surf, it’s the one phenomenological moment (every time) outside of the sheer quasi-spiritual reverence with which I hold music and concerts, where I feel an ephemeral but personal and real connection to the closest analogue in my life to a ‘spirit’ or greater force unrestrained by my own dogged insistence on empiricism and scientific fact.
Shoutout to my mother for raising me with a firm onus on the conservationist, emotional, psychological, spiritual and collectivist environmental/conservationist importance of Gumbaynnggirr oceans, estuaries, bushland, waterways and coastal environments. She’s a hippie and thus, the apple never falls far from the tree. This love of ecological conservation is a genetic and social experience which extends fiercely and proudly through my extended family; many of my cousins and other relatives have made similar lifestyle decisions. I won’t speak on their behalf, but our Caucasian version of a familial mob, tribe, family unit, call it what you will, is inexorable inseparable from our oceanic context.
Mona Irwin, may the Roman Catholic both rest her blessed soul (and erm, maybe also not show her some of the content on here, she’d find it blasphemous apostasy and downright heretical!), is a prime example. A woman who elected to move from Grafton and the Clarence River, a region my own family lays direct ownership of having settled and formed in times past, to the land of Yamba. From there, her love of the maritime permeated and filtered down through the generations, and it was that leadership that sees many of us Irwins, Torrens, McBrides and the like firmly and resolutely planted on the Australian coastline.
Not even financial risk associated with removing myself from the capitalist allure and career-capital associated with, well, basically having to, move to Brisbane and remain in Melbourne. Until I psychologically could not take the cognitive dissonance a minute longer, and relocated back to be closer with the ocean.
I guess this is all a neurodivergent person (me, I’m not armchair-diagnosing family)’s values-based, just-world-hypothesis, low tolerance for values-clash/cognitive dissonance playing out. But sincerely, wherever I end up in life, I can’t and won’t be too far from the ocean, or at least easy enough access to it. I’d shrivel and die in the Central Asian steppes unless I could book at least few-monthly/routine flights to fling myself into the sea, any Sea.
May Gaagal keep me level(ish, haha), balanced and whole.
Thank You,
Brady.