In this issue
* Boulia
* Kalkadoon Connections
* E.F. Schmacher, Aboriginal disadvantage and Affluent Australia
* 2 non-Aboriginal reflections on Palm Island
* Terra Nullius and ecology
sorry - no eco-gadgets this month, we’ve been busy. (see Palm Island housing report) Probably next one though
NEWS UPDATE
All the details about the new, bigger, brighter and better Australian Young Eco-Speaker 2006 (formerly known as eco-voice)
Australian Young Eco-Speaker
The Australian young Eco-Speaker has now been incorporated into the “Australian Schools World Environment Day Challenge” in collaboration with the Wilderness Society, the Parramatta city Council and the Greenbuild and Eco-Show. All details of the Eco-Speaker side of things haven’t changed - don’t panic if you have started work. Its just a part of something much bigger now.
Dont forget, all the old kalkadoon.org articles can be found through the archives and categories on the left or the search function on the right of this page.
the following is from last month but we will keep it up for now
Channel 9 “Sunday” program 26/2/06.
The story of 2 Aboriginal people killed by hit and run drivers in Townsville and the leniency and inaction of the authorities to investigate and prosecute the drivers.
Lawyers for the family of one of the victims have launched a public campaign to pursue the issue. Errol Wyles Campaign
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news at 2:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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“MOVEMENT” by Baganan. Water colour and felt pen.
Now we are going to Boulia.
Boulia is my country a place that time has forgotten but I have not forgotten my old grandfathers land and grandmother who lived and loved and made children and looked after them until the white man took them away to Palm Island so doing the round trip and seeing the land upon which my parents played sang and danced now I can have time to live upon my land and not only me but all of grandads and grandmothers children and grandchildren as we return to our country in murrie time. I realise a lot of my people are still there and as families do want to see our mob and share all the news with each other of our mob far away
and talk about the future of our grandfathers and grandmothers country
over and out
Baganun Kurityityin Theresa Creed
(ed. - please see support us. page)
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news, Aborigininity at 2:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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We are pleased to pass on the following message. It will remain on the “Kalkadoon Pitta Pitta” page if you are looking for it in the future.
I’m Glynnis Taylor currently living New Zealand & I’m the
eldest grandchild of the late May Taylor formerly of Boulia & Mt Isa.
I’ve created a msn group site called Kalkadoon connections, its a
meeting place for descendants to leave messages, post photos and keep in
touch.
http://groups.msn.com/Kalkadoonconnections
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news, Aborigininity at 2:48 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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by John Tracey
“That there should be a massive housing problem in an
affluent society is surely an immense and intolerable
paradox.”
-E.F. Schumacher
August 16th, 1911-Sept 4th, 1977
Palm Island housing report
- kalkadoon.org
E.F. Shumacher wrote a book entitled “Small is Beautiful” As a short person, I took particular interest in his ideas. Unfortunately I didn’t find a political analysis of hight-ism. But “Small is Beautiful” did provide a profound analysis of poverty, affluence, the environment and the deep interconnectedness of them all. In today’s globally warmed political climate such things are not new ideas; However Schumacher was considered a fringe fruitcake, along with all the other flower power hippies of the era, his analysis became a landmark of the alternative movement but remained at that until his death.
Schumacher’s vision did not only “analyse”, it also had an in - built strategy for global social and economic change. Basically his story was that the poor are so poor because the rich are so rich. If the rich were not so rich, the poor would not be so poor. “Live simply so all may simply live” became the slogan that made the “Small is Beautiful” concept into a political strategy - through activity in your own back yard - literally. Schumacher was the global visionary that laid the groundwork for the permaculture and sustainability movements in western society.
However since Schumacher’s passing the affluent world has found some spiritual value in his words and embraced many of them. The affluent adherents of a spiritual lifestyle seemed to have forgotten about the poor though. Too often “live simply so all may simply live” has degenerated into “live simply because it feels nice” and unfortunately some now even try to sell this simple life as a real estate and tourism asset.
Until recently this site proudly presented the “Gondwana Statement” which was a statement drawn up and endorsed at a conference that kalkadoon.org were presenters at. This statement was a concise and clear articulation of the Schumacher vision as relevant to Australia. Unbeknown to kalkadoon.org at the time this conference was part of developing a community interface for a real estate development trying to sell spiritually uplifting lifestyles to the affluent. So we have removed the statement and disassociate ourselves from it.
However the essence of the statement, Schumacher’s vision and Aboriginal disadvantage continues. kalkadoon.org is a part of working out the relationship between them into the future. Thats one way of describing the whole idea, as I understand it anyway.
“Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.”
-E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news, Sustainability at 2:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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An Aboriginal reflection on Phantom Island viewed from Palm Island
(thanx to Creed photography-Palm Island)
another Aborigional view from Palm Island (thanx to Qld. Police - Palm Island)
Two non-Aboriginal reflections on Palm Island
The first of these stories is from Monique Bond, the second is by kalkadoon.org editor, John Tracey.
Monique Bond is a long time supporter of Aboriginal Australia and a member of ANTAR in Brisbane. She recently visited Palm Island during the coronial inquiry into a death in custody in 2004 which sparked the destruction of the Palm Island police complex.
After Visiting Palm Island 25-28 February 2006
by Monique Bond
Recently, Graham and I went to Palm Island to visit our friend Erykah Kyle and to attend the resumed inquest on the death in custody of Cameron (now known at Mulrunji) Doomadgee.
Hanging out and walking around this beautiful island, I saw: active, laughing children, friendly people giving us a wave, parents taking babies and toddlers out to get the cool breeze, some nice looking houses but many more looking derelict, with smashed windows and unkempt gardens, and the police houses, and the new Police Youth Centre, barricaded behind high wire fences..
I was surprised to see how obvious the power imbalance was. The non-locals working on the island are privileged and powerful by virtue of their education, their employment level and their status as whites or honorary whites.
Palm Islanders may have cultural knowledge and local knowledge about hunting and fishing but it is their lack of education, employment and standard English which seem to matter when their status as people is judged by mainlanders.
During the cross-examination of local witnesses at the inquest, it was clear that there is a significant difference in how the locals and the barristers speak English and in the perceptions and assumptions that the speakers are coming from. So simple questions of fact become misunderstandings based on a lack of shared experiences. For example, a man who is asked how much he has been drinking, might answer ‘a carton’ but he does not mean that he personally drank all that – rather that was the amount shared by all the people present. This is obvious to the locals but not at all obvious to the barristers, journalists and others, like me, present in court.
Talking with Erykah and other Palm residents, there is great energy and enthusiasm for doing the things which would make life better for the community. They want better housing, (housing is a major problem on the island, with chronic overcrowding being a contributing factor to many social problems) more culturally appropriate education, proper employment, food grown on the island, running and even owning the stores themselves…. so why do these things not happen.
The Palm Island Council is seriously under-resourced, because it was set up as a penal colony administered by the State Government, and then converted to a DOGIT or Deed of Grant in Trust community. The Council currently has no economic base but it needs to be able to negotiate, on a level playing field, with the numerous state and federal government departments which are continually coming up with plans to ‘fix things’ or to ‘do things’ on Palm.
Unfortunately, the Queensland Government does not allocate the Council sufficient resources to carry out the community consultations and then the overall planning which are needed. So, decisions are made on the mainland which are not ‘owned’ nor accepted by the local people and the priorities of the islanders are ignored.
I call on Peter Beattie and John Howard to allocate the Council sufficient funds to develop a 5 year Plan with prioritized objectives and timeline and to commit their governments to work with the Council with sufficient resources and people to achieve the Council objectives.
After a hundred years of ‘top-down’ management on Palm Island, it is time to give the ‘grass-roots up’ approach a fair go.
Aboriginal Self Determination - It’s common sense, not politics.
by John Tracey
I am writing this article from Palm Island, an Aboriginal community of 3-4000 people off the coast of Townsville in Queensland. It is a spectacular Island with magnificent mountains, beaches and wildlife of all sorts. I have just watched the new moon plummit into its own reflection on the calm high tide. It strikes me that this is one of the few real wilderness areas left in Australia, where human beings still live in the bush; unlike national parks where the people have been killed or removed to make way for the illusion of “the untouched wilderness“, undisturbed by human intervention.
Today I witnessed two disturbances involving alcohol. One was managed by the local police and the other by my local guide and junior law-man on the Island. The first incident involved a large party that had been going on for some time. I don’t know what circumstances lead to the police turning up, but they did. For about an hour the neighborhood was in chaos, people running from here to there and lots of screaming. The police walked through the houses and yards of the party and neighbors, confronting people and at one stage pushing a person backwards when they tried to walk away. Eventually one person was arrested on a warrant for an unpaid fine. This incident occured on the closing day of the coronial inquest into the death in the Palm Island watch house in 2004. It represents the very poor relationship between the police and locals. As such, it seems to me, that this incident had nothing to do with public order, safety or concern for the rights of neighbours. It was simply the police taking a high profile at the party as a warning. The arrest had nothing to do with any illegal activity at the time.
The other alcohol-related incident did involve issues of safety and public order. It involved a group of people standing around a road in the dark of night and at least one of them being very drunk, he was blocking traffic while arguing with those around. My local guide and I were driving on that road when we were stopped. My guide told me to stop the car beside the man on the road. He told the person to get off the road, a demand which was met with aggressive threats and the challenge “make me”. My guide got out of the car and “made him“, through force. At this point I got very concerned as I thought an all out brawl was about to explode, however after only a couple of minutes the two were walking down the road with there arms around each other sharing a beer. My guide took the young man to his home and left him in the care of his family. What I was not aware of, and hence my concern, was the respect that my guide had from the young man and his family. His intervention was welcomed by all involved and it calmed the situation down, thus removing the real threat of a traffic accident, a fight or arrests.
This latter incident, that of the exercise of authority through respect reminded me of the one and only riot that I have witnessed. In 1988, on the day of the big bicentennial Land rights march in Sydney, a large crowd gathered in the only Aboriginal owned pub in Sydney at the time. There were several thousand people in a pub that can hold several hundred at the most. The crowd overflowed onto the footpath at first and then onto the road, blocking traffic. A truck driver, frustrated at the road being blocked, drove onto the footpath knocking some people over. The crowd dragged the driver from the truck and attacked hinm until the police managed to rescue him. The police were out numbered and being showered with glasses bottles and bricks and retreated from the crowd. As I was wondering what the police’s next move would be, one Aboriginal man walked alone into the crowd and told people to move back onto the footpath or inside the pub - and they did, everyone. When the police finally turned up with reinforcements and full riot gear, there only job was to direct traffic to get it flowing again. One un-armed and un-armoured man had already dealt with the situation. I can only guess what would have happened if the police had returned before the lone elder.
There is much truth to the assertions that many Aboriginal people suffer mental health problems as a result of the history of invasion and colonaisation. Intergenerational crisis and anxiety are indeed major obstacles to Aboriginal prosperity. However I am not as convinced as I recently was that history is the prime cause of poverty and dysfunction in Aboriginal communities. It is what happens today and what has recently happened that is the cause of depression, chronic anxiety and a propensity for self medication through drug and alcohol abuse. For example, on Palm Island the residents do have enormous baggage to deal with from the Islands history as a penal colony. However this is not the reason for tension between the police and the community, it is the contemporary status-quo that causes this. The suspicious death in the watchhouse in 2004 and the prolonged and unproductive enquiries into it are the causes of fear, resentment and anger. Similarly it is not the Islands history of authoritarianism that has lead to a lack of will and determination amongst residents, it is current and recent impositions by the state authorities and their unwillingness to accommodate local will that is the cause of dissillusionment. For example the building of the Police yoth centre on the Island. The Palm Island Council demanded a non-police youth centre and were never approached for building, zoning or any other town planning authorisations for the centre. It was just dumped there against the wishes of the democratically elected council, which is supposed to have the same town planning authorities as white councils - but they don’t. In the face of contemporary colonial impositions, it is common sense not to expect to be able to achieve anything; not depressed irrational negativity.
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news, Education at 2:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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By John Tracey
The Green movement has built a concept of wilderness, without consultation with Aboriginal people, we have generalised that concept, politicised it and it is now a significant issue on the Australian political landscape. Yet the way we have described the natural environment bears no resemblance to its ancient reality.
Modern Australia began with the legal principle of Terra Nullius, meaning a land with no law or government, no sovereign population. The British declared this continent to be Terra Nullius after Captain Cook “discovered” it, which allowed the British Crown to claim possession of the land in accordance with international law. Terra Nullius of course is a lie and was found to be such by the Australian High Court when Eddie Mabo proved that his family had owned their block of land since before Captain Cook.. Anthropologists and Aboriginal people assert that there was, prior to Cook and up until today, a complex and sophisticated system of law, government, economy and language, all the defining points of a sovereign nation.
Despite the high courts findings, Terra Nullius remains as the legal foundation for the sovereignty of the crown in Australia which in turn is the foundation authority for the parliament, courts, police, military and every other migrant legal institution.
Modern Australian conservationism dovetails with the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Both deny the reality that this country was and still is occupied by a large complex Aboriginal society.
The conservation values of the Australian Bush are usually articulated in terms of species of plants and animals, geological considerations and often last and least, cultural heritage; usually a description of the history of the European colony and, occasionally, a reference to native title holders or Aboriginal place names (with little understanding of the meaning of either).
The principles of ecology and biodiversity have made us aware of the devastating consequences to an eco system if a particular species of plant or animal is removed. For example if a particular bird becomes extinct, the seeds it used to carry do not propagate and the insects it used to eat swell in numbers. Insect plague and reduced propagation in turn affects an infinite number of other organisms, radically degrading the systems of the ecosystem. The balance of bio-diversity has become an accepted principle in green ideology, yet how much have we considered the devastating consequences of removing the human species from wilderness eco-systems? For thousands of years humans interacted with the bush which provided them with all of the resources of daily life.. Human society and the natural eco systems evolved as one. Today we protect places in national parks and nature reserves and pretend that we are preserving their ancient integrity. Yet the form of bush that is protected in the national parks of today, places without the human species, are a phenomenon of the last hundred years, younger than many Australian urban centres. The removal of human beings from the bush in the last two hundred years has turned our wilderness areas into overgrown untended gardens.
Bushfire management is one example that highlights our misunderstandings of the bush. Conservationists have often argued that preventative burning strategies threaten eco systems; and they are right. Many farmers and fire authorities say the only way to avoid super-fires is to burn forest litter, and they are right also. In the old days the landscape was scattered with sacred campfires burning twenty-four hours a day providing a wide range of functional and spiritual purposes. These fires, along with hunting and cleansing fires, were fuelled solely by forest litter, gently and gradually cleaning the bush in a way that does not disrupt the sacred ecosystems that sustained the fire makers.
It has been a long time between sacred fires in many of our protected areas and as such they have degenerated into dormant infernos awaiting ignition.
Environmentalism tends to subscribe to the notion that the natural habitat of the human species is towns and cities, this is our territory and we should stay out of the territories of the other species. Centuries old notions of the evolution of humanity identify a progression from living in the bush in a savage and unsophisticated consciousness, through the epoch of barbarism into civilised society. This Darwinian notion conforms to the idea that the habitat of the modern human is urbanity. The inherent contradiction of this is it is the city structure that is doing most damage to the habitats of all species, including human. As a product of feudalism, industrialisation and capitalism, cities have grown as ever extending cancers, totally destroying the ecosystems of Europe and almost completing that process in Australia. By the simple evolutionary imperative of survival of the species, industrial civilisation represents a failure, it is our greatest threat as a species. the development of urban civilisation has been a process of ignorantly shitting in our own nests for millennia. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of years or more of sustainable human society in the bush, urban society is a dysfunctional devolution and disintegration.
If we are serious about preserving the Australian environment and indeed the human species we must take direction from Aboriginal people, their traditions of are the only record of the true history and nature of the bush, including how humans manage it. Aboriginal culture itself is a working example of a social ecology, including law and the individual and collective consciousness’ that have been created by the interrelationship between human society and the wilderness.
Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news, Education at 2:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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Posted by kurityityin as HOME - current news at 2:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time
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