“I’m sick of you white people…shut up.”
"I'm sick of you white people…shut up"
"Have you not seen this?"
"You're on the front page of The Australian!"
"What the actual…!?!"
"Like red shouty capitals EXCLUSIVE story."
"And more exclusive than the Pope dying!"
The Pope died on Easter Monday. The news reached WA media hours later, minutes before my own media frenzy kicked in. A friend sent screenshots of the headlines and me into a whole new world of exposure and digging-deep diplomacy and resolve.
It's not something you think you'll ever need to prepare for. To imagine what it feels like to open a webpage, see your photo the size of your tablet looking back at you in high definition, with a headline above your smiling image that makes you look like a racist and bigot.
You never picture yourself nervously asking at a petrol station, the third in a row, for a copy of the nation's broadsheet to read the carnage of your last career move in black and white, on the front page. And a full colour spread on page 8.
No media training ever covered this.
"Holy f&%k, these are my words?"
"How is this possible?"
"How can that even be?"
They literally were. The entire article was a cut and paste of the words I wrote in a document legally signed and lawfully bound. Until it turns out, it wasn't.
I was in shock as messages started to hit my phone. It's a surreal realisation to discover the statistical possibility of finding yourself on the front cover of The Australian newspaper is 0.0028%.
It's in character-defining moments like these you uncover two very confronting realities: who your friends are and who you really are. Followed by one sickening unpalatable choice: will I react, or will I respond.
Next, hurt disguised as anger, rants of injustice, the demand for payment and payback. But kissing and telling isn't my style. Nor, adding to the existing harm, stigma and discrimination of First Nations people. I already felt I failed them. Not done enough. Let them down. Like we continue to do, never really listening. Never really learning. Never actually making the changes we know we desperately need.
I had one of the toughest decisions of my career to make. To use the experience either as fuel or ammunition. A decision that would ultimately define through actions the kind of human and leader I am.
I chose silence.
"I'm sick of you white people...shut up!"
Although taken out of context, spliced and sold by a right-wing journalist to be a race issue, it was what I needed to hear. Sometimes the most powerful response is refusing to play the game you signed up for. Not all thoughts and emotions need to be spoken. Some bouts are won by walking away. As I have chosen more than once before.
She got her headshot and headline. They got their clickbait controversy. But they didn't get my voice. A reaction or any dirt. And they won't however hard they try.
In a world with 0.0028% chance of making the front page, I took the chance to respond by being 100% me when I got there.
H2BH 014/365
