Dean Ingram was born in 1975 and grew up in Waterloo and Redfern. In his interview he remembers many aspects of life in the area; playing, after-school care, unhappiness at school, childhood haunts, his paper run, and land rights marches in 1988, Australia’s Bicentennial year. In the excerpt below he recalls his involvement as a teenager in a community project promoting sex education for young people.
I actually was involved with a youth project with South Sydney Services and Family Planning Association where we had three months of training to work on the ‘Making Sense of Sex’ hotline; so we had to sort of do three months’ training in sex education so that when other kids rang up to ask us questions we’d be able to answer their questions or refer them on. I can’t remember what the project was called – but what we did, we started doing workshops. Like we’d go a couple of afternoons a week and do workshops where we started learning about this and that, about sex education and certain things, STDs, and all sorts of stuff like that. Then we had a four day camp, we had this camp with forty seven kids and we all just met and we had the four days a whole lot of different sorts of workshops training us to both learn about sex education so that we knew a lot, so that we knew to answer questions, and learn how to answer questions on the phone to the people asking. And then one of the things was to start designing the diary because the diary was what we were using to launch the hotline. So after we got back from the camp we had more workshops. We used to set up certain groups like editorial group and different things like that and all starting putting it together. When we launched the diary that was actually to launch the hotline, but the diary was to sort of let everyone know – had the phone number for the hotline and stuff with it.
