The Lisa Jackson Pulver Story - Part 2
In Part 1 of our story of Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver we related how many of our NSW Aboriginal informants independently alleged that they had deep suspicions about Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver’s claim that she was of Wiradjuri Aboriginal descent.
Many Wiradjuri told us that they could not place her at all anywhere within their wide-ranging kinships.
One of our informants, a Wiradjuri lady, listened to us as we related the Professor’s life-story and her achievements - her complex relationship with her dad; her hard work, persistence and striving to ‘be some-body’; and the huge range of achievements she had gained in such wide ranging fields as nursing, the first Aboriginal person to gain a PhD in medicine at Sydney Uni, the highest ranking Aboriginal person in the RAAF, a Professor and the most senior Indigenous person at the world-renowned University of Sydney, an Aboriginal Jew who was the president of the Newtown Synagogue, a member of the Order of Australia with an AM, all coupled with her claims to be Wiradjuri with ‘connections’ from Wagga Wagga all the way through to South Australia via her dad, and up to the far north coast of New South Wales via her mum, as well as having Scottish and Welsh connections that make her, ‘belong to the world.’
Our Wiradjuri friend looked at us and wondered aloud as to why she hadn’t heard of this famous Wiradjuri kinswoman and why didn’t she know of her Wiradjuri family, and then, with the commonsense and direct-speaking of a wise matriarch said, “her life sound’s a bit like that guy in the movie, what was it called? Catch Me if You Can?”
In an attempt to discover, one way or the other, whether Lisa Jackson Pulver is of Wiradjuri Aboriginal descent, we undertook a detailed genealogical investigation, using the publicly available records, into Professor Jackson Pulver’s ancestral claims.
Jackson Pulver has made a number of these claims regarding her Aboriginal ancestry over the past decade or two, claims which we understand may have qualified her for certain tax-payer funded employment positions, educational opportunities and public accolades that are reserved for Australians who are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders descent.
As we have emphasised before, these genealogical investigations that we are doing at Dark Emu Exposed are not about ‘character assassinations’ of particular people for political or any other purposes. What they are about, to use the modern parlance is ‘social justice’ - there is something deeply offensive, immoral and unethical about someone who tries to appropriate another person’s or group’s identity and culture without their consent. This is especially galling when the imposter successfully gains a financial or other benefit at the expense of the person or group they have impersonated.
We are not saying at this stage that Lisa Jackson Pulver is one of these imposters, just that there are many allegations by Wiradjuri people themselves that they do not believe that she is in fact Wiradjuri.
In the next few posts that will appear in the coming weeks we will take the public statements of Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver, statements that she herself has made regarding her family and ancestry, and compare her claims with what the public records actually show.
We want to know, do the records show she is of Aboriginal descent? Do the records provide the evidence that she satisfies the ‘descent’ part of the 3-Part Rule of Aboriginality, which is officially used to define Aboriginality in Australia?
We will present our findings and let our readers, and especially our Wiradjuri informants, make up their own minds as to Professor Jackson Pulver’s bona fides.
As the Public, we Rely upon Our Instititions for Guidance and the Facts, don’t we?
At this stage we don’t know one way or the other whether Professor Jackson Pulver, from the University of Sydney, is of Wiradjuri descent or not.
However, many of our most respected private, public and civic institutions recognise Professor Jackson Pulver as an Aboriginal woman.
For example, the respected ABC commentator, and Wiradjuri man himself, Stan Grant introduced the Professor recently as an ‘Indigenous person’, one of his tribal kinswomen, in the following clip from the ABC’s Q&A program:
If Stan Grant accepts her as a Wiradjuri, surely she must be?
The ABC is touted as one of our most respected media organisations.
Surely, the Q&A producers would have confirmed the Professor’s bona fides before including her on the panel as a Wiradjuri woman, wouldn’t they?
Australian Defence Forces: Institutionalised Professionalism - Built on Procedures, Facts and Evidence, Yes?
The RAAF, our Royal Australian Air Force recognises their Air Group Captain, Lisa Jackson Pulver as, ‘the highest ranking Indigenous official in the RAAF, who also heads the Air Force’s Directorate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs.’ (Figure 3 below).
During NAIDOC week 2014, she was interviewed by Sergei DeSilva- Ranasinghe who is a security analyst, defence writer, consultant and a Perth-based non-resident Fellow affiliated with the National Security Institute, University of Canberra. An excerpt of this interview is below, where Jackson Pulver emphasised how her people have been serving the country for 60,000 years (Figure 3).
The Australian public has a very high regard for the professionalism of our RAAF. So of course the RAAF must have a rigorous recruitment process in place that carefully scrutinises all applicants with regard to their backgrounds and the accuracy of the references, qualifications and claims on their CV’s when they apply to join the RAAF, mustn’t they?
If the RAAF believes that their Group Captain Lisa Jackson Pulver is Indigenous and complies with the government’s own 3-part rule for Aboriginality, she must surely be Aboriginal, mustn’t she?.
Our defence forces are experts in security and quality procedures, aren’t they?
If they have the capability to purchase and build multi-billion dollar defence systems, aircraft and submarines they must know what they are doing, mustn’t they?
So, if the RAAF say that their Air Group Captain Lisa Jackson Pulver is Wiradjuri, shouldn’t we, as members of the public, believe it?
Figure 3 - Source: Policy : a journal of public policy and ideas., Centre for Independent Studies (Australia)• Vol. 30 No. 2 • Winter 2014, p42
On the 15th of March in 2015, the RAAF’s highest ranking Indigenous official, Group Captain Lisa Jackson Pulver, announced the NACCHO – Air Force Kummundoo Memorandum of Understanding.
Figure 4 - File photo of Group Captain Jackson Pulver. Source
Group Captain Jackson Pulver told her audience on the day:
‘I acknowledge this place as a Koori woman whose peoples come from the Lands of the Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta; and from the far north-coast to the Dhunghutti Lands and even further afield to those peoples of Wales and those of the ancient lands of Alba (or Scotland).
I am a proud member of the Royal Australian Air Force, just as my father was, and a descendent of many a warrior who has served our nation in uniform’.
‘… I am delighted to report that Air Force has embraced many of the ancient traditions of our ancestors as a part of professional practice within our organisation. For example, people know the importance of Acknowledging Country, of participating in Welcomes, understanding and recognising the many roles or our Aboriginal and Torres Strait members play, and of the centrality of belonging to country. I spend time at many meetings, from international security conferences through to Air Shows, sharing the importance of the first Welcome to Country this House had seen, back in 2008 – and how that was the perceivable shift in the psyche of modern day Australia which continues today…
This years’ NAIDOC theme is “We all Stand on Sacred Ground: Learn, Respect and Celebrate”. With the steps we are taking with NACCHO and Kummundoo, the learnings, respect and celebrations will certainly be a two way process that acknowledges not only the Sacred Land that we stand on, but also of the Sacred Skies we fly in. Kummundoo will not only support the communities our teams are deployed to, but will allow community to see the diversity of roles in the RAAF.’
- Source
Rotary, one of Our Civic Institutions
The Rotary Club of Sydney has ‘spent 100 years making a difference to the lives and destinies of generations. Nation-building projects, international transformations and overcoming local disadvantage is our legacy.’
As one of our most respected civic organisations, the Rotary Club of Sydney promoted Professor Jackson Pulver as, ‘an Aboriginal woman and the first known Aboriginal person to receive a PhD in medicine at the University of Sydney. Her family come from areas including South Western NSW and Northern Victoria, Northern NSW, Eastern South Australia, as well as from Wales and Scotland.’
If the Rotary Club says she is Aboriginal from Wiradjuri Country, shouldn’t we, as members of the public, believe it?
Figure 6 - Professor Jackson Pulver speaks at Sydney Rotary Club’s NADOC Week celebrations on 10 November 2020. Source
Shalom College - A First Class College of High Integrity
From the Shalom College website, we learn that in 2004 a meeting between Indigenous scholar and UNSW academic Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver AM and the then President of the Board of Shalom College, Ilona Lee AM, led to the establishment of the excellent Shalom Gamarada Indigenous Residential Scholarship Program. Over the past 15 years, up to 25 Indigenous students were supported at any one time with a living scholarship at Shalom College.
To be eligible for the scholarship program, Shalom College requires its student applicants to provide ‘evidence of Indigenous/aboriginality’ by meeting the Commonwealth of Australia definition of Aboriginality (see Figure 8).
Given that Shalom College is strict about collecting the evidence from prospective students to support their claims for being Indigenous, it is obvious that the college must have also assured itself of the bona fides of the scholarship’s creator, Indigenous Professor Jackson Pulver and her Aboriginality and conformance to the ‘the Commonwealth of Australia definition of Aboriginality’.
The Shalom College administrators did check Jackson Pulver’s conformance, didn’t they?
Figure 7 - Shalom College tells us that ‘Indigenous scholar Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver’ was instrumental in the establishment of the Shalom Gamarada Indigenous Residential Scholarship Program. Source
Figure 8 - Selection criteria for acceptance as being Indigenous or Aboriginal as required for the Shalom Gamarada Scholarship. Source.
Perhaps Australia’s Most Credentialed Aboriginal Jew?
Understandably, many members of Australia’s Jewish community are delighted and proud, if perhaps somewhat surprised, to learn of arguably Australia’s most credentialed Aboriginal Jew, Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver AM.
In a 2017 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, when queried by the reporter, Mark Dapin, that he ‘would've thought that Aboriginal Jews might comprise the smallest minority in Australia’, Jackson Pulver replied that there are "quite a lot" of them." ‘For me," she says, "being Jewish is not contrary to my beliefs in spirituality as an Aboriginal woman."
And it seems a number of Jewish organisations have embraced Jackson Pulver as an Aboriginal Jew - in the media, from the Australia to Israel to the UK and within very reputable, local Jewish organisations such as the the Jewish National Fund of Australia (JNF)
Figure 9 - Aboriginal Jewish woman Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver with attendees at her JNL talk in 6 April 2021. Source
On Tuesday 6 April 2021: Members of the JNF Gold Patrons enjoyed an intimate dinner with the inimitable Prof. Lisa Jackson Pulver AM who shared her incredible life story with the group.
Commonwealth Government and the Governor- General Validate the Achievements of Lisa Jackson Pulver with an AM
In 2011, Lisa Jackson Pulver was made a Member of the Order of Australia for "service to medical education, particularly through the Muru Marri Indigenous Health Unity at the University of New South Wales, and as a supporter of educational opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people." (Source).
Figure 10 - Queen Elizabeth II wearing the insignia of the Sovereign of the Order of Australia
The Order of Australia is an honour that recognises Australian citizens and other persons for outstanding achievement and service.
The Monarch of Australia is sovereign head of the order, while the Governor-General of Australia is the principal companion/dame/knight (as relevant at the time) and chancellor of the order. The governor-general's official secretary, is secretary of the order. Appointments are made by the governor-general on behalf of the Monarch of Australia, based on recommendations made by the Council of the Order of Australia. The Council makes recommendations to the governor-general.
Awards are announced on Australia Day and on the King's Birthday public holiday in June, on the occasion of a special announcement by the governor-general (usually honorary awards), and on the appointment of a new governor-general. The governor-general presents the order's insignia to new appointees.
Awardees may subsequently resign from the order, and the Council may advise the governor-general to remove an individual from the order, who may cancel an award.
Announcements of all awards, cancellations and resignations appear in the Commonwealth Gazette.
Nomination forms are confidential and not covered by the Freedom of Information Act 1982. The reasoning behind a nomination being successful or unsuccessful—and even the attendees of the meetings where such nominations are discussed—remain confidential.
- Source
On receiving her AM award in 2011, the on-line Jewish news service J-wire published a celebratory piece on this ‘Jewish Aboriginal’ which included a very impressive list of Jackson Pulver’s achievements, to which Jackson Pulver rather humbly admits,
“I am completely delighted” said Professor Jackson. “This award acknowledges the work which I have done which is beyond the call of duty and is not part of my job description.”
Figure 11- Source
Due to confidentiality, we don’t know if the governor-general on behalf of the Monarch of Australia, or the Council of the Order of Australia, were informed that Lisa Jackson Pulver was claiming to be a Wiradjuri woman, or even if this fact was taken into account when they awarded her an AM.
But if they did rely upon the fact that she was Wiradjuri when giving the award, and it was a material point in her winning the award, they must have background checked her bona fides in this regard, mustn’t they?
Recognition by the Cream of our Academic Institutions
The University of Western Sydney is one our premier tertiary institutions. Their Office of Equity and Diversity is at the forefront of progressive social ideas and the pursuit of Social Justice. If they say Lisa Jackson Culver is,
‘a Proud Koori Woman … whose traditional roots lie in south western NSW, [and who] broke new ground by becoming the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander to receive a PhD in Medicine from the University of Sydney …’
then this must be true, mustn’t it?
Aren’t the public told that universities are places of competence, research, facts and truths?
University Of Sydney
In 2021, Lisa Jackson Pulver was interviewed by the Australian Jewish News, for an article titled, ‘Deadly’ chutzpah! A life unbounded - From a homeless teen to becoming the first Aboriginal person to achieve a PhD in medicine, Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver is driven by a passion to make the world a better place. (Rebecca Davis, AJN, 25 February 2021).
In this article we learn how ‘a Jewish and Wiradjuri Koori woman’ with a life story that involved being a ‘resilient domestic abuse survivor; ambitious nurse; social justice warrior; progressive epidemiologist; committed professor and resolute activist’ rose through the ranks of academia at Sydney Uni to become ‘the first known Aboriginal person to have received a PhD in medicine’, and ultimately, ‘Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Indigenous Strategy and Services, at the University of Sydney’.
Figure 13 - Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver. Source
Professor Jackson Pulver tells us that,
“I had more front than David Jones. Absolute chutzpah!” she reflects, shaking her head. With the help of a friend, Lisa penned a letter to the University of Sydney and “just gave them this big, long story about my desires and dreams” in the hope she would gain entry into medicine.
And she did. In 1992, she was offered a place – and was the only Koori in the class.
She failed first year, and repeated it. She battled through, but by third year, at the advice of a trusted professor, she deferred medicine, opting to study a Master of Public Health part-time.
Finding her stride – and a passion for Indigenous health – following the Masters, Lisa completed a PhD in medicine, the first known Aboriginal person to do so. “Gee whiz, that took a while, didn’t it?” she says in bemusement.
“Since its first graduation ceremony in 1859, this university has graduated more than 500,000 people, yet our first known Aboriginal graduate was the 1970s [and] 2003 was the first PhD in medicine [received by a Koori] in this place. Hello! 2003?!”
“So, you have this minuscule proportion of Australia’s first peoples graduating. That’s shocking and we have to work hard to change it.”
From this interview we are led to believe that the University of Sydney was involved with Jackson Pulver’s career all the way from her acceptance in 1992 as a ‘Koori’ undergraduate, right through to today where the University accepts her as the first Aboriginal person to receive a PhD in medicine and has appointed her as Professor Lisa Jackson Pulver, Vice Chancellor of Indigenous Strategy and Services.
In 2018, when she recieved her latest promotion, ‘the University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor and Principal Dr. Michael Spence said he was delighted Jackson Pulver had accepted the role. “The selection panel and I have been enormously impressed with Lisa’s commitment to embed belonging and key Aboriginal frameworks and world views into initiatives across the education, research and government sectors, as well as into the RAAF where she is a specialist reserve member,” he said.’ (Source).
Conclusion
So all in all, us little people, the members of the public in general, and the Wiradjuri people in particular, just need to sit back in our places and be quiet with our allegations and suspicions.
The ‘experts’ and the academic, civic and institutional ‘elites’ have all done their jobs and professionally vetted Lisa Jackson Pulver’s ancestry as required to confirm that she is in fact Aboriginal, as per the Commonwealth’s definition of Aboriginality.
Or have they?
This Dark Emu Exposed post is designed to put our Aboriginal informants on notice that we have begun a genealogical project to determine the ancestry of Professor Jackson Pulver. The results should confirm, one way or the other, whether Jackson Pulver is of Wiradjuri descent or not, as required under the Commonwealth’s 3-part definition of Aboriginality.
Many of our Wiradjuri informants allege that she is not Wiradjuri, but we note that Professor Jackson Pulver has been quite public about her ancestry and, being a professional academic, a PhD in medicine, a Group Captain in the Royal Australian Airforce and the president of an Orthodox Jewish Synagogue, it is hard to envisage that her claims not true.
But we shall see as our webposts unfold.
How Do Investigative Genealogies Get Done ?
But firstly, many of our readers have asked us how we achieve the detailed genealogies that we publish on our Dark Emu Exposed website. Therefore, we have decided to use the example of Professor Jackson Pulver ancestry to give some idea of our methodology.
A person’s family tree cannot really be determined unless that person themself (or a very close relative) provides some basic information about their own ancestry. Because the primary documents for births, deaths and marriages are understandably kept from public view, for confidentiality reasons, for a set number of years (it varies from state to state), it is virtually impossible to start the process accurately without information directly from the person in question.
In our particular case, we would need Lisa Jackson Pulver herself, or a very close family member, to provide basic information such as, where and when she was born, who her parents and/or grandparents were, as well as other bits of information such as the occupations of her parents and/or where they lived.
The trick with genealogy is to get an accurate start - there are lot of Lisa Jacksons out there so we must be sure that we get a ‘handle’ on the correct parents for our Lisa Jackson (her assumed maiden name), not someone else called Lisa Jackson.
In our investigations, neither Professor Jackson Pulver, nor any member of her family, have provided any information directly to us regarding her family history. Thus, we need to use other techniques to get that ‘handle’ that allows us to start constructing the family tree.
2. Therefore, we started the process by searching online for what Professor Jackson Pulver herself has said about her own family. The following are the important points that we found:
a) An interview with Lisa Jackson Pulver on the 25th of February 2013 at the University of New South Wales in Kensington, Sydney.
Here she is asked, “So, Lisa, can you tell me your full name and where your mob come from, please?” and she replies,
“Yes. Lisa Rae Jackson Pulver. I've got two lines of [Aboriginal] ancestry that I'm aware of and I'm covering more – thank you very much Ancestry.com !
My mother was born a Smith and her mum was born up on the far north coast of New South Wales in an island in the mighty Clarence River and she fled to come down to Sydney and lived in Sydney as a Maori for a while and then, yes, eventually got back with her family and identified who she was. So that’s my mum’s side.
And my dad’s side people were Wiradjuri mob, Jacksons and the Angels(?) and all the rest of it, and they apparently came some generations before from South Australia and that’s a new bit of information that I've recently found out. So I'm happily rooting through the archives, looking at all the Australian Jacksons and trying to work out who they are and are they related and where did that name come from because there’s always a story behind how the English imposed their names along with their ways upon the mob. So, yes, so I think I basically identify as Wiradjuri”.
and
“I always wanted to join the military. My dad was a RAAFie, he served in the war. My grandfather served in the army, my cousins, I've got a couple of them that were army people, my mother’s father died in World War II serving the navy so we’re all over the shop with military service.”
Note: The (?) after Angels is in the original transcript
What we learn from this interview is:
Professor Jackson Pulver claims Aboriginality from both her parents - from her mother, an unspecified, ‘far north coast NSW’ tribe from ‘an island in the Clarence River’; and from her father, Wiradjuri, a central NSW tribe. Somehow she claims her Wiradjuri father’s family came from South Australia (which one would have thought negates that they are Wiradjuri?);
her mother’s maiden name is Smith;
her father’s family names are the Jacksons and Angels (spelling ?);
her father father was in the RAAF during World War II, and her grandfather was in the army;
her maternal grandfather died in the WWII whilst in the navy;
her grandmother ‘fled to Sydney and identified as a Maori’;
she herself is doing research on Ancestry.com, and
records are complicated because of ‘how the English imposed their names and ways upon the mob.’
An experienced genealogist will start to recognise what are called ‘markers’ in this narrative, viz. location markers such as ‘an island in the Clarence River’ and ‘South Australia.’; military markers mean that there should be military records; inconsistency markers such as, how can her father claim to be Wiradjuri if his family is from South Australia?; and markers often used by ‘fakes’ to blur their backgrounds such as, one ancestor fleeing from one place to another, being mistaken for a Maori, and/or having complicated or lost records due to the fault of someone else, such as the ‘English’ or the authorities (it’s always someones else’s fault!).
As our investigation proceeds, readers will see how these markers can come into play by allowing the genealogist to corroborate the family tree as it develops against these markers, which were independently supplied by the subject herself. This helps to confirm that we have the correct Jackson Pulver family tree - our tree has the same markers that the she offered herself.
Also importantly, Professor Jackson Pulver herself has now given us the surnames of her parents - Smith, Jackson and Angel.
b) Dr Lisa Jackson Pulver, as she was then known, was interviewed by Richard Fidler, on his ABC Radio show, Conversations on 12 October 2012. During the interview, Fidler asks (at 03.02), “Where did you grow up Lisa”? Her response provides another set of ‘markers’:
“Well I was born in inner Sydney and my parents moved in short order out to a place called Revesby which is in South-Western Sydney. It is a very unhappy place. My father was a war serviceman in the Airforce”.
What was his war like?
“His war was horrendous. He served in many of the big campaigns of course, and he came back really, really damaged. He came back so damaged that I don’t know how he managed to keep it together to marry my mum. I really don’t. Cause they married long after the war.”
Now it kind of gets complicated in this part of your father’s story because your grandfather, your father’s father was also fighting in the second World War.
“Yeah, my father’s father served in the war. My mother’s father served in the war. It was my mother’s father that died in WWII in the Pacific campaign. So he died on an American Naval vessel. So he died because he was serving in the American forces because the Aussies wouldn’t have him. Apparently he was up to no good and had a couple of name changes and couldn’t properly identify himself and he was a Scotsman who jumped boat in the early days and fell in love with my mother’s mother and had a cascade of children”.
c) In a 2017 interview in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Professor provides a few more details of her life:
‘Pulver was born in Stanmore in 1959, but grew up on a quarter-acre block in Revesby. Her father served as an airman in the Second World War and returned home "severely damaged", she says … my father bashed the snot out of me. I ended up hospitalised … Jackson Pulver never knew her grandfather and was brought up to say her grandmother was a "Maori princess", but both her maternal grandparents were Aboriginal … "
“I ran away from home at 14-and-a-bit," says Jackson Pulver … At one point she shaved her head and changed her name to Lee, to pass as a boy. She began to tell people she was Eurasian …’
‘At 17, Jackson Pulver went to Bankstown Technical College and took a nursing entrance course … Her parents had divorced in the mid-1980s … and Jackson Pulver was shocked when she finally saw her father again [in the late 1980s].
"When I ran away from home," says [sic], "he was a strong, omnipotent guy who could get anywhere and hurt me. When I got in touch with him, he was this decrepit, arthritic, couldn't-stand-up-straight, severely-limping-with-a-walking-stick man. And he was absolutely dead-set broken.”
"When I was a kid, I had a fantasy of killing him – that one day I'd turn up and stab him, or push him off a cliff, or push the ladder over when he was preparing something. When I saw him, all that hate just disappeared. I just looked at him and I thought, 'I've been scared stiff of you?' And then all this disrespect replaced the terror, and pathetic replaced the power that he'd had."
‘In 1991 … she applied to study medicine at Sydney University. She graduated with a public health degree, moved into a PhD program, and in 2003 she became a lecturer in Aboriginal health at UNSW. She felt she'd found her place in the world, after a long journey.
She was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to medical education, and is now pro-vice-chancellor engagement [sic] & Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander leadership at Western Sydney University …’
‘She says Australia is a fabulously rich country, but mainstream Australians have never had to pay for it. She says there seems to be progress towards a treaty, but it has been tortuously slow. More money needs to be spent to address the entrenched disadvantages of Aboriginal people, and the real solutions to their problems lie in improved health and education…’
‘In 2001, [she] entered a relationship with … Mark Pulver, who was to become her husband. He was … a non-observant Jew. She began to attend Newtown Synagogue, but didn't tell Mark, who didn't even know there was a synagogue in Newtown. When she fell pregnant, she and Mark decided they wanted their children to be Jewish, so she began a two-year conversion process’.
"I was pregnant a number of times after that," she says, "but none of the children were born alive. But I love being Jewish."
‘She joined the RAAF about 13 years ago [2004] as a public health epidemiologist in the Specialist Reserve. She completed a brief officer training course, and went on to become a specialist advisor to the Chief of Air Force and set up the RAAF's Directorate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs …’
‘In 2010, Jackson Pulver became president of Newtown Synagogue and, although she no longer goes to services, she celebrates all the Jewish festivals, keeps a kosher home and has other community members around the house for Friday night dinners.
"For me," she says, "being Jewish is not contrary to my beliefs in spirituality as an Aboriginal woman."
d) On the 17th November 2021 Professor Jackson Pulver gave a short interview on Koori Radio where, in her introduction, she relates some more information about her background - listen to the Youtube below and the the genealogical ‘markers’ in the following transcript excerpt we have highlighted in bold.
Announcer Lisa Forester asks:
“Lisa welcome. Can you just let us know a little bit of background about yourself?”
Lisa replies - “I identify as Wiradjuri woman. I've got family connections from Wagga Wagga all the way through to South Australia on my dad's side. And on my mum's side, I've got connections up to the far north coast of New South Wales; and on my grandfather's, both sides, there is a Scotsman and a Welshman so belong to the world I think.”
So, here were a lot of ‘markers’ which we believed were sufficient to get the genealogical process underway.
Our initial aim was to find that ‘handle’ that linked Lisa Jackson to her real parents - who were they? Once we had them, then we could start moving up the paternal and maternal family trees more easily because their births, deaths and marriage records would be in the public domain, their confidentiality having expired.
This would be pretty easy to find out we thought, but after two weeks of solid genealogical research we were getting no where - we just could not accurately identify her parent’s full names.
But then Fortuna turned her rudder ever so slightly our way and we made a break-through, which we will present in our next post.
