AustLit

Cathy Freeman is an Australian sprinter who specialises in the 400-metre race. She won her first gold medal at a school athletics championship when she was eight years old. Like many Australian Aboriginal people, Freeman's family was poor and experienced racial discrimination. Her family worked hard to raise the money needed to take her to national competitions. The family moved to Brisbane in 1989 to be near Freeman, who had won a scholarship to Kooralbyn International School, where she was being professionally coached. After moving to Melbourne in 1990, she won a gold medal as a member of the 4 x 100-metre relay team at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand, becoming the first Australian Aboriginal woman to win a gold medal at an international athletics event. In 1990, Freeman was named Aboriginal Athlete of the Year.

At the 1994 Commonwealth Games, held in Victoria, Canada, she made world headlines after winning the 400-metre race, because she flew the Aboriginal flag instead of the Australian flag during her victory lap. Although the Australian team leader barred her from flying the Aboriginal flag, Freeman defied him by flying the Aboriginal flag again after she won the 200-metre race. She used the publicity to explain the symbolism of the Aboriginal flag: red for the earth, the ochre used in ceremonies, and Aboriginal people's spiritual relationship to the land; yellow for the sun, the giver and protector of all life; and black for the Aboriginal people of Australia.

Freeman lit the cauldron at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Also in 2000, she was awarded an Australian Sports Medal, recognising her achievements as World Champion in 1997 and 1999, Commonwealth Champion in 1994, and winner of the Victorian Institute of Sport Award of Excellence in 1997. Freeman was named World Sportswoman of the Year in 2001. On 15 July 2003, she announced her retirement from competitive running. Her last official sporting engagement was in 2006, when she was one of the final runners in the Queen's Baton Relay, bringing the baton into the Melbourne Cricket Ground at the Opening Ceremony of the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Victoria.

Since retiring, Freeman has dedicated her time to the Cathy Freeman Foundation and the numerous other charities of which she is a patron.

Cathy was inducted into Sport Australia Hall of Fame in October 2011.

John Harding is a descendant of the KuKu Yalanji tribe and the Mer people. He was co-founder of the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-op in Melbourne. The first play produced by the Co-op was Harding's Up The Road, which was subsequently performed at the Belvoir Street Theatre, and then toured nationally.

Harding has been an actor, and has worked in Aboriginal affairs and education. He has been writing poetry since the age of 14, and has written and directed drama for theatre, radio and television. He was assistant Director for the 1989 National Black Playwrights' Conference and Artistic Director of the 1996 Nambundah Festival. His television credits include Lift Off and Blackout, the Aboriginal sitcom The Masters and the SBS Indigenous current affairs program, ICAM. In 2006 Hardy was nominated for a DEADLY Award, Outstanding Achievement in Literature, for his book The Dirty Mile, a History of Indigenous Fitzroy (2006).

Jessica Mauboy is an Australian singer, songwriter, and actor, starring in films such as Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires.

Mauboy is an Ambassador for Indigenous Literacy Foundation. She has been the recipient of prestigious music awards such as National Indigenous Music Awards, National Dreamtime Awards; and in 2013 was Young Australian of the Year (Northern Territory).

Mauboy's mother is a Kuku Yalanji woman, and her father Indonesian.

Cloncurry-born Stephen Oliver has trained as a dancer, actor and singer at the Aboriginal Music Theatre Training Program and at WAAPA. He is also a performance poet.

The former Assistant Artistic Director at Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts, he was one of the creative forces behind Black Comedy for ABC television. In 2016, he scripted his first play, and in 2018, his play From Darkness Whence We Came was produced for the National Playwrighting Festival. In May 2018, he was a featured writer at the NT Writers' Festival.

Born in the southwest of Cunnamulla, Marlene Cummins is kukuyelandji (Kuku-Yalanji), Woppaburra woman, whose origins are from Brisbane to Cherbourg Aboriginal settlement to Great Keppel Island to Cape York. She is known for her song writing and performance in the Jazz Blues genre, in the mid 1990s Cummins refined her skill as a blues saxophonist.

Lance Riley was born at Mona Mona Aboriginal Reserve in North Queensland. When he was separated from his family at the age of five, Riley was taken to Mona Mona Mission and later sent to Palm Island. Riley is an Elder of the Kuku Yalanji language area and tribal clan group Wulburra (Western Yalanji). Riley has served as Regional Councillor for ATSIC and Manager of Mayi Wunba Cultural Dance Theatre.

Riley's story was recorded by the National Library of Australia for the Bringing Them Home oral history project and appeared in the associated publication Many Voices: Reflections on experiences of Indigenous child separation, edited by Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich (2002).

Executive director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts at the Australian Council. Miller was an actor with the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust in the 1980s and 90s.

She performed in the first Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney production of Louis Nowra's Radiance as Cressy. Lydia's stage credits include A Mouthful of Birds (Walkers & Talkers, STC); State of Shock (Toetruck); Malache (Brolgas - RQTC); Capricornia (Belvoir, National Tour, SATC, MTC); Death of Phillip Robinson (New Theatre); Survival '88; Not the 1988 Party (Aboriginal National Theatre Trust, Belvoir): Diary of a Madman (Belvoir, Adelaide Arts Festival '92, MTC and the first Australian Cultural exchange with Russia); Munjong (Aboriginal National Theatre Trust - Victorian Arts Centre); Racing Demons, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (STC); and One Woman's Song (RQTC). Film and television credits include: Backlash, Deadly (Best Supporting Actress at the Asian Pacific Film Festival), Rafferty's Rules, Winners, R.E.D.S., Karbara... First Born, English At Work, Black Smile, Fin de Siecle and Poison (Best New Drama at New York Film Festival and Golden Tripod for Cinematography). Lydia formed a partnership with Rhoda Roberts in a Media Production company AMPIMEDIA.

Source: 'Radiance', Currency Press, Sydney 1993.

'John Karranjal Hartley was birthed on Cadigal homelands at Kogarah ('place of reeds') in 1956. He left school early to travel around country and spent time with First Nation Cree elders in Kanata and Anangu Pitjantjatjara-Yankunytjatjara of the western desert, finding ways of reclaiming ancestral values, beliefs and practices, and Yalanji language and storytelling. John has developed art-based presentations addressing the impacts and effects of colonial violence, and co-produced the documentary Two Brothers Walking a bilingual animation promoting cultural understanding and maintenance.' (Source : Growing up Aboriginal in Australia)

Julia Leftwich was born around the Bloomfield area in Queensland. She is from the Wujal Wujal and Kuku-Yalanji people. After her mother died, Leftwich lived with the Nunn family. When Mr Nunn died, the police removed Leftwich and sent her first to the police station at Cairns and then to Yarrabah.

Leftwich married when she was roughly eighteen years old in 1912. She and her husband had nine children, the oldest of whom was Fred Leftwich (q.v.). Leftwhich left Yarrabah with her husband and children in 1924 on an exemption ticket to give her family a better life and to escape the domineering rule of the Mission.

Fred Leftwich is the son of Julia Leftwich (q.v.) a Wujal Wujal and Kuku-Yalanji woman. Leftwich's father placed him in Yarrabah dormitories for a couple of months then took him out when they left Yarrabah in 1924 to avoid having any more children sent to the dormitories. His father had gotten an exemption ticket so that Leftwich and his siblings could not be taken away by the authorities. Leftwich started work around the age of thirteen or fourteen. His first job was on a cane farm, where he cut the cane, and used a horse and plough to cultivate the land. Leftwich was active in the Assemblies of God church.

'Aboriginal artist Vernon Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His multi-faceted practice includes works that range from large-scale drawings of his ancestors to hard-hitting text-based works and installations. Through clever puns and plays on words and objects Ah Kee fuses the history and language of colonisation with contemporary black/white political issues to expose degrees of underlying racism in Australian society.'

Source: Museum of Contemporary Art.

'Karen Davis is a Mamu - Kuku Yalanji woman who grew up in a family of six in Far North Queensland during the 1970s and 1980s amongst a backdrop of crystal-clear swimming holes, monsoonal rains, sugar cane burn-offs and tropical cyclones. She now lives in Melbourne, works in the tertiary education sector and volunteers for community radio.' (Source : Growing up Aboriginal in Australia)

'Antoinette Braybrook is a Kuku Yalanji woman, CEO of Djirra, LLB, and strong advocate for Aboriginal women’s voices and visibility nationally.' (The Lifted Brow, No. 40, Dec 2018: 111)

'Davina B Woods PhD is a Kuku-Djungan/Kuku-Yalanji woman who lives in Melbourne. She has worked for Koorie-run organisations, served on boards and was the person who instigated truth-telling with her local city council.' (https://meanjin.com.au/essays/an-education/

Walker's story was recorded by the National Library of Australia for the Bringing Them Home oral history project and appeared in the associated publication Many Voices: Reflections on Experiences of Indigenous Child Separation edited by Doreen Mellor and Anna Haebich (2002). Her baskets have been exhibited by the Queensland Art Gallery in the exhibition 'Story Place : Indigenous Art of Cape York and the Rainforest'.