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Issue no. 43 / May 2020
IN CONVERSATION: LINDA BURNEY A proud member of the Wiradjuri nation, Linda Burney was the first Aboriginal person to be elected to the NSW Parliament and the first Aboriginal woman to serve in the Australian House of Representatives. As the Member for Canterbury in the NSW Parliament for 13 years, she served as minister in senior portfolios including Community Services and later as Deputy Leader of the Opposition. She was elected federal member for Barton in 2016 and is currently Shadow Minister for Families and Social Services and Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians. Linda’s commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues spans more than 30 years.
In 2000, when you were helping to organise the Harbour Bridge Walk, what were your expectations as the day drew closer? This was the symbolic end of the formal process of reconciliation so I was terrified it was going to be bad weather and worried that we weren’t going to get very many people. But understanding that we’d done an enormous amount of planning and hard work we were just hoping that all the logistics and coordination at both the state and the national level, in particular the work we’d done with the police and the transport department, would be enough. We’d had about a 12 to 18 month lead up and it got more intense obviously as things got closer. It was actually a very
