On Being Blackfella’s Young Fella: Is Being Aboriginal Enough?

This is a story of identity: how one man experienced exclusion and a sense of unworthiness in Australian society. It is the story of growing up - blackfella’s youngfella - and the struggle to assimilate into the dominant, white European society.

But the struggle, the search and the frustration leads to his uncovering a core question: is being Aboriginal enough? Enough to make sense of life, enough to identify as a proud and free member of an ancient people in a society that stole its land, denied its richness and crushed its sense of identity?

The search also involved fear and disquiet; and conflict for the author as both an Aboriginal person and a Christian priest. Can they co-exist, or are they mutually exclusive?

Thus, it is the ongoing story of his journey into a greater understanding of Aboriginality as a way of being human in this place; and along the way, a discovery that there is no such thing as Aboriginal spirituality, only Aboriginality…