Macklin promises Wadeye makeover with a difference
Lindsay Murdoch; 10/10/08
There are no doors, no furniture and bare, dirt-caked walls. The toilet is broken. Stinking mattresses are strewn in three small, sweltering bedrooms where at least eight people sleep every night. “I’ve lived here all my life,” says Alfred Thardim, 39. Mr Thardim took The Age to his house in Wadeye, Australia’s largest remote indigenous community, 350 kilometres south-west of Darwin, because he wants a better life for his family. “My wife has diabetes. Living like this is not good for her,” he says, standing in the house that was built from bush gravel in 1975, when Wadeye was known as Port Keats, a Catholic mission community few Australians had heard of.
Safeguarding privacy for Aboriginal communities
Frances Morphy & Howard Morphy; 10/10/08
The permit system was the mechanism by which the traditional owners of freehold Aboriginal land controlled access to their land and to their communities-that is until the “emergency response” removed the permit system from public areas in prescribed communities. Chair of the Northern Land Council Wali Wunungmurra, in Canberra recently to lobby for the reinstatement of the permit system, described it this way: “It’s about our cultural survival. Aboriginal land is private property and we would like to keep it that way. “Most Australians respect the right of others to privacy in their own homes, and many Australians have the power to control who enters their community - gated suburbs and secure apartment blocks are becoming more and more common.
See: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/safeguarding-privacy-for-aboriginal-communities-20081009-4xhw.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Housing