'Margaret Throsby talks to Roberta Sykes, poet, author, educator, founder of the Black Women's Action in Education Foundation. Her autobiography was published in 3 parts under the collective title, Snake Dreaming. The first part, Snake Cradle, was released before this interview. It deals with her origins in Townsville, a white town, a hostile environment and it ends with the trial of the men who raped her when she was sixteen. Sykes was a postgraduate student at Harvard University in the 1970s, the first Aboriginal to gain a doctorate from that institution and she also helped to establish the Black Women's Action in Education Foundation to send other Aboriginal women to Harvard or other overseas institutions. She speaks about racism and the powerlessness of blacks in Australia, about Aboriginal unemployment, and the attutudes to employing Aborigines.' Source: Libraries Australia (Sighted 08/04/2008).
