By Flash Wilson
I am an Australian Indigenous man with a cross-cultural heritage: I have Aboriginal, Papua New Guinean, and English backgrounds.
I was raised as a NSW ward of the state after my birth mother lost custody of me as a six-month-old baby. I was taken and raised in a white family who consisted of my foster parents and their two children, and another younger boy who was also a ward of the state.
My adoptive parents divorced when I was five years old. When they separated mum moved us kids to Lismore where we were raised and attended school.
I was totally devastated when mum and dad divorced, so it was difficult to adjust to my new environment and only seeing dad a couple of times each year.
Mum was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was hospitalised several times. A couple of times she woke us kids up in the middle of the night to tell us to leave the house. The first couple of times this occurred my older brother drove us to dad’s place back in Coffs Harbour. Mental illness in the 1980s was stigmatised, and there was a lot of misunderstanding surrounding it. People were quite judgmental.
In the end because my brother and I were wards of the state we were placed in an Indigenous children’s home and told we would never return home to our adoptive family again. My brother had the support of his Indigenous mother, but I had nobody willing to accept me given I was a “white child”. I was told to figure out where I wanted to live and with whom – the welfare officer told me that they were unsure what to do with me.
My brother was finally given permission to live with his mum, while the family I was staying with decided they would love to accept me as part of their family. I would have loved to stay with them, but instead I was given to my foster mother’s parents who had looked after children as part of the old Department of Community Services (DOCS) system. But the feelings I experienced leaving the family at the children’s home tore my heart apart at the tender age of 11.
I was on the streets by the time I was 16 and moving around from one town to another, and one city to another; from one home to another, refuge to refuge, and staying with friends I knew. I unfortunately became addicted to drugs and alcohol and surrounded myself with people from the streets with a life that had no clear direction and no sense of identity.
My father is from Papua New Guinea and was a uni student in Sydney in the early 1970s when he met my mother. I am his first-born child and I have 10 brothers and sisters in PNG who I have never met. Dad was the chief of our tribe and is a very well-respected man in Goroka, located in the northern highlands.
My mother had children who died in their infancy however today I have four brothers and sisters on my mother’s side of the family: my eldest brother, who is African American; my second-eldest brother, who is Tongan; my eldest sister whose father is from Barbados; and my youngest sister, whose dad was also from Tonga, but sadly passed away this year.
Reconciliation means different things for different reasons for me personally: identity, connection, family, pride, courage, spirituality, value, beliefs, action, faith, trust, forgiveness, acceptance, and conversation.
These are the words I felt inside as a child but did not know how to express:
Can somebody hear me?
Won’t somebody save me?
Hold me, teach me, protect and love me!
WHY?
Am I bad?
Do I look so different?
Did I do something wrong?
WHY?
This has been but a small picture of my journey and as such it is a story that left a profound impression upon how I saw the world. I could have given up then and there, given up on my dreams, my life, but I didn’t. I chose instead to fight my way through to the other side; I chose to fight for a life still worth living.
I guess the most difficult choice was how to break free from a mind that had been broken and disconnected and to deepen my love for who I am today. I had to learn to grow and to develop personally, spiritually and socially to achieve a life that burns with desire for future aspirations.
Today I am a full-time student at Ultimo TAFE where I have this amazing opportunity to fulfil what has been in my heart as I embrace social media and podcasting as another stepping stone toward the life of my dreams. Were there ever times I felt like giving up? Well yes! There were many times I felt like giving up, thinking it was too hard and in some ways, it would have been easy to fall back to what I had been accustomed to, the past. I questioned myself over life’s challenges and yet I felt far more compelled to move forward.
Rather than choosing to be a slave to my past I chose to live for the future, a journey that has only just begun.
Listen to this interview and more on TAFE Radio’s Reconciliation Week show this morning from 10am. Flash Wilson will be hosting with Mick Cross.
Featured image: Flash Wilson (second left), George, Peter, Miriam, Judith, Danny and Kathleen.