INTHEBLACK December - January 2022 - Magazine - Page 46
Member profile
INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT
46
DEC 2022
JAN 2023
CPA Australia, INTHEBLACK – Dr Kerry Bodle FCPA
Changing the way future accountants learn
CLICK TO LAUNCH VIDEO IN A NEW WINDOW
me being a mum and, outside of all this,
wondering how I got here.
“It hasn’t always been an easy road,”
Bodle says. “I’ve been here 23 years, and I’ve
really had to fight to try to bring something
different and to be taken seriously, both as a
woman and as an Indigenous person.”
ANCESTRAL TIES
As a descendant of Karendali, Kalali and
Wakka Wakka First Nations Peoples, Bodle’s
background reflects the story of mistreatment
all too common to Indigenous Australians.
Bodle feels a deep connection to her ancestors.
At the age of two, Bodle’s grandmother,
Moola Conbar, was assigned to a white
family in Gladstone, Queensland, on a
work permit. At a young age, Moola fell
pregnant to a white man and was sent to
the Barambah Aboriginal Settlement in
Cherbourg. Bodle’s mother, Margaret, was
born in 1929 and subsequently taken from
Moola at the age of three. After Moola tried
to escape the reserve and find her daughter,
she was sent to Palm Island.
INTHEBLACK CAREER, ELEVATED SPECIAL EDITION
“As a First Nations person, there is a
journey of searching for your cultural
identity, and with that comes the inherent
intergenerational trauma,” says Bodle.
“My mum was part of the Stolen
Generations, and she was sent to a Salvation
Army home and told to forget about where
she came from. Her mother died trying to
find her, and it wasn’t until I started at uni
that we were able to trace her history.”
Bodle’s parents also struggled. When she
was five, she and her twin sisters, Sharon and
Karen, were also sent to a Salvation Army
home. Bodle went to school in Sydney in the
1970s and, after giving birth to Kylee as a
teenager, she was pressured to give her up.
Thanks to law changes and the introduction
of the single mother’s pension, Bodle was able
to reunite with Kylee and take her home.
If she had not, the cycle her grandmother
and mother had experienced would have
continued, Bodle says.
“I can identify with their stories – being
a single mum – and obviously doing a lot
of the stuff on my own has been a struggle
