Mission & Justice

Nicolas Rothwell;10/5/08

They Are Meditating: Bark Paintings from the MCA’s Arnott’s Collection; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

In the mid-1960s, Jerome Gould, an American graphic artist with a keen eye and a taste for adventure, took a series of field trips into the remote terrain of Arnhem Land. Gould was a collector; he had a big budget and a strong visual sense: indeed, his innovative design for Michelob beer bottles was all the rage just then. He chartered light aircraft and flew through the north, snapping up early masterpieces of Aboriginal bark painting from missionary settlement craft shops. During those years, in the margins of his journeys, he did contract design work for Arnott’s Biscuits. So, by a strange and convoluted chain of circumstances, was born one of Australia’s greatest and least-known holdings of indigenous art.

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Russell Skelton; 10/508

Broken Hill’s mining boom has no silver lining for the town’s fast growing population of Aboriginal children, many of whom have unacceptable levels of lead in their blood.Recent figures reveal that the number of children with high blood lead levels has increased, but government funding for programs to minimise environmental health risks has been slashed.

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Jamie Walker; 10/5/08

Having  worked on 50 Aboriginal land rights cases, anthropologist Peter Sutton says that time is up for the nation’s troubled indigenous communities. Professor Sutton, picking up on this week’s Mullighan report in South Australia, the latest to uncover rampant child sex crime in an Aboriginal homeland, said governments should withdraw funding rather than perpetuate the cycle of abuse. There was no future in “state-funded ghettos”, he told The Weekend Australian. Asked if they should be closed down, Professor Sutton said: “No, I am talking about withdrawing funds rather than actively closing them. The fact is they are artificial communities. If they were full of white fellas, no one would dream of propping them up just because the people say they want to stay there.

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Richard Ackland; 9/5/08

In recent weeks the charter of rights “debate” has been heading largely in one direction - against. The antagonists have had longer at the megaphone than usual and have cranked up the volume. Cardinal George Pell is out on the barricades, and unsurprisingly he thinks a charter of rights is a bad thing, along with stem-cell research, contraception and abortion. The NSW Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, and the former premier Bob Carr have lent their voices to the anti campaign. They think you would be crazy if you let anyone other than NSW politicians look after your freedoms. A handful of conservative provocateurs from the fourth estate keep banging away about how awful such legislation would be. These voices are relatively fresh from saying the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, which gets me thinking that surely they cannot be hugely wrong yet again.

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Paige Taylor; 9/5/08

The WA state Government’s three-year overhaul of child protectionservices yesterday topped $500million and will include $112million over four years for more case workers in needy areas such as Aboriginal communities in the remote Kimberley. Within 12 months, an additional 210 child protection workers, service delivery workers and support staff will be deployed to the areas of greatest need.  At a cost of $5 million, remote community workers will be sent to Warmun and Oombulgarri in the East Kimberley.  “Following last year’s review of the former Department for Community Development, we made structural changes and invested significant further funding into protecting our children,” Treasurer Eric Ripper said. The budget allocation comes three months after West Australian Coroner Alastair Hope described the plight of Aboriginal children as “especially pathetic”.

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Andra Jackson; 8/5/08

Tommy Watson sits quietly and toys with his walking stick to trace an outline on the floor. His niece Jorna says the Alice Springs artist often uses a stick in the same manner to draw an idea in the dirt for what might become an acclaimed painting. While others talk around and about him, the elderly artist from the Northern Territory border’s Irrunytju community, has a faraway look in his eyes.He speaks only Pitjantjatjara and his niece and Agathon Galleries owner John Ioannou.

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John Stapleton; 8/5/08

Therese Rein demonstrated yesterday she will be quite different from her predecessor, Janette Howard, when it comes to public speaking. While Mrs Howard was notoriously wary of the media and kept a low public profile during her 11 1/2 years at Kirribilli House, Ms Rein was more assured yesterday as she mixed with some of the book industry’s senior figures after her first speech in Australia as the patron of a charity. The wife of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has become the patron of the Indigenous Literacy Project, a national book industry initiative in partnership with the Fred Hollows Foundation to improve literacy in remote indigenous communities by providing books for children.

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Paul Toohey; 8/5/08

Ted Mullighan came up with 46 recommendations to tackle child sex abuse in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands. He might have stretched himself and made it 47.  The former Supreme Court judge exposed some seriously disturbing matters in his report. But there was one thing too unpleasant to touch: ending the permit system in those lands.  Mullighan would have done well heeding the words of 19th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham - words the judge probably knows because they relate to making sure the courts operate in the full public gaze.

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Ashleigh Wilson; 8/5/08

A Sydney councillor has criticised a playground sculpture for featuring an extract from Paul Keating’s Redfern speech, claiming the words were a “real guilt trip” to non-indigenous Australians who had already apologised to the Stolen Generations. Shayne Mallard, a Liberal member of the Sydney City Council, last night said the former prime minister’s message was inappropriate for a children’s playground. “This is political correctness going mad when you put this in the playground,” Mr Mallard said. “What happened to the age of innocence?” The sculpture, by indigenous artist Fiona Foley, includes several lines from Mr Keating’s acclaimed speech in the Sydney suburb of Redfern in 1992.

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Paul Toohey; 8/5/08

Northern Territory Deputy Chief Minister Marion Scrymgour has reached across the top of Australia to give a sharp touch-up to the man she called “Saint Noel” and a “latter-day Martin Luther” - better known as Cape York Institute’s Noel Pearson. In a speech to parliament in Darwin, Ms Scrymgour doubted north Queensland’s Mr Pearson was any kind of visionary and described his views as “unremarkable”. She hit bombastic stride by likening the challenges of her Government to those faced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he entered the White House in the Great Depression.

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