Mission & Justice

Nicolas Rothwell; 13/5/08

Scholar and grandmother, translator and cultural defender, Dr R. Marika, who died, aged 49, over the weekend near her home in northeast Arnhem Land, was one of Australia’s most prominent and admired traditional Aboriginal leaders. Dr Marika’s long list of achievements, appointments and accolades highlighted her brilliance; but they give little clue to the determination, bravery and sweetness of character that made her so loved by her wide circle of friends. Born into the Rirratjingu clan-group of the Yolngu people, the eldest daughter of the land rights campaigner Roy Marika, she devoted her life to education and to the cause of communication between the English-speaking mainstream and her own society.

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Natasha Robinson; 13/5/08

Opal fuel should no longer be advertised as non-sniffable, the Northern Territory Coroner warned yesterday, after finding a boy died after sniffing the supposedly safe petrol at a remote central Australian community. Kenny Burns, 12, suffocated after sniffing Opal fuel for about 10 minutes after a disco at Hermannsburg, Coroner Greg Cavanagh said in his report, delivered yesterday. The boy, a regular petrol sniffer who had been responding well to social workers’ attempts to steer him away from the habit, had been sniffing Opal with his 15-year-old cousin, who watched him fall backwards and begin to suffocate after inhaling the volatile fumes.

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Paul Maley; 13/5/08

A six-month-old baby and a teenage girl were killed during a firefight in Afghanistan between Australian troops and Taliban militants. But a report into the battle, in which Australian soldier Luke Worsley also died, has not recommended the Diggers change their rules of engagement. The Vice Chief of the Defence Force, Lieutenant General Ken Gillespie, yesterday said the baby was in a room from where a man and a woman, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, opened fire on Australian troops on November 23 last year.

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Patricia Karvelas; 14/4/08

All rural and remote Aboriginal children would be entitled to a bed in full-time hostels built by the federal Government beside new schools, under a radical proposal to be put to the 2020 Summit. West Australian Aboriginal activist and chair of the Northern Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance Peter Yu - a participant in the 2020 indigenous panel - said if the Rudd Government was serious about social change, it would invest millions into school-based infrastructure. Mr Yu, who is a previous leader of the Kimberley Land Council and made his name during the native title debates of the 1990s, believes the new hostels should be built in all regional centres and provide full-time mentors to indigenous students

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David Marr; 14/4/08

Powerful evidence of Mohamed Haneef’s innocence has emerged at the Old Bailey in London — evidence the Australian Federal Police and the Commonwealth Director of Prosecutions appear to have ignored in holding the Gold Coast doctor for questioning last year and then charging him with a terrorism offence. The case against Dr Haneef always centred on allegations that his second cousin Sabeel Ahmed, a doctor practising in England, was part of a terrorist organisation.

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Erin O’Dwyer; 10/5/08;

Conversations With The Mob; Megan Lewis; UWA Press

When photo-journalist Megan Lewis won a Walkley award for her series on the Martu people of the Western Desert, photography critic Robert McFarlane described her work as detailed and heartfelt but “only intermittently touching”. “Her comprehensive essay” he wrote in the Herald, “on this rarely photographed, remote community is not helped by garish colour prints, so deeply saturated as to add an unnecessary air of unreality to an already exotic subject” It was stinging criticism and, I would argue, unwarranted. Conversations With The Mob is a stunning collection of more than 200 photographs and oral stories that capture the grief and joy of a community that see-saws between traditional and Western cultures. For the past few weeks, it has lain on my coffee table and I’ve dipped into it countless times. Lewis’s own stories of living with the Mob, as the Martu call themselves, are compelling, insightful and beautifully written, in a spare style that balances candour and colour.

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Andrew Fraser;, 12/5/08,
Lawyers have presented a united front in a growing battle with the Rudd Government over access to documents that they claim are vital to the truth of the Mohamed Haneef affair being exposed. The Queensland Law Society has backed the former terror suspect’s legal team, which claims the Immigration Department is denying it documents needed for the inquiry ordered by the Rudd Government into the bungled case. Queensland Law Society president Megan Mahon has written to Attorney-General Robert McClelland disputing the Government’s argument that a royal commission for the inquiry into the Haneef matter was not necessary as all parties were co-operating with the Clarke inquiry, which began at the start of the month.

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12/5/08

It’s appalling that both Peter Faris (”Kooris’ court a waste of money”, Legal Affairs, 9/5) and Chris Merritt (”Koori codswallop”, Legal Affairs, 9/5) can write in terms which so disparage the real needs of indigenous Australians. The Victorian Koori Court, like the Nunga Court in South Australia and the Murri Court in Queensland, will include other parties in sentencing processes, and do use language which is less formal. But how are these things negative? The innovation of these courts represent turning points in the ability of the legal system to listen properly to people of indigenous background, initiated by women and men who had long years of personal experience seeing the injustice which occurred when the law was applied to black people as if they were white.

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11/5/08

Many more underage Australians believe it is acceptable to drink alcohol on a regular basis today than they did 16 years ago, according to a national survey. The Dolly Youth Monitor, which has surveyed thousands of teenagers between the age of 10 to 17 since 1992, found there has been a sharp increase in the numbers that approve of alcohol use. The latest edition of the bi-annual survey found that 80 per cent believed regular drinking was acceptable, while back in 1992 only 64 per cent thought so.

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Andra Jackson; 12/5/08

Coming to Australia after 18 months held in the Manus Island detention centre — 10 of them by himself — Aladdin Sisalem felt he had finally found a new beginning.Instead, the stateless Kuwaiti-born Palestinian found that he had merely exchanged one form of living in limbo for another. He was placed on a temporary protection visa that banned him from applying for permanent protection for five years.He has spent the past four years not knowing if he would have to uproot himself and try all over again to find another country to take him at the end of next year.

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