Transcript

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HUGH LOVESY TALKS ABOUT WORKING WITH INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

By chance, that's how I got involved. I'd come back from living a long time in India. and had two different choices, one was to work in television, and the other was to go to Mimili community which is fairly near Ayres Rock, and work there as the community adviser. I chose to go to Mimili and it was a good choice.

There are a lot of interesting challenges that people have to face when they are going to start a business, but at the same time they can be easily overcome. The first challenge was to really separate out all the information which was flooding into those communities, and to say "what are the core things that people need to know", it's like a storm of information, so that's the hardest thing.

I see a lot of opportunities for people who want to start a small business in central Australia with Indigenous communities. There are two levels of opportunities. One is working with Indigenous communities themselves, and the other is actually working in a more mainstream environment. The sort of things that we do are critical to the success of any organization, particularly an Indigenous organization. Since it is critical, there is a lot of room for different people to work in that field, it is an opening field.

My comment to people starting up would be balance your specialised knowledge with getting advice from people that can really help you. Firstly, I'd find someone who really knows the ins and outs, that's very important, you need that person on your team. I'd talk to government, I'd also talk to businesses in town. And if people are coming from outside the area to go to Chamber of Commerce, there's some really good practical people there. The second thing is you need to be adaptable and flexible in what you are doing. And thirdly you need to have good contacts in the government. So those three things are very very important. And underlying them is you've got to have a genuine desire and like of aboriginal people and then you will not only have a successful business but you will enjoy it.

When we first started we got our advice from a number of different sources. Looking at how we started I think we would have been better off to get more advice. After having won the Telstra award I'm so aware of how much I've learnt about being an entrepreneur as opposed to someone with an idea that has gone into business. It's quite a different thing. We knew a lot about aboriginal communities, we didn't know much about business, although we thought we did. So we didn't really get enough advice.

The way I see our businesses progressing, is working in cooperation with people as part of a larger team.