That’s a long yarn, and squeezing my life’s history, which fuelled the AMHC, into a couple of paragraphs won’t be easy.

So I’ll keep it simple.

My parents were both 17 when I was born. I grew up in violent, unsafe and unstable conditions and became a very traumatised kid.

As a result, I’ve spent much of my life sitting across from psychologists, counsellors and therapists, from early childhood to this very day.

At the same time, I was trying to navigate an experience many of our people know in different ways.

Trying to walk between two very different worlds.

Indigenous and non-Indigenous. The old ways and the new ways. Traditional culture and modern culture.

Many of us are left trying to figure out how to exist within family, identity, culture, intergenerational trauma and everything else we were left to carry.

And this is where those two parts of my life started to collide.

I learnt a lot through my own mental health journey and from sitting with professionals.

But unfortunately, many of the people I sat across from, even when they genuinely wanted to help, didn’t really understand much about our cultures or the complexities that can come with being Aboriginal in Australia.

That ongoing experience of feeling isolated and misunderstood shaped a belief I still carry today: where we can, we have a responsibility to make the road a little easier for the people coming behind us.

When I think back to what I needed, I needed someone to help me make sense of what the fuck was actually going on, inside me and around me.

Why I felt the way I felt.

Where much of our shame can come from.

How trauma works.

How our families, identities, cultures, communities and shared history can affect our mental health.

And most importantly, how we can navigate all of that now, in the healthiest way possible.

That’s why I felt it was necessary to work alongside a qualified social worker who shared that passion for our people, and together we created the Aboriginal Mental Health Course to turn that need into something practical and directly connected to the support I wish I’d had.

To create something I wish someone had put in front of me when I was younger, and to make that support easier to find through the Aboriginal Mental Health Course.