Now I’m 67-years old (yikes, that sounds crazy), I guess that I should be slowing down and enjoying life here in Perth. Well, I am enjoying life, other than hugely missing my children and grandchildren in the UK, but I don’t seem to be slowing down.
I’ve now got a very busy few weeks ahead. Firstly, I’m just preparing the last bits I need before submitting my book Carrolup to a publisher. [The tag line of the book, which would appear on the cover, is A true story of Aboriginal child artists challenging a government’s racist policies.] For those of you who are interested, you can download a short version of this story in an article I wrote this year for the Journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society (Number 104, 2020). One of the children’s artworks is shown on the cover of this Journal.
I’m also working on a strategy for a new project I’m developing with Lisa Martello-Hart, a children’s book author/illustrator. This project will involve creation of a grassroots-based, community healing initiative, primarily focused on children, that in part utilises the story of Carrolup and related themes, as well as an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach.
At the end of the month, my colleague John Stanton and I will be heading down to Kojonup to give talks to the community at The Kodja Place. I’m very excited about the talk I’ll be giving—The Carrolup Legacy: Facilitating Connection, Resilience and Healing—which I hope will inspire the community and help kick-start the project that Lisa and I have been talking about (almost daily) and planning over the past weeks. I’m also writing an article for the community… and beyond.
Given all this, I’m not going to have time to research and write new blogs for Recovery Stories over the next few weeks. Instead, I’ll be re-posting some of my favourite blogs that I first posted in the early days of the website (2013-2014).
The photograph above is of the school at Carrolup, a place of healing for the Aboriginal children of Carrolup Native Settlement in the second half of the 1940s. It is the the focus of our Carrolup project. The photograph was taken in 2016.
