[Music] i'm an explorer and a guide i started my career in the gold mines in africa in an old working gold mine tour guiding taking people through the mine fast forward and i became a game ranger wearing a khaki uniform showing people fierce animals by day in waterholes and at nighttime little tiny creatures by torchlight i grew up really nomadic i spent some time with a zulu king and his five wives i even at some stage lived in soweto the biggest township just outside of johannesburg long before white people used to tread there and then
with a maasai warrior in kenya before i've hit sunny perth in western australia i'm a human behaviorist that that likes to discover new places new communities and learn more about them and then connect them because in the end it really comes down to community when my husband and i moved here to australia we first did what we call our alice d trip a look see and decide and we stayed everywhere for for about a week just to explore all the different nuances that australia had to offer until we fit perth perth has sucked us in
like a black hole we just loved it here maybe it was a similarity it's uh kind of a similar latitude the weather patterns are similar maybe even the people or is it that similar i came from a continent scattered with white thorn acacia trees to one with tall eucalyptus everywhere so what do you see when you look at this picture what does it represent for you maybe a nice blue sky some tranquility maybe you immediately spotted it and recognized it as a blue gum or a eucalyptus tree what if you were all a room full
of koalas assuming you've stayed awake because they do sleep about 22 hours a day maybe then you would have said food what if you were an indigenous medicine woman a healer maybe then you would have said medicine because we know the eucalyptus leaves are good for so many things perspective is important do you know when the first europeans came out here to australia and landed here in western australia they came across an indigenous mob and they were at a traditional smoking ceremony and they had a young baby and they were holding the baby over the
eucalyptus smoke the europeans rushed back to europe to go and report that there's a bunch of cannibals living here who's probably cooking their children perspective is really important now you can't really travel for more than probably 10 kilometers in australia without coming across one of these eucalyptus trees my first real memory and getting to know eucalyptus trees was where my story started in in these gold mines they used the eucalyptus trees to hoist itself to the top it makes it really strong when you put pressure from the top on the tree so they use the
eucalyptus trees to hold up the mine shafts it's also a really fast growing tree so you could replace them really quickly they also do like water and it didn't take long before south africa in the late about 60 years after started declaring them a weed a destructive species because they drink about 16 of the water needed per year and they wanted to eradicate them get rid of them now at the end of apartheid in 1994 in south africa these trees became really symbolic of this melting pot of nationalism on the one hand you had these
trees that held up mine shafts that represented freedom for people who could take out gold from under the ground and on the other side you had white settlement the powers to be suddenly all got together in in stuffy rooms to start discussing how can they eradicate this plant get rid of this invasive species but what they were really discussing was truth and reconciliation apartheid on one end and freedom on the other side i have a friend who lives in melbourne and at the height of that pandemic when they were in the 15-week lockdown we had
a bit of a chat at some stage and he's an enthusiastic health fanatic and uh he kept up his exercise routine to one and a half hours every single day but early on in the conversation expressed to me how he was missing trees how they represented freedom to him because he suddenly was stuck in his suburb he couldn't get out from from where he was he couldn't go and sit and have a picnic under a tree and we just discussed how one day there will be planes in the sky again and he will come and
visit and we'll spend christmas or birthdays together and it represented hope for us that hope however could also be an acronym an acronym for hope but also opportunities and possibilities that are just absolutely endless but talking about freedom made me reflect and wonder are we real all equally free we know that during the pandemic marginalized communities were affected much more let's just for a moment pause and look at maslow's hierarchy of needs as a tree i have to point out that this here is an american tree and this is important to keep in mind and
the reason this is an american tree is because maslow stems from brooklyn in new york and leadership is often applied universally but it's not it should really be applied within a particular cultural context now maslow said that right at the top of this tree once all of these bottom needs has been filled should self-actualization sits at the top but many academics argue that this is maybe not quite true at least this may be true for western cultures but eastern culture should probably rather be a sense of community and if you just think of closer to
home of our indigenous mob yarning under a tree surely for them that sense of community is rather at the utmost top of the tree of life the same tree also of course if you look right from the bottom up can provide us with shelter and medicine a place to hide from a storm a place to catch up with friends and ultimately really provide again that sense of community who have you yarned with under a tree lately i want you to think for a moment just just go back and think when you had your last barbecue
who did you have over was it people that was just like you people with a similar educational background a similar sexual orientation maybe they voted for the same political party was it a bunch of people with random different perspectives it's only when we expose ourselves to these different perspectives that we could really get to know them get to understand them so i want to encourage you to to reach out to somebody on the other side of this room today someone on the other side of your office building on a different floor someone that's different from
you someone that you would normally not have lunch with don't ask them this story learn about their perspective and just be open to listening without judgment the virus still on our minds and it has certainly affected the way that we work that we live that we play but it hasn't affected us all equally i'm a guide and i'm an explorer but i'm also a woman and i'm a mother and i'm a wife and people like me and people like you have disproportionately been affected women for example has lost many more hours compared to men during
the virus our working hours have gone down considerably comparatively as well i would even argue that the government incentives that got handed out were very much towards male incentive industries male driven industries like for example the construction industry people of color were also affected right at the time where they had a universal platform to try and make a difference to change our intergenerational inequality has been coming through for the last decade already with young people earning less and less unless we change the way that we do things we face the risk of turning back the
clocks of going back in time i remember in march this year i came back from a business trip and i was picked up at the airport by my uber driver and he stopped and as i got in he sighed with relief and we started a conversation with me trying to explore why is he so relieved and he immediately explained enthusiastically and animated that he has just driven past three chinese clients and he's cancelled their ride because obviously we couldn't pick up chinese people in a time like this i was saddened by the racism in that
the next wave will be the mental health wave we've already seen statistics around this and we already know that many people has been affected by the stress the human impact of this is going to be enormous and it's your job and my job to reach out to our community and to give a helping hand this fear that we have experienced has changed the makeup of our psychology and when we fear when we're scared our system starts shutting down and we increase our biases we become more conformist and become less open to the stories and the
opinions of other people those same opinions is like white noise they're all around us and everybody has one but that white noise it washes down into our systems into our souls and it causes generational trauma generational trauma that we pass on through our genes to our children and our children's children that's why it's so important to reach out i am an explorer an ex-game ranger but like with all professions you can't just go out there and the magic will happen you need to spot some patterns you can maybe go out to a water roll and
wait for the animals to arrive in the same way that we can use these patterns of animal behavior we can read human behavior and we can reach out to others we can reach out to those that's different from us get to know this story without judgment without judging them for their skin color or their looks up front and already deciding before the conversation started that maybe i just won't talk to that person go out and go and find the common ground go out and explore i'm definitely still an explorer i'm no longer living with a
maasai warrior or walking around with lions but i'm still exploring i'm still exploring different perspectives different people we're gonna have to all find different ways to travel we can have to find different places to go different ways to do things so embrace that see the endless opportunity of that the virus also brought a lot of sorrow and some people lost people some lost dignity some lost freedom but i want to encourage you all to go and explore in your own backyard start a day and go just one neighborhood to your left or to your right
and go and explore other people other people's stories go on safari in your own backyard you
