King's Birthday honours
Annie Guest: 830 Australians have been recognised in this year's King's Birthday Honours for contributions to the nation. Among this year's recipients are an Indigenous activist who's worked through all levels of the education system and an avid stamp collector who's traced some of Australia's postal history. Kimberley Price reports.
Kimberley Price: Dr Geraldine Atkinson has dedicated almost 50 years of her life to improving the education system for Indigenous students. She started out as an Aboriginal teachers' aide at Wanganui College in Shepparton, Victoria in 1976.
Geraldine Atkinson: All schools were given money to employ Aboriginal teacher aides to get students into schools so they said we would see an Aboriginal face. So I'd visit families of the children and I'd go in classrooms with the children.
Kimberley Price: Going the extra mile for students and their families is something the Bangerang-Wiradjuri elder continued to do as she saw the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.
Geraldine Atkinson: A lot of them were leaving school as soon as they turned 15 and that really worried me. I really thought something needed to be done.
Kimberley Price: Throughout Aunty Geraldine's career, she's worked across all levels of the education system, including starting a childcare centre in her local Rumbalara community to her role as President of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association. She's travelled to Canberra to lobby governments to do more for Indigenous education. As an inaugural co-chair of the First People's Assembly of Victoria, she's advocated for a treaty between the state government and Indigenous communities.
Geraldine Atkinson: We were teaching those children about their culture, about their identity. We wanted them to be children that were going to be proud of their Aboriginality.
Kimberley Price: Growing up in 1960s Australia on missions and communities along the Murray River, Aunty Geraldine says she was always proud to be Aboriginal.
Geraldine Atkinson: I think it was where I'd lived, lived in Leighton, that had made the house out of tin from the tip and there would be other families. So we were all together and we had each other and we all knew we were Aboriginal.
Kimberley Price: Today she still lives along her beloved Murray River in Barmah and Aunty Geraldine says she's proud to receive the National Award of Officer of the Order of Australia. Many others have received an honour today. In Lismore, near the northern New South Wales coast, Geoffrey Wotherspoon admits he had a bit of imposter syndrome when he found out he was receiving a Medal of the Order of Australia.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: I did think at the time, have I done enough to deserve this and all that sort of stuff, but yes, certainly an honour.
Kimberley Price: Geoffrey Wotherspoon began collecting stamps in high school and it's led him down a path of researching his local history.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: There's a close friend of ours, Lloyd Newton, he was an incredible collector and he took me under his wing and I've been collecting ever since. He specialised in the early series, the King George and the Kangaroo series and that's where I specialised.
Kimberley Price: As president of the Richmond River Philatelic Society for over 30 years, Geoffrey Wotherspoon has worked with many community members to record Lismore's history. In 2019, he wrote a book detailing Australia's first official airmail flight and led the re-enactment of the event for its centenary in 2020.
Geoffrey Wotherspoon: It started from just looking at our own local history, finding something and then it just basically got out of hand on a full blown investigation, took me across Australia and different places, all the national archives, everywhere, tracking down all this information on this aeroplane flight.
Kimberley Price: And through his passion for stamps and history, Geoffrey Wotherspoon continues to engage his community. He'll soon start passing his knowledge on to the next generation with school holiday programs.
Annie Guest: Kimberley Price with that report.
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