This week, Living Black throws the spotlight on Ray Baker, who has spent over 15 years working as an Intelligence and Liaison Officer fro Railcorp at Redfern Railway Station.

Ray, who is from the Wiradjuri nation, describes his job as making sure Indigenous people around Redfern station are "given a fair go".

"We have an understanding where they can use the toilets, the phones, and we mediate with them where there’s problems and all that sort of stuff, ... " he tells Living Black.

Ray helps out community members with a wide range of needs - from just using the phone to finding somewhere spend the night. He says the position with Railcorp offered him opportunities he wouldn't have had with other employers, as he left school in Year 10.

From his insider perspective, Ray says it's vital that Australian organisations give employees special trainingin order to better understand Indigenous people and the issues they face.

Ray told Living Black what his job means to him.

Watch the video

KG: Tonight we meet Ray Baker, a Wiradjuri man from Cowra and a regular fixture at Sydney's Redfern railway station, where he works to improve relations between the Aboriginal community and the railways. We caught up with Ray during a typical day on the job as a Redfern intelligence liaison officer to hear about the help he provides to those using the station.

Roy Baker, Redfern Intelligence Liaison Officer: Basically what we do, we meet up between with the Indigenous people to make sure that they're given a fair go, that there's no problems, no hassles, you know. And we have an understanding where they can use the toilets, the phones, and we mediate with them where there's problems and all that sort of stuff, you know.

HELPING PEOPLE...

Roy Baker: Well, the good things is to try and help people who are - like when they come on the station, they have problems with tickets and all that. We try to help them as much as possible. If not that, there's also different areas like drugs and alcohol, you know, problems and that, but I mean, basically, with the drugs, they come up and get us to call the ambulance for them, or get Missionbeat to help them in that way, because some of them are homeless and all that, you know? Or they've got nowhere to go for the night, so we try to help them that way.

MOTIVIATION...

Roy Baker: Well, my own personal reason is to try and better myself and also to better Indigenous people to make sure that they can get a fair go on different parts of the jobs on railway and all that, you know. Myself, I've found it great, good respect out of it, because it's a job that's very demanding and you always have different things that can put a hiccup in, you know.

EDUCATION...

Roy Baker: Well, what happened when we first started here, we were all not up to scratch, up to the position where we should be, so what the State Railway did, or RailCorp, they brought us up to level to where we can do the job that we can do, plus put us through training and all that sort of stuff, which is a better aspect for all our people to try and go through. My strongest belief is training and make sure that you do plenty of it, you know. And I recommend that you should do it to get - if you want to better yourself you've got to do that.