Archive for the ‘Aboriginal’ Category
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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Saturday, May 1st, 2010
Bruce Elder; 1/5/10;
Richard Broome, Allen & Unwin; 400pp, $35
Since 1982, Professor Richard Broome’s Aboriginal Australians has been one of the key general texts about this continent’s “First Nation” inhabitants. Although it has been revised four times and sold more than 50,000 copies, it has not been part of the so-called History Wars. Keith Windschuttle, for example, does not even list it in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History’s bibliography. Nor does Henry Reynolds in Frontier. Broome has managed to write an essentially political history of indigenous Australians and avoid the ire of the left and the right, a major achievement when the politics of Aboriginal history have been so venomous.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, History
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Friday, April 30th, 2010
Natasha Bita; 30/4/10
Former human rights commissioner Tom Calma has won a $694,000 federal contract to supervise an indigenous anti-smoking campaign. Mr Calma – whose five-year term as Race Discrimination and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander commissioner ended in January – now has a three-year contract as “national co-ordinator for tackling indigenous smoking”. “Part of my job is to help roll out the program and offer leadership and support to the agency,” he said yesterday. Mr Calma said the contract payment included his salary, travel allowances and accommodation. He said the $100 million, three-year campaign involved placing indigenous “tobacco action workers” – health workers assigned to Aboriginal medical services – in 57 regions, to help smokers quit and educate others not to take up the habit.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs
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Friday, April 30th, 2010
30/4/10
Mal Brough is right: there can be no progress in indigenous education without attendance (“Punish parents to save kids, says Brough”, 29/4). If any parent in any city of Australia habitually failed to ensure their child’s attendance at school, they would be fined and, if they continued to flout the law, their child would be put into foster or state care. This can’t and won’t happen in remote areas of Australia because, obviously, it would create a new stolen generation for which non-indigenous Australia would be blamed and have to apologise. Alistair Gordon, Pialba, Qld.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education
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Thursday, April 29th, 2010
Lex Hall; 29/4/10
A family-style boarding program has lifted retention rates for indigenous students to 90 per cent as Marrara Christian College battles the bleak literacy and numeracy statistics plaguing students who come from a “lost generation of parents” in remote communities. For the past 10 years the school, on the outskirts of Darwin, has run what it calls the Family Home Groups boarding program, in which indigenous students from remote communities live in the suburbs with “house parents”. Melissa Mallinson and her husband, Karl, have been house parents at the 630-student school for the past six years and are looking after nine boys, aged 12 and 13. For most of the 90 students in the program, the transition to academic life is long. “In the communities there are no boundaries. So it takes about six months before they realise they’re safe and secure. Then things start changing.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Education
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Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
28/5/10
The battle for an Australian charter of rights is the debate that will not die. The question has been a persistent part of the national discussion since World War II. The decision of the Rudd government last week to rule out a national human rights act in favour of a human rights “framework” will not change that. In fact, over time it will likely strengthen the case for reform. The debate will not go away because Australia has several persistent, deep human rights problems. Most people in the community live comfortably and without fear of their basic liberties being breached. This is not the case for many others, and the failure to treat these people with the dignity and respect they deserve is what drives the push for reform. The human rights report prepared late last year for the Rudd government by Father Frank Brennan was based upon story after story of Australian governments neglecting or ignoring people’s basic rights. Disturbingly, many of these breaches were based on policies about which our major parties have been in furious agreement, such as those that affect the lives of asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians.
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Tags: Australia, Human Rights
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Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Ben Cubby, 27/4/10
Dozens of cliffs have crumbled or collapsed, Aboriginal rock art has been destroyed and metre-wide cracks opened in the earth as a result of coalmining in the Gardens of Stone wilderness area near Lithgow, an independent report has found. The damage, inflicted over three decades by five coal mines and continuing today, is caused by subsidence from longwall mining, which now almost surrounds the Gardens of Stone National Park, part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Site. It is likely to be extended further if a new mine plan is approved by the NSW government. The report, to be launched today by the former premier Bob Carr, documents wide-scale, unpublicised damage, including the destruction of some of the area’s unique sandstone pagodas and rock arches. ”In its monitoring reports to government, the coal industry regularly understates the damage caused,” said Keith Muir, the executive officer of the Colong Foundation for Wilderness, which produced the report. ”Mine operations do not work to minimise environmental damage and have been largely unresponsive to environmental concerns.”
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Environment, Trade
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Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Marcia Langton; 24/4/10
Those living but not working in mining regions are suffering economic disaster Karratha and Roebourne are neighbouring settlements, one a port and mining dormitory town on the coast of the southern Pilbara region of Western Australia, the other an old town, a half hour inland, where most people are Aboriginal. Karratha has new brick houses, tree-lined streets, substantial amenities, a motel, shopping centre, restaurants and tennis courts. Roebourne is old, dusty, and showing signs of years of neglect: broken fences, potholes, weeds and flaking paint. Here and there a well-kept house and garden appear incongruously among the other homes. A TAFE college, a few offices and a basketball court signal that someone decided to spend some state money in Roebourne, rather than concentrating all new investment in Karratha.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Housing, Trade, Workers
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Lex Hall; 24/4/10; (2 Items)
It was just past sunrise on a cold Alice Springs Saturday when white man Glen Swain started kicking Aborigine Donny Ryder in the head. Consumed by hate, his mind twisted by the full bottle of Bundaberg rum he had drunk through the night, Swain could think only of revenge against the black man who had thrown a bottle at his mate’s car. The trainee pest exterminator lined up Ryder, lying defenceless in the red dirt, and delivered two vicious kicks to his head, stopping only when he noticed his victim was motionless, “sort of like a rag doll”, as he told police. Swain would later explain the cowardly attack as a case of “tunnel vision”. “I was doing what I was doing, not worrying what everybody else was doing,” he said during a police re-enactment at the scene.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Racism, Reconciliaion
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Nicolas Rothwell; 23/4/10
Poised, graceful, as slender as a fresh-cut strip of green pandanus, Mavis Ganambarr, the queen of Elcho Island’s strong school of fibre art-making, bends quietly to her tasks. Here, beneath the spreading shade tree, in a garden back yard in crowded Galiwinku community, is her studio: black cockatoos screech overhead and scatter the seed-husks; children wander, dogs prowl, but Ganambarr’s slim fingers never cease their movement. Forward, back; forward, back: she pounds and scrapes the pale kurrajong branch before her into long slivers while her clan relatives and her daughters watch. Close at hand is everything she needs for her art: an art subtle and simple, rich in scope and rapidly evolving. During the past decade, as Ganambarr’s reputation in the wider world has grown, so has her range. She pours out new work, not just the plant-fibre baskets and shell-decorated dillybags that have long been staples at the island’s art centre, but bracelets, soft sculptures of animals, even human figures made from fibre and twine. Her most intensely decorated bags and baskets, multi-coloured, shell-adorned, with bright feathers shot through their weave, are works that have left utility far behind. They belong in cabinets of curiosities, or fine art galleries, their normal destination these days.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Art, Australia, Culture
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Louise Hall; 23/4/10
Developers and farmers who unwittingly damage an Aboriginal object or site will face fines of up to $1.1 million under a controversial overhaul of laws designed to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage. In an attempt to shore up the green vote, the NSW government says the hefty penalties will decrease the widespread destruction of indigenous artefacts by landholders who have claimed ignorance or chosen to pay fines, currently as low as $5500. But indigenous groups say the amendments to the National Parks and Wildlife Act do not go far enough, as officials can still issue permits authorising the destruction or removal of items such as skeletal remains, middens, stone artefacts, rock shelters and carved trees. Permits are issued at the rate of three a week to developers, mining companies and government departments such as the Roads and Traffic Authority. Yet the government successfully prosecuted just 10 cases of wilful or flagrant destruction or desecration by those without a permit between 2005 and 2009.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Culture, Human Rights
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Kate Benson; 23/4/10
Aborigines living in Sydney are just as likely to die from cancer as those in remote areas of NSW, shattering the belief that a lack of services is responsible for late diagnoses and limited treatment. New figures released by the Cancer Council NSW show that Aboriginal men in metropolitan areas are three times more likely to die from oesophageal cancer than white men, and indigenous women are three times as likely to die from kidney and cervical cancer, even though they may live close to hospitals and medical centres. The study also found that indigenous men were 50 per cent more likely than white men to die from lung cancer and 1½ times more likely to die from stomach cancer. Women were twice as likely to die from lung cancer. Experts have blamed the high death rates on a lack of transport, cost of care and some indigenous people not wanting to leave their families for long periods to seek treatment.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, health
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Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Lex Hall; 23/4/10
Alice Springs is on high alert this morning as five young white men aged 19 to 25 face sentencing over the bashing death of an Aboriginal trainee ranger, in a case that has set racial tensions seething in the troubled central Australian town. Timothy Hird, Joshua Benjamin Spears, Anton Kloeden, Glen Anthony Swain and Scott John Doody –all members of respectable Central Australian families – have pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of 33-year-old Donny Kwementyaye Ryder beside the Todd River last July. According to evidence given in court, the five men had been on a 12-hour drinking binge and attacked Ryder after he threw a bottle at their white Hilux utility. Dubbed the “Ute Five”, the men have been in protective custody at the Alice Springs jail for the past eight months. The jail population is 80 per cent Abriginal.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Drugs, Human Rights
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Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
David Nason; 22/4/10
The South Australian government will consider a negotiated settlement of future Stolen Generations civil actions following the final Aboriginal victory in the Trevorrow test case. The state’s new Attorney-General, John Rau, made the concession while rejecting using a compensation tribunal to deal with 100 other potential such cases. Mr Rau’s comments came as George and Tom Trevorrow presented Premier Mike Rann with a detailed submission for a tribunal on behalf of the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority. The submission calls for the establishment of a tribunal to run for five years that would make “fair, just, quick and efficient determinations” on compensation for Aborigines illegally taken from their families as children.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Human Rights, Reconciliation
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Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
Tony Koch; 20/4/10
The Queensland government yesterday refused to release a report on how it had failed to analyse the benefits of declaring some Cape York rivers “wild” and putting them off limits to much development. A Senate committee is investigating Queensland’s Wild Rivers Act following the introduction into federal parliament of a private member’s bill by Tony Abbott to overturn the state law. The Opposition Leader said he took the action because the legislation impinged on the rights of Aboriginal people in Cape York and was introduced without their approval or proper consultation. Written submissions to the Senate committee contain evidence now posted on its website, including that the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management advised bauxite miner Cape Alumina “that there has been no attempt to properly analyse the public policy benefits of declaring the area (sought to be mined) a wild river”.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Environment, Trade
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Monday, April 19th, 2010
Richie Ahmat; 19/4/10
The confrontation between the Aboriginal traditional owners of Cape York Peninsula and The Wilderness Society in relation to Queensland’s Wild River laws is fundamental. If it is not resolved fairly and soon, it will be the beginning of a long war that our people will never abandon until justice is restored. What is at stake here is the very meaning of land rights. While our people are defending the principle that Australia was not a terra nullius, TWS is pursuing the restoration of terra nullius through the concept of wilder nullius.Wilder nullius, which is a vision that TWS has for indigenous homelands across northern and remote Australia, allows for black people in the landscape but in a highly restricted form. These blacks are not supposed to engage in any form of wealth creation or development. They are only allowed to pursue traditional activities. They are to eschew employment or consumption, and not participate in or be in favour of any form of industry. If the blacks abide by the role envisioned for them, then TWS will arrange for the environmental agencies of government to provide funding programs for them to be employed as rangers and so on.
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Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Environmental, Trade
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