[Interview: Interviewer, & Ziggy Ramo]

Hey, look, thanks so much for doing this

The idea is to introduce you to the audience

But we wanna talk about your music

Pretty uncompromising lyrics

Yep

But there's a lot of—, what I really like about your music is that it's so direct

Yep

You cite your musical influences, or your influences, as Charlie Perkins and Gary Foley

And I think you know, that question of palatability

You know, with Hip-Hop you can certainly, you can pull no punches

You can say pretty much what you like, because the genre is known for that

I'm pretty much like a hip-hop nerd, I just—I live and breathe it

And, I live and breathе words, essentially

So, you know I'm very big into Shakеspeare

I'm very big into my literature

But, you know, uh—, like if you look at Shakespeare today

You know, he's kind of, kind of feared by students in high school

Because he just seems, you know, so beyond our level to kind of comprehend

As teenagers looking to, to study him

And the thing is, is like, when his works were, were being acted and delivered on stage

You know, like eighty per cent of the audience was illiterate

We look at it today, outside of the context, as being amazing

And obviously it's amazing work

But the correlation between, for example, Shakespeare and Hip-Hop is actually

You know, it's— it's very conjunction with each other

And um, I think Hip-Hop is essentially— it's just, it's just a Genesis of literature

You know, it's come from a long lineage

It's first kind of credited around the 1970s, but everything has a genesis

Nothing just comes from thin air, um

Certainly not, yeah

You know, and um

Around the 1970s, that was when there was a massive influx of Caribbean immigrants in America

And they had such a rich knowledge of education

And they had this massive library, and they had a caste system

Where different people had different roles in society, essentially

And they had one role, where it was essentially to memorise just hours and hours and hours upon of poetry

And it was to pass on knowledge around social issues

And, you've got some people that can recite a four-hour poem, it's phenomenal

You know, and that kind of experience came on the boats, and then

You know, you also look at like, for example, like Etta James, you know, she was scatting in the '30s, '40s

And that rhythm is a lot more aligned with what Hip-Hop is than I guess singing

So, yeah, there's a long genesis, and for me, that really intrigued me

I really wanted to kind of understand it

Because before, if I was into music, I was very much into literature

And very fascinated with words

I think I— I personally, I probably write a little provocatively

Just because in my day-to-day life, I probably don't have that freedom

Now tell us where you, where you're from, is the question I wanna ask you

Yeah, yeah, um, so

As one blakfella to another

Yeah, we've just recently re-discovered that we have Wik ancestry

Because Dad's grandmother, when she was taken, she was actually taken off country

For a while we thought it was kind of 'round Cape York area, but, um

Yeah, yeah, just recently, 'cause Mum and Dad had moved to Arakoon at the start of the year

Um, where Dad's principal and Mum's teaching up there

Yeah, they rediscovered that actually, yeah, we have Wik ancestry

And Dad's the first Wik principal, um, which is pretty amazing

On top of that, Mum and Dad's first teaching job out of Teachers' College was in North-East Arnhem Land

In Gapuwiyak, um, on Yolngu country, and they were adopted into the kinship

And, so, um, obviously when they had us kids, we were born into the kinship

So, we were also lucky enough to kind of have that connection on Yolngu country

And, you know, that is as much as my family as anyone

Regardless of blood or, you know, like, they've been such a big part of my life

And, I've been so lucky to have that connection to Aboriginality because, you know, add to that connection of culture

Yeah, um, and then pretty much just been moving around Australia

Doing big circles between Perth, the East Coast and Arnhem Land

I finished up school in Sydney, and I just, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do

So I returned back up to East Arnhem Land, and worked in communities with Public Health, with, uh, preventing chronic disease

And yeah, and then that's when I gotta be passionate about health

So, I ended up moving back to Perth then, and that's where I'm based at the moment

You also have ancestry from the Solomon Islands

Yeah, yeah, yeah

Uh, yeah, so Dad, um, yeah, he's Indigenous and Solomon Islander

And um, yeah, so his Solomon Islander ancestry brought across, um—

Which is crazy as well, like, it's crazy that this isn't more commonly known, but

Essentially, what it's called is blackbirding, and yeah, it's slavery

So, they were brought, um, across, uh, to Mackay in Queensland to work on the sugarcane fields, um

And that's—, that's— yeah, that's essentially like, heh, I guess that's what drives me

It's— it's pretty crazy to think, you know, like, the sugar industry is such a big industry in Australia

And, it's something we don't talk about, the fact that it's founded on slavery

You know, and a lot of Australians are thinking, you know, we kind of love to say, um, lest we forget

Especially with the ANZAC spirit, um, but then, kind of as soon as it comes to Indigenous Australia or anything, it's pretty quickly forgotten, um

It's amazing how few people know the story

Yeah

Of the, you know, indentured, well basically organised, industrial slavery that happened here

Yeah

Particularly in far North—, in North Queensland and northern New South Wales

Yeah, yeah, yeah

And, um, and Western Australia as well, um, north WA

And, um, uh, pretty rampant actually, it's actually—

And a lot of Aboriginal people have that heritage too, and I'm one of them

Yep, yeah, yeah, and that's like, that's just—

I'm one of them

Haha, it's crazy to think that, that like disconnect, you know, like that's just—

How can you have— how can that kind of be happening in, um

I always kind of like to refer in inverted commas, um, to us as the "Lucky Country"

Because it's just like, um, if we want to present ourselves—

Depends who you, depends who you ask

Exactly, exactly, and I like, at the end of the day

I love this country, because it's our ancestry, you know, and, um

It's just crazy to me to think that, you know, we have the oldest, oldest people in the whole world

And it's not something we're proud of as a country

It's, it's not something we, we don't really celebrate just how rich, um

The resources we have in, in terms of culture

That's just baffling to me, that's something I've never, ever understood

Because I honestly believe, and I would like to believe that, you know, good, logical, kind, compassionate, people

Once presented with the information, will kind of see the light

Because, you know, I don't see it as Indigenous and non-Indigenous issues

It's just kinda, are you a good human being issue

You know, like, how are you as an individual okay with how our government's suspending the Racial Discrimination Act to pass intervention

There was genocide in this country, there was slavery in this country

And, those, those events didn't just affect the past, but are continuing to affect today

In Western Australia, the incarcertation rate of Indigenous Australians is nine times the incarceration rate of black South Africans during the Apartheid

And how are we going to sit here, uh, in the "Lucky Country", um, and, and accept that

That is, that's disgusting, that is unacceptable to be happening in this country

It's just crazy to me, you know

Even, even the closure of communities, um, kind of throughout WA, um

What a lot of people don't kind of, um, understand about that is

You know, the funding for Indigenous communities, were, was a fed— federal funding

And then the federal government decided that it would then be state legislation

So, they gave all states a big lump sum of money to, to deal kind of with the financing and, and, of these communities

So, the WA government took that lump sum

And then said, "You know what, these communities aren't economically viable"

Totally disregarding the, the importance of being on country and the connection to culture

They didn't even have a plan, you know, so like if you're doing this for the children, what's the plan?

You know, like you're gonna close these communities and then where are those children gonna go?

There was no plan, there was no plan, zero community consultation

They were happy to spend eighty-three million dollars on that rollout

To invade our Indigenous people's rights

Yet, you know, that's seen as economically viable?

And it's just disgusting, it's really, it's just so unacceptable that this is happening in our country

Well, the intervention created a lot of jobs for non-Indigenous people in Indigenous communities

Yeah

And there's a huge, a huge costs in administration of the intervention, we know that it's largely been a failure

But it's—

Yeah

It remains in place

And that's the thing, it's just been a change of policy

And if you actually look at what's really happened, like, you know, in the 1990s

So, ten per cent of youth suicides between ages ten and twenty-four were Indigenous youths

And to make up ten per cent of, of all suicides when we only make up two per cent of the population is just outrageous

But that same statistic in 2010, we make up 80% of those youth suicides

And in correlation to the intervention, you know, after the implementation of that legislation

Suicide increased in the Northern Territory by five hundred per cent

You've got children, you know, ages five, recently suicide

You know, what child can not, you know, see a viable option in life, and they rather cognitively take their own life

Like that is just unacceptable, that is, eh—

It honestly, it makes me quite emotional just talking about it

To think that, you know, we have children in this country

That look at their experiences as an Indigenous Australian and what they have to, to live for

And they decide that it's not worth it

And that's just, that is just so, that is heartbreaking for me

And I think that's what a lot of Australians don't realise, that you know

We're kind of forced to get on the horse and ride ahead

And try and make this change, but sometimes it's just hard to, to not have time to mourn

Because like this stuff is atrocious, you know, obviously, what was happening in Kalgoorlie recently (Yeah)

Like, there was so much talk in the media and everything and

I just couldn't believe the fact that people weren't actually realising that there was a fourteen-year-old boy

Like he, he'd just died, and he was never going to go home to his family, he was never going to grow a day older

And, we were all trying to argue the semantics about what did or didn't happen

And it was just like, that's a fourteen-year-old boy, that's a real-life human being, that is no longer here

And, you know, we are so normalised and numb and conditioned to, to kind of, to not even budge an eyelid at that

And that's just, that's um, quite unsettling for me

I identify as Indigenous and non-Indigenous, you know, I cannot measure my blood in percentages

If I put my blood on a piece of paper, I don't think it's going to split up you know

Like my arm isn't white, and my head's black, you know, one, you know, it's— it's all one

And so I identify as Indigenous and non-Indigenous

And the only— so I've kind of been privileged of seeing, I guess, the whole picture, um

You know, I've been brought up very close with my mother's family

With my Scottish ancestry and, you know, I love, I love all of my family

And you know, my mother is non-Indigenous and I love– I love her to death, you know, um

It's not at all, um, an individual attack on an individual non-Indigenous person

It's just looking at the confines of what has happened and the structures of society, but um

If you, if you look at the like the first accounts of, um, Indigenous Australians in English literature

I think it was by William Dampier, who was a buccaneer, which is just kind of a nice word for pirate

And um, his, his kind of first encounters with Indigenous people that he wrote about in his book

Called 'A New Voyage Around The World' um, it's really interesting because, um

Because they've never really been addressed, it's been allowed to perpetrate, um, for two hundred years

And, and, those, um, those ideas of what is Indigenous and what is known to be Indigenous by non-Indigenous Australians

Is perpetrated, and it can be directly kind of linked to him

You know if you, if you look at his early writings, um

One of his first encounters with Indigenous people was, um

He got off his boat, and he was, um, met with some Indigenous people, and he saw that they were all naked

And so, he put down clothes in front of them, um

And in his mind, that was his payment for them to then work for him and carry his water, uh

But the Indigenous Australians just kind of looked at the clothes and laughed (Haha)

And, what he writes about is that, you know, uh, you know they, they stood like a, uh, a group of monkeys laughing, um

And they seemed like they weren't accustomed to carrying burdens (Haha)

And I was forced to carry the water myself

Um, and that attitude, you know, can be directly linked to events today

You know, like you, you look at that terminology, you know, monkey and ape

You know, you only have to go back to 2013 when Adam Goodes, um, was called an ape

And I think what troubled a lot of people is that

We, as Indigenous Australians, don't get to choose who racially abuses us or who racially vilify us

And he was brave enough to put a face to that discrimination, and

It really troubled a lot of non-Indigenous Australians, that, that was a thirteen-year-old girl

Um, and like you said, you know, because, the "other", the Indigenous, is inherently wrong

Then, of course, a non-Indigenous girl, you know, you know, wasn't her fault, you know

And as Adam— and that's the other thing, is like, I cannot believe the backlash Adam Goodes got

Because if you actually look at the way he handled that

You could not have been more of a gentleman, you know, if you were paid to

Like he, he came out the next day, and said all he wanted as for an education for her

Because, you know, she's been conditioned and, and a part of a society that has, you know seen her to call him an ape as something acceptable

And he, he spent so much time in educating her and her family

And, and the backlash was just, I just couldn't believe it

But, you know, you look at what a lot of non-Indigenous commentators were saying about Adam Goodes

And it was like, they couldn't believe that he wasn't accustomed to carrying the burden of racism