Life membership presentation to Aunty Barbara Nicholson

It is a great pleasure and a privilege to introduce the recipient of this award and commemorate her many achievements with you today. A Lifetime Membership, for those unfamiliar, is conferred by the South Coast Writers Centre Committee of Management to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to this organisation for many years, as our way of acknowledging that work and as a token of our appreciation of that member.

The South Coast Writers Centre is hugely fortunate to have Aunty Barb among our number, and I am personally so grateful for her guidance, which she is so generous in sharing; her tenacity in pursuit of what is right; and her great sense of humour as a fellow member of the Committee of Management.

It is fitting that at this AGM we are acknowledging the years of work she has given to this community, and to communities far beyond. The South Coast Writers Centre began in 1995 and Aunty Barb joined at the very first AGM, and has been a crucial part of this organisation ever since.

Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson is Wadi Wadi woman and highly respected Elder, a beloved mother and grandmother, and a member of the South Coast Writers Centre Committee of Management. She is also a poet, an activist, a published academic and university lecturer with connections to many universities up and down the coast, and the recipient of numerous awards in Aboriginal Education. She was born on her Country, Wadi Wadi land, and raised at Coomaditchie, and describes herself as someone who always dabbled a bit in writing.

After raising her own family, she then went on to higher education and graduated from the University of Newcastle with an Arts degree triple major in English Literature, Linguistics, and Philosophy. She has worked many years at UNSW and UOW, and in 2014 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by the University of Wollongong for her exceptional history with the institution and in recognition of her great works beyond it.

Aunty Barb is perhaps best known for her leadership of the Black Wallaby Project. She has been the project director of Ngana Barangarai for over a decade, and the chief editor for the acclaimed anthology collection, Dreaming Inside: Voices from Junee Correctional Centre.

This year celebrated the eleventh publication in that series, and not long ago Aunty Barb launched the inaugural publication from Dilwyinnia Women’s Correctional Centre titled Sistas Green Sea Dreaming as well.

In acknowledgement of her vital work in this project, the First Nations Australian Writers Network recently awarded Aunty Barb the significant honour of a Lifetime Achievement Award to First Nations Literature during her visit to Alice Springs some months ago. The Ngana Barangarai program has also received national, and now international recognition, and has been reported on by SBS and NITV, and there is more to come. With Aunty Barb’s guidance, the program is now reaching new correctional centres across Australia and soon will be bringing opportunities for self-expression and publication to even more inmates and young people at risk.

I feel Aunty Barb’s impressive achievements speak volumes about who she is as a person, and I would like especially to recognise the generosity and selflessness in her work. As creative people, many of us seek to share our work, and ourselves, with the rest of the world and hope for some recognition of what we have made. It takes a particular kind of person to seriously and consistently champion the creative work of others and expect nothing in return, as Aunty Barb does as an editor. She takes great pride in not only bringing this opportunity to inmates to share their stories but in protecting their honest, real voices in print: she doesn’t correct spelling, as some editors might, or try to polish the work to make it more palatable. She lets them speak for themselves, and lifts their voices up to be heard. She has my greatest respect for her integrity and commitment, and for this project that puts the dignity of incarcerated people at the heart of all she does.

I would now like to ask Dr Aunty Barbara Nicholson to please accept this Lifetime Membership with our very sincere thanks for all she has done for the South Coast Writers Centre.

Speech by SCWC Chair Samson Soulsby.