From Grade 4 to Crown Law and Native title

Briefly back in Perth in the early 1990s with two small children, I took a couple of part-time jobs tutoring at my old Law School and doing historical research on native title claims. I got the research job through Dr Neville Green who had been my Grade 4 teacher and had tracked me down to help him on one of the books he was writing. He was the first person to introduce me to Aboriginal history and culture. He’d taught at the mission at Warburton Ranges before he came to my school, and was keen to share that experience with his class of eight year olds. He organised Aboriginal people to come and talk with us, showed us Aboriginal art and artefacts and told us the stories of what happened after European settlement. I remember I wrote a play about one of those stories and we produced it in class. Maybe that’s why he’d remembered me after all those years.