If you have been downtown in the last fortnight, it would have been hard to miss seeing the new artwork covering the Koori Mail building on Molesworth Street. An Australian Aboriginal flag, holding a central yellow heart where the circle of the sun usually sits, sprawls across the entire building.

The Lismore App Spoke with Naomi Moran, CEO of the Koori Mail, about the significance of the artwork and the process behind the design.

“As a team, we try and always have collective input. There’s some staff members here that have been part of the Koori Mail for such a long time. And so we were kind of throwing some ideas around about what this building would look like - not just a colour scheme, but what we wanted the building to represent in terms of the Koori Mail story, and the Koori Mail flood recovery story. And so we thought, let's just paint the Aboriginal flag on there, because it just makes sense that this is the blackest building on the block."

"You know, this whole entire building now is 100%, Aboriginal owned by the Koori Mail, which means it's also 100% Aboriginal owned by five Aboriginal organisations that make up the Koori Mail in this region. So we played around with where we would position the flag, where we would position the yellow circle, on the building and then our editor Darren Coyne suggested, “Why don't we use the heart because of the significance to Lismore and symbolism of the heart as a flood affected region”.

Not only following the 2022 flood but after previous floods also, red heart flags have been displayed in shop fronts and houses where there has been complete devastation, and the red heart has become a symbol for the town, broadly but especially in relation to its flood recovery.

The Koori Mails first edition that was printed after the flood (after missing just three editions when their offices were flooded) featured images of their volunteers, with the red heart in the middle of the front page.

“And so we toyed around with this idea of representing that the Koori Mail is the black heart of Lismore, the Bundjalung heart, given our story around supporting the flood-affected community with our flood hub and with the Koori Kitchen. It's not a design that we’ve come up with because we've seen designs like this before, but I think it's more around the meaning of that concept in this context and what that means for us.”

A beautiful mosaic artwork of the same design hangs on the wall in Naomi’s office - a gift from an unknown non-Indigenous person who obviously valued the contributions that the Koori Mail made to the community following the floods.

“Everything that we do, we really try and centre it around 'What do we want people to feel when they're in this space?’ And that's such a cultural thing for us as well. We could put a sign on the wall that says Welcome to the Koori Mail, but if people actually don't feel what we feel every day when we come here and work in this special place… That’s something that we really wanted to try and impact on the community - that everything that they felt when they came to receive that support after the floods, that this becomes a central place to continue providing people that support or continue doing really great stuff for our community.”

“It's not just presenting to the community that outward-facing look of the building and what that represents. We want people to receive that in a way where it's non-threatening, but it celebrates the success of an Aboriginal business. It celebrates how mobilising a community can support disaster recovery and how important it is to recognise that that comes from the ground up that that came from our community and from our Bundjalung community and our Bundjalung group of volunteers but also that it represents this absolute ability to connect as both black and white communities to get the job done and that we had an immense response from non-Indigenous volunteers as well that supported what we've done.”

“We've all got a long way to go to keep doing the work to support this unity between not just our local communities here, both indigenous and non-Indigenous, but also around the nation. So I think putting a statement out there that honours the work that's been done but speaks to the work that still needs to happen, and that it's absolutely possible if we just put our differences aside and look at the examples of how we operated last year. And when you were on the ground here and you looked around, and you saw that it was both indigenous and non-Indigenous people doing the absolute most to care for people- that's what it's about.”

The Koori kitchen didn't close down until January of this year, offering almost 12 months of practical support to the community post-flood. On the Koori Mail’s social media posts of the building’s new look, people have been sharing their memories of what happened after the flood and of Koori Mail’s contribution to their recovery.

“It’s really, really special,” Naomi said with tears in her eyes.

If you haven’t seen the spectacular new look of the Koori Mail building on Molesworth Street (opposite Browns Car Park) yet, it’s well worth a drive past .