My idea(s) of “Creating a Better World for the Common Good” have changed over the decades. 

Starting in the sixties, when Dylan famously sang ‘the times they are a changing,’ I wanted change and I wanted it immediately. Especially for my own people, Australian Aborigines, for until 1967 we were not even counted in the population census of Australia. 

At University, I fancied myself as a Marxist-Leninist. As a left-winger, I was so sure I was right and so I set out to educate those who, in my estimation, were ‘part of the problem’ (them), as opposed to ‘part of the solution’ (me). One of ‘them’ was my mother, a fine human being but who in my view, was hopelessly apolitical. 

After one of my political raves about the need for a revolutionary consciousness and emphatically expounding on the enemy, including those white Australians who had stolen Aboriginal land, my mother looked at me and said, “I don’t know what they teach you at University Lillian, but it certainly isn’t manners.” Her words were like a Zen slap in the face and to this day, they still resonate within me whenever I recall her wisdom. 

Wisdom in those days was ‘wishy-washy’ to me, which is why I leaned to the Black Militants, Mao and others as opposed to people like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi who spoke of love and peace. As a ‘revolutionary’ I loathed the language of love. But my resistance was soon to change as I set out in the seventies to work full time in Aboriginal education and struggled through the many policies, pamphlets and platitudes pertaining to the area. They all seemed to be about structure and systems sans spirit; about ‘the letter of the law’ as opposed to ‘the spirit of the law.’ I still wanted change but felt the need to go about it differently. 

I decided to look within at self rather than blaming those without. I realized that to change the world, I would first have to change myself. Today, in my sixties (age), I look back on the era of the Sixties where it all began for me. It’s been a wonderful journey of me being introduced to me—from within. It’s taken me from exteriority to interiority, to reflection as well as action. 

As Gandhi said, ‘let it begin with me’ and ‘be the change you want to see.' So today, I see myself as a contemplative in action wherein I can be in the world but not of it and still help create a better world.