We recently caught up with Senator Patrick Dodson who received the 2008 Sydney Peace Prize. He sat down with us to discuss the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia and the need for honesty and truth in creating a better society.

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In this slice of his 2008 lecture, Dodson focuses on the need for change in Australia through a “new Australian dialogue.” Delivered during the global financial crisis, Dodson’s lecture is particularly relevant now, considering the challenges our world is facing. So, sit back and listen to the extraordinary Pat Dodson.

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Patrick Dodson looks intently into the lens, his brown eyes focused as they peer over a pair of spectacles. Camera lights hit his beard, giving each strand its own tone of grey. Unchanging, however, are the iconic red, black and yellow colours around his wide-brimmed hat.

On a shelf in his parliamentary office is a biography, Paddy’s Road, written more than a decade ago. The book’s cover is black and white, save for the cotton band and its colours of the Aboriginal flag. Senator Dodson was Australia’s first Aboriginal Catholic priest and then “the father of reconciliation”, thanks to his chairmanship of the former Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.

He has been in the public eye for more than a quarter of a century, but the 68-year-old novice frontbencher never imagined he would hold public office. “Not in my wildest dreams,” he says about an hour before his first speech.

I’ve been so used to screaming from the outside of the Parliament or trying to lobby ministers to get their ear on some matter.

This afternoon, the lobbying is being done from Australia’s Senate chamber. The latest version of the inaugural address is drenched in yellow highlighter and laid out on his thinly-populated desk. I immediately notice the first words.

PHOTO: Senator Dodson’s inaugural address is drenched in yellow highlighter. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

Ngaji mingan, Mr President (How are you Mr President?)

Gala mabu ngangan (I am good)

Janu buru Rubibi. Yawurugun (I am from Broome)

Ngayu nilawal Djagun (My name is Djagun)

Ngayu Banaga wamba (I am a Banaga man)

The opening will be in Yawuru and Senate President (equivalent to the Lower House’s Speaker) Stephen Parry will also be speaking the language of the Kimberley region traditional owners. “I just walked up to him in the corridor and said: ‘I’d like, if you wouldn’t mind, if you respond in Yawuru to a couple of things that I’ll say to you in Yawuru’,” the senator for Western Australia recounts. “And he said: ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be interested in that, but you might have to give me some coaching.’ “So I said: ‘Well that’s fine, we’ll organise that.’ “That’s the spirit that a lot of Australians don’t see about this place.

Unfortunately we perform, I think, under-par when it comes to Question Time and that’s what most Australians see.

PHOTO: Supporters from all corners of the continent enter Senator Dodson’s office. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

PHOTO: Pat Dodson’s brother was 2009 Australian of the Year. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

As it creeps towards 5:00pm, more and more supporters, from all corners of the continent, enter the office. One is Mick Gooda — one of two royal commissioners investigating the Northern Territory’s scandal-saturated youth justice system. Mr Gooda has become a royal commissioner 25 years after Senator Dodson was one. Then, he was probing Aboriginal deaths in custody. Sadly, problems inside prisons persist and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people encounter justice systems far too often. And you only had to glance at the office coffee table to see that. “Race Riot”, The West Australian’s Wednesday front page said, after a protest over the death of an Aboriginal teenager in Kalgoorlie turned violent.

Senator Dodson emerges from his private office after one final run-through.

He shakes hands with his brother Mick — 2009 Australian of the year and former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner — then walks to the chamber.

Apprehensive. You’re never comfortable when you walk into that Senate,” he says.

At 5:01pm, Senator Dodson begins in Yawuru before acknowledging local Ngambri and Ngunnuwal peoples, elders and “emerging leaders”.

PHOTO: Pat Dodson makes his maiden speech in the Senate. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)

PHOTO: Senator Dodson’s speech opening is in Yawuru. (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)

On the left side of his jacket is a badge featuring a red ‘R’ — the logo representing the Indigenous constitutional recognition campaign. The badge nearly did not make it — it seemed broken just minutes ago — although the oratory would have compensated for any absent accessory. Senator Dodson says constitutional change is needed to overcome a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale”, as William Edward Hanley Stanner once described Australia’s neglect of its first peoples and their history.

Senator Dodson, one of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s closest advisors on Indigenous affairs, talks of “the need for meaningful discussions with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on a treaty or treaties”. He acknowledges sovereignty is something “many Aboriginal people argue has never been ceded or surrendered”.

Some of Senator Dodson’s new Upper House colleagues hold constitutional recognition in low regard. Some also want to dilute sections of the Racial Discrimination Act. Some though have been elected on platforms which I will undoubtedly find challenging,” he says. But he warns them against taking Australia’s statue books backwards, in the direction of bygone laws that “were genocidal in intent, application and consequence”.

“Such views and laws led to the horrors of Soweto and Robben Island and even the hate crimes of Nazi Germany,” he says. “These laws and regulations cannot be permitted to emerge once more in our precious democracy. Senator Dodson hopes, with a record number of his Aboriginal brothers and sisters on Capital Hill, Australia’s race hate laws will remain intact.

Finishing his speech, Senator Dodson magnetically pulls senators towards him from every direction in the chamber. Malarndirri McCarthy — Labor’s other Aboriginal senator — is among the first to congratulate him. Others filter through.

But one stands out. Her smile is beaming. Pauline Hanson extends her hand to Senator Dodson. We do not know what they said, if anything. But the Queensland senator’s mere presence in the chamber for this Aboriginal champion’s first speech might be a step towards the recognition and reconciliation he wants to see between black and white Australia.

This article, written by Dan Conifer, first appeared on ABC News on September 2nd, 2016.

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Lamenting that the situation has deteriorated since the landmark royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991, Professor Dodson has called for a formal engagement between Indigenous Australia and the Parliament on a new approach in an impassioned speech to mark the 25th anniversary of the report:

Accepting the status quo permits the criminal justice system to continue to suck us up like a vacuum cleaner and deposit us like waste in custodial institutions. We need a smarter form of justice that takes us beyond a narrow-eyed focus on punishment and penalties, to look more broadly at a vision of justice as a coherent, integrated whole.

Professor Dodson was one of the commissioners who investigated 99 Aboriginal deaths in custody between 1980 and 1989 and made 339 recommendations. Since the report was tabled in Parliament in May 1991, the rate at which Indigenous people are imprisoned has more than doubled, raising questions about how effectively the recommendations have been implemented:

Certainly, one has to wonder what happened to the principle of imprisonment as last resort and the 29 recommendations relating to this issue.

Professor Dodson, who is set to become a Labor senator next month. He said mandatory sentencing, imprisonment for fine defaults, “paperless” arrest laws, tough bail and parole conditions and punitive sentencing regimes had all contributed to high incarceration rates, along with funding cuts to frontline legal services and inadequate resourcing for much needed diversionary programs. This suggests that legislators in some jurisdictions have not learnt from the past, and are still intent on arresting their way out Indigenous disadvantage.

Professor Dodson cited the “devastating” case of 22-year-old Ms Dhu, who died in the Port Hedland lock-up in 2014, but said her story “could have been plucked at random from almost any moment in the modern story of Aboriginal injustice”.

Ms Dhu died after she was held at South Hedland police station in WA. Photo: ABC News

For our communities, the storyline is all too familiar: the minor offence; the innocuous behaviour; the unnecessary detention; the failure to uphold the duty of care; the lack of respect for human dignity; the lonely death; the grief, loss and pain of the family.

A quarter of century after the report, Indigenous people were more likely to come to the attention of police, more likely to be arrested and charged and more likely to go to jail, he said. “The statistics speak for themselves and the cold hard facts remain an indictment on all of us,” he said.

In the past decade, the incarceration rate for Indigenous men had more than doubled; Indigenous youths now comprised more than 50 per cent of juveniles in detention; and, for Indigenous women, the rate of imprisonment was accelerating even faster – a 74 per cent increase in the past 15 years.

If we are to disrupt current trends, we must invest in rebuilding the capacity of families and communities to deal with the social problems that contribute to these appalling indicators.

Professor Dodson stressed the need to develop preventative programs that engage the community in winding back “the ravages of drug and alcohol abuse, the scourge of family violence and welfare dependency”. “We will not be liberated from the tyranny of the criminal justice system unless we acknowledge the problems in our own communities and take responsibility for the hurt we inflict and cause to each other.”

Professor Dodson appealed to governments to embrace the royal commission’s call for a response based on a philosophy of empowerment. “The Australian Parliament needs to be more open to the idea of engaging in a formal way with Indigenous people on matters that affect our social, cultural and economic interests as well as our political status within the nation state,” he said. Professor Dodson said he hoped to play a constructive role in advancing solutions in his new role as a senator.

This article by Michael Gordon appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on April 13, 2016

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All of Australia has since got a look at Patrick Dodson, the bloke with the waist-length beard and the hat with its band of black, yellow and red, who has spent much of his life working for a better deal for Australia’s First People. We’re about to see more of him, for he’s Labor’s new senator for Western Australia. It’s a bit of a surprise to those who’ve known him for a while.

Politicians tend to be a bit tentative,” he told me a few years ago during a long yarning session. “They see life in terms of three-year brackets, not in terms of history.”

Pat Dodson is known as the Father of Reconciliation. Photo: Peter Eve / Yothu Yindi Foundatio

Paddy Dodson, however, has always been capable of surprising, and at 68, he might be able to teach politicians a bit about seeing things in longer time frames.

Those curious boarding-school kids way back in the 1960s learned pretty quickly that the first Aboriginal student at their school was much more than they imagined. He didn’t know what a bread plate was, or a butter knife, but life had already thrown bigger and harder lessons at him. Born in Broome to an Irish-Australian father, Snowy Dodson, and an Indigenous mother, Patricia, his family had fled across state borders to Katherine, in the Northern Territory, when Pat was a two-year-old baby.

Pat Dodson will become Labor’s Senate candidate for Western Australia. Photo: Andrew Meares

The hounding laws of Western Australia had become too much. Even love was a crime. Snowy had been jailed for 18 months, years before, for “cohabiting with a native woman”, Pat’s mother. Pat had to grow up fast. Aged 13, he and his brothers and sisters – seven of them altogether – were orphaned. Their father died first, and then their mother, three months later. Pat and his brother Mick, who was aged 10, were in danger of becoming “stolen children”. Their aunt and uncle came and collected the children and took them to Darwin on the back of their Chevy truck.

“The protector of native affairs in the Northern Territory, a fella called Harry Giese, was poised to send me to one of the Catholic Missions,” Pat told me.

“Unfortunately the church, as often happens, couldn’t find the necessary resource to send me over the Strait (from Darwin to the Garden Point Mission on Melville Island) as the boat that was supposed to take me had sunk.” The Dodson children’s aunt and uncle, both of whom knew firsthand about life on missions, battled the authorities in and out of court to keep the little family out of the clutches of authority.

Chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Pat Dodson lights a candle with former prime minster Howard at a luncheon in the Great Hall of Parliament House to mark the start of Reconciliation week. Photo: Mike Bowers

Pat and Mick, however, and a brother and sister, Patricia and Jacko, were declared “wards of the state”, but in the care of family, though they were split up. Eventually, a couple of priests from the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart stepped in and decided to help the orphaned Pat and Mick to get as far away from the Northern Territory as possible. They arranged scholarships for Pat (and later Mick) to fly south, to Hamilton in far-west Victoria, to board at Monivae College, run by the MSCs.

And so, in the early 1960s, an Aboriginal boy found himself in an alien world, trying to hide in his bed down the end of a dormitory as 200 boys jockeyed to get a look at the most exotic student they could imagine. Paddy, as he quickly became known, didn’t hide away long. He emerged as a hard-studying and quietly powerful character, aware of high expectations thrust upon him at a time when no one knew anything about Indigenous affairs.

“There was always the search as to who was going to be the ‘first’ of this and the ‘first’ of that as if that was going to be the only ever achievement in this country,” he remembered.

He won the diligence prize five out of the six years he was at Monivae, became a middle-school prefect before Australia had even held a referendum concerning recognition of Indigenous Australians and formed tight friendships that endured.

By the time I arrived as a student at Monivae in 1967, Pat Dodson was captain of the school, captain of the all-but unbeatable First XVII and Adjutant of the Cadet Corps. He was an undisputed leader.

Pat and Mick (another leader, who became vice-captain and a House Captain) had no money. It didn’t matter. A fellow named Bill Walsh – the father of Phil Walsh, who became coach of the Adelaide Football Club and who was killed in tragic circumstances last year – ran Thompson’s Department Store in Hamilton. He simply provided the Dodson boys with uniforms, footy boots, casual outfits and sports gear. Other parents took the boys to their farms for holidays. Everyone knew the Dodson boys would make a name for themselves. But we couldn’t have guessed that Pat would become known as the Father of Reconciliation and win the Sydney Peace Prize, or that Mick would become Australian of the Year, and much, much else.

From little things….

This article, written by Tony Wright, first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 5th, 2016

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