Meg’s reflections after a recent workshop

I was at an Eco-communities workshop on the NSW Central Coast the other day. We got to talking about local environment projects and people’s experiences in the area. One of the participants told us she lived on a few hectares not far out of town. She and her family really loved where they lived, lots of bush they enjoyed walking through and caring for.

Not long ago while walking the much loved family dog, she and her two children came across a snake. Before they could restrain the dog it attacked the snake and injured it quite seriously. But unfortunately the dog was bitten by the snake and died quite quickly, before their eyes.

They were left with a dead family member (that’s how they felt about their dog) and a seriously injured snake. So what to do? I think most people would find a stout stick and finish off the snake, probably with a vengeance, and that was the first impulse of the children. Revenge. But no, she talked to them about it and they decided the right thing to do was to look after the snake. So they called the local wildlife rescue service who came and took it away, to be nursed back to health. Then they buried their dog.

This woman, I thought, is a saint

November 2005

Graeme's story

The other day I stepped in on a conversation between two people who were getting quite hot under the collar about a proposed housing development and shopping centre in bushland near where we live. One of the people was in favour of the proposal, the other against. They had stopped listening to each other and started to become personal. There’s only one way for this sort of encounter to go and that’s further down. I made my position known and managed to engage the person with the different view in what fairly quickly became a quite productive and respectful exchange of views.

Later on I wondered why. How did I manage this? Yes, I’m big, and fairly quietly spoken, certainly not loud and terribly threatening. But what else? Lots of previous experiences I think but one comes to mind.

In the mid 1990s I participated in a Strategic Questioning workshop conducted by the American social change activist Fran Peavey. The workshop was at Richmond in western Sydney. On the second day Fran organised participants into pairs to go in to the town and start conversations with strangers to discover how they were feeling about Aboriginal reconciliation. I was paired with a young woman of Asian origin who must have been about half my size and age. We approached a white man, on his own, aged in his mid-thirties and explained we were participating in a short course that day and that as part of the course we wanted to discuss with people their feelings about Aboriginal reconciliation.

Turns out that he wasn’t feeling that well about it at all and he let us know, with a range of negative views that he shared very freely and loudly. We listened and asked a few questions – following the strategic questioning approach ­ and it wasn’t long before he was admitting he didn’t really know any Aboriginal people and most of his views came from certain elements of the media and popular stereotypes. His life wasn’t easy and he was angry at many things. After 20 minutes or so when we finished the conversation he thanked us for helping him think about the issue more clearly than he had before.

I’d recommend strategic questioning (find it via Google) to anyone interested in people – and isn’t that all of us?

April 2006

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