To Joe and Charlie Pezzino, to Dino’s family and friends.
In Death of Dino Pezzino
For the past thirty years Dino has honored me with his friendship. He was like an uncle to me and I went to see him every time I was in Western Australia. Dino was truly a great man. Generous, friendly and …funny! He was the force behind the Fremantle Shoemakers Cooperative and few people truly understood that he taught Australian unemployed kids for free, in the evenings and out of his great heart. He was taken to court by the Shoemakers Union because he was teaching unemployed kids without having a Ticket to do so. So Dino submitted himself to be examined by a panel of expert shoemakers, half of which he had taught the trade (!), got a Ticket and got the satisfaction of winning the court case. Not only did he win, the Judge highly praised his work, awarded damages against the Union and the Fremantle Shoemakers Cooperative, received the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Award for best job creation scheme in Australia in 1982.
A master in his art, Dino commanded the respect, even the awe, of the men and women he taught. He started his apprenticeship in Sicily when he was fourteen years old in his uncle’s shop. His first job was to straighten used tacks that his uncle had used to make shoes. He became very good and his skills literally saved his life. As a prisoner of war he was interned at Buchenwald where he was asked whether he wanted to work or not. He offered to work and was sent to a factory that made shoes for the German army. Here during his lunch hours, with leather from the seat of a downed US Bomber, he made a pair of boots. A German officer took notice and asked whether Dino could make him a pair….very soon ALL the German officers wanted his boots and Dino was handsomely paid, in army rations!
That’s Dino for you, the ultimate charmer, the friendly, funny, gifted artisan who only did, beautifully, what he loved to do.
You were an inspiration Dino, travel well my friend. I know precisely who got to get a beautiful pair of Kangaroo leather’ moccasins, like the ones that I still have in my wardrobe. I never thought that I would be jealous of the Almighty because of an infinite supply of Dino’s shoes!
Ernesto Sirolli
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Friday, 5 November 2010
Teaching Artists How To Make Money
Ernesto Sirolli addressed the JUNCTION 2010 ARTS conference in Tasmania on August 28, 2010.
Ernesto Sirolli: the one who gets it
What do unemployed hippies, an Italian shoemaker, a nun, Western Australian fishermen and a man who knows nothing about business have in common? Passion, creativity and the makings of powerful storytelling.
Ernesto Sirolli's plenary address, Passion, entrepreneurship and the rebirth of local economies, had one simple but profound message: do what you want to do and find someone to do what you hate.
This straightforward message to the artists, community arts workers, business people and others in the audience was delivered lyrically, humorously and, like only the Italians can, with great gusto and feeling.
Sirolli narrated his experiences of developing entrepreneurs in Western Australia in the 1980s. He believes that the idea of an entrepreneur has been hijacked by corporate language which two-thirds of the population doesn't understand. He suggested that the first thing we need to do is reclaim the word 'entrepreneur' and its original, fundamental meaning: an entrepreneur is someone who 'gets it first'; who is innovative and courageous.
Through his engaging storytelling and grass-roots experiences, Sirolli urged the artists in the audience to dedicate their lives to finetuning their skills, to forget about trying to learn how to sell their work and to surround themselves with people they trust who can do that for them. That way, they return the gifts they have been given to the world.
And his belief about the universality of human experience? Every man and woman at any given time in their lives has a wish to better themselves. You don't have to take ideas into communities or tell people what to do - the people there already know what to do. You only have to take your passion and listen - not arrive with a 'briefcase of answers' - to help people do what they want to do.
What community wouldn't he inspire?
Author: Wendy Newton of Flying Arts
Ernesto Sirolli: the one who gets it
What do unemployed hippies, an Italian shoemaker, a nun, Western Australian fishermen and a man who knows nothing about business have in common? Passion, creativity and the makings of powerful storytelling.
Ernesto Sirolli's plenary address, Passion, entrepreneurship and the rebirth of local economies, had one simple but profound message: do what you want to do and find someone to do what you hate.
This straightforward message to the artists, community arts workers, business people and others in the audience was delivered lyrically, humorously and, like only the Italians can, with great gusto and feeling.
Sirolli narrated his experiences of developing entrepreneurs in Western Australia in the 1980s. He believes that the idea of an entrepreneur has been hijacked by corporate language which two-thirds of the population doesn't understand. He suggested that the first thing we need to do is reclaim the word 'entrepreneur' and its original, fundamental meaning: an entrepreneur is someone who 'gets it first'; who is innovative and courageous.
Through his engaging storytelling and grass-roots experiences, Sirolli urged the artists in the audience to dedicate their lives to finetuning their skills, to forget about trying to learn how to sell their work and to surround themselves with people they trust who can do that for them. That way, they return the gifts they have been given to the world.
And his belief about the universality of human experience? Every man and woman at any given time in their lives has a wish to better themselves. You don't have to take ideas into communities or tell people what to do - the people there already know what to do. You only have to take your passion and listen - not arrive with a 'briefcase of answers' - to help people do what they want to do.
What community wouldn't he inspire?
Author: Wendy Newton of Flying Arts
Tuesday, 12 October 2010
News from ENABLE Enterprise Facilitation® in North Liverpool
The Journey so far...
North Liverpool is a place full of passions, vibrant, gritty and always tough and there have been many “top-down” initiatives that have tried to do things for the area but ENABLE is set to utilise local imagination and passion, using the Sirolli model, so that the area, its people and its communities are the engine of a real transformation. When Ernesto Sirolli, full of charisma and stories of his belief in people and his “bottom-up”, counter-intuitive approach visited the area in early 2005 many were sceptical. Much talking and thinking took place. People from most of the local community organisations got involved and by the spring of 2006 there was sufficient determination and will to go ahead and appoint a Facilitator. The selection process was very thorough and exhaustive and our facilitator was appointed to start work in December 2006. Much still lies ahead. The quality and effectiveness of this will depend on the efforts of all involved. We are determined to build our Panel further but a lot has been achieved already. We can celebrate much especially: -
That so many community organisations are firmly bedded into our work
That we have a good and positive culture and a set of core values that are respected
That our Facilitator has a growing and highly diverse band of clients – both existing businesses and new set-ups
That our belief that there is a strong flow of worthwhile business ideas awaiting expression in north Liverpool is now supported by evidence
That the special kind of highly personal support that we can offer is now making a real difference in many cases and is of the kind that is not available elsewhere
That a significant contribution is being made by the personal connections made amongst clients and with others.
That our Panel can repeatedly offer good and relevant ideas for our brainstorming
That our Panel has a wide spread of talent and is a place where hardnosed business people can engage and interact with community activists and public servants
That the Panel’s meetings are always accompanied by valuable informal exchanges of information
That our work is creating and enhancing a genuine “ripple effect” to create a distinctive culture of enterprise amongst people and communities that have long had a culture of dependency
That we are working in excellent harmony with the adjoining Sirolli projects.
That even at this relatively early stage successes are emerging that provide good role models and a base for convincing sceptical local businesses and people that the Sirolli methodology works.
What we have achieved to Date
What we have achieved to Date
New Businesses Created in 2006/07 ~ 2007/08 ~2008/09 ~ 2009/10 TOTALS
0 13 19 3 35
Existing Businesses 7 23 11 2 43
Jobs Created 0 17 27 0 44
Beneficiaries 23 81 129 16 249
Friday, 17 September 2010
Enterprise Development in Aboriginal Communities
Gerhardt Pearson, 14/9/2010 9.45am
Australian Aboriginal culture is the world’s oldest, continuous, living culture. Our people have always been traders, artisans, environmental guardians, managers, builders and entrepreneurs.
When the Romans were conquering Britain in the year 43, when the Anglo Saxons took over in the year 410, when the Britons defeated the Anglo Saxons in 495, when the Vikings invaded in 793, when William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, when Henry the VIII (Eighth) was marrying and beheading his wives, when the English were fighting a Civil War in 1642, when the Industrial Revolution was revolutionising manufacturing, throughout all these years, and back a further 20-30,000 years before England even existed as a known habitable region, over all these millennia, the Aboriginal people of Cape York, and from around Australia, were travelling, trading and living prosperous lives.
Our Yolngu Aboriginal Colleagues in North East Arnhem land began the first commercial trade deals with China 400 years before European settlement in Australia, around the time of the European Renaissance. That commercial relationship continued, through the Maccassan fleet, every year until 1900. So set aside the common place concepts that Aboriginal people are not used to trade and commerce. Given the right incentives and opportunities we are as adept at business as anybody in the world.
But Europeans were slow to appreciate our skills and knowledge. When Captain Cook first came into contact with my direct descendents, the Gugu Yimmidhirr people at Cooktown, he wrote in his journal “Some part of their Bodys had been painted with red, and one of them had his upper lip and breast painted with Streakes of white, which he called Carbanda. Their features were far from being disagreeable; their Voices were soft and Tunable, and they could easily repeat any word after us, but neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said”.
Even Cook, who must have felt like he was on the planet Mars, recognised the nobility of our people, but he did not recognise the way we did business.
The 1860-1880s for the people of Cooktown and Cape York, was a period very similar to when the Romans, Vikings and Normans invaded England. But unlike the Britons, we had no experience of foreign, invading armies. We knew what raiding parties looked like. But these usually involved a couple of dozen warriors at most. Most of our wars occurred when wives were in short supply or when our lands were in drought, suffered natural catastrophes and we had to find new sources of food and supply far from our homelands.
So we suffered very badly when William Hann discovered gold at the Palmer River in 1872. 35,000 miners invaded our country in 1873 and they took 26,600 kilos of gold from our rivers by 1912.
The Palmer River Gold rush is widely regarded as the wildest, toughest, most ruthless gold rush in Australian history. Palmer made the southern gold rushes, the Eureka Stockade and the California gold rush look like a picnic. One of the reasons was because the gold was so accessible. Anyone with a pan could access the gold from our rivers and streams. It was a free-for-all in which only the toughest and most barbaric survived. There was widespread lynchings, battles between European and Chinese miners and my people were randomly killed, forced from their lands and tracked down by prospectors, vigilantes and police alike.
Just, as during times of invasion in England, monasteries were a safe haven for nobles, the saviours, for many of my people, were three German missionaries Fierl, Schwarz and Poland. They created a safe haven at Cape Bedford, and many of our people were protected from police, vigilantes and indiscriminate violence, and survived there from 1886 to 1942.
From 1886 to 1967 most of our people lived under some form of mission or State supervision. However I want to emphasise that throughout all of this period, Aboriginal families were extremely industrious. There are many stories to tell of this period. However it should be noted that Cape Bedford mission was self sufficient for most of its history, despite it being a very barren agricultural area, and all of its buildings and churches were created by Aboriginal labour. Similarly, after WWII, the entire town of Hopevale, and much of its infrastructure, was built by Aboriginal carpenters and family members.
This was our period of learning about and adjusting to the European economy. Many of our people ran their own small businesses. My father ran the Hopevale butcher shop and he was a master of the art. Furthermore he knew about a few more cuts of meat than the European butchers. You see if you look at Aboriginal xray paintings you will see that one of the things that is set out there is the way to butcher native animals so that every piece of meat is used. There is also a long tradition of who gets what cuts of meat, how they can be traded and who they can be traded to, and in return for what. These trades came naturally to our people. (See Appendix One)
The problem for many of our people was that during this long period of “protection” we could not be financially or economically independent. It may come as a surprise to many here to realise that even if we could build, trade, and earn good money from our businesses or our labour we were legally forbidden from accumulating capital and assets. No matter how talented you were, you could not enjoy the fruits of your labour. We were not allowed to own our own homes. My father had to write to the State protector of Aborigines in Queensland to make any withdrawals from his earnings or to purchase something as small as a boning knife.
Imagine if you as small business people had to write to the Minister before you could spend any money on your businesses! Imagine if all of your wages and earnings were with-held from you!
So I hope this gives you some insight into what drives Cape York elders, me and my brother Noel forward into economic development. We want to regain our freedom to trade and be entrepreneurs in our right. I hope this also helps you to understand why we are so concerned now in 2010 that our economic rights are again at risk by the Wild Rivers legislation in Queensland. Just as we are reaching a time when Indigenous entrepreneurship is coming to the fore, when our children are excelling at their studies, and people are free to trade and to build capital and resources, our whole capacity to create enterprise is threatened by environmental legislation which is just as pervasive and destructive in its effects as the Palmer River gold prospectors.
We do not fear real conservationists here. We are the original conservationists. We are simply against puritanical, anti-human ecologists. We fear that another regime will restrict our economic independence and will mean that the environmental gold of our rivers is only accessible through a poorly funded national parks service with token aboriginal rangers and businesses which are inevitably financed (albeit inadequately) by government.
When we formed Balkanu – the Aboriginal Cape York Development Corporation - , in 1997, our goal was to create an organisation that would be an incubator for Aboriginal businesses and would fast track Aboriginal economic development into a new era. That was our dream and we have stuck steadfastly to it.
There have been many, many challenges.
One of our primary goals was to acquire, for traditional owners, the lands that were lost over the past two hundred years. For those who are not familiar with the complex world of Aboriginal land ownership, our job was separate to, but complimentary to, the Cape York Land Council.
Above and beyond native title questions, which is the domain of the Land Council, we have worked with government and private land holders
• to develop Indigenous Land Use Agreements,
• to authenticate traditional land ownership,
• we have facilitated land tenure arrangements and
• most importantly, we have on some occasions managed to directly buy back lands in the commercial market place that are outside the jurisdiction of native title settlements on behalf of traditional owners. Most of our traditional land that is of commercial value has needed to be bought back via the commercial real estate market. So this on its own is a monumental task.
Just dealing with the land issues would have consumed any ordinary organisation. But you can imagine how important this work is to our people. We are acquiring access, protecting or buying back the lands that were held by our grandparents and great grand parents but stripped away from them without any fair renumeration or compensation. For the great great grand children and grand children this is a very important job.
A second area of our work is to acquire a good mix of large and small commercial operations that will create long term economic prosperity in the form of income, jobs, training and skill development for our people. In this area we have had some successes. Balkanu owns and manages the Cape York Digital Network that delivers world class broadband digital communications across the major regions of Cape York Peninsula. So we are the equivalent of Telstra for the sixteen Aboriginal communities of Cape York and we provide access to everything from wireless hotspots to community internet centres to videoconferencing to remote accounting and health consultations. Over the next few years we hope that CYDN will become a real commercial force on the Cape that helps our kids become real citizens of the 21st century.
We have also been working for more than a decade on several large infrastructure projects including the Mossman Gorge Gateway project that will create a visitor centre and business hub for our people as well as provide better facilities for the more that 600,000 people who visit the Gorge each year. At Wujal Wujal at the other end of the Daintree rainforest we have also worked very closely with the Aboriginal Council to create a similar but smaller gateway project to the sacred waterfall that is also very well known to many of the international and national visitors to our region.
I could mention many other large and medium sized projects that Balkanu has supported, advocated and developed but I want to now focus on something that is at the heart and soul of this conference and the heart and soul of Balkanu. When you consider the scale and scope of Balkanu’s operations you might think that small and micro business were something that might be an after thought for us. But I can assure you that is not the case.
As you all know, if there are not small, family businesses or even micro sized individual businesses in your community, you can have all the big developments you like, and they will never directly touch ordinary people’s lives, aspirations and day to day reality. That is why for us Aboriginal small and micro business owners are very much heroic, front and centre enterprises, that we want to get behind at every opportunity.
I want to mention three businesses today that are renowned in the cut-throat, competitive Cairns tourist marketplace. The first is the Kubirri Warra brothers Linc and Brandon Walker and their family at Cooya Beach. The second is the Walker Sisters tour of the Bloomfield Falls at Wujal Wujal. The third is Nugal-warra elder Willie Gordon’s remarkable Guurbi tours.
These three remarkable Aboriginal micro businesses are linked together in a partnership with Adventure North to create a BAMA way tour from Kuyu Kuyu (Cooya Beach) to Wungaar Wari (Hopevale/Cooktown). (See Appendix two) Every single day of the week, rain, hail or shine, tourists from all over Australia and the world, come to hear and experience the skills and understanding of our people through these micro-businesses and to learn about our 40,000 years of cultural knowledge. For many, it is the most important part of their trip to not only North Queensland, but Australia.
Linc and Brandon, the Walker Sisters and Willie Gordon are real ambassadors for our people that bring enormous benefits to our communities through their work. Without them the big infrastructure projects, the big commercial operations and even the acquisition of lands do not mean anything to our grass roots communities and people.
Of course there are many other small and micro Aboriginal businesses throughout the Cape. Our job at Balkanu is to create the framework and supporting infrastructure that enables them to multiply and flourish.
But small and micro-business development is very different and a very specialised sphere of operations. I became the inaugural Chairman of the ISX (www.isx.org.au) back in 2004, on top of my duties at Balkanu, to learn as much as I could about creating Aboriginal small and micro business throughout Australia. We were inspired by the model of social entrepreneurship in the UK and the USA and also, most particularly, by the great economist Muhammad Yunus. Yunus you will remember transformed aid and development work, through the Grameen Bank which makes commercial loans of as small as $A200 to Bengladeshi women. Yunus and Grameen transformed whole communities by creating hundreds of flourishing micro-businesses.
The situation here in Australia is very different. For a start the income scale and differentiation is different. Bengladesh does not have a welfare system like Australia’s that generally guarantees an income of roughly $20,000 per annum in family and individual payments. $200 is about 4 days payments from Centrelink. So building an asset base with $200 is not enough of an incentive for people to move from welfare to business. This incidentally is why many aid agencies prefer to invest their small development funds in third world countries and not Australia. They perceive they can do more good for more people outside of Australia than inside Aboriginal communities.
But though the scale is different, many of the principles of Yunus’s Grameen Bank do apply. Yes there are micro business entrepreneurs in every one of Cape York’s Aboriginal communities. Yes with the right incentives and infrastructure they can become successful entrepreneurs that do transform their own and their families lives. Yes loans with commercial pay back terms can make a difference. Yes these loans need to be tailored to the traditional and family structures of businesses.
So if this is the case, what do we now need to do to support small and micro businesses? Well, as everyone in this room knows, real organic small and micro businesses do not grow from economic textbooks. They do not grow up overnight. There is no homogenous formula for their development. They cannot be created from the top down. They evolve from the most elusive of human qualities: passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence.
Unfortunately we have too few business incubators that focus on individual passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence. We have lots that focus on business opportunities, projects, “good ideas”, production, financial management and marketing. We have endless numbers of government grants that will fund business plans.
But the great Italian small business guru Ernesto Sirolli (www.sirolli.com) says "A shift from strategic to responsive development can only occur, if we are capable of believing that people are intrinsically good and that the diversity, variety, and apparent randomness of their passions is like the chaotic yet ecologically sound life manifestations in an old-growth forest."
To carry on with Sirolli’s analogy, I can tell you that there are many people who are good at business who get lost in our renowned Cape York rainforest and who do not see the abundance of life and food and sustenance that are there. There are many people who are trained in formal economics who would not have recognised Willie Gordon or Linc and Brandon Walker or the Walker sisters as outstanding, commercially successful entrepreneurs.
There would have been very few banks who would understand their business products or their needs. There are also very few formal government economic schemes that will take the time and make the effort, over many years, to work closely with the human dimensions of small and micro business.
In addition we have to be very careful to nurture the human dimensions of small and micro businesses. You can provide money and infrastructure and business support; but if any of these things change the scale, change the passion or change the creativity of a small or micro business then sometimes the life can go out of the business.
So all of these things make Aboriginal small and micro business development a task that requires great patience and skill.
I am reminded of one of the outstanding Aboriginal business people and entrepreneurs of the Kimberley, Sammy Lovell. I met Sammy at the community trading floor of the ISX in Broome in May 2004. One of our colleagues asked one of small business developers from the Commonwealth government.: Would you provide a grant to someone who didn’t finish primary school, who used a passbook for his banking, who had no formal business plan for his business? The answer should have been: what other skills and opportunities does this person have to offer? But predictably the answer was: no! As such the most successful, internationally renowned, tourist operator of the Kimberley, Sammy Lovell and his family, would never have received any form of public small business support. Of course Sam and his family didn’t need it to be successful, but if we want to create more opportunities for Aboriginal entrepreneurs then these are the sorts of issues in Aboriginal small and micro business development we need to understand.
We continue to work away at these issues at the ISX and at Balkanu. Let me make these final concluding observations:
• There are no instant answers or solutions.
• You have to work for a long period. Five to ten years is, I think, the kind of period which is realistic to create one successful, independent small business or micro business.
• You have to be able to tailor capital, support and ideas to people and families. Above all, passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence should be what we set our small business development compass to, certainly not to text book ideas of what a successful business or plan looks like.
• Finally, to be successful there has to be Indigenous and European risk and commitment on the table. When these things are in the right balance then we have a strong possibility of small and micro business success.
Thank you for listening and I hope that we at Balkanu and the ISX can look forward to working alongside, and with, many of you in the future.
Australian Aboriginal culture is the world’s oldest, continuous, living culture. Our people have always been traders, artisans, environmental guardians, managers, builders and entrepreneurs.
When the Romans were conquering Britain in the year 43, when the Anglo Saxons took over in the year 410, when the Britons defeated the Anglo Saxons in 495, when the Vikings invaded in 793, when William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, when Henry the VIII (Eighth) was marrying and beheading his wives, when the English were fighting a Civil War in 1642, when the Industrial Revolution was revolutionising manufacturing, throughout all these years, and back a further 20-30,000 years before England even existed as a known habitable region, over all these millennia, the Aboriginal people of Cape York, and from around Australia, were travelling, trading and living prosperous lives.
Our Yolngu Aboriginal Colleagues in North East Arnhem land began the first commercial trade deals with China 400 years before European settlement in Australia, around the time of the European Renaissance. That commercial relationship continued, through the Maccassan fleet, every year until 1900. So set aside the common place concepts that Aboriginal people are not used to trade and commerce. Given the right incentives and opportunities we are as adept at business as anybody in the world.
But Europeans were slow to appreciate our skills and knowledge. When Captain Cook first came into contact with my direct descendents, the Gugu Yimmidhirr people at Cooktown, he wrote in his journal “Some part of their Bodys had been painted with red, and one of them had his upper lip and breast painted with Streakes of white, which he called Carbanda. Their features were far from being disagreeable; their Voices were soft and Tunable, and they could easily repeat any word after us, but neither us nor Tupia could understand one word they said”.
Even Cook, who must have felt like he was on the planet Mars, recognised the nobility of our people, but he did not recognise the way we did business.
The 1860-1880s for the people of Cooktown and Cape York, was a period very similar to when the Romans, Vikings and Normans invaded England. But unlike the Britons, we had no experience of foreign, invading armies. We knew what raiding parties looked like. But these usually involved a couple of dozen warriors at most. Most of our wars occurred when wives were in short supply or when our lands were in drought, suffered natural catastrophes and we had to find new sources of food and supply far from our homelands.
So we suffered very badly when William Hann discovered gold at the Palmer River in 1872. 35,000 miners invaded our country in 1873 and they took 26,600 kilos of gold from our rivers by 1912.
The Palmer River Gold rush is widely regarded as the wildest, toughest, most ruthless gold rush in Australian history. Palmer made the southern gold rushes, the Eureka Stockade and the California gold rush look like a picnic. One of the reasons was because the gold was so accessible. Anyone with a pan could access the gold from our rivers and streams. It was a free-for-all in which only the toughest and most barbaric survived. There was widespread lynchings, battles between European and Chinese miners and my people were randomly killed, forced from their lands and tracked down by prospectors, vigilantes and police alike.
Just, as during times of invasion in England, monasteries were a safe haven for nobles, the saviours, for many of my people, were three German missionaries Fierl, Schwarz and Poland. They created a safe haven at Cape Bedford, and many of our people were protected from police, vigilantes and indiscriminate violence, and survived there from 1886 to 1942.
From 1886 to 1967 most of our people lived under some form of mission or State supervision. However I want to emphasise that throughout all of this period, Aboriginal families were extremely industrious. There are many stories to tell of this period. However it should be noted that Cape Bedford mission was self sufficient for most of its history, despite it being a very barren agricultural area, and all of its buildings and churches were created by Aboriginal labour. Similarly, after WWII, the entire town of Hopevale, and much of its infrastructure, was built by Aboriginal carpenters and family members.
This was our period of learning about and adjusting to the European economy. Many of our people ran their own small businesses. My father ran the Hopevale butcher shop and he was a master of the art. Furthermore he knew about a few more cuts of meat than the European butchers. You see if you look at Aboriginal xray paintings you will see that one of the things that is set out there is the way to butcher native animals so that every piece of meat is used. There is also a long tradition of who gets what cuts of meat, how they can be traded and who they can be traded to, and in return for what. These trades came naturally to our people. (See Appendix One)
The problem for many of our people was that during this long period of “protection” we could not be financially or economically independent. It may come as a surprise to many here to realise that even if we could build, trade, and earn good money from our businesses or our labour we were legally forbidden from accumulating capital and assets. No matter how talented you were, you could not enjoy the fruits of your labour. We were not allowed to own our own homes. My father had to write to the State protector of Aborigines in Queensland to make any withdrawals from his earnings or to purchase something as small as a boning knife.
Imagine if you as small business people had to write to the Minister before you could spend any money on your businesses! Imagine if all of your wages and earnings were with-held from you!
So I hope this gives you some insight into what drives Cape York elders, me and my brother Noel forward into economic development. We want to regain our freedom to trade and be entrepreneurs in our right. I hope this also helps you to understand why we are so concerned now in 2010 that our economic rights are again at risk by the Wild Rivers legislation in Queensland. Just as we are reaching a time when Indigenous entrepreneurship is coming to the fore, when our children are excelling at their studies, and people are free to trade and to build capital and resources, our whole capacity to create enterprise is threatened by environmental legislation which is just as pervasive and destructive in its effects as the Palmer River gold prospectors.
We do not fear real conservationists here. We are the original conservationists. We are simply against puritanical, anti-human ecologists. We fear that another regime will restrict our economic independence and will mean that the environmental gold of our rivers is only accessible through a poorly funded national parks service with token aboriginal rangers and businesses which are inevitably financed (albeit inadequately) by government.
When we formed Balkanu – the Aboriginal Cape York Development Corporation - , in 1997, our goal was to create an organisation that would be an incubator for Aboriginal businesses and would fast track Aboriginal economic development into a new era. That was our dream and we have stuck steadfastly to it.
There have been many, many challenges.
One of our primary goals was to acquire, for traditional owners, the lands that were lost over the past two hundred years. For those who are not familiar with the complex world of Aboriginal land ownership, our job was separate to, but complimentary to, the Cape York Land Council.
Above and beyond native title questions, which is the domain of the Land Council, we have worked with government and private land holders
• to develop Indigenous Land Use Agreements,
• to authenticate traditional land ownership,
• we have facilitated land tenure arrangements and
• most importantly, we have on some occasions managed to directly buy back lands in the commercial market place that are outside the jurisdiction of native title settlements on behalf of traditional owners. Most of our traditional land that is of commercial value has needed to be bought back via the commercial real estate market. So this on its own is a monumental task.
Just dealing with the land issues would have consumed any ordinary organisation. But you can imagine how important this work is to our people. We are acquiring access, protecting or buying back the lands that were held by our grandparents and great grand parents but stripped away from them without any fair renumeration or compensation. For the great great grand children and grand children this is a very important job.
A second area of our work is to acquire a good mix of large and small commercial operations that will create long term economic prosperity in the form of income, jobs, training and skill development for our people. In this area we have had some successes. Balkanu owns and manages the Cape York Digital Network that delivers world class broadband digital communications across the major regions of Cape York Peninsula. So we are the equivalent of Telstra for the sixteen Aboriginal communities of Cape York and we provide access to everything from wireless hotspots to community internet centres to videoconferencing to remote accounting and health consultations. Over the next few years we hope that CYDN will become a real commercial force on the Cape that helps our kids become real citizens of the 21st century.
We have also been working for more than a decade on several large infrastructure projects including the Mossman Gorge Gateway project that will create a visitor centre and business hub for our people as well as provide better facilities for the more that 600,000 people who visit the Gorge each year. At Wujal Wujal at the other end of the Daintree rainforest we have also worked very closely with the Aboriginal Council to create a similar but smaller gateway project to the sacred waterfall that is also very well known to many of the international and national visitors to our region.
I could mention many other large and medium sized projects that Balkanu has supported, advocated and developed but I want to now focus on something that is at the heart and soul of this conference and the heart and soul of Balkanu. When you consider the scale and scope of Balkanu’s operations you might think that small and micro business were something that might be an after thought for us. But I can assure you that is not the case.
As you all know, if there are not small, family businesses or even micro sized individual businesses in your community, you can have all the big developments you like, and they will never directly touch ordinary people’s lives, aspirations and day to day reality. That is why for us Aboriginal small and micro business owners are very much heroic, front and centre enterprises, that we want to get behind at every opportunity.
I want to mention three businesses today that are renowned in the cut-throat, competitive Cairns tourist marketplace. The first is the Kubirri Warra brothers Linc and Brandon Walker and their family at Cooya Beach. The second is the Walker Sisters tour of the Bloomfield Falls at Wujal Wujal. The third is Nugal-warra elder Willie Gordon’s remarkable Guurbi tours.
These three remarkable Aboriginal micro businesses are linked together in a partnership with Adventure North to create a BAMA way tour from Kuyu Kuyu (Cooya Beach) to Wungaar Wari (Hopevale/Cooktown). (See Appendix two) Every single day of the week, rain, hail or shine, tourists from all over Australia and the world, come to hear and experience the skills and understanding of our people through these micro-businesses and to learn about our 40,000 years of cultural knowledge. For many, it is the most important part of their trip to not only North Queensland, but Australia.
Linc and Brandon, the Walker Sisters and Willie Gordon are real ambassadors for our people that bring enormous benefits to our communities through their work. Without them the big infrastructure projects, the big commercial operations and even the acquisition of lands do not mean anything to our grass roots communities and people.
Of course there are many other small and micro Aboriginal businesses throughout the Cape. Our job at Balkanu is to create the framework and supporting infrastructure that enables them to multiply and flourish.
But small and micro-business development is very different and a very specialised sphere of operations. I became the inaugural Chairman of the ISX (www.isx.org.au
The situation here in Australia is very different. For a start the income scale and differentiation is different. Bengladesh does not have a welfare system like Australia’s that generally guarantees an income of roughly $20,000 per annum in family and individual payments. $200 is about 4 days payments from Centrelink. So building an asset base with $200 is not enough of an incentive for people to move from welfare to business. This incidentally is why many aid agencies prefer to invest their small development funds in third world countries and not Australia. They perceive they can do more good for more people outside of Australia than inside Aboriginal communities.
But though the scale is different, many of the principles of Yunus’s Grameen Bank do apply. Yes there are micro business entrepreneurs in every one of Cape York’s Aboriginal communities. Yes with the right incentives and infrastructure they can become successful entrepreneurs that do transform their own and their families lives. Yes loans with commercial pay back terms can make a difference. Yes these loans need to be tailored to the traditional and family structures of businesses.
So if this is the case, what do we now need to do to support small and micro businesses? Well, as everyone in this room knows, real organic small and micro businesses do not grow from economic textbooks. They do not grow up overnight. There is no homogenous formula for their development. They cannot be created from the top down. They evolve from the most elusive of human qualities: passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence.
Unfortunately we have too few business incubators that focus on individual passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence. We have lots that focus on business opportunities, projects, “good ideas”, production, financial management and marketing. We have endless numbers of government grants that will fund business plans.
But the great Italian small business guru Ernesto Sirolli (www.sirolli.com) says "A shift from strategic to responsive development can only occur, if we are capable of believing that people are intrinsically good and that the diversity, variety, and apparent randomness of their passions is like the chaotic yet ecologically sound life manifestations in an old-growth forest."
To carry on with Sirolli’s analogy, I can tell you that there are many people who are good at business who get lost in our renowned Cape York rainforest and who do not see the abundance of life and food and sustenance that are there. There are many people who are trained in formal economics who would not have recognised Willie Gordon or Linc and Brandon Walker or the Walker sisters as outstanding, commercially successful entrepreneurs.
There would have been very few banks who would understand their business products or their needs. There are also very few formal government economic schemes that will take the time and make the effort, over many years, to work closely with the human dimensions of small and micro business.
In addition we have to be very careful to nurture the human dimensions of small and micro businesses. You can provide money and infrastructure and business support; but if any of these things change the scale, change the passion or change the creativity of a small or micro business then sometimes the life can go out of the business.
So all of these things make Aboriginal small and micro business development a task that requires great patience and skill.
I am reminded of one of the outstanding Aboriginal business people and entrepreneurs of the Kimberley, Sammy Lovell. I met Sammy at the community trading floor of the ISX in Broome in May 2004. One of our colleagues asked one of small business developers from the Commonwealth government.: Would you provide a grant to someone who didn’t finish primary school, who used a passbook for his banking, who had no formal business plan for his business? The answer should have been: what other skills and opportunities does this person have to offer? But predictably the answer was: no! As such the most successful, internationally renowned, tourist operator of the Kimberley, Sammy Lovell and his family, would never have received any form of public small business support. Of course Sam and his family didn’t need it to be successful, but if we want to create more opportunities for Aboriginal entrepreneurs then these are the sorts of issues in Aboriginal small and micro business development we need to understand.
We continue to work away at these issues at the ISX and at Balkanu. Let me make these final concluding observations:
• There are no instant answers or solutions.
• You have to work for a long period. Five to ten years is, I think, the kind of period which is realistic to create one successful, independent small business or micro business.
• You have to be able to tailor capital, support and ideas to people and families. Above all, passion, self motivation, creativity and intelligence should be what we set our small business development compass to, certainly not to text book ideas of what a successful business or plan looks like.
• Finally, to be successful there has to be Indigenous and European risk and commitment on the table. When these things are in the right balance then we have a strong possibility of small and micro business success.
Thank you for listening and I hope that we at Balkanu and the ISX can look forward to working alongside, and with, many of you in the future.
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