Linda Jean Burney  

Director General of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs

A member of the Wiradjuri nation, Linda Burney was born in Whitton, a small Riverina farming community and schooled at nearby Leeton. Completing senior school at Penrith High School, she won a government scholarship and was first Aboriginal person to gain a Diploma of Teaching at Mitchell College of Advanced Education (now Bathurst campus of Charles Sturt University).  

In 1979 she began teaching at Lethbridge Park Public School in western Sydney, and became involved in the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG). From 1981 she worked with the Aboriginal Education Unit of NSW Department of Education on the NSW Aboriginal Education Policy, first such policy in Australia. In 1983 she was appointed Executive Officer of the NSW AECG, then elected President in 1987.  

During her Presidency, 1988-98: the AECG became incorporated; moved to its own offices, which it now owns; embedded the principle of negotiation with Aboriginal communities through the AECG on all Aboriginal education; Aboriginal Studies electives in Years 7-12, and core Aboriginal history and geography for all students in Years 7-10; added training to the AECG mandate; rewrote the Aboriginal Education Policy to apply to all students, all staff, all schools; was Principal Consultant to the national teacher education project ‘Teaching the Teachers’; secured system action on the impact of Otitis Media (middle ear disease) on the education of Aboriginal children. She was appointed to the NSW Board of Studies and the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training.  

At the national level Linda Burney was a prime mover in forming the National Federation of AECGs and was Interim Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Training Advisory Council. In 1994 she was a member of the ATSIC national Social Justice Task Force which produced the report ‘Recognition, Rights and Reform’ on social justice reform in response to the Mabo judgement. She was a member of the Board of SBS 1994-98.  

1994-97 Linda Burney was appointed to the national Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, member of Council Executive, chair of the Media, Education and Consultative Committee and of the Events sub-committee which co-ordinated the 1997 Australian Reconciliation Convention. In 1995 and 1998 she represented Aboriginal education at meetings in Geneva of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations; she was also involved in World Indigenous Peoples’ Conferences: Education in 1990, 1993 and 1996. In 1998 she facilitated for ATSIC a national senior managers’ workshop and western Queensland region housing workshop, and the National Indigenous Constitutional Convention.  

Awards include the 1993 Department of School Education Director-General’s Award for Outstanding Service to Public Schools, NSW TAFE Medal 1995, and Lipton’s Australian Women’s Quality of Life Award 1996.  

Linda Burney is currently Director General of the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs, a Member of the NSW Centenary of Federation Board and a  member of the NSW Advisory Committee for the International Year of Volunteers 2001 and Australian Volunteers International.   

Until recently, she was Chair of the NSW State Reconciliation Committee, Member of the NSW Board of Vocational Education and Training, Historic Houses Trust, Anti-Discrimination Board, University of Canberra Council, the Sydney Institute Council of NSW TAFE and a trustee of the Mick Young Memorial Scholarship Trust.   

Linda Burney has a high profile at state and national levels, both in education and training, and across Aboriginal affairs, and is widely known as an effective public speaker. She is also an experienced meeting facilitator and chair.  

Interview with Linda Burney

 Do you see yourself as a leader? 

I don’t actually call myself a leader, I prefer to describe myself as an Aboriginal person that’s in a leadership position. I think that’s due to the fact that leadership is a really Western construct for Aboriginal people, it’s often something that the media or White Australia dubs you as, instead of the Aboriginal community saying ‘you are one of the leaders we see’. 

Given that, I guess it would be silly to say that I’m not perceived to have a leadership role in Aboriginal affairs. 

What is your vision?
I see issues around leadership and developing capacity within communities as the most important issue that needs addressing in relation to Aboriginal affairs. 

I say that because where you can say there’s a housing need in an Aboriginal community, or a domestic violence or a drug problem in the community, (there are a whole range of other issues, you could nominate any of them), those things will never be fixed by governments or so-called experts with the answers coming into the community.  

But where there is capacity and leadership within the Aboriginal community - particularly at a grassroots level –you see those communities taking control of their own problems, developing ways to deal with those issues. And you also see a community that’s much more healthy and functional. 

So the notion of leadership and capacity is, I think, one of the critical ones that face Indigenous Australians and Australia. 

One of the keys to leadership, particularly from an Aboriginal cultural perspective, is the notion of humility. 

If you think that you’ve got the answers, if you think that you’re king pin, that you know more than anyone else, then you’ll soon fall on your backside, because that’s not the way you act as an Aboriginal person. Its also not the way the Aboriginal community would expect a leader to act.  

That’s what white people have done to Aboriginal people for years, saying “we’ve got the answer to your problems”. We can’t become our own oppressors in that sense.  

An Indigenous leader must be able to recognise the issues facing Indigenous Australia and understand the context in which you are working.  

You have to be politically astute, you have to be intelligent, and you have to be able to work out how much energy you expend on a particular issue, or whether there’s a bigger fight, or issue that you should be concentrating on. 

The key to good leadership is not necessarily about you as an individual. The key to good leadership is making sure that you recognise and grow and respect and listen to the people that you have around you. Unless you do that you are not a leader. A leader is only as good as the people around them. 

What forms of assistance are available to develop leadership among Aboriginal women? 

Very little. I can’t think of anything specifically for women. There is of course the newly formed National Indigenous Leadership Centre, which I had a fair bit of involvement in setting up, but that’s not specifically for women. 

The development of leadership and capacity for Aboriginal women is critically important, particularly in the current debate on domestic and family violence within Aboriginal communities. 

If we are going to address this issue, then rather than focus on Aboriginal women as the victims, the first and foremost thing we have to do is provide leadership skills to women to understand and access their rights, and to have some power over what is happening to them. 

What particular difficulties did you experience in achieving your professional ambitions? 

That’s really hard to answer. One of the real challenges was to try to manage my family life, in particular my children and their upbringing, and the demands that were being made on me from a community and professional point of view.  

People can say ‘well its your choice’, but when you’re in a leadership position as an Aboriginal person, you don’t turn off at 6 or 7 o’clock, and say ‘my job’s finished for the day’. It’s with you 24 hours a day, and the expectation from the community is also that as well.  

The positions I have held have been incredibly demanding and required an enormous amount of my time and energy, and I think that any woman who has a profession, but is also trying to raise children - particularly as a single parent as I was for a fair bit of that time - you just wonder 10 or 12 years later whether you made the right balance, and I don’t think I did. Now, when I see my children at the ages of 16 and 17, I really think that I didn’t put enough time into them, which is a very difficult thing for me to say, but its true. 

Often, as a member of a board or in a meeting, I’ve been the only woman, the youngest person, and the only Aboriginal person in the room. That creates a dynamic that is extremely difficult to handle if you’re not used to it – its an impossible situation if you’re not experienced.  

So not only do you not have be absolutely prepared to make sure that you’re able to contribute in a sensible way to the discussion. 

Another challenge – and I think this is really important – as an Aboriginal person it is wrong to say that you only provide leadership for Aboriginal people. If you’re a leader, and happen to be an Aboriginal person or an Aboriginal leader, your leadership has to be for the whole country – obviously with a focus on the constituents that you represent.  

And that is a responsibility that becomes almost unbearable at times, because you know that what you do in certain situations will trigger a policy or a range of events, or set in place the thinking for very senior people on how they should be dealing with Aboriginal issues. So the focus on you is intense. 

Who are some of the leaders you admire today? 

I always find that a really difficult question. There are so many people I could name that I have a great deal of admiration for. 

But the true heroes for me are people - mostly women - that have worked at a local community level all their lives - not got paid, not got 30 second grabs once a week on telly -who have ensured the lifeblood and the wellbeing of their community throughout the Assimilation, Protection and the Welfare policies, when they were just treated like crap by the rest of society. 

And also the people – both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal - that fought the 1967 referendum. Those people laid the foundation for us in a period of time where we weren’t even conscious that these things were going on because we were too young. To look back at those heroes who did that, at a time when it was dangerous and just about impossible, are the people we should be honouring much more than we do. 

What advice would you give women with respect to assisting Reconciliation? 

Reconciliation, to me, will be delivered by the humble acts of what individuals do.  

Women often have the role of nurturers and mothers and running households, so I think the best advice I can give to women is to raise your families - and if you don’t have children of your own make sure that the children around you - are exposed to things that grow them up to be decent people.  

I think women have an enormously powerful role in that respect. And its not such a hard thing to do. Women in the corporate world and women who have senior positions also have to maintain that same philosophy right through what they do, and cant forget that nurturing and powerful role that we have as women in this society. 

What advice would you give women with respect to climbing the corporate ladder?

Don’t ever lose who you are. Who you are doesn’t arrive magically one day, and I think people spend too much time angsting over that sort of stuff, but you always have to remember from where you came, you always have to remember and acknowledge the people that have made it possible for you to be where you are.  

In climbing the corporate ladder, don’t ever compromise yourself as a woman because it’s just not worth it, that compromise will stay with you forever. It is important to be incredibly honest to the people around you and to yourself. 

If you think you’re going to get to the top of that ladder on your own then you’ve got rocks in your head. Make sure that you treat the people around you, who make it possible, with a great deal of love and respect.