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We're kicking off season six from the beating heart of the country. Jessica Staines recorded this episode at Uluru with two Koori Curriculum team members, Shan Morrison and Kelly Quick, after a few days of on-the-ground research for next year's retreat on Anangu Country. That's the fourth retreat, and it'll bring 40 educators from all over Australia to the Red Centre.

Picture a 4:30 am wake-up, a pitch-black bus, and a huge shadow slowly rising out of the flat landscape until Uluru is just there. Then the weather turned. Desert hail at a bus stop had even the locals stunned. There were camels, a spot of line dancing, and a blessed cancelled tour that turned into an unplanned breakfast buffet.

The team also joined the roughly 1% of visitors who've seen waterfalls running down Uluru, the rock shining like someone had painted it silver. The bus ride back was very quiet. The team gets honest about the hard stuff too. Uluru had been greener than anyone could remember after nearly 400 millimetres of rain, yet there was barely a bird or a kangaroo to be seen, and that silence says a lot about colonisation on Country today.

Then Jess, Shan and Kelly talk about what happens behind the screen. A Koori Curriculum blog drew 567 comments in a single day, most of them racist, and Kelly opens up about her first real look at what Aboriginal businesses cop online. Jess shares a moment at Coles that her four-year-old daughter witnessed, and what the anti-bias approach looks like when it's your own kid asking why a stranger was angry at you.

Key Takeaways

Being on Country teaches you what a textbook can't. Kelly says she'll be processing this trip "for weeks and weeks to come", and Jess points out that some of the stories shared by guides belong on Country, so you'll have to come out and hear them yourself.
Colonisation is still reshaping the land at Uluru. One tour guide had seen a single kangaroo in more than a year, and the local Anangu community had hunted just one in the past 12 months. They still practise traditional ways, but the animals simply aren't there.
Camels and buffel grass make a destructive pair. Australia now has the largest wild camel population in the world. The camels eat native fruit without spreading the seeds like emus did, and buffel grass burns at 800 to 900°C, while native grasses burn at 200 to 300°C. That leaves native plants with almost no chance.
Cultural knowledge is shared in layers. Guide Reggie taught the team the word tjitji, meaning child, and explained that visitors hear stories at a children's level. Deeper knowledge, including women's and men's business, is protected for a reason.
Racism in Australia is predictable, so predictable that marketing runs on it. Shan explains how Meta's algorithms reward any engagement. A post about Aboriginal culture brings out the trolls, while a post about almost anything else gets crickets.
Moderating comments is a duty of care. Shan hid around three-quarters of those 567 comments to protect mob and the educators who are just starting this work. Even a short Welcome to Country clip from the First Nations National Education Conference in Brisbane, with nothing political in it, drew racist abuse across 150,000 views.
The kindness keeps the work going. Kelly described seeing those comments for the first time as "like being hit in the face". She found her comfort in the inbox, where thank-you emails from educators sharing the blogs with their teams outnumber the hate.
Children see racism and need us to name it then and there. Jess knows the anti-bias approach back to front and trains educators in it. Still, when a man sneered at her Welcome Welcomes shirt in front of her daughter, she found it hard to find the words. Saying "we'll talk about it later" dismisses what the child has just seen.
Every culture in your team deserves a place in the room. Jess asks multicultural teams how they share their own cultures with children, and too often they tell her they don't. "Being different is an asset. It's not a deficit," she says, and she traces that silence back to the White Australia policy and its pressure to assimilate.
Curiosity is where it all begins. Shan says the time he feels most Australian is when she's learning about mob. Jess adds that education is a strong form of advocacy, because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture is part of every Australian's story.

This episode will follow you into your next staff meeting, and that's a good thing. Jess leaves you with questions to take back to your team:

Who's expected to speak up when racism happens at your service?
Do your Aboriginal staff and families know leadership has their back?
Does anti-racism show up in your everyday practice, or only around NAIDOC and Reconciliation Week?

Grab a cuppa for this one. It's warm and raw, there are some giggles, and it's exactly the yarn educators need right now.

Then join the Koori Curriculum Educator Community on Facebook, where Kelly will be posting prompts to keep the yarn going (Jess admits she wouldn't remember to do it herself).

Resources discussed in this episode:

Connect with Jessica Staines:

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