Former NRL star Justin Hodges had a spiritual awakening after making made life-changing discoveries about his family while appearing on Who Do You Think You Are? - via NITV
When Justin Hodges left the NRL after 15 years, he suffered an identity crisis like many other elite athletes upon retirement."That's all you are."
"They're starting to learn about Captain Cook [at school]... about colonisation and the Stolen Generations," he said. "I try to take them back home to Cairns, so they can walk on Country and hang around their cousins, and go in the same creeks that we all swim in to bring a little bit of culture back into their lives."
"That's the biggest thing that they took away from her, that she never got to live her life as an Aboriginal woman," said Hodges."To know that her own mother was part of that Stolen Generation... I've always paid my respects to that mob with a tear in my eye, because I can't even imagine what it's like to have family members taken away.""Yeah, that was probably one of the hardest parts of the story.
He was invited to partake in an ancient ritual that physically and spiritually connected him to Country and millennia of tradition. Wading into the river where his ancestors had hunted and swam, Justin spat into the swirling eddies, letting the rainbow serpent know he had returned.Indigenous children at the mission in Yarrabah. Justin's three-times great-grandmother was forcibly removed there.
"So I don't know if I ever ran past my grandmother's umbilical cord, or it's just where she walked, or things like that.
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