The ID Muster was rolled out across Saibai, Thursday Island and Bamaga over five days in early November with much success. Led by Errol and Bernadette, the QIFVLS team engaged with 185 new contacts including some with multiple cross referrals.

QIFVLS hosted this event that brought together a range of associated organisations including (births, deaths and marriages and Meriba Omasker Kaziw Kazipa). It was therefore very satisfying for the team to see such a strong response from the Torres Strait Island communities and NPA region travelling to seek help with birth, death and marriage certificates, drivers and boating licences, and with traditional Ailan Kastom practices.

Charismatic, wise, caring, quirky. These are just some of the words used to describe Aunty Bino, an unmissable personality who has been woven into the QIFVLS tapestry since 2013. Our Communities Matter (OCM) spent time with Aunty B, as she is affectionately known, to find out a bit about her life’s journey.

OCM: Aunty Bino, where were you born and raised?

AB: I’m a Gungulu woman, from Mount Morgan in Central Queensland – inland from Rockhampton. It’s quite a big area, part of the Gungulu nation people. There’s east and west side, three of us groups have combined to form a kind of super group. Our neighbours on the western side of the Dawson have joined with us for our native title application.

OCM: And how’s that going?

AB: We didn’t get the determination back in June but we are in the process of appealing, which should happen early next year. We’re just waiting for all the respondents to get back to us. We’ve been given leeway to have input into the final appeal process and personally I think we’ll be successful.

OCM: So what was life like in your early years Auntie B?

AB: I was brought up Catholic in Mount Morgan, a little mining town. All our mates were Irish and our fathers were miners. We did a lot of work down on the properties – our neighbours were all pastoralists, cow-cockies. We would earn extra money cotton picking and they’d be droves of us mob working with our parents. We would set up tent cities and as I was one of the older girls so I was kind of like the camp steward, making sure they had a feed and fires were made. Dad had three brothers and there 10 or 12 children in those families and it would just be a community. Our mothers had young babies and they were swapping us around with the breast feeding and tag-teaming with the parenting. It was a good life, we weren’t rich but we had a lot of help from the nuns. It was just a small town and we didn’t know racism or any of that kind of thing.

OCM: You said you ended up having five kids of your own, starting when you were just 17. Through your twenties, were you working as well, or concentrating on being a mum?

AB: I’d first started work back when I was 15 at an orphanage not far from Rocky. It was the one that was mentioned in the Institutional Child Abuse Commission. The difference between me and the young women that were being abused was that mum and dad used to come down to pick me up every fortnight and I’d go home for the weekend with them. Looking back, I can see that abuse was happening. There was a lot of favouritism, but I have very fond memories, with great bear hugs from the nuns and the priests and they helped me out when I was having some issues with my husband later on.

I was a mum through my twenties when I was married to my first husband, who was a mine worker at the smelter. We had the five kids and were living on a pittance. I just had the desire to bring myself and my kids, and him, up to a better place in life. I got work at the meatworks outside of Rocky. We weren’t employed, we’d just go down there at 5:30am and sit under the tree and they’d pick you out of a pool of people to work for the day. I would do that for four or five years before I went back to do my Year 12. Achieving that kind of gave me self worth. I thought, I can do this.

We were making connections all over the the place at this time, and this one fellow from the CSIRO said to me that what they really needed was lab assistants. So I enrolled in a two year biology certificate before I swapped across to to social studies the next year. I broke up with my husband just after that and moved down to Brisbane with my family. I said ‘stuff it’ with these little certificates, I’m going to do a degree at Uni.

OCM: You were in your thirties when you finished that, where did your degree take you?

AB: Prisons. My first social work was at Boggo Road Women’s Prison. My office was an old sewing room they cleaned out for me right next to the real hard-arsed inmates. It was there that I helped set up ‘Sisters Inside’ with Debbie Kilroy (now Debbie Kilroy, OAM). The girls used to tease me by saying: “Who’s the most stupid here, you or us? It must be you, because you’re choosing to come here every day to be locked away”. From there I ended up in Head Office doing program development and policy stuff with my own little research team. I was out visiting prisons and training program officers, which included mainstream programs like anger management. Doing that, as well as the program delivery for a long time, burnt me out in the end.

OCM: And how did you become involved in QIFLVS?

AB: I left Corrections to go into Mental Health, based in Emerald before they sent me over to ‘Bilo’ in a little house on country out there. In that period I was also sent to Theodore to help with social work after the floods of 2011. Working in Mental Health is a high risk job and was starting to feeling burnt out again so decided to have a year’s hiatus. Towards the end of that period I had a chance meeting with one of the psychologists that I knew from QLD Health who encouraged me to get back into the workforce. A position came up with QIFVLS and I saw it as a way to work with my community. After I’d been there a while, I was talking to Barry Doyle and suggested that it was time for QIFVLS to reconsider the way it had been operating, to look at more of a wrap-around service that included case management – and to cut back on the legal jargon when talking to indigenous clients.

OCM: What are your hopes for the future at QIFLVS?

AB: At the moment there is sort of a two pronged approach between the case management and legal work. I would like to see more integration between the two, where they work as one. I would also hope to see more therapeutic intervention; improving our client’s wellbeing, helping them plan for the future, working out what they need right now to feel better and getting them closer to their values in life.

OCM: Personally, what does Aunty B like enjoy doing on her days off?

AB: I’m a weaver. Actually I do a lot of stuff. I sew, I cook and do community work – particularly with our kids at the moment as they try to manage the transition into high school.

OCM: Thank you Aunty Bino