Mission & Justice

Denis Gregory; 18/5/08

Police are investigating claims a group of young Aborigines were threatened by a man armed with a tomahawk and wearing full-length Ku Klux Klan garb. Members of the group say that about 1am last Saturday, as they were walking home in the Riverina town of Griffith, the man jumped out of a black utility truck and waved the tomahawk at them while yelling racial obscenities. They say another man emerged from the truck wearing a black balaclava and the female driver of the ute also began fighting, with one of the female Aborigines. The group claims that when police arrived, the men pulled off their garb and put it in the back of the truck.

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Sanna Trad; 17/5/08

“Go home, Osama,” was not a particularly clever insult. “Go to hell, you educated pigs,” was much better, although a little unexpected. Waleed Aly, a counter-terrorism expert and founding member of the new SBS comedy Salam Cafe, reckons there came a point where the racist insults he received in the street stopped offending him and started making him laugh. “The funniest thing is the one-liners you get,” he said. “How can you compete with comedy like that? After a while it stops being offensive and just starts being funny.” Salam Cafe, the brainchild of the show’s regular panel members Mr Aly, Ahmed Imam and Susan Carland, takes a rare look at the funnier side of the issues that affect Muslims.

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Jewel Topsfield; 17/5/08

When former immigration minister Kevin Andrews sparked a race row over his claims that African refugees were engaged in crime and failing to integrate into Australia he was acting contrary to advice from his own department. In a confidential briefing to the minister, obtained by The Age, the Immigration Department stressed that studies suggested it was not ethnicity that determined criminal behaviour but a combination of socio-economic problems and other disadvantage. The briefing was prepared for Mr Andrews in response to an article in the Cranbourne Leader suggesting that transit police believed Sudanese men were responsible for 99% of assaults and armed robberies on two Victorian rail lines.

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17/5/08: http://www.smh.com.au/letters/index.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

The scrapping of temporary protection visas for refugees is long overdue and very welcome (”1000 refugees receive protection, not detention”, May 16). The Opposition’s claim that this sends a “clear message to people smugglers that Australia’s borders are open for business” should not go unchallenged. The Immigration Department’s statistics show that more people came by boat in the two months following the introduction of TPVs than had arrived in the previous10 months. Before TPVs, men travelled alone on the boats to Australia hoping to sponsor their families to join them later. But once TPVs came in, they could not access the family reunion program. With no legitimate way to be reunited with husbands and fathers, wives and children turned to people smugglers. Before TPVs, very few children were among asylum-seeker boat passengers. After TPVs the percentage of children on the boats increased. On SIEV X, the boat that sank en route to Australia killing 353people, more than 35 per cent of the passengers were children, most of whom drowned. - Sue Hoffman Bassendean (WA)

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16/5/08

This year, on May 26, Catholic Religious, along with all Australians, will commemorate Sorry Day with a little more hope in our hearts. We thank Prime Minister Rudd and the Commonwealth Parliament for making a national apology to the Stolen Generations, their families, and communities. This apology spoke to our hunger for healing and for reconciliation. The apology in itself does not alter the conditions of poverty and marginalisation of many Indigenous Australians, but it helps us know how to go forward in a respectful manner. The truth has a way of setting us free and the apology will become a source of strength for action.

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13/5/08

Whether the wrongs done to the Stolen Generations sometimes counted as genocide is obviously not a question to which we must urgently seek an answer. Your editorial (10-11/5) is right that far. The same could be said, however, about many questions whose answers will be part of a truthful account of Australia’s history. Indeed, it could be said of most of the questions raised in magazines and journals devoted to reflective discussion of the kind to which The Australian Literary Review now contributes with distinction. Any group of Australian citizens that suffered, as many Aborigines now do, would be owed the urgent attention of an Australian government because that is what governments owe to all their citizens.

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13/5/08

If Aboriginal culture is now to be described as complex and diverse (”Dreamtime over in Aboriginal studies’’, 12/5), what words are left to describe the culture of the European Renaissance, or the court of Harun al Rashid and his astronomer-poet Omar Khayam, or the hundreds of vanished cultures? This politically correct thinking is looking at history through the wrong end of the telescope. Isn’t it beneficial to marvel and wonder that Aboriginal cultures have survived unchanged for so long - far longer than the apparently more sophisticated cultures of Mexico, Egypt, India and China? Howard Dewhirst; Burleigh Heads, Qld

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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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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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Justine Ferrari & Lauren Wilson; 12/5/08

Dreamtime is no longer an acceptable term to describe the collection of Aboriginal creation stories, and should be referred to as The Dreaming or The Dreamings. And the structure of traditional Aboriginal society should not be described as primitive - but as complex and diverse, and the term “native” should be replaced by “indigenous groups” or “language groups”.  Advice for teaching indigenous students, which has been prepared by the West Australian and South Australian education departments, contains lists of appropriate words to describe Aboriginal people and culture.  The West Australian document, part of its Aboriginal Perspectives Across the Curriculum project, contains the headings “less appropriate terminology” and “more appropriate terminology”, and sets out unsuitable words and their substitutes.

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