Welcome, everyone, to 100 Climate Conversations at the Powerhouse museum. As always, I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the ancestral homelands upon which the Powerhouse museums are situated. We respect their Elders, ancestors and recognise this sovereignty was never ceded. To the Gadigal people whose land this talk is being recorded on, I acknowledge that the colonisation of this continent started here. I acknowledge your resistance and your resilience and that despite violent attempts, your cultures, peoples, your waters, your animals, your land is still here.

The series presents 100 visionary Australians that are taking positive action to respond to the most critical issue of our time, the climate crisis. Today is number 65 of 100 conversations happening every Friday, and we thank you for tuning in to the podcast every week and to our live audience for your ongoing support. We’re recording live today in the Boiler Hall of the Powerhouse museum. Before it was home to the museum, it was the Ultimo Power Station. Built in 1899 it supplied coal powered electricity to Sydney’s tram system right into the 1960s. So, in the context of this architectural artefact, we’re going to be shifting our focus forward to the innovations of the net zero revolution.

My name is Rachael Hocking and I’m a Warlpiri woman from the Tanami desert. Sitting next to me is Grace Vegesana, the climate and racial justice director at the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and a board director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Foundation for Young Australians and Sweltering Cities. She recently completed a double degree of environmental and climate science and law at Macquarie University, and she is passionate about empowering young people to forge systemic solutions to the climate crisis. And she actually graduated on Monday. So, please put your hands together for Grace Vegesana. Can you tell me about how your childhood growing up in Western Sydney shaped your awakening?

Yes. I grew up and was born in a rural mining town, copper and nickel mining, in the outskirts of Francistown in Botswana, which is in southern Africa. And so, I think growing up in that situation where you’re in such close proximity to energy and like mining combined with like ancestral ties to Southeast India and the coast is a pretty common story of migration to Western Sydney. Western Sydney has a huge heap of diversity. It has a region that speaks 200 languages. It’s the most diverse section of this continent in terms of cultural, linguistic and religious diversity.

And I think something that I really remember growing up in Western Sydney was really feeling the heat and really being confused when I would go from the train line, the really sweaty, sticky train line from Blacktown where I live, into the city or to the beach on like day trips with my family. And I remember being like, Wow, it’s literally ten degrees cooler in the city with the coastal breeze than it is in Western Sydney where I’m living every day. I’m going to school, playing in the parks, I’m seeing my friends and my family. And I remember noticing the different patterns of people who lived in Western Sydney versus people who lived in the city and how much whiter the city was and how little diversity there really was in areas where we were going to the beach.

And then I kind of grew up noticing all of these patterns, whether they were class differences, race differences, heat and temperature differences of like how the climate was actually changing over time. But it was when I was 14, when I was sitting in a year nine science class and I remember climate change being mentioned in literally one sentence of like ‘global warming is happening, it’s not very good, anyways’. And then we continued on. And I think that really stuck with me because I was like, what do you mean? What is global warming? This sounds like a terrible concept.

Was that the first time you’d heard it?

Yes, that was pretty much the first and only time that it was like explicitly said throughout my entire schooling curriculum. And so, that was a really stark moment to me where I was like, I think there’s more to it than this, surely. And throughout high school was kind of like encouraged by teachers to unpack some of the systems that I was sort of seeing and picking apart at.

I had really great teachers throughout high school and like in year 12 particularly who encouraged me to look at how colonisation impacts the world around us and Western Sydney and our lives. How migration patterns impact us, how different connections to communities do, how capitalism plays into the way that people experience life and live. And so, I felt really privileged to have teachers and the support system to challenge the one liner I received. And I think I was really glad to actually probably be the last generation of like school students to get through an entire full 18-year course of kindy to year 12 without climate change really being on the curriculum at all. And if it wasn’t on the curriculum, at least hearing about it in like outside the world in new cycles in the way that school strikes are playing out or kind of public education was happening. And so, I was really 14 when I was like, hmm, there’s something wrong.

Something’s going on. I want to break that down a little bit and what else was going on for you, because you obviously had this moment in a science class where what should have been the exact right environment to be unpacking and learning more about it ended up being a place that became a barrier to more learning. And that same time you’ve told me about these experiences throughout your childhood, growing up in Western Sydney, where you started to notice the soles of your shoes melting when you’re walking to school because of how hot bitumen is. So, you obviously had some questions. When did you start to formulate those questions and how important was that response from those teachers? I think you said humanities teachers in particular who responded to those questions.

I think a classic time was definitely the HSIE, humanities faculty that were like, there are kind of bigger forces at play. It’s not just about looking at the science, it’s actually about intersecting crises that we are experiencing in our world. Whether that’s like environment or social, economic crises. And so, the climate crisis very much comes together at the intersection of all of these different things. It’s not just a matter of fossil fuels and energy and solar panels. It’s very much about the different ways that our world interacts with each other.

A lot of the work that I do is actually moving us beyond the climate action framework of very technocratic, technology-based solutions of like we need more solar panels, we need them faster, we need to transition away from fossil fuels and coal and gas and oil. It’s actually about looking at the way that communities and particularly young people are actually being impacted by climate change in their lives right now, but in their lives and the world they inherit. And so, the work that we do for climate justice is the acknowledgement that the climate crisis is not fair or just, it’s an intersecting crisis of economic, of social, of environmental issues, of literally anything that you can think of in the world is really impacted by climate change.

That’s right. Let’s break that down in just a little bit. But before we get back, I want to find out when you first heard about the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and what were your steps to joining?

Yes, I remember when I was in year 12, I was searching through so many different ways of like, what is climate change? I think was the first thing I Googled because I was like, oh, people keep talking about this thing, but I actually don’t know what this is at all. And so I think, yeah, I did more and more searching around it. And the name that kind of kept popping up through all of my Google searches was the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. And I remember being like, that’s a very self-explanatory name. It does work in Australia, it does work with youth, it does work on the climate, it has a coalition. That makes sense. And so, I think this was just a name that I kept seeing and I was eventually like, I’ve got to sign up. I would love to actually learn something at the very least about this.

And explain what you mean by sign-up. So, what sort of things were they offering to people like yourselves?

I remember the first thing I saw was the about page, and it was talking about climate justice. And I was like, I have no idea what those words are, but it’s like a bit of an explainer of climate justice being about the people who are affected the worst have done the least to cause the problem. And I think something that was really different for me with the AYCC was that it did the work to actually educate young people on how the climate crisis isn’t just a really huge abstract concept that’s super far away. So, like worlds away. It’s a global issue.

It’s actually about the intentional and traceable clear steps and decisions that were made by people in power who have the influence to create change, to actually intentionally destroy Indigenous land everywhere, to burn fossil fuels for profit, to export, instead of like transitioning to renewable energy. Like it’s the really everyday intentional choices that are made. And I think, for me it was AYCC’s about page being like, this is what it is.

It’s not just an environmental issue, it’s not just about the trees in your backyard, it’s actually about the systems of play, whether that be colonisation and the ongoing impacts of mining on First Nations land. It’s about capitalism and the way that the people who are impacted the most are people who don’t have any option but to work in really harmful industries or who bear the brunt of like impacts because they live in areas that have been effectively sacrificed in order to reap economic wealth for the 1 per cent. It’s about the patriarchy and the way that energy jobs are valued over care jobs and community jobs. And so, I think it was that front page. I was like, oh, this feels like a hot take to me. And I realise now it’s probably not a hot take because I think the conversation has really shifted in that way.

But you know what, you made a point though –

At the time.

That’s right. And for what information you’d been allowed to consume as well as a young person. I guess I want to know like what impact that had on you reading something that it sounds like it sat with you, like it had some resonance, and what it is like to read something that actually starts to reflect the world that you think you know and that you see around you. What was that like and did it challenge your thinking at all?

It absolutely challenged my thinking, I think. I really think about the most transformational moment in life my climate journey was when I was 17 and I had just finished HSC. It was like literally the week I’d finished. And I went along to an AYCC New South Wales training camp, and I remember them talking in a climate science, like 101 workshop, about climate refugees and like how migration was occurring because of the way that climate change was affecting environments across the world and people having to forcibly move. And I remember the people running it were like someone from Sydney who’s white, and then some from a regional area who was also white. And I remember being like, this is such an abstract concept to them.

But I was like thinking of my family back in Botswana and like the forced desertification that happens and the way that animals and water actually migrates when the climate is changing, and weather patterns change and people can’t live on the places that they originally called home. I was thinking about my family in like the coast of India and the way that banana farming is like not actually super viable because the way that like environmental conditions have actually shifted across the country means that like our family’s ancestral farming practices aren’t actually relevant anymore.

And so, I think there [were] a lot of people who were talking about things in really abstract terms of like this happens to people so far away. We don’t know them. They’re not really in the periphery, but it’s important to acknowledge them. And I was sitting there, and I was like, no, I know these people, they’re my family, they’re my people. And so, I think that really challenged me and I was ready to not go back the next day for the second training camp. I was like, this is a very stark reality to be faced with and to put words to, as opposed to knowing the facts, but remaining ignorant to actually how to articulate that.

And so, I did go back the next day. I’m very glad that I did, because the next day was about solutions. And I think that really challenged me, this stuff isn’t just happening overseas. It’s not just like impacting the people overseas or it’s not just impacting these like faraway concepts of islands sinking or war and famine and forests being chopped down and deserts like losing water. It’s actually happening here. And I remember hearing about how Newcastle Coal Port was like one of the biggest coal ports in the world and was literally a two-hour drive from where we were at that point.

And it was the concept of Australia actually fuelling all of this damage that is happening all across the world. And our role in stopping that was something that I think really stuck with me and really transformed my ability to recognise that we really need to take our role in what we’re doing, in exporting, in burning fossil fuels and producing it in this endless cycle of destruction to make sure that actually we can stop those problems here right now. And it has such a huge global impact.

That’s it hey. I mean, you said something that’s, I think just so important for anyone who’s interested in talking about the climate crisis to remember, which is that it is the people who have the smallest impact, who feel the consequences of the climate crisis the hardest. It’s Indigenous peoples who live in small communities, often where we see our islands sinking in the Torres Strait, where we see the rising heat levels in the desert and the impact on the animals that once used to go to that area and then the flow on effect, you know, the impact on cultural practices as well for our people, so impacting community in so many ways.

So, what’s interesting about that is that you’ve named that, and it’s quite obvious that that’s what’s happening. But you were volunteering with AYCC when you founded the Western Sydney branch. That didn’t happen till 2017. The organisation was founded nearly 10 years before that. Why did it take so long to have a branch opened up in Western Sydney?

I think the short answer is that it’s hard. And it’s hard not just because the work is hard. I think it’s hard that there isn’t the investment and the sort of outcome that is driven out of doing work in Western Sydney or communities of colour, particularly. A lot of climate work is funded by philanthropy. So, everyday people giving money or major donors giving money or some form of money coming in so that you can actually deliver community education programs, so you can run training camps, so you can bring young people together.

And I think one of those things was there’s a huge lack of investment in the work of existing marginalised communities to actually train up and bring up and build up the organisers from those communities who bring with them lots of like vicarious trauma, intergenerational trauma, who might not be able to work the full week, who might need to take more time off. But I think that work is really, really important because you shouldn’t have organisers from other communities coming into communities that aren’t their own to be organising. And so, there was a really huge historical lack of investment in doing the work around, particularly like multicultural Indigenous communities. And I think that’s really, really shifted in the last like eight years. But definitely not shifting fast enough or at the scale that’s needed.

And when that branch opened in Western Sydney, did you at least start to notice a shift in the local conversation and how it was being handled, you know, not having, like you say, those kind of fly in, fly out people who are not from the community instructing the conversation?

Yes, I think it was really special to actually see a group of young people, Western Sydney, who were able to speak to their community. And I think the principle of organising is that your own community is actually the hardest to organise. It’s hardest to talk to your own people and deal with the accountability and the repercussions of speaking out. But I think that’s the most important way to actually reach out to the people who are trusted within the community, who actually have the reputation and the standing in a community to be able to actually have sway and influence. And that happens in communities of colour, particularly where there [are] cultural hierarchies of people who are Elders and older, are genuinely more like respected than young people.

And so, yes, these conversations were really starting to change when you saw that young people were standing up for like talking about climate change. We’re like having those really hard conversations. And I’m not one to like tout identity politics in any way, but I think you can see a really clear demographic difference in who AYCC and the climate movement was before the Western Sydney branch and after the Western Sydney branch. You really needed like young people of colour to stand up in very white spaces being like, this is the work that we really need to be doing and stepping up into leadership and putting themselves out there for others to actually see themselves in those roles and step up into leadership to follow them or to grow their bases in that way.

And to this day, Western Sydney is still the most diverse branch, I think it always will be. There’s like so many young people of colour who have really stepped up in that area, which is really exciting. But it’s like a really important thing to see in the conversations actually shifting of not just diversity on like a face value, but who that diversity can actually pull up and reach at the same time as doing the work.

Yes, you said something really interesting I think it resonates for me as a blackfella who works mostly with my communities, and that’s the accountability factor. And while that can make the work incredibly difficult because you know that if you mess up, if you maybe don’t mess up or if you make mistakes or you don’t necessarily go to the correct spokesperson for a particular group, then it will come back to you because it’s in your home. You know they speak to your parents, they know your family and it makes the work harder, but it also makes the outcomes stronger because people who go into communities where they don’t have to go home to people saying, ‘Hey, what was that about?’ can sleep at night. You know, they don’t have this feeling of I’m responsible to these people because they’re my family, they’re my community. But also, I live and breathe the same environment as them. And that accountability extends culturally as well. So, it’s like a superpower in a way, you know, once you figure out how to harness and what it looks like and not to be scared of it, it’s just incredible to see young mob really taking that power, I think.

I want to talk about Black Summer. So, during the Black Summer bushfires had a devastating impact obviously on quite a large part of the continent, but especially in Western Sydney. A bushfire warning went out through your area in Western Sydney and people were getting text messages mostly in English or only in English, and it was on their phone. So, I just wanted you to kind of talk about what that experience was like and how you saw the community coming together in the face of such a, I suppose, ill thought-out response.

I very clearly remember Black Summer like the summer of 2019 to 2020, and a third of greater Western Sydney burnt down during Black Summer, like during about an eight-month period, which is quite a big deal for two and a half million people that reside within Western Sydney.

I remember there was a lot of moments within that where I think the climate movement moved into a really extremist and alarmists like tone of like everything is burning down, like this is it. And it was like really missing the nuance of who is actually being left behind in these conversations. And I remember when my street was actually issued a ‘Prepare to Evacuate’ order by the SES. We just got this like very caps lock, very intense text from the SES being like everyone alert, prepare to evacuate. And we were like, what?

And I think for me, as a young person who can speak English, you can understand the context around weather changes and what’s happening when the sky is bright red and has been for months. I think that made sense. I was like, okay, this makes sense. But I knew that the demographic of my street, which includes lots of people who are refugees, lots of people who speak English as like a second or a third or a fourth language who don’t come from particularly highly educated backgrounds who have definitely never heard of climate change before Black Summer. That was a really alarming and terrifying thing to receive.

And I remember walking out onto my street and there was so many people gathered, like literally just on the road of our street, and they were just like, ‘What does this text mean?’ Like, I can’t actually read this. I don’t understand. What do we have to do?’ And I was like, ‘Okay, this is kind of what it means,’ like trying to communicate, I think around like seven languages. There was like seven different groups of people on that street and trying to communicate across them of like, this is what we need to do.

But I think it really made me realise that multicultural communities are really being left behind in the communications around disasters and as a bigger threat, climate change of like, not being brought along in the journey by government or institutions of this is what’s happening, this is how it impacts you, this is what you can do to stay safe or get out of the way or evacuate if you need to. And so, that was a really stark moment for me of realising that communities were just being left behind and it was happening in real time, and it actually was being counted in lives. It wasn’t being counted as some abstract thing, it was literally lives being lost through Black Summer.

And so, I think that was a really key turning moment for me of just how bad the problem actually really was. If there was a street in Blacktown being evacuated or prepared to be evacuated. Imagine actually having to go through with that and how many people would have just stayed in their homes because they couldn’t understand the evacuation order at all.

And that’s in 2019. And that’s the thing, I guess there’s still so much catching up for everyone else to do. But you can see it right in front of you. And you’ve already talked about why it’s so important to understand these intersections when we talk about responses to the climate crisis. I want to talk about some of the ways that the community has come together in spite of pretty poor government attempts. How have you seen trusted community establishments like places of faith and worship utilised in the community responses such as during the Black Summer?

When we talk about trusted community institutions, I mean like places of worship, places of like community significance, whether that’s like churches, mosques, temples or like community infrastructure places like community meeting spaces. And I think, that comes with a caveat that those aren’t necessarily trusted by everyone, and that’s okay. I think community spaces are like critical infrastructure when it comes to actually adapting to and surviving disasters, both in terms of connection of people who are connected to other people in their community can actually bring them along into those spaces and recognise if they need extra help or recognise if they need water or to be checked on or support actually getting there.

But the infrastructure within communities actually means that there’s a place for them to gather and to be safe. And I think we’re seeing like so many examples now of communities actually coming together in like the failures of government and institutions to actually deliver critical services during climate disasters. And I can think of two particular examples. One was like the huge Koori Mail response that happened in Lismore with the huge devastating floods that have happened over many years now in the northern rivers of New South Wales and like what the community has actually done to get boats out of like regular people, to rescue people. Of the ability for communities to be connected to each other and the wider community to actually respond where the government just is failing or the state government is just like not responding appropriately and not preparing the services that are needed.

And there’s also like the mutual aid pieces that exist during disasters. So particularly like the Sikh community during Black Summer, did a lot of the mutual aid pieces of like cooking food in like literally hundreds of thousands of meals in like Sikh gurdwaras, so, temples. And then would go and deliver them to like bushfire victims who are evacuating. So, they at least have like a meal to eat and were able to sustain themselves over a shorter period of time and doing the critical infrastructure pieces that are really needed that are often very, very forgotten during times of crisis.

And so, communities are really stepping up. And I think that’s the most important part of communities of colour in a lot of ways, is that they already know what it means to be a community. They know the heart of a community is connection and social capital with each other and maintaining the relationships and looking out for each other. And I think that’s something that government will probably never understand, is how to actually build that and foster that in the long term when we need it.

I think that’s just such a good point. I think, you know, just speaking back to that example from Bundjalung Country in the Northern Rivers. As you know, it’s still astounding to me as someone who’s a journalist, that it was not just an Aboriginal organisation, but a black media organisation, a newspaper, that led the response to the flooding around Lismore. And they came out with some pretty public stories about how poor government attempts were. Even when they did show up.

They had military personnel come to the site of the Koori Mail newspaper and my beautiful Bundjalung sisters were there and they were like, ‘All right, we need you out of this house over here. We’ve got a lot of mould over there. You need to help these fellows go clean up.’ And they were like, ‘Oh mould? That’s an OHS issue for us. We’re going to have to get it assessed before we can go in.’ And they were like, ‘If moulds an issue for you, why are you here at a flood zone? Like go home. It’s not very useful.’

And so, it was very interesting to me to see that even after that stuff was made public, how much the Koori Mail and other community organisations have still had to lead the response, you know, even after it’s been called out. And so, you’re right, you don’t have to teach us community because it’s ingrained. We’ve grown up in it. And also, it’s just it’s a responsibility. You’re there, you’re living there, and so if you don’t do it, your home’s gone, your country is gone.

I think it would be important to bring us back to how this kind of ties in with your work at AYCC. So, I guess just thinking about how you’ve brought in this amazing branch in Western Sydney, which you say is the deadliest branch in the country. How does a focus on racial and climate justice at the organisation create this framework for the wider community to work meaningfully with diverse communities?

Yes, I think there are really like three stand out periods of time that I think about in the journey to us getting to this point. I think it comes with like the flag that I think that AYCC has always been a bit of a pioneer in the climate space to actually try new things, to invest the money and the resourcing in the people and the time into doing the work that no one else is actually doing or prioritising.

And I think that was really shown to me through the 2019 federal election when we ran multilingual ads for the first time. And to this day they’re still – like multilingual ads are still the best performing ads we’ve ever run. Like in terms of views and reach per dollar, it is by far the best thing we’ve ever run. And so, we ran those in five different languages, like kind of explaining the civic education pieces of why it’s important to vote, how climate change connects to voting, and like the democratic process around voting, climate change, money in politics, fossil fuels. Kind of drawing those links together. And I think that was a really clear moment for me of like, it’s not just important because of community and reach, but it’s actually something that you can tangibly like look at and see the impact that it’s having. It’s not always like a qualitative measure, it’s a quantitative thing too. That this work is actually working and it’s really important to invest more into it.

And then I think, yes, 2019, 2020, Black summer bushfires, the clear threats and the clear people who were being left behind were already people who are marginalised and communities, but the people who were doing the response work were those who were either both marginalised in communities and have connection to community that were actually leading those responses. And that was in western Sydney, a lot of communities of colour and a lot of like community institutions for multicultural groups across society. And so, they were able to actually do the work that was really like being let down by other sort of government-led responses as well.

And then I think throughout 2020 there was like a lot of the Black Lives Matter protests that were sort of happening. But outside of even just like the protest, there was more public willingness to think about how race and other things intersected as well. And I think a clear one that came out of that was like a lot of the fights for land rights and a lot of the fights that Aboriginal people are leading and how that connects to climate change and what that actually looks like. And so, I think those conversations around climate racial justice really reached a kind of peak of people being like, what is environmental racism? How are people being impacted across society?

Like the things that I think a lot of people have been harping on in their communities for a very long time actually were able to be like, listened and turned into infographics, I guess, in a very digestible way. And so, I think that was a really key point of being like, well, we actually need to make sure that we’re bringing communities along through this work. Like it’s not just about educating young people, it’s about young people actually doing the work in the communities that they’re connected to and can uniquely reach to bring those people along too so that we’re actually filling in the gaps that historically have never been filled.

And so, I think that’s a really exciting point in time for actually creating the climate racial justice work. I think it’s taken a lot of work over a lot of people, but I think it’s – yes, the momentum has actually reached a point where we’re able to get the investment from the community, the willingness to listen, the willingness to actually platform it and do the work that’s needed across the entire climate movement to actually connect these dots together.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, it’s really interesting because I graduated high school in 2010 and we just didn’t have these yarns. You know, we talked about it when I was back home on country and Lajamanu because it was getting hotter, and we weren’t going mali or Kangaroo back in the same areas. But when you’re in inner city Melbourne, which is where I went to high school, these conversations weren’t happening, for me at least, in 2010. And now, more than a decade later, it feels like multiple generations have been born because the conversation has grown so much and a lot of it due to the just passion, the dedication of young people to say, ‘Hey, teach me properly, tell me what I need to know because this is my future.’

You were involved in the School Strike 4 Climate. You helped organise it in 2018. So, I just want to know what did that moment feel like seeing thousands of young people take to the streets and asking and begging for action on climate change?

Yes, it was crazy. Is effectively a summary. I remember like helping start the Sydney School Strike 4 Climate branch when I was 18 and we were literally just like preparing for like a small little action in Martin Place. We were like, there will be a couple hundred people. Like it won’t be anything too big. It’s kind of what we’ve run before. It’s all good. Like we’re expecting young people, we should take care of them. And then the trains just would not stop coming. People were pouring out of these trains into Martin Place. And we were like, there is literally 5,000 people here on the very first School Strike 4 Climate. It was actually insane to see.

It was so hot. I think it was like in the high 30s and it was like really like packed building, concrete jungle space. It was just like, blisteringly hot. I’ve never seen that many young people in my life at that point in one space, and everyone was really fired up. They had great signs. Like a really memorable one for me was this kid who had a skateboard and had made a protest sign out of his skateboard and was like holding it up. And I was like, you’ve nailed it. This is exactly what it’s meant to be.

Yeah, but I think that was really like a moment of capturing how much work and momentum had actually built up until that point in time of huge frustration within young people, a lack of education and the ability to access knowledge and other forms outside of school, the real willingness to want to do something about a problem that they’re inheriting and are living. And so, it was a really crazy moment to see that grow and grow and grow. And I think, it reached a point of like 1.1 million people in 2019 striking on a random Friday in September. And so, I think it’s like that momentum of frustration, of elements of hope, of what it could be, of wanting to do something, wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself. That was really special.

And I think the fire is still kind of there, even if it doesn’t look the same after Covid. But I think all those young people are so special in like wanting to actually step outside of their comfort zone, take a day off school, hang out in a really hot, heated space with 4,999 other people.

It was really beautiful to watch, you know, especially saying like younger mob from western parts of New South Wales, travelling some on the train for a whole day to come in for it. As we see, young mob becoming more passionate but also raising their voices on these important issues. It can be really tricky at the same time because not everyone’s families, the older generations, are welcoming these conversations in the home and it can make for some pretty, pretty hard conversations when you want to tell your parents or your grandparents about what you’re doing, but maybe they’re not quite there yet in their understanding of it. What do your family think about your work?

I think this is a very fun question because I think people are often surprised that my family are like quite hard right-wing people who actually have moved from being climate deniers into climate change is an act of God punishing the earth kind of energy. And I’m like, I’m not sure if that’s actually better or worse. If that’s progress or not, but it’s changed over the years. I think there is a lot of nuance to how can family and community actually respond to things like speaking out about climate change, I think is also changed over a longer period of time where climate change has become less of a partisan political issue and more of a, this is happening. What do we do about it? Kind of conversation.

But I think, for my family, there’s lots of nuance around like political experiences overseas and what that looks like with like oppressive governments and like militant governments that actually shut down protests or like a very violent or forced people away from homes. And so, I think my parents very much grew up in that sort of environment of not really understanding and not wanting to speak out about political sort of conversations and topics and kind of keep to themselves in a lot of ways.

But I also think that I inherited this probably from my grandparents and they like I would say that they were community organisers, even if that’s not the terminology that they would have used. I think they very much brought people together while also doing like farming and fishing and teaching, which I think are like core essential jobs within a community. And so, I think like the concept of feeding a community off the land and maintaining a sense of like self and connection through those processes is what makes a community organiser more so than how they might vote or how they see the world.

And so, I think it’s like interesting to look at the different like generations of values that exist within the work that we do around community organising and campaigning, climate change and how intergenerational values actually really change. But I think the short answer is it’s an interesting thing to have parents who definitely don’t support this work and they’re like, ‘When are you quitting a job?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m probably not.’ But I think that is like deeply rooted in care, which I think is like the fundamental piece that holds it all together.

Like, for example, when I was working really heavily on the Adani campaign, so like the stop Adani from opening the Carmichael coal basin up in central Queensland, my parents were really afraid that – they were hearing like a lot of news stories from India where like people who had Indian citizenships were being deported to go back overseas and a lot of those young people were being killed by both Adani and the government for speaking out against coal mining. And my parents were terrified. They were like, ‘This is going to happen, you’re going to get killed.’ And I was like, ‘I think I’ll be okay.’ And then they were like, ‘We’re cancelling like your overseas citizenship of India.’ So, there’s no like possibility of being deported back to any of those sort of extremist violence situations.

Which I think was like a hard thing to deal with in terms of losing a sense of your identity and your connection to a place, even though citizenships are very silly, fickle things, actually. But I think it came out of a place of care and love of actually recognising what harm can look like and to be able to actively speak out against something you also need to protect yourself against certain factors. And I think that’s what family does sometimes, which is really – a really interesting take on climate activism, I think from my parents.

I think so. Yes, I mean, thank you for sharing so much. I think it’s very generous of you to give so much of your personal story in this space. And I do think that when you think about families and how they function and maybe not always being on the same page about things, being able to identify that care is core to the work that you do, right? Because if you can’t identify or humanise that person in your community, then it’s going to make it a lot more difficult.

What’s really beautiful is just to see this generosity from the younger generations to their parents and grandparents for understanding how difficult it has been for them, especially as people of colour, as people who have experienced extreme racism throughout their lifetimes and not had maybe the same opportunities to come to this understanding in a safe way as well, because that fear is real, that fear of governments is very real. So, I guess do you have any advice for young people about how they might approach conversations with their families on topics that they don’t agree on, especially around climate?

Yes, I think there’s a lot to do around maintaining the open mindedness of meeting people where they’re at. I think, yes, you’re absolutely right. I think there’s so much in how people have been able to access opportunities to actually learn and grow. And I think as young people, it’s really easy to be like, ‘You’re old, you caused the problem, like your generation is to blame.’

But I don’t think that’s actually true. I think something that is true as the alternative is actually that not all people in that generation were actually thriving or making money off burning huge amounts of fossil fuels in the same way that’s true today and now. And so, there’s a lot of empathy that goes into talking to older generations of actually you need to position yourself in a way that’s like willing to be challenged and held accountable and be wrong if you need to be wrong. That’s really important in bringing them along, but also like kind of doing the work to create your own community outside of that.

I think community for people of colour isn’t always like this dreamy utopian, oh, we love each other and support each other and we’re able to be our full self and able to like, be whoever we want and follow our dreams. I don’t think that’s always true. It’s about recognising that you’re going to get some things out of the community that you already have and you’re born into the circumstances that you have, but then also finding the community outside of that, whether that’s with other young people, whether that’s with people in your local area, whether that’s like taking action together for something that you believe in as a common thread.

I think that’s like my biggest piece of advice is like, really find your own community within other young people and people with similar lived experiences because you’re going to have a very different opinion to your parents most of the time, and that’s okay. But sometimes you just need to have dinner with someone who you can rant to and have that reciprocated.

Yes, that’s right. And then you don’t take that home, you know? Resentment.

Yes.

So, just to wrap up for you in 10 years time – and look, these questions can feel very airy and up there. So, feel free to ground this whichever way seems relevant to you in your work right now. But what is one measure, not the measure, but one measure of whether governments and communities are responding meaningfully to this current moment in the climate crisis?

I think if I had to pick one measure of like a metric of, we’re doing it or not, I think it would be what level of fossil fuels we’re still extracting and using out of sacred Aboriginal land. I think that’s a really key piece. I think – this has been a really bad week for the climate actually. If you’re listening in the future to this podcast, this week in May 2023, it’s just been a not a very good one. But I think you’re seeing really intentional and trackable decisions that are being made by the fossil fuel industry and enabled by government policy under what theoretically was meant to be a climate election less than a year ago that is enabling the opening of new coal mines under a safeguard mechanism that was meant to be the cornerstone of climate policy to take us into the next 40 years.

You’re seeing on Wednesday, this past week on May the 3rd, the NT government opening up fracking in the Beetaloo Basin, which is just like it’s bad on quite literally any front that you actually look at it, whether it’s like economic, social, community health, Country, water, land, literally anything. And you’re seeing these decisions being made quite actively and proactively, actually without the accountability, without the transparency, without the opportunity to challenge.

And I think a really key thing that I hope to see in 10 years is that we don’t do those things anymore. And I think that will be the real key measure of like whether or not we actually have committed to taking the critical decades seriously or not, whether we have actually implemented governments in place that want to change things up, whether we have been able to create the movements and the social license for governments to challenge things like state capture, where the fossil fuel industry provides like a revolving door of jobs, from government to industry, from government to industry.

And then if we take a step away from reality and we put on what I like to call speculative, imaginative, excited caps, you know, when we start to think about futures that we don’t just imagine for our communities, but we hope for, what do you see?

I think I always really struggle with this. I think I really pride young people on being like the dreamers and the visionaries of communities. I think there’s naivety in that and I think that’s a special thing to have. But I think something that would be really lovely is like people actually be able to thrive and have the choice of what their life looks like. Like they’re not put into sort of defined categories of, this is what your life will look like because you live in this certain area, or this is what the path that set out for you by so many institutional decisions that have [been] made outside of your control look like. And so, I think that piece around like self-determination for young people and for communities that are already like marginalised or experiencing the impacts of the climate crisis is a really key thing that I think will actually bring joy and help us thrive in a climate resilient world.

I really like that answer. Thank you so much, Grace. It’s been a pleasure. Could everyone please put your hands together for Grace? To follow the program online you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to visit the 100 Climate Conversations exhibition or join us for a live recording go to 100climateconversations.com. This is a significant new project for the museum and records of the conversation are going to form a new climate change archive preserved for future generations in the Powerhouse collection of over 500,000 objects that tell the stories of our time. It is particularly important to First Nations peoples to preserve conversations like this, building on the oral histories and traditions of passing down our knowledges, sciences and innovations which we know allowed our Countries to thrive for tens of thousands of years.