Richard Trudgen - BiographyRichard Trudgen was born and raised in the rural area of central NSW Australia. He flunked out of school and was lucky to pick up a trade as a fitter and turner in a farm mechanical work shop. Richard believes he learnt so many life skills in this very hard, dirty but challenging job. In his late teens he, his two brothers and two friends put a rock band together with Richard learning and playing lead guitar, and singing harmony. The band was the first of many seemingly 'impossible' projects he would be involved in throughout life. 1977 changed his life for the better with marriage to Hazel. She came to live at Ramingining and they had three children while there; with two later being born in NSW. Well and truly outstaying his 12 month voluntary term, Richard spent eleven years living, learning, laughing and crying with Yolŋu people at Ramingining, and believes he learnt more from the people than he ever taught them. Yet in the two-way cross-cultural cross-language sharing environment Richard started to discover the people’s confusion about the new world around them and what did and did not work for them. Whenever new information was built on their traditional knowledge in language things work well but when it was dumped on them in English it failed. In this time he trained Yolŋu as heavy equipment plant operators, mechanics/fitters, office workers, essential service and powerhouse operations. He was also called upon to give advice to the local town council and two other community associations while he carried out his duties in a community development team consisting of 5 Yolŋu and himself. This team also ran the home lands movement working with the Yolŋu land owners to build air strips and other essential services on their homelands. As the English speaking part of the team he also found himself orientating and training the Balanda (non-Indigenous) staff that came to work. The community development team also moderated disputes between Balanda and Yolŋu and between Yolŋu clans who found it very difficult now living all mixed together in one central community. Due to an unfortunate series of health problems in 1982, Richard experienced first-hand how the medical/hospital system can work against you, an experience that was common place to many of his Yolŋu colleagues. Following this experience, he returned to central NSW and spent the next 8 years running a small business and building his health away from the tropical heat. In the 1990’s several Yolŋu elders encouraged Richard to return to work with them because so many things were failing for them. When he left Ramingining in 1984 the Yolŋu were running most things on their community. Now 8 years later almost all the paying jobs had been taken by expatriates. Yolŋu were also suffering high death rates due to disease and sickness; way exceeding anything they had ever experienced before. Rev Doc Djiniyini Gondara charged Richard to develop and deploy his educational methodology named by Djiniyini as 'discovery education'. Djiniyini said, “This education methodology is great because we, the people, discover what we want to know rather than Balanda telling us what they think we should know. This is real empowerment rather than just more headaches and disempowerment”. Discovery education maps the people’s knowledge gaps around any subject area and then uses dialogue in language together with traditional and contemporary knowledge to close the knowledge gaps. It has been used to teach complex health issues such as infectious disease like HIV / STI’s and all form of chronic disease, as well as legal, governance and economic issues. Under instructions from Djiniyini, Richard wrote and self published the book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die. It is now in its 8th printing with over 30,000 copies sold and continues to sell at an ever increasing rate. In the late 1990’s Richard looked for ways to give Yolŋu all over Arnhem Land and in Darwin access to the discovery education material. We needed to change the education ratio from one to ten too one to eight thousand otherwise the people would never get enough access to information. Throughout the ten years between 2000 and 2010 as CEO of Aboriginal Resource and Development Services Richard helped to build a shoe-string radio service called Yolŋu Radio www.ards.com.au/radio.htm. With over twenty transmission sites across north Australia and available on the internet it is the only such service in Australia that delivers a wide range of adult education material and general information to a group of Indigenous people in their own language. Richard is also well known for his insightful seminar ‘Bridging the Gap’ that continues to be attended by large and varied audiences across Australia. Again developed at the request of Yolŋu elders as part of a strategy to get their story out and to better equip the dominant culture community with skills and knowledge in how to work with Indigenous people in a positive way. In addition to this seminar, he runs a range of workshops training Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in community development, cultural awareness, cross cultural communication, education that works, traditional and non-traditional learning processes, traditional laws and politics and developing health, economic and legal literacy programs. Richard is still writing on the above subjects and producing for Yolŋu Radio. His latest big 'Impossible' project is to develop a complete e-learning school in Yolŋu Matha the language of the Yolŋu people of north-east Arnhem Land. |
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In 1973 he left home to do 12 months voluntary work at Ramingining in central Arnhem Land. Forced to learn the people’s language he discovered a new world that excited his intellect and shamed him as an 'Australian'. In 1975 he trained as a community worker/organiser as he wanted to be part of 'fixing' people rather than just fixing 'tractors'.