SDN 2024 Aboriginal Men’s Workshop Falls Forest Retreat NSW
A workshop was held in late September involving Aboriginal men from the mid north coast and Canberra. The venue was the Falls Forest Retreat between Port Macquarie and Taree in a beautiful valley between South Brother and Middle Brother Mountains on Birrpai country.
Recognising that I am not an Indigenous man, the workshop needed a co-host. Independent Birrpai Goori man, John Heath agreed to take this role and help recruit men to the workshop. From my years as an anthropologist and recent efforts at repatriating my archives to Aboriginal people and communities, I was also able to invite men I knew.
Others present were activist, actor and language man Gary Williams, Vietnam veteran and hostels manager Harry Brandy, Shane Drumgold who until recently was the ACT DPP, and John Kelly, one of Ray ‘Shunk’ Kelly’s sons. I worked with Ray on the NSW Sites Survey from 1973-1987 and gave a presentation showing sites we recorded and the old people we worked with.
Other topics included culture & country, discovering Indigenous identity, forced adoptions, family trauma, problems with some claims to Aboriginality, Australian racism, and various achievements relating to each participant.
This was the first Aboriginal men’s workshop to be held under the SDN banner for 50 years. NED Foundation founder Ned Iceton held workshops with Aboriginal men after he arrived in Armidale in the early 1970s. There was a feeling that another workshop like this should be offered sometime soon.
Harry Creamer, SDN Coordinator
