Joel Davison (2010)
Paul Galea:
Joel Davidson. Paul Galea from IGS, ringing up to see how are you going, mate? How are you doing?
Joel:
Yeah, not too bad, thanks. How are you doing?
Paul Galea:
Good, mate. Good. I always do a little bit of an introduction. So you left in 2010. I remember you as a little bit of a pain in your early years but you developed into a fantastic kid when you were in your older years. You put your head down and got stuck in pretty well. I hope that’s not too offensive! I also spent some time with your little sister down in Tasmania this year for Writing The Island and that’s how we sort of got back into contact. So anyway, that’s a sort of a bit of a vibe about who you are. Can you let us know when you left IGS and what you’ve been doing since you left?
Joel:
Yeah. Totally. And don’t worry about it. I think it might be a bit of a compliment to say that I put my head down at all. I had a lot of fun at IGS!
What I’m up to now is I’m a senior business analyst at a consultancy, helping the agile software development teams to succeed. We do a lot of work with not-for-profit, some sort of pro bono or low bono work. But to get here, it’s been a long and winding road, and that’s only really half of what I actually do.
Leaving High School, I thought that I wanted to study architecture. I guess I just thought, like, what do you do after high school? You go to university? Yeah. A bit of a HECS debt, a bit of faffing about for about a year and a half, and I eventually dropped out of that. While I was at university, I was also doing some car upholstery, here and there, for a bit of scratch. After I dropped out, you know, I did odd jobs and packets of Mee Goreng. I was working at McDonald’s, as an IT administrator and I was painting houses.
Eventually, I decided while I was doing all that, that I wanted to be a horticulturalist. So I went to TAFE and I studied horticulture. I got a job as a horticulturalist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney and yeah, I figured that I’d settle down and be a labourer for the rest of my life. But it ended up not really being enough for me. So I did some night classes, through a sponsorship at what was then Coder Factory and I got a job as a full stack software developer at a small indigenous owned and run consultancy called N G N Y. From there I moved on to the bank to do analysis and to learn about project delivery and got to where I am now. In the meantime, I’ve also written a bit of poetry, taught some classes through the Sydney Festival about Gadigal language, done some work with Midnight Oil, had some of my poetry published and I’ve also done some art work for Google’s HQ in Sydney.
Paul Galea:
Let me stop you there. First thing I want to say. Wow! So you’ve been gone 12 years. You’ve done a lot of things. Can we just dig into those? Dig into some of the things you just said then? One of things I’m interested in is that you did about a year and a half in architecture. What did you discover that made you drop out? Or was it not what you thought it was going be? I’m interested in knowing where that sort of path ended and why.
Joel:
Yeah, so I suppose that the degree that I was actually doing was architectural computing. What I found was that architecture is a really classist sort of area of study. I remember very distinctly our first lecture. Our lecturer showed us a portfolio from an ex-student of his who had gone on to an Ivy League college in America, and the second page of his portfolio was a full page spread of all the places he studied, all of the universities and colleges that he had studied at around the world. And it was basically, unless you go to an Ivy League college and get your Masters in Architecture, you’re not going to be an architect. You’re going to be doing visualisation for architecture, perhaps. I was sitting there and you might know architecture students carry around this cute, really big black portfolio with their nice sketch paper and pens and stuff. I had to buy a secondhand portfolio and budget moleskins, and I couldn’t afford the pens, so I was borrowing pens every time. Yeah, it was really rough. What I should have done was that I should have transferred to Computer Science, because all of the computing classes in that degree, I was really enjoying.
Paul Galea:
Okay, so did you consider that, or was that just something that didn’t occur to you at the time?
Joel:
You know, I was just really dejected by the whole experience. I was racking up student debt and didn’t really have much of a direction. I felt a bit like a failure. And yeah, I needed to start being able to pay rent, so I couldn’t be studying full-time, if I wasn’t really focused on it.
Paul Galea:
So then you’re headed towards horticulture, and you said that while you finished your course and you got what sounds like a good job, at the Botanic Gardens. When you say it wasn’t enough for you, wasn’t it stimulating enough? Wasn’t fulfilling enough? I’m just interested in exploring that a little bit.
Joel:
It would be a dream if I could just do labour and doing labour paid the rent and put food on the table. There were really, really interesting parts about horticulture, all of the biology things, but 90 per cent of what you were doing was the actual manual labour. It was mulching and shovelling and blowing leaves and one thing that took a surprising amount of time was sweeping bat guano off of sandstone. And I was thinking about, like, maybe I should get into biology because learning about plants and soil compositions and the like; how all of that whole system works and ecosystems in general work, that’s all really interesting. That’s the thing that gets me up in the morning and gets my brain working. I started to realise that, actually, you know, I wanted to be doing things that are really crunchy that my brain can work over.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, and sweeping up bat poo didn’t quite make it on that level, eh?
Joel:
Hmm. I’ve done my bat guano time, I think. I don’t feel I have to go back to that.
Paul Galea:
Very good. So, you also mentioned that you’ve done a little bit of Indigenous language stuff. You want to tell us a little bit about that? Because I’m interested in that. Where does that come from? Obviously, you’re Indigenous, but where does that come from, what do you get out of it and tell us some of the things specifically that you’ve done with it.
Joel:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think, when I started doing it professionally the first time, I was contacted by the Sydney Festival. It was really kind of the first time that someone reached out to me because they were interested in giving me a platform to teach people about my culture and heritage. It really got me thinking about the impact that I can have on Australia more broadly. You know, the sort of ideal is that everyone in Australia should also be able to at least understand the local Indigenous language.
There’s so much of culture that language carries and stores, especially in a language that had no written form, like when you think about data integrity today, we think that stories are only real if they’re written down somewhere or we can only validate that something is true if we can find a book in the library somewhere that someone wrote the information down in. But for tens of thousands of years, my people kept information integral to our responsibilities to each other, in our ecosystem, in our language.
That’s a really powerful thing that I think l has so many values in there that are important to being human in the 21st Century. Being able to engage in that and inform a strategy around that vision, really started pushing me forward, I guess, and thinking about what I can do. And since then, there have been a lot of opportunities, but there’s a lot of, “What do I say yes to, what do I say no to? Who is serious about it?” I had the opportunity, I guess, in 2018 to 2019, the New Year’s Eve broadcast to the ABC, to give a Welcome to Country in language at the Opera House, and that was broadcast to some three million people, which is, I think, historically, the most people that have heard my people’s language, which is really significant.
Paul Galea:
Wow, that’s super interesting because, I think that whole aspect of the maintenance of culture through language and not written language is really interesting. Like you say, you have been able to spread it or at least expose three million people through that one moment that you did that one Welcome to Country. I think that’s super interesting, you know, and very, very valuable to Australians as a whole, but also to the Indigenous peoples of our country, because that’s really reaching out, I reckon.
Joel:
Yeah. You’re completely right. It’s exposing people to the fact that it exists, it’s still alive, and it’s still out there. It is still something that can proliferate and spread. That is really significant. But to me, it’s sort of, the wider vision is, everyone should be able to understand it or hopefully speak it. You know, it’s kind of disappointing that it seems like the best I can do right now is expose most people to it, or a lot of people to it.
Paul Galea:
Small steps, mate, small steps. You’ve got to start somewhere and then build and build and build. That’s really interesting, I think. And so, obviously you’re a full time worker who needs to fit in a full-time job, but your interest in Indigenous language has to sort of fit in with that. So I’m interested to hear, that you talk about you getting a lot of opportunities. But part of your big thing is to work out, which are the more genuine ones, which are the ones that aren’t tokenistic. Is that right? Like, you get some offers that maybe are not so genuine or not so authentic?
Joel:
Yeah, Absolutely. Or just aren’t impactful enough. There are a lot of very well-meaning people who want to do their own thing in their little corner of the world but when it comes to managing my own time and sanity, the short amount of time that I do have, I have to lend it to the most impactful things that I can say “Yes” to.
Paul Galea:
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. You can be the only person who can manage your life and if you try and do too much, basically, you’re going to end up not doing a good job anywhere.
Joel:
Yeah, I’ve been there before.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, okay. So you’ve learned from past experience, as we all do. How do you feel your time at IGS helped you or didn’t help you, for what came after, do you think? Have you got any feelings about your time at IGS in terms of your life now?
Joel:
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I was very lucky to be able to go to IGS. I think one of the biggest things for me was I was given the opportunity to be a student leader in Year 12, which I thought was so brave of the teachers, to be honest, looking back at that, because when I was in High School, I really did not have any sense of discipline. I was sort of a little kid running around doing whatever was most exciting at the time and it could be getting really deep into my Design Technology project and then next moment, running off and socialising with my friends over here and then making trouble over there. But, you know, being exposed to the responsibilities of leadership, really, I was able to think about that in the future and really accurately dissect the gap between the leader that I wanted to be and the leader that I was being in High School, and to really work on myself in my own approach to close that gap sooner than later.
Paul Galea:
Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? So, in some way, that opportunity, the fact that you were given that opportunity, spurred you to become, well, you know, a better person because you’ve got that opportunity. Had you not gotten that opportunity, you might have never been in a position to really think about it too much and maybe just sort of went on your merry way.
Joel:
Yeah, it’s kind of like, the first time you try anything, you’re going to stumble a little bit. Right? And I’m glad that in terms of leadership, I had the opportunity to stumble in High School as opposed to out in the productive workplace, where poor leadership can result in really bad outcomes for the people who you work with.
Paul Galea:
Yeah. Okay. Very good. Have you got any specific memories of IGS that you really remember fondly or anything that is fixed in your mind? It doesn’t have to just be good.
Joel:
I’ve got a lot of moments that I remember that keep me up at night! You know, just, like thinking about this one horrible thing or dumb thing that I said! I do remember, in your, was it Traditional Cultures class, in Year 10, where you promised to take us out to Japanese restaurant for lunch and it never materialised. It sounds like you owe me a lunch!
Paul Galea:
It sounds like something I’d do; I was famous for doing that. I had a Japanese restaurant that we used to go to. So we’ll have to think about why that didn’t happen. What year would that have been? 2008 or something?
Joel:
Yeah. 2008.
Paul Galea:
Yeah. Okay. I’ll have to think about that. Well, maybe I’ll have to take you out to that Japanese lunch, to right the universe, to get the universe back in balance because I am a guy who tries to live by the credo of I never say things that I don’t follow through with. So if I did that, that’s a bit of a worry. Let’s move on because that’s causing me to rethink my whole life! Speaking of our existence, one of the things that got us to this interview point was that, your little sister, Nyree, saw my tattoo of the world on my arm, and she really freaked out because she said that “My big brother, Joel, has got that exact same tattoo!” Now I know why I’ve got mine. Do you want to let us know why you have got a tattoo of the world on your arm?
Joel:
Yeah, I guess I got my tattoo to remind myself of our own ethnocentricity as humans. It’s very easy for us to get so involved in our own context, so absorbed by our own problems that we forget that there’s this whole big wide world out there full of different stories and different experiences. And we can only ever occupy one tiny little corner of the world at any one time. So it’s just a reminder of that.
Paul Galea:
Well, mine is remarkably similar because I’ve always loved maps of the world, and I’ve got a huge map of the world on my wall, and I was staring at it one day and my daughter said to me, “Why don’t you get that tattooed on your arm, Dad, because you’re always talking to us about how we’re only a little part of the world?”
There’s a whole world out there and it’s very similar to what you’re thinking about. We live in a suburb in Sydney, in Australia, in a country of 25 million. And there’s just that whole, as you say, experience out there. So for me, it’s also a little bit of a reminder that, yeah, it’s there, but also to get out there into that world. Now, I always ask this, and people will always give me different things, but sometimes the students listen to these podcasts. I’m just wondering if you have got any advice for the younger people. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering advice but any advice, since you’ve been out of school for 10 years and you’ve had an interesting journey? Any advice you might give to young people who were thinking about what they’re going to be doing?
Joel:
Yeah. Nobody’s perfect. Feel free to make your own mistakes, but make sure that you learn from them. And learn anything that you want to learn. Don’t let anyone put you into a box or tell you you’ve got to do this or that. If you’re interested in something, learn about it.
Paul Galea:
Pretty good advice. I will be contacting you off the air, and you and I will go and have a Japanese lunch because I think you seem like a very interesting young man who I wouldn’t mind talking to more because a few of those things I’m very interested in. But part of that is I don’t like leaving debts unpaid!
Editor’s note: Joel is living in Melbourne so he’s still waiting to get that Japanese lunch!