Kara Graham

Growing up I didn’t experience racism much because we were young and obviously a lot of the children obviously didn’t have an understanding of our history. I didn’t get really taught much in primary school. But as I got older, I experienced racism because I wasn’t a certain colour that was Indigenous-worthy type of thing. And I just want to get past that, I still experience it. Victoria’s amazing, there’s a lot of opportunities of course, but there’s not a lot of culture being taught around in Victoria.

I used to work in childcare and I tried to involve Indigenous culture within the younger generation. But it’s just the stop of Indigenous culture in primary school because there’s not much of the history that they’re being taught. And then there’s only a little bit going into high school and not really as much that there should be. It means like our history is not getting put forward to – as the generations getting older. And we just want the history to be taught the way of what our history actually is, not like an assumption of our history. And I just want more of our culture being spoken to instead of other cultures from like overseas being taught. It should be First Nations culture being taught first.

Language is really hard to get access of because a lot of it was lost over the years since the settlement. And there’s a lot of cultures that still have language, but it’s just trying to get the language that isn’t recorded of certain cultures and to be taught into history and to be taught in schools and everything.

I’ve experienced it myself. Which is a bit unfortunate because my mum said to myself that we would have learnt culture if it wasn’t – if my mum didn’t get taken away. Neither did my nan and so forth. Devastating. I’ve seen a lot of Indigenous people, especially kids, like from my mob learning like had Aboriginal, like they’re like Gunaikurnai language as a first language instead of just English, which is pretty devastating, which I wish I absolutely had growing up, which would have been amazing.