Open Discussion with Participants

Tim Keogh (Chair)

Tim: Well, let’s see now whether your words have stimulated some thoughts and questions amongst the panelists, first of all, and then we’ll go to the broader group of participants. So would any of the panelists like to firstly – or any of the presenters – like to firstly comment on anything that Eve has brought up.

Eve: I would like Kenny to answer what I’ve asked about language – some time.

Kenny: Thank you for that.  We actually have language in two forms. The first language is ceremony language, that actually criss-crosses over all language groups. That language was kind of given. It was given but it also has powers that are associated with it. It’s the language of the Creator. Then we have a second language which is the language that we all speak within our tribal groups. This is why language is so important. Because it actually defines you to a particular area. Like the X boundary, or the Y boundary, or the Z boundary. However, there’s the ceremony language that actually criss-crosses all over these different language groups. And once upon a time it did it all the way down south and east and west, all of that. It actually connected everyone, when everyone participated in ceremony. It actually allowed people to come together and speak the ceremony language. And it’s only spoken during ceremony, and it’s just left there to re-visit.  Just like when you go to a church and you hear certain words being uttered in church, and it’s the only time they are uttered and it’s left there. It’s the same as those kinds of wording with power of the god or the power of the Creator attached to it. And it’s respected in that way as well. So that’s why language is so important in regard to not only your boundary, and what’s on your mother’s side or your father’s side. You could have two completely different boundaries, but you have a role to play as a king on one side and a peasant on the other side. So we all have that role, being a boss or something and also being a worker or something. So a language allows us to understand all of that. So that’s why it is so important – a language defining meaning for things to be understood. Without that, we tend to flounder and have, I suppose, a surface understanding of what we’re trying to get our head around.

Language with its other cultures with its other constructs is what we need to understand as well.  Like I could use the word ‘alcohol’ and ‘marijuana’ and all that, They actually come from another culture that actually has set up principles and given to them in a form of recreational use or ceremonial purposes, and only used for those purposes. And it had rules. And then, when we mix it all up, without those rules, this is where we get into trouble. You know, like alcohol itself, came to Australia, but we don’t know the full story. We don’t know the actual true meaning of what is it, and what was it used for, what purpose. Because the language hasn’t been taught.

So look, Eve, language is very important in those two aspects.  We have two forms – the actual ceremony form, and the everyday spoken language form.

Tim: Did that help your question, Eve?

Eve: Those who have lost the language. It is so important because it is part of one’s identity. Michelle has YortaYorta language, and a belonging there. And if you have lost your language, as well as everything else, it is disastrous. I wondered about your feeling about educating the young, sending them south, and sending them north, and mixing the two together – what you thought about that?

Kenny: Thank you very much for that. Reinventing and revisiting the language is actually fantastic.  In fact, the early missionary days, they actually captured the language in its most Shakespearean form. So realistically it’s captivated in that language that allows us to revisit the language. So the beautiful work that was done by fellow Australians in regard to forming the alphabet, creating the actual vowels and sounds, and making it a written text, is great work that was done.  Because if you look at the X language, and all other languages from early settlement and movement, they captured the languages in its most Shakespearean form. I think the fantastic work that they have done, which allows us the privilege to reconnect …

Eve: So the Central Australian Choir – I saw it again, for the third time – singing the songs and hymns, the Arrernte translations to Germany!

Kenny: If you look at the translations from Hebrew to Germany, and German to Arrernte. Wow! That just incredible!  We’ve got to marvel at the people who did that kind of work without the modern day technology. It’s incredible work.

Now, with students who go away to boarding and all that – I think going away to boarding allows one to be a part of the actual Western world from an educational perspective. What I mean by that is that it allows for a young person to be part of family groups that are just like farmers, and part of their dinner table conversation is “OK, we need to get up early tomorrow and get the cows ready and into the shed for milking”.  Right, that’s one form of hunting-and-gathering. And then you’ve got a second form, a family group, where they say “OK, this weekend we’ve got a stocktake happening. We need all members’ hands on deck to ensure that we’ve got the stocks organised, and the old stock moved out, or thrown away, or whatever”.  So that’s another form of our economy, that selling the produce.  A third form of family group, sitting around a kitchen table, after having dinner, the father says “OK, after dinner we are going to have Uncle So-and-so come around, and give us an update on our portfolios”.  That’s three different ways of hunting-and-gathering in the mainstream, producing something from the land, and actually selling something, the produce from the land, making money, but then putting money to work.  

It was absolutely mind-blowing for me to experience that as a young person coming from a remote community, and only understanding the civilisation that exists on remote communities in Alice Springs, let alone flying into Adelaide for the first time on TAA (Trans Australia Airlines).  That’s going back, isn’t it! – TAA.  Anyway, coming in and seeing all the farmland, to seeing buildings, lights, cars, and then people.  The only way I could describe what I was looking at – because this is where my language takes one – in our language we have only “one, two, and many”. That’s it.  The only way I could describe what I was looking at – because this is where my language took me – was that “people are like ants”. Because ants fly, insects are the only things that we see in large volumes. And to see people like that, houses like that, and cars like that, was just mind-blowing!

And I think that kind of scenario still happens for some people.

Tim: It happens in reverse for us too.  

Mishel:  I just love what Kenny is talking about – that language has stories connected to it. If someone could learn the word ‘cup’ – who doesn’t speak English – fair enough, they might be able to say the word, but unless you’ve got the story that’s attached to that word, you don’t know what to do with it, it’s just a plastic cup. You’ve got to know the study that’s attached to the word.  Sometimes people talk about First Nations language as if it’s a simple translation – it’s much more than that.  For myself as a Yorta Yorta woman, there’s a word ‘garaba’, which means ‘wait a little’. People might learn than and think it means ‘just sit down’. We use that to say, ‘Maybe you’ve got to talk to someone first’, ‘Maybe you’ve got to have a drink first’, or ‘Maybe you just need some time, or speak to an Elder first’.  There are a lot more meanings attached, and with those meanings there are concepts, or purpose.

Kenny: It’s all the nuances that are attached to it.

Tim:  That’s really important. Julie, did you want to add some comments?

Julie:  I was very struck by the interest in a number of analytic concepts that kept getting raised in the discussion, raised by participants. I gave it a log of thought over the period of the Webinars. I would like to offer a few ideas because I feel that technical terms can either clarify – and we’re talking about language here, of course – or they can obscure meaning. I think that it’s really important that we try and speak about the concepts that we’re using in ordinary language. I would like to talk a little about my understanding of countertransference.  When I work analytically, or even in ordinary conversations, I can sometimes, but not always, of course, I can be aware of the emotional impact the person I’m speaking to has on me. This is my counter-transference. Sometimes this impact is a very strong feeling – so strong that it can overwhelm my capacity to bear that feeling, let alone name it. If I can bear it long enough to name it, to understand it, then I might – and I emphasise ‘might’, be able to learn something about myself and about the person I’m speaking to. In being honest about this emotional experience, real understanding and, in fact, personal growth, can occur.

Now I think that Donna and Kate spoke to this process, being required as they were to bear the almost unbearable in their work with Indigenous clients, the painful feeling that they did in fact bear was of not knowing. Now we hear a lot of talk about not knowing, living with uncertainty, and you could say ‘Well, that doesn’t sound very hard, really’.  But sitting for many months with feelings like ‘I must be stupid if I don’t understand what’s going on here’. 

It is not an easy task. But these counter-transference experiences are sometimes suffered for months or years in order to finally understand them and work with them. And to work out what this experience means for this particular relationship that I’m involved with. Emotional growth is the outcome we hope for once this emotional storm can be understood.

It was Rise’s, and my, hope that we could begin a process of honest two-way conversations between therapists and Indigenous thinkers and clinicians.  We are aware that we might stumble on the way.  But try as we may to be honest, we might unwittingly open up old wounds.  I was grateful that Matt and Alan could speak about their experience of encountering Indigenous culture in a personally honest way. I was heartened when I heard Michelle say ‘This is how we begin; we start from where we are'.  I was moved when I heard our Casse colleagues speak about their life-changing work in Central Australia. I felt that we were listening to the distillation of the essence of psychoanalysis. Their psychoanalysis doesn’t look like it looks in a consulting room, but in essence it’s the same. It involves a two-way learning, a deep getting-to-know the other that is at the heart of every analytic encounter. It’s when we enter a real and close contact with another that we open up the possibility of real intimacy and emotional growth. However, in this open state, we are also more vulnerable to hurt.

I hope this series represents an attempt at a two-way conversation which starts from where-we-are, knowing all the while that even describing out own experience may risk hurting the feelings of the other. We may hurt others’ feelings in ways that we certainly didn’t intend, and because of our ignorance, we are not able to predict. It’s through bearings these feelings that change may begin to be possible.

Tim: That was really a very helpful elaboration.  As you say, it did come up quite a lot. I think your comments exemplify that the psychoanalytic approach is very much about doing more thinking and listening and talking, which I think is so important in an effective bi-cultural partnership.

Matthew: I have 1000 questions, so I’ll just ask one.  

Thank you to Kenny and Michelle for your discussion about language being more than just words, but [have] profound meaning. I was thinking about the panelist who used ‘monstrous trauma’, and Craig’s warning to us to not apply our Western understandings of trauma. So I guess I wanted to ask Pamela and Craig and others – because you gave such condensed presentations last week and the week before – I wanted to ask would you either reinterate or make a few more comments on your thoughts about the trauma you work with.

I’m asking Pamela and Craig, but I’m also aware that others might comment, particularly Kate and Donna, from their groupwork.

Craig: Just very simply – I’d like to signal to this group/gathering here – there are several themes that really would bear much more careful unravelling in the future, if more of these sessions occur.  One has to do with trauma and intercultural trauma.  The other has to do – in my opinion – with this thing called unconscious transference, or intercultural transference. The trauma one – I would say that it’s taken the Europeans and Americans, perhaps since World War I, 100 years to begin to unravel the intricate process of trauma and traumatisation that has evolved in that culture, to now when it’s spoken about at least, it’s spoken and even advocated that trauma theory and trauma, etc. etc.  But what I am extremely careful about is the 100 years of European and American trauma development should not be imposed directly upon the Indigenous Australian circumstances.  It might take as much careful and intricate work to unravel what it means in Pitjantjatjarra, Walpiri, Arrernte and Wiradjuri for instance.

So that was my caution.

Pamela: I think there’s a lot to be said about Craig has just said. I think there’s a lot that could be said.  I was preparing a paper, looking at some old material, and the first trip I made back in about 2001-2003, where I was fully immersed in night patrol work, and courts. I wrote when I came back, that I felt like I had been in a warzone, but the word trauma was deleted from my mind.  I’m very careful about using theory of trauma, but in my experience in a lot of the work in Central Australia, I think the past has a living presence. I’m also mindful of what Kenny said when he said that a lot of people may not be aware of the impact of colonisation.  I think there is something about the silence of transgenerational trauma in the not knowing. I’m also reminded of some interviews which Kenny did when we worked with the men in the violence group, Actually it was incredible to hear what they had to say about their trauma, about their bleeding hearts, and how they were seen as perpetrators, but that they are also victims.

So I think there’s a whole lot of things to be said about that. And I’m also careful about using the theory of trauma per se. But I do think the past of dispossession and colonisation has a living presence, and it is a minefield in terms of the work. It is ever-present. One thinks about conversations about youth going to boarding school as well.  I remember getting off a plane and going to a conference in Alice Springs. There were some men there who stopped me. They were crying. They told me about a youth who had suicided, who had been a very successful student, and yet apparently, he experienced enormous stress. So it’s like wherever you go, there can be all sorts of encounters of trauma in daily life that one might endure, such as when you’re having dinner in the dining-room in the hotel, when a hungry youth steals food from your plate bringing the Whitefella guests to a standstill, to knowing so called at-risk youth who are goaled at the age of 12. These youth have sustained generational trauma and act out what can’t be remembered. They do not know what to do with their pain that smashes them on the inside, so they are out and smash their external worlds. Then they are detained. There are encounters of trauma almost everywhere. They might be visible or normalised to the point of invisibility. So, I hold to that position of a landscape of trauma. I think it’s very important to be mindful of it. 

Having said that, I just want to finish by saying that there is also an enormous resilient spirit generosity, humour, shown by Aboriginal people that is evident and inter-cultural two-way work, which doesn’t get talked about so much. But perhaps it is also the forum that we’re in now. But for me, I think it is ever-present in the work.

Tim: Thank you very much.  While you were talking, I also thought about giving a plug for authenticity as well actually. There is something very very important about an authentic dialogue, in an authentic engagement, that makes such a difference.

Allan: It’s not really a question. It’s just a comment. I’ve been very touched by Andrew Spencer’s paintings this week.  I just wanted to put that out there. The depth of the communication in those paintings, particularly the two snakes.  And just the depth of the dream that he told Craig. These are enormously powerful communication from this man who, at some level, must feel like he has a chance to be heard. I suspect there’s a truth in that. I have found that the presentations about these snakes or about the paintings quite disturbing, and I can imagine what we as a group are holding from that presentation.  Also, enormously hopeful because it was such a deep and powerful expression and communication and coming together.  I’ve been sitting on that, so I’m only sort of putting it out there. I just thought what a marvelous coming together in that moment around what – we in our Western way – we call trauma, or whatever words we use.

Kenny: I’d like to follow up on Julie’s comment in regards to ‘start-from-where-we-are’. An Elder, Wenton Rubuntja from our community said that any children who are born here are all Arrente.  So what he was actually stipulating there is that any children that are born in this Country are all part of this Country and part of the Dreaming, part of this Cosmos, part of this whole being. We are the Yipirinyas, destined to become the beautiful butterflies. So when he actually articulated these words, he was saying “Look, we are all one here, our nature and all of that. We don’t have these differences anymore”. That was an old senior man, and a well-respected senior man, articulating that to this town, saying that any children that are born here are Yipirinyas.

It comes back to words and all that. If we live in the Dreamtime Creation, then the beings that are responsible for conception and birth, so therefore it makes us who we are.

Tim: I’d be very interested to hear from the vast number of people from out in the dark who have got their screens, but not their faces, on. I wonder if people would like to use the ChatBox to make any comments. You don’t have to speak, but you could just join in the conversation, into the dialogue, by sharing some thoughts, feelings, or observations in the ChatBox.

Kate: I want to go back to the question about trauma, and the things that the panel was saying, and thinking about the work that was done in the Mothers Group that Donna and I were talking about. Certainly for me – actually for many years in that group – there was a sense that there was very deep, very desperate kind of trauma that I felt aware of, but that could not be articulated. I used to wonder whether the women knew how traumatised actually they were, and what they were actually carrying. There’s just something about the nature of trauma that is inarticulate. When you’re in it, you almost have to be able to stand outside of it really to articulate what’s going on. But when you’re in it, and living it, and having to survive day to day, it’s a very difficult thing to know in yourself, and therefore to have the words to describe to others what’s happening for you.

Craig: I just wanted to acknowledge Andrew Spencer and his family and also Kenny who knew Spencer.  And to repeat what Kenny is saying. The emphasis upon the two-way collaboration is crucial. I understand why, because I’ve seen collaboration happen, and also that perpetual denial of collaboration.

I am acknowledging the combination, the conjunction, that I feel we have to keep working towards, as psychotherapists, because it is so easy – certainly in Central Australia – to (unconsciously) perpetuate the denial of the two-way work.

Pamela: I actually just wanted to add that I began my paper with Kumanjai Walker because that was the haunting background to our work last year. It was a very traumatic incident. The incident begged a two-way relationship. What I want to say about that -which and I think it links to what Craig was saying – is that trauma is the constellation of Aboriginal-White relationships manifesting colonial legacies of dominion and racism, which is something which we really must not forget. Again I’m reminded that when I was working with Kenny’s father on two-way health business in 1980s, of painful occasions where his father was turned away from hotels, where we were just getting cool refreshments, in Tennant Creek then when a pastoralist told him to get off his property, the property where Kenny’s father was born, with only an excision of land to show for it and so on.  The trauma goes back into the past a long way, but it is also present. I do think that the trauma is real and not theoretical and cannot and is very much in the constellation of Aboriginal-Whitefella relations across the racial divide

Tim: It is good to refer to what’s happening currently as well.

Donna: I wanted to respond to what Pamela was saying. I think we’ve got a big job to do in terms of acknowledging the trauma that’s happened to Aboriginal people, that we’ve been responsible for, ongoingly. That’s essential to understanding our history and our present as well.  But I also wanted to talk – and it’s quite difficult to describe – a countertransference experience which was quite hard to put my finger on, which was definitely there and I became aware of.  There was, in the group that I ran, between the mothers, and particularly notable with the children, there was – I don’t know how to describe it other than to describe it as a deep knowing.  There was a knowledge and an awareness, a holding that the children were able to bring with each other; there was an expectation of a space waiting to be filled, and maybe you would call it “relationality”. It was different to any other adult group that I’ve worked with, or any other children that I’ve worked with. There was an expectation that there was someone next to the child. They always made room for one another – not to say they didn’t argue and have trouble sharing, as any toddler might. But there was, in the countertransference, without a doubt, something deeply cultural that related to their Indigeneity. You know, Pamela, you talked about resilience and there’s 60,000 years of cultural experience banked there. Some of it’s been shattered and blasted apart, but there’s enormous richness and readiness, I think, given the right opportunities for that to emerge.

Mishel: I’ve just got something small.  As we were talking about trauma, two words come to my mind. I recently served as a patient by Terry Cross – he’s a Canadian Aboriginal man – he talked about two words:  helpers or healing.  Two ways of approaching the conversation about trauma. 

When he talked about helpers, he was talking about the Western European concept of you come with your professionality and your toolbox, full of all your interventions, your applications, and your theories, and you apply it -- helping.  

But with the concept of healing, it’s very localised. With healing, the actual person themselves will hold within them the agency for the healing – from their spirituality, from the actual localised country, from their community.

Two completely different ways of approaching – helping or healing – two words that carry very different meanings.

Tim:  I’m struck by the similarity of what you are saying, Michelle, and the way psychoanalysis originally started with the one-way application of technique to the patient. Over time, it’s become much more acknowledged that the way that the process of healing works is, in a sense, through an appreciation of intersubjectivity, where the other’s agency, and what’s co-created between the two is vitally important. So it’s resonant with what you’re saying.

Yvonne: I was struck by Kenny talking about the language of the creator, and the language that is spoken in the tribal groups. It seems that the trauma of having lost language as a mode of communication may have resulted in an enhanced appreciation of the language of the creator. Perhaps the power of silence – I wondered whether that’s the space that was waiting to be filled. Or if that was not wanting to take away from the emerging knowing of the unknown known. But it seems to me that there was an unacknowledged appreciation in some respects of the power of silence. Perhaps the hushed awe of the sacred presence in silence that may have developed almost like a natural selection process because of the deprivation of language by virtue of the dispersion of the different tribal groups. So resort to the creator language, and how powerful that is in creating a space where the two meet.

Kenny: When it comes to even understanding where DVO (domestic violence) for some of the men, when we unpack DVO, we say ‘you’re just a woman-basher’. When we say that to a lot of prisoners who are in jail for all these kinds of offences, they take notice and respond to that because they are able to attach meaning to it – but they can’t attach any meaning to what DVO stands for. There’s a whole new word that they’ve got to try to get their head around – what does that actually mean? Domestic violence? Violence in domestic situation. Unless you’ve got a degree in the Western language, and you say ‘I’m only in here for DVO’, it sugar-coats. So what we’re saying to our organizations is ‘Let’s stop sugar-coating, and then we will see the reduction in this violent behaviour. We can better understand it, and call it for what it is. We need to understand it as a “woman basher’. From that, we’ve actually had men responding and taken on the ownership. One man said: ‘I’m here in prison because I’m a woman basher’. That was great ownership of that individual, and he’s now released and is doing really well. So language and words do create that meaning. We need to understand it for what it is. And its nuances as well.

Leanne (in ChatWindow): She says ‘I wanted to agree that there is still ongoing trauma and prejudice. Aboriginal children are still being removed from their families. Aboriginal people still die much younger than White Australians. My grandmother’s siblings were dead in their 60s or earlier. Since this training started, two Aboriginal I know – one a colleague and one a relative – have died. Some of the losses are so insidious they are hard to see the relationship to colonisation.’

Chair: That’s a very sobering comment. I think anybody who has worked in Aboriginal communities is stunned by how much loss people have experienced by a very young age. And of course we’re not doing well in addressing the social indicators – the rates of mental illness, the rates of incarceration. These are issues that I’ve been petitioning long and hard about. They’re all still looking pretty bad. There’s a lot of work to be done.

Carmel:  This is a comment of a different nature. I really want to thank you, Kenny, when you quoted the Elder who said ‘Every child who is born here is part of the dreaming’. I was born here, and I’m White. I felt very moved by that, and I’m still feeling quite moved because it shifted something. I think it was a moment of healing, and Thank You.

Julie: I want to comment in response to Donna, what Donna said about countertransference. I really appreciated it because countertransference is not all bad. That was a really lovely example of trying to interrogate a very complicated feeling. It’s beautiful. Thank you.

Rise: What struck me was Donna’s focus on the silence and her talking about silence at length.  And Eve’s comment on Jews and many other people after the holocaust, and how long it took for people to talk. There is such a silence after trauma. Having worked with Cambodian refugees, there was such a deadly silence that permeated the rooms for many years. I wonder – when Craig and Pamela were talking about not superimposing our own trauma theories on Indigenous and Aboriginal people, that it does take a long time to talk about trauma, for these literal experiences to emerge in any kind of way, and it does sit for a long time in the unspoken, really, until someone can find their own words to talk about, or leave enough space between the trauma or the experience of what happened in the perpetration of violence. I think there are some levels of what I call trauma now that are beyond words, and that one can never ever talk about.

Tim:   It does speak to how long sometimes it takes to actually bring things into a form where it can be symbolised and expressed and talked about. The approach that we take as analysts is very much sitting, waiting, being with silence, using our countertransference. But some experiences are so horrible that they seem almost unrepresentable.

Donna: I want to extend that a bit, in terms of what the silence might mean. I think it means different things at different times. You don’t always know what it means. I guess that’s the point of waiting, rather than trying to fill the space.  It’s just sitting and waiting and holding uncomfortable feelings, and you may not know what you’re sitting with until it emerges a bit later. I don’t know how much it parallels or can describe the Aboriginal experience of deep listening. I don’t know how much the same … I guess if you fill the space too much with your own anxiety and words and actions, then there is no space for the other. I think there’s benefit to holding, sitting, waiting, thinking, trying to work out what does this mean. Or just feeling lost at times.

Mishel: I think the way you talking about silence is really lovely. It really connected with deep listening. But also it’s a form of communication that’s more than just human business. When you have silence, whatever your beliefs are, there are other entities, animals, and the wind, or the rain, or the waterway.  You are allowing other entities to fill that space that you’re talking about.

The other thing that I wanted to say is about attachment. I think this is my reaction – I own my reaction: Sometimes there’s a very fine line between people have a response to something from their own lived experience, or people taking First Nations perspectives and it becoming an add-on to the Western knowledge system. When I hear people who from their own lived experience will hear something – they’ll go ‘Oh, that’s like that Western theorist, or this Western …’. I keep myself quiet for that moment because I know that’s a connection being made. Someone has from their lived experience – as whatever professional they are – encountered a particular theorist, and their brain goes ‘OK, that’s similar to what I already know’. That is maybe the response. But sometimes it is almost like removing nuggets of us, and fitting it in as an add-on to the already developed Western system.  It’s a fine line, which one it is. One I could have an emotional response to, and the other one is ‘It’s nice to talk to you and have this conversation’.  Even myself, when I was a Social Work student I was really into Bowlby. But then, taking myself as an Aboriginal woman, to grow into ‘I’m a baby in my own culture’.  Yes, these Western (mostly men) had a lot to say about attachment [laughs], but also my ancestors have for thousands of years have also developed ways of talking and knowing and thinking about attachment.

Matt (ChatBox): I like the idea of critiquing the Western idea of trauma, and questioning how relevant it is to the experience of traditional owners from colonisation, dispossession, identity, dehumanisation, and destruction of culture, which has occurred over so long. I wonder, whether by use of the Western idea of trauma, we are perhaps minimising the profound socio-cultural impact of colonisation on traditional owners. I wonder, then, what consequences that may have if we were to change our understanding, and how traditional owners may be able to perhaps define, or re-define, the impacts of colonisation. 

As I write this, Rise talks about the silence after trauma, and finding perhaps traditional language to make meaning. And Vivienne says that since language is an inherent problem with trauma, that another approach I found helpful with the chap from the Stolen Generation was through the use of art.

Vanessa (ChatBox): I would like to express my appreciation to all the contributors through all the seminars in this series as being thought-provoking and deeply interesting. Thank you.

Ruth (ChatBox): I am thinking how important it is to provide the space for the deep listening, not rushing in to provide answers, but really wishing to know what is thought and felt.

Tim: I re-read a paper by Pamela Nathan, with a lovely quote from AM Margaret Kemarre Turner (page 96). I want to read it to you because I think it captures a lot of what has been said. She says: 

‘You must learn to wait. Let your thoughts come back to you. Understand how the other person may be feeling too.  Appreciate you might not know the answer or understand the question. That’s what it means to work in a cross-cultural way. Respect has to flow both ways.  Learning too.’

Reference

Kenmarre Turner AM, M. Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What It Means To Be an Aboriginal Person, Alice Springs, IAD Press, 2010.