Parity Guest Editor Sarah Brinkhege interviews Dr Jill Gallagher AO, Chief Executive Officer of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO)
This article was originally published in the October 2024 edition of Parity magazine. Learn more about Parity including how to access full editions.
The 2023 Voice referendum held the promise of significant constitutional recognition and empowerment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, offering a beacon of hope for positive change and acknowledgment of historical injustices. However, the subsequent loss of that hope has had profound and damaging effects on individuals and communities. The disappointment and disillusionment resulting from the perceived failure of the referendum to deliver meaningful outcomes contributed to a sense of betrayal and disconnection. (1)
In this interview with Council to Homeless Persons, Dr Jill Gallagher, CEO of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO), talks about restoring hope in the aftermath of Treaty setbacks, improving health and well-being for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in homelessness services and the need for advocacy and education to raise awareness of shared history and transgenerational trauma. The importance of cultural safety, employment and community support is emphasised. The interview also highlights the need for better integration of Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) into specialist homelessness services to ensure culturally safe practices and effective support.
VACCHO is one of Australia’s largest Aboriginal training providers and became a Registered Training Organisation in 1999 by providing wraparound services, advocacy and industry education and research. VACCHO’s programs are designed to address the essential skills and knowledge required in Victoria to support and empower cultural competence and cultural safety.
Parity: What are the key priorities for the specialist homeless sector to improve the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community sleeping rough and without a roof over their head?
Dr Jill Gallagher: Aboriginal people represent 13 per cent of all Victorians accessing homelessness services. So it is a pretty high number, despite only making up 2 per cent of the Victorian population. It is pretty scary when you look at the statistics: 17 per cent of all Aboriginal people in Victoria accessed homelessness services across 2022. This is a statistic that really shocked me also. That is a lot and what these statistics tell me is that we still have a lot of poverty in our community, right across this continent, not just in the outback. I would rather be homeless in the outback, where it is nice and warm, then be homeless in Melbourne.
To answer your question, what can the specialist homelessness sector services do? It is around standing with us and having the same voice, the same advocacy. Given that we only make up 2 per cent of the population here in Victoria, and I think it is 3.5 per cent nationally, our advocacy is that the more voices around the same table saying the same things, then the more politicians and the public will listen and hear.
I believe the reason we lost the referendum is because the majority of Australian citizens do not know the shared history of this country. They do not know that Australia was not terra nullius and all the atrocities that happened.
So it is the advocacy that I think other agencies could help us with. I think it is important to understand why the statistics are as they are. Educate yourselves on why, and I can go a bit more into that later. It is really important – education. We talk about it, in the health space, as transgenerational trauma in our communities and we have also got transgenerational poverty as a result. If you ever want to hear some of the voices of the past, Google ‘Letters from Aboriginal Women in Victoria 1867-1926’ (2), there are letters from all over Victoria from Aboriginal women living back in the mission era. And those letters, when you read them, you get quite emotional about it, you hear their despair and you hear their lack of hope.
There was one letter in particular that really struck me. An Aboriginal woman was writing to the Aborigines Protection Board seeking permission to put a small deposit on a little old shack on a little block of land that would have been, back then, 150 pounds. She was asking permission from the authorities to put a deposit on it, so that when her husband comes back from the war, they will have their own home, their own place. And also in that publication, you get the responses to those letters from the Aborigines Protection Board or the mission masters, and in this case it was denied.
That transgenerational poverty still impacts our communities today. Here in Victoria, we have 7,000 Aboriginal families living in public housing, some of these have multiple extended family members living in that housing. And if that public housing was not there, a lot of them would be chronically homeless. That is a lot of poverty, so I think if we have got agencies such as the Council to Homeless Persons and Parity, that advocacy, that education, that understanding about standing beside Aboriginal organisations, saying the same, having the same voice, that is powerful, because we do not make elections, Australians do, all Australians – not us.
Parity: How does a broken spirit contribute to the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accessing specialist homeless services?
Dr Jill Gallagher: That is very powerful. A broken spirit is one of the biggest factors. We all know, those of us who are in the know and who work for the Aboriginal community and as Aboriginal people ourselves, we know the atrocities that happened. We know about the massacres, we know about the missions and the attempts to stop us from passing on our 65,000-plus years of knowledge and history. We know about all that and what that does to your spirit. It is when you have people, human beings, who have lived so long on the planet and survived for 65,000-plus years. I mean, we even outlive the extinction of some dinosaurs on this continent. You know, the megafauna that lived here, they became extinct 30,000 years ago. Our people walked this continent when there was a land bridge between Tasmania and Melbourne and Victoria, and my own people in Western Victoria, down on Gunditjmara Country, my ancestors witnessed volcanoes erupting and we survived all that. Our people survived that, but we almost did not survive colonisation and the brutality of it, and the forced removals, forced to stop practising your language. Two hundred and fifty years ago, when Captain Cook came and this continent was colonised, all the damage that was done to Aboriginal people, they almost, almost succeeded in making us as people and as a culture, invisible. Do not pass on that knowledge – that is what the missions were set up for and they did a bloody good job in southeastern Australia, because that is where it all started, down this neck of the woods, before it went right up into the remote parts of our country. So that lack of hope and the sense of no power and the intergenerational trauma attached to that, that is a broken spirit. To a lot of Australians, and a lot of migrants, this country has been a beacon of hope: that you can come here and have a fair go, start a new life and build wealth in our country. But our people were not allowed to participate in that wealth creation, we were systematically barred. The arrival of European settlers in Australia led to the dispossession of land, loss of traditional livelihoods and the almost complete destruction of cultural practices. A broken spirit among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is a profound sense of loss, despair and disconnection from cultural roots, traditions and identity. It is a manifestation of the impact of historical trauma, colonisation and the ongoing systemic issues that disrupt our ways of life.
Parity: What services are critical in the prevention of First Nations’ homelessness?
Dr Jill Gallagher: The Government is talking about that we have not got enough homes and we have not got enough units. They are looking at ways how they can make that happen pretty quickly and I believe this is an important initiative but there needs to be a lot more support to the Aboriginal communities. More buildings are only the beginning.
We need to change the way we service our people, our communities. We already have the captured audience. We do not need to find out who they are, okay. So we do not need to run a big PhD project. We know who the 7,000 Victorian Indigenous families doing it tough are. So how do we ensure that all these services that we currently deliver work and keep these families safe? How do we wrap around families and provide cultural care, not just a place to live?
So for example, you might have a single mum and two kids and mum cannot find work.
How do we help her so that she does not become homeless? How do we ensure she has a place to bring her kids while she is out job-hunting? What training might she need to get better job opportunities? How can we make sure that when she does find employment that she goes on to save for a deposit and move toward home ownership? It is about looking at that family, identifying the needs and then bringing those services into the home or having a safe space to provide them.
So cultural service systems come in and help that. It all comes back to three important things: being strong in culture and where you are from, employment and housing. That is our aim, for our community to know and be proud of who they are, find valuable employment and have housing. We have got to go beyond just wanting public housing, and build generational wealth in community to undo the generational trauma and poverty.
Parity: What are the key changes you would like to see in the future?
Dr Jill Gallagher: One of the biggest things that I would like to see, and that might actually happen, is that really good cultural safety training is delivered – and this requires sustained investment and partnership with Aboriginal organisations. This is so services have a better understanding. I remember one case when I was the Treaty Commissioner, and I visited the hospital in Emergency. While I was there, I met another Aboriginal woman who was homeless, with a busted leg and something had happened to her, but she would not tell the hospital. So it is 11.30 at night, the hospital were going to turf her out of Emergency with a busted leg and two garbage bags of clothes, so I said, “Where is she going to sleep?” The answer I got was, “We’re not a motel”. I called it in and made sure she was not discharged until the next morning. So, I actually think there needs to be a lot more training, not only in homeless areas, but also in other public health services, so they change their thinking, their understanding, and more importantly, their humanity.
VACCHO is an Aboriginal training provider. Its programs are designed to address the essential skills and knowledge required by industry to support and empower cultural competence and cultural safety.
Endnote:
1. VACCHO 2024, Health and Healthcare, Housing and Homelessness, Education submission to the Yoorrook Justice Commission, p 13, https://cdn.intelligencebank.com/au/share/NJA21J/e3v71/4zVbl/original/Yoorrook+Justice+Commission+Health+and+Housing
2. Nelson E, Smith S and Grimshaw P 2002, Letters From Aboriginal Women of Victoria, 1867-1926, https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/items/fdd1abc7-a66c-524a-881a-2b59e266f65f
This article was originally published in Parity magazine. Learn more about Parity including how to access full editions.