July 3: Happiness is sharing knowledge at Bennelong Point & the Sydney Opera House

It’s no secret that Bennelong Point is one of my favourite places to be; to meet friends, to gather for important reasons, and today, to speak at the NSW Department of Education, Aboriginal Education Conference at the Sydney Opera House.

Bennelong Point is the original gathering place of the 29 Aboriginal clans of Sydney. It’s where the first recorded corroboree was held back in 1790. And it’s no a place where people from around to world meet to celebrate culture in a different format – dance, theatre, opera, food, and so on.

I was thrilled when I was first invited to deliver the keynote address to educators as part of the conference and to celebrate NAIDOC Week. This year’s theme: #BecauseOfHerWeCan was the perfect platform to talk about the women writers who pioneered the way, who opened the doors of publishing and the minds of Australian readers and made it possible for me to have a voice today. Writers like Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Ruby Langford Ginibi who broke new ground in the 1960s and 1980s.

Today, I was happy to be able to share my journey with an audience keen to learn ways of embedding Indigenous perspectives in the classroom using literature written by Aboriginal women.

They say it’s not work if you love what you do. And while I had to prepare the keynote and get up at 5am to get a flight to Sydney, to present, it didn’t feel like work at all. Today I loved my job and the opportunity to present at one of the world’s most iconic venues.