Stan Grant. Like many, my best Christmas memories come from childhood. Endless hot summers, the river, food, and family. And faith. I come from a big Aboriginal family. There's no Christmas like a black Christmas. There was never much money and presents were few and modest, but they were treasured. One year I got a book of Greek myths that opened a world of wonder and ideas that have stayed with me a lifetime. We played cricket with a homemade bat carved out of an old fence post. Our ham came from a tin and chicken substituted for turkey. But we were blessed. Christmas was a time of prayer and hope. My uncles were pastors in the Aboriginal church. They looked to the black church leaders of the United States like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. These people had been forged in the furnace of the worst of Australian racism. Yet they refused to yield. Victimhood was not for them. The Aboriginal civil rights movement had grown out of the church. Men and women of profound faith who
