The footballer Adam Goodes will coach young Indigenous people about mental health and cultural resilience at the Koori youth summit on Thursday in one of his first speaking engagements since retiring from the AFL last year.
The former Sydney Swans player, who retired after being continually booed by football fans throughout the 2015 season, has banned media from attending the Q&A event, which will be attended by 180 young Victorian Indigenous people as part of the two-day summit.
Greg Kennedy, the state coordinator of the Koori Youth Council, said that Goodes, a Adnyamathanha and Narungga man from South Australia, had been invited to speak as a “symbol for strength and standing up and success and pride” for the Koori community.
“We are hoping that he will be able to support the young people to stand up and succeed,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, himself a Tati-Tati and Muthi Muthi man from north-west Victoria, who also has Noongar heritage, said that mental health and identity had been chosen as the themes for the summit in response to the “unacceptable levels” of youth suicide among Indigenous Australians
Suicide is the leading cause of death for Indigenous people aged 15 to 35 and Indigenous people in that age bracket are three times more likely to commit suicide than their non-Indigenous peers.
Kennedy said the national attention paid to the suicide epidemic in remote communities, like the recent death of a 10-year-old girl in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, often overshadowed the situation in cities and towns on the east coast, where the suicide rate remained high.
“We have had a lot of youth suicides in Victoria recently … in the past three months there have been three suicides,” he told Guardian Australia.
“So there are some issues in community that are obviously a hangover from colonisation and these sort of things have resulted in communities sometimes not being as strong as they need to be to support young people.”
He said the Koori youth summit, which begins on Wednesday and will bring together people from metropolitan and regional areas of the state, would allow young people to lead the conversation about mental health and develop proposals with which to lobby government.
The summit also connects young people with elders and cultural leaders, a connection Kennedy said many of the Victorian mob was lacking.
“We are a state that was heavily massacred by settlers and there’s a real sense of young people now that [we] really, really need to bring back some of those things that have been taken from us,” he said.
“We have seen in the last three years a real push for a sort of cultural renaissance where we are really pushing hard to reconnect not only with culture but with different ways of thinking about the country and our place in it. Not just among Indigenous people, but non-Indigenous people too.”
Maddee Clark, one of the delegates at the summit, told Guardian Australia that she hoped the focus on mental health would see mainstream mental health organisations make a space for Indigenous people to join their campaigns.
Clark, a 26-year-old queer Bundjalung person from Geelong who is completing her PhD in Indigenous studies at Monash University, said the focus would not just be on racism but on issues of gender identity and sexuality, which she said many in the Koori community were “desperate to talk about”.
“It’s a really valuable couple of days,” she said. “It’s good for people’s wellbeing, it’s good for their development and it’s good for them to know that they have a place in the community and they are not just isolated – that the community supports them too.”
