Tjanara Goreng Goreng
Tjanara Goreng Goreng is a Wakka Wakka Wulli Wulli traditional owner from Central Queensland who was born in the outback at Longreach in central western Queensland. She has spent a total of 40 years as a public servant at Commonwealth and state levels and in academia, and was one of the bright young people taken on by Charlie Perkins, the first Indigenous person to head up the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
In 2006, she was suspended and later, resigned, from her position in the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination in the Prime Minister’s Department after she turned whistleblower and helped expose the Howard government’s fraudulent claims leading up to the intervention (NT Emergency Response) into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.
Tjanara moved to academia, and is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Indigenous Studies at the University of Canberra while completing her PhD at the Australian National University. Tjanara is the founder of The Foundation for Indigenous Recovery and Development Australia, and is also a Member of the National Indigenous Research Knowledge's Network based at Queensland University of Technology.
She is a mother of one daughter, and has recently become a grandmother. In her spare time she meditates, paints; and plays, sings and composes music with her brothers. She lives in Canberra.
Tjanara Goreng Goreng with Julie Szego
Life was tough and poor as an Aboriginal kid in No Go, in remote Queensland. Dr Tjanara Goreng Goreng navigates the treacherous waters of her childhood, immersed in the legacy of 200 years of brutal treatment of her mother’s people that has left its suppurating scars deep in their psyche. Tjanara’s parents believed that education was the only way to break through systemic poverty, and found ways to send all seven children to school that were at once desperate and fraught. A disempowered people are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse – in her case, by the Catholic clergy.
A strong-willed, successful student and athlete, after graduating from university, the times were ripe. She found her place in the new era of federal policymaking: land rights and self-determination, initiatives on health, education, and social justice that were spearheaded by Charlie Perkins and his bright young people. Tjanara was at the nerve centre of Australia’s political life, shaping policy during the most exciting and innovative period in Australian politics.
But she struggles to escape the dark side that leads straight back to her heritage – her experiences as an Indigenous Australian: the abuse, the daily acts of cruel racism, the despairing plight of her people, the addictions to numb the pain. Rising to a management position in Social Policy within the Prime Minister’s Department, the ideological landscape has taken a tectonic turn under the Howard government. When fraudulent claims are cooked up to give the government an excuse to send the military into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, she courageously blows the whistle, and is sacked, charged and convicted for breaches of the Crimes Act relating to disclosure of confidential information; and is bankrupted for her actions.
Always the professional, engaged in numerous ways to help her people, her own damage leads her on a search for healing: from psychotherapy to Aboriginal knowledge to Indian meditation and spirituality.
Szego is captivated and captivates us with this extraordinary Australian whose irrepressible, playful wicked humour leaps off the pages, even as we glimpse the personal and communal pain and despair at times in a life that sweeps across the breadth of the land and its history.