Archive for the ‘Aboriginal’ Category
Saturday, May 15th, 2010
Jamie Walker;15/5/10; (3 Items)
The investigation into the 2004 death in custody of Palm Island man Mulrunji Doomadgee was stripped of credibility because of a “perception of collusion” between local detectives and the policeman who caused the Aborigine’s fatal injuries. But Queensland Deputy Chief Magistrate Brian Hine, delivering the findings of the third coronial inquest into the affair, found yesterday there was no evidence that Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley had meant to inflict the injuries that killed Doomadgee. The open finding on whether his death was accidental or deliberately caused by Sergeant Hurley dashed the family’s professed hopes to finally secure “closure”. Doomadgee, 36, died after he was arrested while drunk on Palm Island, off Townsville, on November 19, 2004, creating such outrage in the community that people rioted a week later.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Death in Custody, Human Rights, Racism
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Friday, May 14th, 2010
14/5/10; http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/literacy-tackled-in-two-languages-20100513-v1ud.html
It is more than 2500 kilometres from Kempsey to Groote Eylandt, in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but the early childhood literacy work piloted in NSW is about to begin on the island … with one big difference.The preschoolers, aided by family and other community members, will be taught in both the Anindilyakwa language and English. Mary-Ruth Mendel, the chairwoman of the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation, said the combination of speech pathology and educational understanding significantly improved children’s entry to school. ”Playing games and activities designed by [us] in the Anindilyakwa language and in English develops strong oral language skills and crucial brain development,” she said. ”These skills are essential stepping stones towards strong English reading and writing development.” The speech therapy component helped children reach an ”aha” moment, she said, when deciding whether they were listening with their ”English ears rather than their Anindilyakwa ears”. The Territory’s Department of Education has signed a three-year contract for the program. Up to 130 children will have access to it.
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education
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Friday, May 14th, 2010
Lex Hall; 14/5/10
In a ceremony not far from the site of the Northern Territory’s 1966 Wave Hill walk-off, Aboriginal traditional owners yesterday became joint managers of the culturally rich Gregory National Park. About 300 traditional owners gathered at Jasper Gorge, where Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin handed over the deeds to the 1300 sq km park in the Territory’s northwest. At the same time the park, home to spectacular gorges and traces of early European and Aboriginal history, was leased back to the NT government for 99 years. The traditional owners welcomed the handback, but insisted that local people had to be given priority in the park’s management.”Contracts should be offered to us first before they go out to tender,” said Narinyman elder Larry Johns. Jasper Gorge traditional owner Kevin Bishop said joint management was a way of empowering future generations.”We wanted to see our young people grow and get knowledge about Aboriginal culture and about land management and tourism,” Mr Bishop said.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Victoria Laurie; 12/5/10
Last year, archeologist Mike Morwood and rock art specialist June Ross took the ride of their lifetime across the northwest Kimberley. They hired a helicopter and flew across largely trackless territory, their pilot landing periodically in spots where he felt he could get his helicopter down safely and where they believed a good rock art site might lie. Their journey took them from Bigge Island, one of the Kimberley’s largest offshore landmasses, east to inland pastoral stations, and north as far as the rugged Drysdale River National Park, the Kimberley’s largest park that lacks an airstrip, ranger station or even a single road. The pair’s aerial reconnoitre recorded 27 locations in which they documented a total of 54 rock art sites. “It was an absolute revelation,” Ross recalls. “What struck us was how many rock art sites there are, and we developed a great admiration for the artists who made them.” Across the Kimberley, hundreds of thousands of paintings lie in rock overhangs and caves, often behind curtains of tropical vines. Dappled light plays over the surface of hauntingly beautiful images that have made the region famous: Gwion Gwion or Bradshaw paintings depicting slender dancing figures in mulberry coloured ochre or younger images of Wandjina spirits, wide-eyed and startlingly white despite the passage of years.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Religion
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Wednesday, May 12th, 2010
Anna Patty & Dn Harrison; 12/5/10; (2 Items)
Teachers will need to learn how to teach Aboriginal children as part of their training before they can register to work in public and private schools under national plans to lift the standard of indigenous education. Education ministers have agreed to a revised blueprint on how they will tackle disadvantage in schooling. They aim to halve the gap in the literacy and numeracy performance of indigenous and mainstream students by 2018. It is expected that a formal announcement will be made at the next Council of Australian Governments meeting, which is expected to be scheduled in the next two months. But leading indigenous educators have criticised the draft Indigenous Education Action Plan, saying it fails to recognise the crucial importance of cultural pride to success at school.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Children, Culture
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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Adam Cresswell; 11/5/10
Dialysis services for kidney patients in Central Australia are to be scrutinised in a joint governmental review following a barrage of criticism over indigenous patients being turned away from Alice Springs. The review, to be conducted by the commonwealth in conjunction with the governments of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, will seek to work out ways to avoid making patients travel thousands of kilometres away from their homes to receive kidney treatment. The study was imperative, said the federal Minister for Indigenous, Rural and Regional Health, Warren Snowdon. The current poor co-ordination of services caused a scandal in February when it emerged that a senior indigenous community leader from Ernabella, in the north of South Australia, had been told she would have to travel to Adelaide for dialysis treatment, despite Alice Springs being much closer.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, health, Human Rights
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Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
Victoria Laurie; 11/5/10
Shimmering heat and a dazzling purple-blue sky hang over Burrup Peninsula’s vast rocky landscape, and intense light makes it hard to pick out details in the stony rubble. But once they adjust, the eyes can make out lively images of humans, animals and symbols. In this remote northwest corner, about 1500km north of Perth, a vast array of images is scratched on sun-beaten surfaces and in shadowed crevices. Camera in hand, Mike Donaldson has covered almost all of the Burrup Peninsula and nearby islands of the Dampier Archipelago, off the Pilbara coast. He has encountered thousands of petroglyphs, or rock engravings, scattered across the landscape. It’s thought there are probably a million or more in what is almost certainly the largest concentration of petroglyphs on any continent. Yet there has never been a complete archeological survey and, until now, no book that comprehensively captures its art. Burrup Rock Art is Donaldson’s remedy for the latter oversight, if not the former one. He decided to put together the book after attending a wake for Pat Vinnicombe, an anthropologist who conducted many early site surveys and worked tenaciously to get Burrup art protected. She died in 2003 while visiting the place she loved with politicians and rock art enthusiasts who were trying to halt destruction of Burrup sites to make way for an industrial plant.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Religion, Trade
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Monday, May 10th, 2010
10/5/10
A television channel is broadcasting the first lessons in an Aboriginal language aimed at young children, in a bid to stem an alarming decline that wiped out hundreds of native dialects. “Waabiny Time,” for three to six-year-olds, teaches “yes,” “no” and other basic terms in the Noongar language, which is spoken in the southwestern region around Perth. The show, broadcast daily and repeated Saturdays, started last month with 13 half-hour episodes and proved so popular the entire series is now being screened again. “I realised while working with Aboriginal communities that kids weren’t talking with their grandparents in their language,” producer Cath Trimboli said.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education
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Monday, May 10th, 2010
Anthony Klan; 10/5/10
For indigenous Australian Anthony Trimbole, a secure job installing scaffolding at NSW public housing sites meant a steady income and comfortable rental home. But now a stoush between major government contractor Spotless and one of its subcontractors has left the company he works for – Koorie Scaffolding & Rigging – teetering on collapse and Mr Trimbole homeless. Mr Trimbole and his colleague Jamie, who have not been paid for two months, have been forced out of their homes for not paying rent and have both separated from their partners. They are living in a work shed in Auburn in Sydney’s west while they continue to ply their trade on projects providing affordable housing to others. “When things like this happen, you start getting depressed; if you’re not sure whether or not you’re going to get paid, it’s pretty hard to pull yourself out of bed,” Mr Trimbole told The Australian.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Trade
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Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Yuko Narushima; 9/5/10
When Kerry Arabena was told the Royal Flying Doctor Service could not attend to a young boy whose finger had been severed, she was furious. ”That boy was going to be a concert pianist,” she said before slamming down the phone. Reflecting on what sparked her passion for indigenous justice this week, the public health specialist came back to that moment. ”That was a pivotal point,” the 42-year-old says. ”I realised that I could be incensed with rage about how systems could deny people entry, or make economic decisions about what their value was.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, health, Human Rights
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Friday, May 7th, 2010
Linda Morris; 7/5/10
It is already a heady year for the indigenous dancer Daniel Riley McKinley. At just 24, in only his fourth year in the Bangarra Dance Theatre, he is poised to make his choreographic debut in the company’s new double bill, of earth & sky, with a tribute to his photographer cousin. And he has been nominated for the first time in the highly contested category of outstanding performance by a male dancer at the Australian Dance Awards next month. During a break from rehearsals, Riley McKinley says he was taken aback when a letter arrived saying he had been nominated. ”It’s nice to be recognised [but] I don’t class myself as being in the class or style of those other dancers nominated,” he says.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture
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Friday, May 7th, 2010
Nicolas Rothwell; 7/5/10 (2 Items)
Just off the marshy coastline of the Northern Territory there lies a magic island, unknown to most Australians, where spirits walk, spells and incantations course through the humid air, and rival bands of traditional doctors wage a constant struggle for supremacy. Elcho Island – better known these days by the name of its main settlement, Galiwinku – is home to almost 3000 Aboriginal people, members of the hyper-cerebral Yolngu group of clans. It is a place of lush natural beauty: the curving beaches are surrounded by deep-red cliffs; the forests of acacia and stringybark stretch away.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, health, Hindu, Spirituality
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Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Michael McKenna & Tony Koch; 6/5/10
The Crime and Misconduct Commission has recommended two senior officers, picked by Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson to review the discredited investigation into the 2004 death in custody of Palm Islander Mulrunji Doomadgee, face disciplinary charges for an alleged whitewash. A draft CMC report has accused the Ethical Standards Command officers of running a biased investigation to protect other police. It is alleged that witnesses were guided in their answers in interviews, with some provided in advance with copies of the questions they were to be asked. A further allegation is that some key witnesses were not even interviewed by the officers, privately described by Mr Atkinson as among his “most respected”. Last night, a Queensland Police spokesman would not comment on whether the Ethical Standards Command report would be released, although the CMC has committed to putting it out within weeks.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Death in Custody, Human Rights
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Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
Matthew Franklin & Patricia Karvelas; 5/5/10
Tony Abbott has sparked a fresh battle in the so-called history wars by arguing that Australian history has rarely seen discrimination based on race or culture. Echoing former prime minister John Howard, the Opposition Leader also rejected the “black armband view” of history, praising Howard-era border security policies as “tough but effective” and vowing to reinstate them if he wins this year’s election. But his comments on racism were rejected as unrealistic by Aboriginal Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda, while the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia accused him of promoting public fears about immigration for political reasons. The Howard era featured lively debate about the past, with the history wars dividing the nation between those who endorsed Mr Howard’s belief that people were being taught a “black armband view” of the past and those who favoured a critical view of the nation’s heritage.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Racism
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Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Patricia Karvelas; 3/5/10; (2 Items)
Members of Australia’s new national Aboriginal representative group will be subject to police checks and its decisions will be vetted by an ethics council in an effort to avoid the scandals that destroyed the reputation of the former indigenous body ATSIC. The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, launched in Sydney yesterday, is the first indigenous representative body since 2005, when the Howard government abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission amid corruption scandals. The Rudd government has bankrolled the new group, pledging $29.2 million in keeping its election promise to establish a national Aboriginal body. The group will represent Aboriginal interests in government, business and international forums, and establish a wide-ranging agenda based on thorough research and “evidence.” It will aim to also become a think tank, creating visionary leadership on issues affecting Aborigines.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Finance
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Monday, May 3rd, 2010
Jodie Minus; 3/5/10
A father of two from Brewarrina in northwest NSW and a former social worker from the ACT are the new faces of indigenous representation in Australia. Sam Jeffries, 46, and Kerry Arabena, 42, were yesterday announced as co-chairs of the executive board of the newly established National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples. The announcement was made at The Australian Hall in Sydney – scene of the milestone Aboriginal Day of Mourning and protest in 1938 – and attendees smiled and hugged each other on what they called another “landmark day”. Dr Arabena, who was recently awarded a doctorate in human ecology from the Australian National University, has an extensive background in public health, administration, community development and research. Her professional appointments range from political agencies, such as director of the Regional Governance Unit in the Office of Indigenous Policy Co-ordination in Canberra, to health services.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia
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