As a child, Amy Thunig did well in school and followed all the rules. But the teachers still hated her. “For no reason other than where my family was from,” says Amy.
If you can acknowledge that I've developed strong analytical skills and I've learned to be articulate and to navigate certain systems,where do you think I learned that from? Like, I'm the first in my family to get a PhD, but I'm not the first in my family to have been capable. My success is reflective of the kind of parents that they were because they were incredibly loving. They were the first people to tell me that I could succeed and they repeatedly told me that I would.Dr Amy Thunig
In this episode, writer and academic Dr Amy Thunig challenges us to check our own biases. They share stories of their experiences with racism and classism, reminding us that parents are doing their best with what they have.
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, SEEN is a podcast series about the trailblazers who persist and succeed without positive role models in mainstream culture. Hear from the likes of leading tech creative Tea Uglow, activist Tarang Chawla, academic and writer Dr Amy Thunig, and more as they share their stories of resilience and courage.
Follow SEEN on the SBS Audio website or app, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host: Yumi Stynes
Producers: Mandy Yuan, Laura Brierley Newton, Marcus Costello
Sound Design and Mix: Ravi Gupta
Executive Producer: Kate Montague
Theme Music: Yeo
Art: Evi O Studios
SBS Team: Caroline Gates, Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Micky Grossman
Original concept by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Transcript
Yumi STYNES (Voiceover): We begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record this podcast, the Cammeraygal people and Gadigal people, and their Elders past and present.
We also advise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners that this episode references people who have died. It also includes some references to traumatic events.
If anything comes up for you, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander crisis support line on 13YARN.
(Theme music)
Amy THUNIG: I was drinking this drink and writing and then, all was well. Um, and then I, as soon as I shut the laptop, I just turned my chair and I threw up. Everywhere. Like, I didn't run to the bathroom, I didn't go, “Oh no, I'm feeling nauseous” — I just threw up everywhere.
STYNES (Voiceover): On today's episode of SEEN, we speak to author Dr. Amy Thunig, Gomeroi academic, advocate and the first author I’ve ever spoken to whose writing about trauma caused them to violently vomit.
THUNIG: And it was so foul. And even like, when I was pregnant with my kids, I had HG, like hyperemesis, so I was throwing up so much, all the time, to the point of wetting your pants… And even then. I never threw up on myself. Even then, I always made it to a garden or the bathroom or something. So I was so shocked.
STYNES (Voiceover): The memory Amy was writing about was when they were a little kid, in a cheap hotel with their parents, for what was supposed to be a fun outing to the zoo. Dad had gone out and Amy was alone with Mum.
(Sound of bathroom tap running)
THUNIG: And mum had come out of the bathroom and she'd sat behind me on the floor, leaning on the bed, so her head was right behind me. And I was pretty sure, oh wait, I, I can't hear breathing. Like there's, you know. I- I'm not aware of sounds behind me and, yeah, and I kind of froze up. Um, and yeah, she had overdosed.
(Theme music)
STYNES (Voiceover): I'm Yumi Stynes and you’re listening to SEEN.
Last year Amy published ‘Tell Me Again’ — a memoir about growing up with parents who struggled with addiction and incarceration. It was a smash hit, critically admired, and it advanced the conversation about many things including addiction, Indigeneity, and the questions around to whom do our successes belong?
For Amy, their "successes" — the degrees, TV appearances, book deals are not despite their family. It's because of them.
STYNES: Amy, what's it like to I guess now the book's been widely read, it's been acclaimed, um, and shared and talked about, to now have these stories from your childhood widely known
THUNIG: Yeah, it's a funny one. Um, before, before your stories are known, there's this weird fear of, well if people know, then they wouldn't be kind and, um, if you're a really kind person, that would sound really odd to you. But actually, when people know you're having a hard time, it doesn't make them be kinder to you, it makes them wary of you. And I know the podcast is called SEEN and I think that's so funny because, um, I recognise that the work that I do can be very valuable to people, and so I'm happy to do it, but in thinking about, well, if I put this into a book, and it'll be a process with my family and we'll talk about it. And that's where it started. I went and I talked with my mom and I talked with my dad and, um, they contributed and helped me shape the stories and, it's been really good having it out, but I didn't know how it was gonna go until it was out.
STYNES: The other thing that I wanted to respond to, Amy, was something so common in memoir, which is that people want... you to be fixed. They want your parents to be healed and perfect and for you to be living this wonderful life. So, for instance, I read a lot of drug and alcohol memoirs because I am an alcoholic, um, that you can't write the memoir until you're sober. And even if you're bullshitting and you are completely not sober, you have to sell that idea of redemption in order to tell the story that people find acceptable. Was that your experience with trying to, um, unfurl the nuance of your parents' lives?
THUNIG: Actually, it's part of why I wanted to write it. So, you know, like, this idea that if my parents weren't fully healed, then I couldn't be successful, or if I was in contact with them still, I couldn't be fully successful, was just so false. ….like, I'll have people make awful comments in front of me, and you know, having someone say something like, oh, you know, “I'm struggling with infertility. Meanwhile, heroin addicts are having babies.” And, um, like that happened. And, and I turned around and I was like, well, yeah, like I'm one of them. Like I'm a heroin addict baby. I was born addicted, actually. And the person's jaw just dropped. But then it's what happens next. It's, it's, you know, because this happened so many times in my adulthood.
They'll do it without asking questions. Um, they will fill in the gaps for you and they'll say, “Oh, well, you know, and look at you now, aren't you so glad you don't talk to them anymore?” And I was like, what? Or, “Oh wow. So how old were you when they got clean?” Firstly, gross. Weird language to use. And never? Like, what do you mean? And so I started thinking about that and realising there were only two arcs that were acceptable. One was that I had separated permanently from my family, thus freeing myself from their shackles and going on to bloom without them. Or they themselves had become fully healed people, thus enabling me... to bloom.
Because statistically, like according to all the research and that, I should never have gotten to where I've gotten and I shouldn't have what I have. Like I'm first in family to finish high school.
And my parents are so proud of me. But. It was not me that got me here, like, it's always collective, it's always community, like, whatever you're doing, no one succeeds or fails alone, no one exists in a vacuum, but that complexity is missing from a lot of the storying, and so that was the goal of the book. If you can acknowledge that I've developed strong analytical skills and I've learned to be articulate and to navigate certain systems, where do you think I learned that from? Like, I'm the first in my family to get a PhD, but I'm not the first in my family to have been capable.
My success is reflective of the kind of parents that they were because they were incredibly loving. They were the first people to tell me that I could succeed and they repeatedly told me that I would.
STYNES (Voiceover): On today’s episode we’re going to understand more about radically accepting those you love, about breaking cycles - but also intentionally keeping some cycles going. And sometimes I think so much of this podcast is about mothers. Motherhood, being a mother, and that eternal, turning circle.
THUNIG: We were very close and she was very proud of the book and the storying and I did get to give her the copy that the publishers make when they're, you know, letting all the book stores know ahead of time about your book.
Like, mum got to see all of that and she loved it. She kept it with her in the hospital. She kept it with her at home, like, when the time was at the end, like. Um, Mum was very proud and, uh, I had completed my PhD in the January, um, and I got my marks back in the July, about two weeks before my grandfather passed.
And then we found out that Mum was sick, so, she got to hear about it all, um, the uni did try. Oh, I am, you know what? I've been really working on my healing. And one of the things that sucks about that is you, you start crying.
Like I used to be really good at not crying. And then I started to learn, like, actually it's good for you to cry and it lets cortisol out and all that stuff.
And now, you know, when I think about mum, I just miss her. You know, we're about to move house and it's just the new house is wonderful, but it won't ever have mum sleeping on the couch. It won't ever have her stack of books, you know. Next to her nook. Um, it won’t ever have her dancing, like she was always dancing.
One of the last videos I've got of her was my eldest child asking her about a type of dance she'd heard. She'd heard about, I think it was go go dancing. And mum, who had an oxygen tank at this point, it was about four weeks before she passed, she got up and was fully go go dancing for our eldest, um. So, you know, we were good.
We were good. You know, we were good within the complexity. You know, we were good within the difficulty.
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STYNES: Tell me about your childhood. What was that like?
THUNIG: It was good. I was a very clever kid. So, I think clever in the way, it's that gifted to autistic diagnosis in adulthood pipeline. Um, but I love to read. My mum was always reading, so I was always reading.
STYNES: Was there a moment, Amy, when you realised you weren't from a conventional family?
THUNIG: I think, uh, I remember, so I was in a very small primary school. There were only 12 kids in our class.
Anyway, we're in a composite class, and so there's only about four girls. And then, I think there were six boys. And one of the girls who, her mum didn't like me, for no reason other than the family I was from, um, she threw a McDonald's birthday party, the height of birthday parties for our community, and um, invited the other three girls but not me. And, um, because I said to the girl, “Why can't I come to your birthday party?”
And she said, “Oh, mum says, um, it'll cost too much money.” And I said, okay, fair enough. So I went and I told my dad, oh, such and such hasn't invited me to a birthday party. He goes, “How many kids has she got going?”
I said, “Oh, all the girls, just not me.”
“Did she tell you why?”
I said, well, “She said she can't afford it.”
Well, I remember seeing in Dad's face that he knew that was a lie. So dad got out of me the information of when and where the party was, and he drove me to the Maccas, walked me in, sat me down and then gave that mum 10 dollars and said, here you go, order Amy their food, and she was so burning. But you know, the little girl was thrilled because she wanted me there, and the other kids were all happy, and I was thrilled, and it was only as an adult, I'm like, oh my god, my dad and that woman had a massive power play over me getting to go to a fucking Macca's birthday party when I would have been 10.
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STYNES (Voiceover): Amy talks about their parents and childhood with such humour and kindness, but one of the stories that really strikes readers is that Amy’s parents, without a word, just left. Left teenage Amy completely alone, without explanation, to fend for themselves for a whole year while finishing high school. Amy worked at McDonalds and barely scraped by.
THUNIG: I was killing it at McDonald's like a goody two shoes, Capricorn autistic who just fucking loves following rules and was desperate for the money. You just know I was hitting all of them targets.
STYNES (Voiceover): Despite often not having enough money for food, Amy nailed the Maccas job and was offered a full time role that would have meant career development and more money. But Amy had sights set on being a lawyer.
STYNES: Tell me about going to university and what that represents for you.
THUNIG: Yeah. I think, um, I mean, some people will say. Oh, education's oversold as a tool, you know? No, I don't think it is. I don't think it's oversold. I think that, I think that it's becoming, um, inaccessibly expensive. I think that the amount of debt that you're saddled with is enough of a fear and a barrier that it keeps some people out.
But getting into university, for me, was the start of being empowered to actually influence the world around me. And, you know, in simple ways from having enough money to eat to more influential ways to getting heard. Like, I've been saying basically the same stuff since I was 12. But, you know, I- after I got my Masters was when I noticed people actually started listening.
And that's what it's done. Like it's paid off. It was, I used to call it a gamble. And then one of my brother boys, who I've known since I was young and who has gone through, um, similar things in terms of, uh, coming from a very low income, first in family to finish high school. He corrected me and he said, it wasn't a gamble, it was an investment.
And I think he's right.
It was an investment. I was, I was investing. I didn't have actual money, but I knew that I did not want to be locked into poverty forever. And so I just kept grinding.
And I do find that it's paid off. You know, my children both learn musical instruments, which to me is like, you know, everyone has their thing. You know, everyone's got their little what's financially making it. Is it the Vienna ice cream cake? The Vienetta, sorry. Is it the, the... ice machine in the fridge and for me, it was the idea of my kids being able to actually learn a musical instrument. Um, and both my kids learn musical instruments.
STYNES: That's the flex.
THUNIG: That’s the, well, that's for me in my heart going, okay, this is worth it. It paid off because I'm giving them the tool to support their cognitive development. And then when they're older, they're not going to be the one in the room who doesn't play an instrument.
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STYNES: Talking about cycle breakers. What does that mean for the people who don't understand and what's the pressure that comes with it?
THUNIG: You have a set of patterns that you're starting with. And those patterns are taught to you intentionally and unintentionally throughout your life. Maybe you're copying it, or maybe you're trying to do the opposite of it. Um, but it is influenced by what you've seen.
Like I really didn't realise how much of a food hoarder I am. Um, until Luke moved in with us.
STYNES (Voiceover): Australian actor, writer, comedian Luke McGregor is Amy's partner.
THUNIG: And he very respectfully asked if he could start clearing through the kitchen cupboards. And I was like, well, you can, but it's all excellent, good food, and he then pointed out that some of it was like two years expired. Um, and I just need to always have a stocked cupboard. And that's actually a really common trauma response for Indigenous peoples because of this pressure of, well, what if child welfare come and check on me? What if they, you know, and that's something that comes from being in a house that didn't have enough, and that comes from, you know, grandparents who would have welfare actively checking up on them and there needing to be certain foods in the cupboard. So like, that's an example. Um, and so you have a right to your own cycle, but many of us hope to do better than what was done before us.
So, for example, my dad's dad, my Pop Tierman, he passed away last year and he was a huge supporter of mine but he never, ever said, “I love you” with his words. So my dad never heard the words “I love you.”
So for my dad, saying “I love you” was really important, but also really hard. So he had to work on that. And he really prioritised saying, “I love you”. And if he couldn't see you in the morning, he would leave a note.
Um, dad gets very cross if I thumbs up a message. “What is that? I'm your father.” You know, like, “You know, you've got to communicate that you love us.” It's, um, it's, he really prioritises saying I love you. So for me, I don't have any hangups around the words I love you because I then saw, like my dad broke that cycle and I was, you know, in my twenties before mom pointed out to me, you know, your grandfather's never said I love you to your dad. And I was like, what? And we were kind of waiting to see like, oh, we're going to come through with a deathbed I love you? You know. But dad broke that cycle, just because your parents didn't break all of the cycles doesn't mean they didn't break any.
So then for me in my parenting, there's so much that I don't do, and I love parenting. Parenting isn't for everyone, but it's definitely for me. I love kids, my children are the best. I think they're so cool, they're so funny, like, sometimes when they'll do things that could easily be framed up as like, naughty or disrespectful, it's quite funny to me. But how I perceive their behaviours, how I frame their behaviours, and how I treat them in response to their behaviours - are very intentional. And that's not always easy. You know, I did get smacked growing up. I am strongly and vehemently opposed to assaulting children. And like, I don't even care if that upsets people. If you hit kids, that's so wrong. However, what I acknowledge is if you've been hit and your child does something or child in your head does something that you would have been hit for, you have an impulse to hit them.
And I'll see smacking them in my head because I would have gotten smacked for that. And I have to stop in my brain and reframe it. And when they were smaller, I used to think, well, when they get older, I'm going to say to them, “When I was your age, do you know what I would have gone through? Ra ra ra!” However, I've done a lot of reading around that and actually that's not great to do either. Like instead, I'm going to slowly and gently explain to them some of the stuff that I've lived through. I'm not going to use it over them. Like, you should be grateful that you just had a slightly raised voice or whatever. But yeah, for me, I'm trying to build relationships with my kids. It's based on trust. I want them to know that if something's going on at school, I'm going to listen to their teacher but I'm also ready to listen to them. My parents always backed the teacher and that was very frustrating for me particularly because I had teachers who were really just out to get our family.
But yeah, so cycle breaking is recognising that you belong to a cycle, like you're a link in a long chain of families and ancestors and ahead of you have descendants, people in your life, your community that you're impacting, how you respond to that in raising them, but also in how you respond to yourself. Like, are you treating yourself with kindness? Are you repeating the good cycles? Like, my mum telling us how beautiful we are is something I do want my children to have. My dad being free, abundant and generous with I love you's is something like, like that'll never be withheld if I'm mad at you. Recognising the cycles that you're part of helps you become aware of it and then you can choose if you want to break it or if you want to retain it and nourish it and grow it.
I now say things that my mum used to say. I have a tween child at home and, and an eight year old. And, and it's important for them to still hear the messaging that my mum used to give. And it's, she used to say, “Ah you are so lucky. You are so lucky to be that good looking.”
She'd say “Some people out there never knew the blessing of having kids this good looking.” You know what, I got a lot of issues. Self confidence about my looks, it's not one of them. Uh, cause I'm comfortable in my skin. Because my mum, like she was proud of all my academic stuff, but my parents did the best that they could with what they had. In the time that they had. And um, I respect them for what they did achieve.
(Upbeat music)
STYNES (Voiceover): Amy told me a saying — "When an Indigenous elder passes away, it's like a library being burned to the ground."
Amy's PhD research was about the experiences and motivations of Indigenous women in academia, and the impact their studies can have on their immediate familial, extended kinship and broader Indigenous community.
For Amy, getting a tertiary degree was in part about increasing earning potential... but it was also about opening pathways for more Indigenous kids to pursue learning.
These days, Amy is a full time researcher in the field of education, and works in the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at UTS, which is a majority-Indigenous department.
But they haven't always worked at unis that have felt culturally safe.
(Upbeat music fades)
STYNES: Tell me about some of the, um, what you've described as violence in academia.
THUNIG: Okay, so when we talk about systems, when we talk about health systems, criminal justice systems, education, every one of these systems is a collective of people.
And every single one of those people has gone through some kind of formal training and qualification, you know, police go off to the police academy. I mean, police don't necessarily go through university, but pretty much all of the major professions do. And anyone who gets caught up in the police then faces the, you know, in quotation marks, justice system, which are lawyers and judges and advocates and and people who have been through the university system.
And so once you start thinking about that. You really start to recognise the power of universities.
We have, you know, over 200 years of really intentional dehumanisation of Indigenous peoples, including the active exclusion of Indigenous peoples from city limits, from country, from education systems.
You know, your office becomes a safe place when you're teaching at the university and your mob, because the Black students, Indigenous students come and find you. You know I've had medical students come and find me and say that they just left a lecture crying, this was, you know, at a previous uni I worked at, because the lecturer said that Indigenous health rates were the way they were because all Aboriginal people do drugs. And this was to a massive lecture theatre of, you know, pre med students.
And so we have people today qualifying as doctors, nurses, technicians, lawyers, you know, going on to become judges, teachers, future principals. And so the racism is being in-built because they think it's fact. They don't realise it's opinion. They don't realise like, oh, that's misinformation. That's opinion. That's bias. It's, it's pretty full on.
STYNES: What makes it worth it?
THUNIG: Because of the teacher principle. So the teacher principle, and I think this is a really good principle to bring to any public conversation you're having, is 20 20 60. So in every group of people that you're talking to or being perceived by. So maybe you're having a back and forth with someone publicly on Twitter or on Facebook or something.
I'm not usually actually talking for them. Because if they're being that, if someone's being really offensive, I'm not, I'm assuming that I might not be able to make much leeway with them. I'm thinking about everyone watching.
STYNES: Mm.
THUNIG: And a good rule is 20 percent of people are already on board. Right? They already agree. They already know this stuff. They've already got it. 20 percent of people will never be on board. It doesn't matter how much information. They will not be on board. 60 percent, they could go either way. So you're going for the 60 percent and it's how much of that 60 percent ends up successfully unpicking the misinformation and opening their mind to a humanised understanding of Indigeneity, it's going to change in every group.
But I've had students cry by the end of my course and just really purge in like emotionally in the tutorials admitting and saying, oh my God, this is stuff I've said before. These are things, you know, that they'd written in their essay or, you know, these are comments that they'd heard their family members say that they'd never challenged or thought to challenge and, and they realise they're wrong.
I had a student confess in a massive group conversation, that she had repeatedly reported an Aboriginal family at this school where she was doing, like, teacher's assistant. She didn't have a degree yet. Repeatedly, because she'd noticed that the kid wouldn't be wearing his shoes while they were walking up.
But he had his shoes in his bag, you know, she listed all these things which were absolutely normal, some of them were cultural specific, and that child got removed.
STYNES: Oh gosh.
THUNIG: And so she was sitting there crying, and like as the teacher, I was going, oh, like, oh my God, I don't know how to facilitate the well-being of the rest of the class right now.
I can't do anything about the child and that child's family who has had that horrendous experience.
But what I know the rest of the class learnt in that moment is that they absolutely need to be wary of their colleagues at times. That you cannot just trust that everyone's at the same level as you.
And her being willing to talk about it to the rest of the class was probably a good thing in that they all then recognized how common and, and current, what I'd been teaching them was. Seeing that there are, there are students here who are going to actively work against this stuff makes me want to really work for it, and that's really solid. Um, and that's what my community and my elders have called on me to do is to work in that education space and to do what we can to make these pathways more culturally safe for the kids. But also, you know, so that we do end up with, with the judges who are a little bit more aware and lawyers who are a little bit more sensitive and health staff who are going to check their biases and maybe look out for the biases of their colleagues.
(Gentle music)
STYNES (Voiceover): A few years ago, Amy was taking their children to see an autism specialist — and the specialist saw in Amy some telltale signs.
STYNES: You were diagnosed with autism as an adult, tell me about being seen as that person.
THUNIG: So I sat on it, it was something which at first I was like, oh, I can never tell anyone about this because as an Aboriginal parent who has a child, who's currently experiencing some challenges, this is going to make me even higher risk. Um, coming from the background that I come from as well and I didn't have my doctorate yet and I wasn't financially stable yet.
So I kept quiet about it until I felt like I had enough of a stable base that I could do so safely.
But yeah, that's why I started talking about it is kind of being like, okay, I can kind of safely talk about it. And as I access scripts for how to ask for things, putting them up online, like I'll have people message me and say, I'm autistic and I'm scared to talk to my employer about it. So thank you so much for sharing this. It's just who we are. And it's not, it's not something we're trying to heal or fix, it's who we are, and that's okay.
STYNES: Everything you just said made me think about your parents and the accommodations that they didn't get.
THUNIG: Yeah.
STYNES: And what you just said about accepting them for who they are also is what you've, that template you've applied to them as well.
THUNIG: That's true, I hadn't thought about that.
So, my mum and my dad both experienced a lot of, of trauma early in life. You know, and I'm not, I'm not projecting, neither of them have gone through a diagnosis process. I'm not saying that they are. I'm just saying it's genetic and I am and the kids are.
(Laughs) Um, it's come from somewhere, you know, uh, but... Coming in with even less than what I came into the world with and less awareness of this stuff and no supports in school. I can see how the quiet that comes with certain substances would be very tempting and there was not the education back then to stop them getting started on that track that then, you know, became near impossible to get off of.
So yeah, I think, um, and this is when we were talking about cycle breaking, what I meant when I was saying, sometimes you have to ask yourself, am I being kind enough to myself? Like, the, the phrasing I learnt last year when I was very overwhelmed with mum getting sick was, I am doing my best. And I think that's really powerful.
(Theme music)
Because it would be, like, something that Luke says is you wouldn't be mad about needing to use a wheelchair when you need to use a wheelchair.
You don't get mad at someone for needing to use a disability park. You don't get mad at someone because they can't run as fast as you because they're using a crutch or something. We need to recognize that everyone has their challenges. And that to love people and to be in community with people is to hold space for not just their strengths, but for where they need support.
STYNES (Voiceover): This has been SEEN. Hosted by me, Yumi Stynes. If you liked this episode, please like and share it with the people around you who you think will love it because every share helps our show to grow.
From Audiocraft, Season 2 of SEEN was produced by Mandy Yuan, Laura Brierley Newton and Marcus Costello. Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta, and Executive Producer is Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Caroline Gates, Joel Supple, Max Gosford and Micky Grossman.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi-O Studios.
And music is by Yeo.
SEEN's original concept was by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn.
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