Mission & Justice

Victoria Laurie; 14/6/08

The windmill stands midway along the Canning Stock Route, spinning lazily in the late afternoon breeze. Beneath its blades, marked “Well 33 Kunawarritji”, a group of Martu women are gathering for a photo. Giggling and grumbling, these Western Desert artists lift skirts to step over bull-rushes growing around the foot of the water tank.  Around its side they’ve draped a canvas decorated with yellow, gold, orange and green circles. Sisters Kumpaya Girgirba, Nora Wompi, Bugai Whylouter and Nora Nangubar finished the canvas earlier in the day. Now a young indigenous photographer, Morika Biljabu, is herding them together for a commemorative snapshot. “Look out, snake!” someone shouts and they scatter like startled galahs at a waterhole. It’s a false alarm and everyone settles back into position for Morika to get her shots from the top of a Nissan four-wheel-drive. Remote is too weak a word to describe how far we are from anywhere. Our party of 15 artists and a small crew of non-indigenous helpers has gathered roughly halfway along the Canning Stock Route, the droving trail forged by surveyor Alfred Canning in 1906 to bring cattle down from the Kimberley town of Halls Creek southwest to Wiluna, a daunting 1750 kilometres through sand and salt pans.

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8/6/08; http://www.theage.com.au/world/us-leads-the-world-on-prisoner-numbers-20080607-2n96.html

The US has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch says. This means an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared with 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, the organisation said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures released yesterday. The figures show a sharp racial imbalance in the US prison population, with blacks outnumbering whites by six to one. Nearly 11% of black men aged 30-34 are in prison, according to Justice Department figures. Human Rights Watch said blacks were 12 times more likely to be jailed for drug-related crimes than whites, though drug use was about the same in the two races. “Although whites, being more numerous, constitute the large majority of drug users, blacks constitute 54% of all persons entering prisons with a new drug offence conviction,” it said.

Ahmad Al-Akhras, 8/6/08

Like racial profiling, the so-called Watch List hinges on a false premise that people commit crimes because of their racial, ethnic or religious background. This false premise caused huge suffering to African Americans, Japanese Americans and now Arab and American Muslims. The worst part of this is the assumption that practicing Islam, never mind being an activist at that, gives one an appetite for terrorism. In the process, people who are in good standing who did not commit nor had a criminal record are treated as “posing a threat to civil aviation or national security” or as “potential enemies of the state”. Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported last year that since 2003, a database that stores names of “individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States” has quadrupled from 100,000 to 435,000. I am sure the numbers now are way higher. The question is that if the US has these many “terrorists” or “dangerous people,” then we have a real and huge problem that cannot be solved by a watch list that selectively targets people.

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Annabel Stafford; 2/6/08

There is a new face of Islamophobia in Sydney. Gone are the images of angry young men draped in Australian flags and brandishing beer bottles as they rampage through Cronulla terrorising anyone who looks Middle Eastern. In their place is middle-aged, earnest-looking Kate McCulloch, wearing a large Akubra hat plastered with Australian flag stickers. She tells the TV cameras that she is not racist, but Muslims take our welfare, do not live by our rules and are not welcome in Camden.
They are different faces, but their message is the same. They do not want Muslims on their beaches, in their streets, in their suburbs.

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Graeme Cordiner; 2/6/08

Myall Creek is hardly a metropolis. In fact no one actually lives there. It is marked only by a large corrugated tin hall, commemorating the fallen in battle in the World Wars, a loo, and a couple of clay tennis courts, now sadly overgrown. This June long weekend, as I have done every year for several years, I will travel from Sydney to Myall Creek near Inverell. It is not such a big deal. It means a couple of nights away, leaving Friday, returning Sunday, but it is a commitment on my part, and hundreds of others. Why do I do it? Myall Creek is the site of an infamous massacre of Aboriginal people in 1838. Nothing unusual in that perhaps, as there were many massacres, some far larger than the 27 or so women, children and men killed that day. Not far from Myall Creek, at Waterloo Creek, there had been a far larger massacre, by soldiers.
See:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/lets-bury-our-hearts-at-myall-creek/2008/06/01/1212258640207.html

Paul Daley; 1/6/08

In the past few days Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has missed a golden leadership opportunity. …  Sometimes a leader needs to call a wrong for what it is, and damn the immediate consequences. … Local resident Kate McCulloch, wearing a towering hat covered in Australian flags, declared that the outcome was a victory for “decency”. “The ones (Muslims) that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life,” said McCulloch, eerily reminiscent of another woman who burst into national consciousness 12 years ago, Pauline Hanson.

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Damien Murphy; 31/5/08

The hair is assisted blonde rather than red, but the rawness of Kate McCulloch’s words curiously echoes Pauline Hanson’s redneck worries about dispossession and the need to curb Muslim immigration, especially in the white-bread community of Camden. Mrs McCulloch, a Catholic mother of four, became the poster girl for Camden’s Muslim-shy residents this week when local councillors voted unanimously “on planning grounds alone” to reject a Quranic Society proposal for a $19 million Islamic school on Sydney’s rural outskirts. Having railed against Muslims who “take our welfare”, Mrs McCulloch, 45, now says she is considering following Mrs Hanson into politics. She met the Queenslander when she pulled into Camden last November to help oppose the Islamic school as part her failed crack at a Senate seat.

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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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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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Phil Brown; 7/5/08,

The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police; Jonathan Richards; University of Queensland Press
The sad emptiness that pervades parts of rural Queensland is a curious residue of colonisation. I felt this keenly when, in the late 1970s, I lived in a small to,wn in central Queensland. The town had an Aboriginal name but there was little other evidence that indigenous people had lived thereabouts. The local historical society ignored the indigenous past and promoted stories about the hard-working, God-fearing folk who settled the district. Of course, for these pioneers to flourish local Aborigines had to be subjugated and “dispersed”, as it was described in colonial times. That euphemism crops up regularly in this disturbing book about a shadowy aspect of our nation’s history. “Dispersed” meant disposed of, run off or killed, sometimes by settlers, often by the much-feared Queensland Native Police, a force of largely. indigenous policemen that terrorised their countrymen and women and helped destroy their way of life.

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