Cultural Mapping

I have always seen opportunities where there is need. In the 1980s, it was alternative ways of living that were more community orientated and that is when I also established my first business in a small rural town, Candelo Bulk Wholefoods. 

I then commenced horticultural studies where I discovered my love for natural environments. My growing desire to work with communities then led me to studies in social sciences where in 1988 I was given a field placement with the Australian Council of Social Services in Canberra. 

This is where I met Aboriginal activist Kevin Gilbert an admired leader who inspired many, including me. He invited me to assist him to set up art exhibitions to secure money for water for dry central desert communities.

At the time I had just completed a major public launch for the Children in Poverty Campaign for ACOSS, this combined with my experience with Kevin working on exhibitions marked a major turning point in my career when I saw that art can be a powerful tool for communities to have economic opportunity, and later I was to learn how powerful it can be in other ways also. Soon after meeting him I attended an Aboriginal arts conference in the Kimberley in the early 90’s, where I became concerned to learn that Aboriginal women in remote communities with limited livelihood opportunities were being excluded from the growing Aboriginal arts market. 

In 1991 I sold my home, invested in some land and with what remained I relocated to the Kimberley with my young sons to establish an art gallery for remote Aboriginal women. The establishment of the gallery had been overseen by a group of elder women and their cultural leader Queenie McKenzie, whom I had invited to become involved and Queenie soon claimed a leadership role and became my cultural mentor for many years. Unfortunately, I was very 'green' and naïve about the potential challenges of working with communities in crisis while wearing two different hats, one as a community support worker as was my prior training and one as an entrepreneur business owner as was and still is my passion. This was years before the term social entrepreneur was coined and understood, consequently what I faced in the environment I was now working in was mistrust from the private sector if I engaged with my community hat on and mistrust from the community sector (e.g funding bodies, NGO's) if I engaged with my business hat on. At times there was also a large degree of aggression and also physical threats from those who saw my community arts support as competition as they had been happy with the status quo regardless of the women's situation. The stress became so great that within a few short years I went belly up (literally) became so ill and burnt out I could not function.  However, the up side of losing ones property and business this way is the learning that can come from it albeit painful and what you can later do with that when you recover, to recreate a different future. I am discussing this in my training and it will be discussed in my next book. However....

other types of important learning also came during my earlier years of collaboration with the community, the elders — Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britton, Hector Jarndany and Peggy Patrick — had repeatedly asked me this question:

“What about the kids, we can’t get them to sit down and listen to us any more like we did with our grannies. What’s going to happen to our knowledge?”

Their profound concern created a determination that grew in me for the next decade to find a solution regardless of the time it took. When Queenie passed away in 1998, the potential for loss of her knowledge became even greater and consequently....

in 2001, the senior women of the community and I agreed to collaborate on a project to research and map the cultural legacy of Queenie. By 2007, and to my great surprise, the amount of data (cultural assets) we had repatriated and collected from academics, museums and galleries around Australia was stunning in both quantity and quality. Consequently, the potential for the current and future generation of kids appeared enormous if the assets (data) could be safeguarded and accessible to the women and if appropriate training was applied to secure the opportunities that now seemed endless.

So, in 2010 I began to put all my hard-earned knowledge, resources and professional experiences and a decade of research into designing a culturally secure training framework. In 2013 when I had completed the first stage of it I knew I had to do more research and I could see the value in undertaking a PhD to test the relevance of it to a diverse range of sector leaders, i.e. existing community partners who interacted in the Kimberley on a broad range of industry or government initiatives. 

The earlier research findings had shown these relationships, for community, were rarely mutually beneficial. I completed my PhD study this year and it has given me the insights I needed to refine the training into what it is today; a bespoke Cultural Mapping Training ™ methodology that is also a collaborative (two-way) learning program for creating sustainable livelihoods and sustainable growth. It can now be applied to create mutual benefits for communities and those they choose to collaborate with and if that collaboration is undertaken within the training framework it will keep everyone safe and expose new opportunities for everyone that could otherwise not be seen. The version of the training on this online delivery site had to be cut back, the face to face delivery or the online version combined with coaching delivers the full program. The journey continues and next will be the publication of the thesis and refinement of Modules 3 and 4……