Category: Indigenous affairs

  • JIM COOMBS. “CIRCLE” Bail Hostels

     

    One of the common reasons for incarceration of Aboriginal children is failure to appear at court and breach of bail conditions (often a residence condition). One way to overcome this is to establish “bail hostels” like those in the U.K. Too often ignorance of the need to comply, losing court papers, illiteracy, and homelessness militate against compliance with the requirement to appear at Court on the appointed day. This often leads to an arrest warrant being issued, arrest, incarceration, and often refusal of renewed bail. This is both costly and administratively time consuming, when the infraction that led to it would rarely lead to a prison penalty. Research by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (BOCSAR) shows that this is so for persons before the courts generally. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. ‘Aunty, with our prospects in life – what is the point of being healthy?’

     

    The ABC Boyer Lecture series this year is being delivered by Sir Michael Marmot, the World Medical Association President and Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London .The main thrust of his lecture series has been about inequalities, poverty and social conditions – the social determinants – that have a major impact on health in the community.  (more…)

  • MUNGO MacCALLUM. Malcolm Turnbull and indigenous affairs.

     

    If Malcolm Turnbull did not know it before, he certainly should now: before you stomp your way into Aboriginal politics, it is wise to first don the emu-feather sandals of a trained Kadaitcha man.

    The area is fraught with uncertainty and sensitivities which are not always apparent to the outsider; whitefella politics are relatively straightforward compared to the Indigenous version.  (more…)

  • JIM COOMBS. “Circle” Incarceration

     

    After the revelations this week, it is trite to say that the criminal justice system is failing the Aboriginal people of Australia. One significant reason for this is the exclusion of the Aboriginal community from the process. One “reform” in the process over the last decade or so is “circle sentencing” which allows a small panel of community elders to assist magistrates in the process of sentencing, after the offender has pleaded guilty.

    Given that the incarceration of Aboriginals is 23 times the rate for white offenders (compared with 5-7 times for African-Americans in the USA), it is clear that we have failed quite badly. (more…)

  • MUNGO MacCALLUM. A treaty with indigenous Australians.

     

    The idea of a country negotiating a treaty with its indigenous inhabitants is hardly novel.

    Three of our closest friends and allies (New Zealand, Canada and the United States) have all done so successfully, and none of their nations fallen into terminal division and chaos.

    And of course even in Australia, a treaty has been under discussion for nearly a century. Aboriginal elders have talked about it since at least the sesquicentenary of settlement in 1938, and it was seriously mooted a generation later when the great public servant, Dr H C (Nugget) Coombs proposed what he called a makharrata – a settlement. (more…)

  • MICHAEL GRACEY. The simmering shame of aboriginal ill-health.

    Indigenous people have experienced miserable health outcomes compared with other Australians for decades. Efforts going back to the 1960s brought some improvements but these were not enough to remove the inequalities. The federal government was prompted to try to resolve this impasse by establishing the so-called ‘Close the Gap’ Strategy in 2008. This brought fresh hope that this international embarrassment would be removed from Australia’s report card. Indigenous people welcomed the initiative but medical experts questioned whether the massive changes the Strategy set as targets could be achieved, as planned, within a single generation. It seems that the reservations about the feasibility of the Strategy were well founded. When the seventh annual Close the Gap report appeared in 2015 the then Prime Minister Abbott admitted that progress was “far too slow” and that the findings were “profoundly disappointing”. When the 2016 report was published the situation was still unsatisfactory and Prime Minister Turnbull limply commented that the results were “mixed”. There was no statement of determination from him that his government would do all in its power to put things right. Surely that wasn’t too much to expect. (more…)

  • BRAD CHILCOTT. The war on generosity – rewards for meanness!

    An interesting aspect of the Coalition’s suggestion that the ALP had committed to restoring $19 billion to the Australian Aid budget is that pro-Aid campaigners themselves had previously only mentioned $11 billion of cuts. That is, they intentionally inflate the level of cuts to more powerfully demonstrate their commitment to balancing the budget on the backs of the world’s poor. While politicians and Australia’s humanitarians war over the dollar figures in the forward estimates there’s another battle that’s less about our national budget and more about our national character – a war on generosity. (more…)

  • JULIE COLLINS. How can we achieve reconciliation? Myall Creek offers valuable answers.

    This weekend, hundreds of people will make the pilgrimage to the small town of Bingara on the NSW North West slopes and plains, for the annual commemoration of the Myall Creek Massacre.

    The memorial site, just out on the Delungra Road, marks the site of the massacre of 28 unarmed women, children and old men that occurred there on June 10, 1838. This is a place where terrible things occurred, a place shunned and avoided by locals, especially Aboriginal people, for over 150 years. (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Best we forget. We commemorate Australians who died in foreign wars in foreign lands, but not Australian aborigines who died in defence of their own country.

    Yesterday, in a moving ceremony, the remains of 33 Australians who were buried in military cemeteries in Malaysia and Singapore were returned to Australia. Our Governor General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, and Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, were at Richmond airbase to witness the repatriation of 33 Australians who had died in foreign lands.

    What a contrast this is to our refusal to acknowledge the 30,000 aborigines who died, not in wars in foreign lands but in defending their homelands where they had lived for hundreds of generations. (more…)

  • Ian Webster. Is community medicine dead?

    John Menadue said in the NSW Health Council Report of 2000, “Services should be based where patients and consumers live. The autonomy and dignity of each patient is best serviced by providing services wherever possible outside hospital. So a shift to community multi-disciplinary health teams is a major issue still ahead of us.” He returned to this theme in a recent blog, “A major aim of good health policy for Australia must be to keep people out of expensive hospitals.”

    Two South African physicians, Sidney and Emily Kark, working in poor communities started community-based primary health care – community medicine – in 1940. In each community their approach started with community diagnosis, working out the health needs in the community.

    In 1973 the Whitlam Government set up the Community Health Program for Australia. It was led by an ex-South African, Dr Sidney Sax, who knew the Kark’s approach very well. His committee recommended that the community health program should be based on primary health care. (1)

    One aim was to influence the doctors of the future and so, for the first time, chairs of community practice were funded by the Government in all medical schools. At the time, medical schools were narrowly focused on biomedicine and disciplines concerned with the body’s organ systems. Every medical student could tell you about Virchow’s contribution to pathology in the 19th century, but few knew anything about his statement about the social causes of disease, “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale.” (2)

    Outside the medical school, the general public were becoming more interested in the way doctors were trained. They were concerned about the neglect of disability, chronic diseases, mental health, addiction, Aboriginal health and other troubling health problems. And preventive medicine was missing from the GP’s repertoire.

    I came to community medicine at the UNSW after working in Whyalla, South Australia and Sheffield, England. Sheffield was once the “blackest city” in Europe. Coal dust, smog, untreated childhood infections and tobacco smoking caused the lung diseases I treated at the city’s only respiratory clinic. And the impoverished and dank suburbs where I worked as a GP showed me how the social world played out in people’s health. This convinced me of the importance of social medicine.

    These problems of health in the community were seen as lost causes in the medical schools of the day but over time, and to a varying extent, they have been picked up in contemporary undergraduate teaching.

    Public health was a Cinderella discipline. It was regarded by most medical students as boring stuff about drains, sewerage, unimaginative health promotion interspersed with dry statistics. But with the capacity to collect large datasets and the increasing power of commuters to analyse and interrogate data there was an explosion in enthusiasm for public health. Important questions could now be answered and integrated into the guidelines for medical practice. Epidemiology now makes enormous contributions to the thinking and practice of day-to-day medicine.

    But these technical developments – seeing the world through a computer screen – marginalised the messy business of dealing with the day-to-day lives of troubled people, working alongside others to deal at the grass roots with their predicaments.

    In the recommendations of the Community Health Program for Australia was the central role of the GP in multidisciplinary community health teams. And progressively, but slowly, medical schools have come to accept general practice as a legitimate academic discipline and area for postgraduate training and specialisation.

    In parallel with the academy, the Commonwealth aimed to support general practice through creating networks of GPs. These were known as Divisions of General Practice during the Howard government. They were renamed Medicare Locals in the health reforms of the Rudd government, giving them increased responsibilities and funding.

    The current government is funding Primary Health Networks across Australia.

    “Primary Health Networks (PHNs) have been established with the key objectives of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of medical services for patients, particularly those at risk of poor health outcomes, and improving coordination of care to ensure patients receive the right care in the right place at the right time.” (3)

    PHNs will have increased responsibilities for the populations in their geographical footprints. For example, in meeting local and regional needs for mental health and drug and alcohol problems, and managing the burgeoning problems of chronic disease as well as preventing and treating the common illnesses and injuries seen by GPs.

    Community medicine is not dead, it is there in the principles which will inform the new PHNs with their defined responsibilities for communities and “community diagnosis” in their localities.

    References:

    1. A Community Health Program for Australia, Report from the National hospitals and Health Services Commission: Interim Committee, June 1973. Australian government publishing service, 1973
    2. Anderson MR, Smith L and Sidel V W What is Social Medicine? Monthly Review, vol. 56, No. 8, January 2005. The authors said, “Rudolf Virchow is considered by many to be the founder of social medicine.”
    3. http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/primary_Health_Networks

    Ian Webster is Emeritus professor of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales. 

     

     

  • Bryce Barker. Of course Australia was invaded – massacres happened here less than 90 years ago.

    Much has been made in the last few days of the University of New South Wales’ “diversity toolkit” offering teachers guidelines on Indigenous terminology.

    The most controversial directive was a line about using the term “invasion” to describe Captain Cook’s arrival here:

    Australia was not settled peacefully, it was invaded, occupied and colonised. Describing the arrival of the Europeans as a “settlement” attempts to view Australian history from the shores of England rather than the shores of Australia.

    This story made the front page of the Daily Telegraph. Radio personality Kyle Sandilands quickly condemned it as an attempt to “rewrite history”.

    But detailed historical research on the colonial frontier unequivocally supports the idea that Aboriginal people were subject to attack, assault, incursion, conquest and subjugation: all synonyms for the term “invasion”.

    This was particularly the case in Queensland, where the actions of the Native Mounted Police were designed to subjugate Aboriginal resistance to European “settlers” on their traditional lands, and to protect pastoralists, miners and others from Aboriginal aggression.

    The UNSW guidelines are not “rewriting” history – they are simply highlighting a history that has never been adequately told in the first place. This history is one that certain sections of Australian society are determined to deny, led by conservative media commentators who recently whipped up an indignant storm about how a university chooses to educate their students.

    It is telling that Sandilands suggested people “get over it – it’s 200 years ago” when we so revere the notion of Lest We Forget when remembering our role in a foreign war (WW1) 100 years ago.

    It is also worth remembering in this context that large scale massacres of Aboriginal people were still being carried out through the 1920s and early 1930s in some parts of Australia.

    A newly begun project focusing on the archaeology of the Queensland Native Mounted Police and Indigenous oral histories will look at the physical evidence of frontier conflict, including the range of activities undertaken by the Queensland Mounted Police, and the effects of their presence on both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

    The first step will be to listen. As Jangga Elder Colin McLennan, from Central Queensland, said in a recent project meeting:

    this subject has been left idling too long. Aboriginal people are very sensitive about what happened. We need to investigate these places and we need to talk about them openly and honestly … I’ve kept a lot of this knowledge in my head about Aboriginal people being slaughtered and the locations of the killing fields in my country. It’s like an open wound that needs to be healed and it needs to be dealt with. This history belongs to all of us. We need to share it with each other.

    In a way, Sandilands isn’t trying to deny the scale of frontier conflict (although many do) – he just wants us to forget about it. But who we, as Australians, choose to remember and what events we commemorate are inherently entwined with how we view ourselves and how we want the world to see us as a nation.

    Official records of the Coniston massacre, which took place in the Northern Territory in 1928, admit to 31 Walpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye men, women and children being killed by Constable William Murray and his men. Is not an event on this scale – which happened just 88 years ago – worth remembering? Is not a Walpiri man’s death defending his way of life just as worthy of remembrance as a World War I digger’s ten years earlier?

    Why are we as a nation so reluctant to face up to this part of our past? Inconvenient truths that risk tainting the white “pioneer/settler” narrative are, it seems, not to be commemorated but forgotten.

    Although the historical record documenting frontier conflict is a powerful and unequivocal record of our colonial past, it is mostly limited to written records that largely exclude Indigenous voices.

    Yet the magnitude, persistence and near-universality of Aboriginal oral narratives of frontier violence are surely telling.

    Combining the material evidence for frontier conflict through archaeology with written records and Aboriginal oral tradition and memory, might be the one way to track events and their repercussions more clearly.

    Along with oral tradition, monuments and sites are powerful tools in remembering. They are physical markers on the landscape of events that happened.

    For many Indigenous communities, the physical evidence of frontier conflict in Queensland in the form of Native Mounted Police camps and locations where people were killed are — just like Gallipoli — important places of remembrance that should never be forgotten.

    Hopefully one day non-Indigenous people will be able to visit these sites and reflect on our collective history, rather than being threatened by it.

    Professor Bryce Barker is Professor and Acting Head of School of Arts and Communications, University of Southern Queensland. This article was first published in The Conversation on March 31, 2016.

  • David Stephens. Invading our smugness: thoughts on a diversity toolkit

    Wednesday, 30 March, must have been a slow news day at the Daily Telegraph. It is difficult to find any other reasonable explanation for the fuss the Telegraph made about the ‘diversity toolkit’ it discovered on the website of the University of New South Wales. What followed, however, spoke volumes about how careless some in the mainstream media have become about evidence and, more importantly, how easy it is for ‘hot button’ issues to provoke massively disproportionate reactions.

    First, on evidence. Despite the Telegraph’s fulminations that students were being directed to say Australia was ‘invaded’ rather than ‘settled’, and to accept various concepts that the Telegraph blamed on ‘nutty professors’, the toolkit was a fairly mild document. A statement from UNSW insisted the toolkit contained nothing mandatory, merely lists of ‘more appropriate’ and ‘less appropriate’ terminology relevant to settler-Indigenous history in Australia.

    The university rejects any notion that a resource for teachers on Indigenous terminology dictates the use of language or that it is designed to be politically correct … The guide does not mandate what language can be used.

    Even Wiradjuri journalist Stan Grant (Guardian Australia) fell for the idea that UNSW was trying to suppress free speech. Those who delved a little deeper also found the UNSW guidelines had been obtained under licence from Flinders University, Adelaide, that there were similar guidelines in place at the Australian National University, Monash University, the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Melbourne and probably other institutions, and that the UNSW Indigenous guidelines were based on material that has been used in New South Wales schools since – wait for it – 1996.

    Secondly, on the reaction. Paul Daley (Guardian Australia) argued that ‘invasion’ was the correct word to use. He attracted more than 2600 comments in two days, both strongly supportive and strongly resentful, and an unusual number ‘deleted by Moderator’. Shock jocks Hadley, Jones and Sandilands frothed although morning television was fairly laid-back. (The Telegraph’s original outrage had found willing support from Keith Windschuttle and the Institute of Public Affairs.) In non-MSM media, Alex McKinnon in Junkee kept a level head. Up in Queensland, Premier Palaszczuk supported QUT’s similar guidelines. Among the exercised, there was some confusion about whether Cook or Phillip was the invasion leader.

    As usually happens, the best analysis arrived a couple of days after the initial explosion.

    [W]hy is this hysterical response so entirely predictable? [asked Waleed Aly in Fairfax] Why is it that the moment the language of invasion appears, we seem so instinctively threatened by it? This isn’t the response of sober historical disagreement. It’s more visceral than that. Elemental even. It’s like any remotely honest appraisal of our history – even one contained in an obscure university guide – has the power to trigger some kind of existential meltdown. What strange insecurity is this?

    Archaeology professor Bryce Barker in The Conversation also provoked trenchant comments pro and con. He made an important connection.

    It is telling that [Kyle] Sandilands suggested people “get over it – it’s 200 years ago” when we so revere the notion of Lest We Forget when remembering our role in a foreign war (WWI) 100 years ago … [W]ho we, as Australians, choose to remember and what events we commemorate are inherently entwined with how we view ourselves and how we want the world to see us as a nation … Is not a Walpiri man’s death defending his way of life [at Coniston, NT, in 1928, when 31 men, women and children were killed by police] just as worthy of remembrance as a World War I digger’s ten years earlier?

    Why are we as a nation so reluctant to face up to this part of our past? Inconvenient truths that risk tainting the white “pioneer/settler” narrative are, it seems, not to be commemorated but forgotten.

    You could write a history of Australia around two invasions: Australia from 1788; Gallipoli 1915. You would need to explain, though, why one invasion has attained cult status while the other, for many of us, is euphemised out of mind. Smugness reigns.

    ‘Invasion’ or not? Semantics can lead us up a dry gulch. Not all invasions look like D-Day, the War of the Worlds or the Gallipoli ‘landing’ but none of them end when the last soldier splashes ashore. An invasion, at its simplest, is entering and remaining in a place where you are not welcome.

    If the initial reaction of the Eora to Phillip was more one of puzzlement than hostility this did not remain so for long. The invasion went on to take various forms, from loss of land to poisoning to massacre. Indigenous resistance commenced within months of the First Fleet and persisted, led by warriors like Pemulwuy, Windradyne, Jandamarra and unnamed others.

    According to recent research by Evans and Ørsted-Jensen the invasion of Australia led to more than 65,000 Indigenous deaths (men, women and children) in Queensland alone and perhaps 100,000 across Australia. That’s many more Australian deaths than in World War I and about as many deaths as in all our overseas wars.

    ‘Get over it’, or not?

    You cannot “get over” a colonial past that is still being implemented today [responded Indigenous writer Luke Pearson in Guardian Australia]. You cannot come to terms with a national history that the nation refuses to acknowledge ever happened. We cannot “reconcile” what happened yesterday when we are too busy bracing ourselves for what will inevitably come tomorrow.

    That initial ‘wound in the soul’ has been reopened many times and still festers beneath Indigenous family violence, incarceration and mental and physical illness. The strand of our history that traces from 26 January 1788 has left a mark that many of us cannot fail to see and feel but that many more of us refuse to recognise.

    David Stephens is secretary of the Honest History coalition and editor of its website (honesthistory.net.au). Sources for the article can be found here or by using the search function on the Honest History website. The views in this article are not necessarily those of all supporters of Honest History.

  • The things that must be done…

    Some Genuine Decision-Making Power: Dealing with the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the prison system

    This is an extract from the 2016 Frank Walker Memorial Lecture delivered by the Hon. Bob Debus AM on 16 February 2016. The Hon. Frank Walker QC was NSW Attorney General from 1976 to 1983. He later became a Federal Government Minister and a District Court judge. As a former Attorney General himself Bob Debus believes that Walker’s approach to the affairs of Aboriginal people remains the correct one.

    See link for full speech: http://www.nswlaborlawyers.com/fwl2016.

     

    “When Frank Walker was in office in the early 1980’s there was no heroin epidemic, no talkback radio law and order campaigns and there were less than 4,000 people in prison in New South Wales.

    In June last year there were nearly 12,000 inmates and more than 2,800 or 24 percent of them were Aboriginal. Nationally, there were nearly 34,000 inmates, 27 percent of them Aboriginal. For every 100,000 non-Indigenous Australians there were 146 in prison last year. For every 100,000 Indigenous Australians 2,253 were in prison.

    There is some encouragement in the news that there has been a decline in the rate of imprisonment for younger males over the last ten years, but here’s the rub. In the last decade or so overall rates of Aboriginal incarceration have increased by more than 50 percent In New South Wales.

    Modern ‘law and order’ politics arrived in New South Wales in the lead up to the 1988 general election when Frank Walker and I both lost our seats. Heroin related rates of street crime — violence and robbery — had begun what was to be a steady 20 year period of increase and there was straightforward, reasonable concern about it in the community.

    However, this was also the first election to be conducted in the climate of resentment, revenge and hysteria generated across the tabloid media by the new talkback style of radio. Frank was Minster for Youth and Community Services by then and I recall that his completely sensible juvenile cautioning scheme was attacked for being “soft on crime”. The Liberal’s promise of “Truth in Sentencing” legislation and the restoration of summary offences legislation was a defining, successful election strategy.

    Once the cork is removed from this particular bottle it’s very hard in real life to get it back in. Politicians may be indifferent to an increase in levels of incarceration, or they may strenuously try to limit it, but either way they cannot operate in isolation from aroused media and public opinion.

    In any event a long wave of more punitive laws concerning sentencing, bail and parole saw a substantial increase in the prison population across Australia and the Common Law world. And these changes had predictable and disproportionate effects upon Aboriginal offenders, in several ways.

    Aboriginal legal services, underfunded as they have been, have still made sure that fewer people are verballed or plead to crimes they don’t commit. However problems still reside in the consequences of intensive policing and the high visibility of the kind of street level offences habitually committed in impoverished communities, not least traffic offences.

    On 30 June last year there were more than 9,000 Indigenous prisoners in Australia and 7,100 of them had been in prison before. It is quite critical to understand that – as a statistical matter — the higher rate at which Aboriginal people first arrive in prison is much less significant than the rate at which they come back to it.

    Substantial possibilities do exist, apart from more adequate funding, for improving the way that the justice system itself deals with Indigenous people. I will mention only a few of the most obvious.

    1. In these days of frequent ideological attack upon the civil service it’s worth reminding you that dedicated, competent public servants can fix some things just by paying attention, by doing the administration of government well.During the year 2009/2010 the average daily number of juveniles in custody in New South Wales reached 485, in part at least because of strict bail condition requirements. Rooms were doubled up and healthy young people were being placed in clinical beds. Officials understood that these circumstances could lead to a riot, incidents of self-harm and the like. Fifty percent of inmates were on remand. A quarter of that remand population were detained for a breach of bail without committing a new offence, typically for breach of curfew. There had also been a number of kids who had been granted conditional bail but could not meet all the required conditions.So special officers were placed in all children’s courts and were also available to provide information to magistrates at any court hearing children’s cases. Their function was not to supplant the lawyer’s role of advocating for bail but rather to provide the court with options and to mobilise resources to support young people having difficulty meeting bail requirements.In 2014/15 the average daily population of Juvenile Justice Centres was stable at an average of 286, a fall of around 40 percent. The proportion of Indigenous inmates remained unchanged at 50 percent, so there are now 20 percent fewer Indigenous kids in full time detention in New South Wales than there were five years ago.
    1. My next example concerns the reduction of recidivism. We know that Indigenous inmates are more likely to be arrested and charged with new offences. We know also that the reduction of reoffending is by some distance the fastest way to reduce the Indigenous prison population. We know from internationally validated data that tailored through-care and back of prison sentence programs assisting inmates to reintegrate into the community are effective in reducing recidivism.We know these three things but here in New South Wales nevertheless, the Government is taking no notice.Prisons are running seriously over capacity. In such circumstances rehabilitation work is always degraded but the situation appears to be worse than that. The Budget Papers show that targeted offender programs and education programs have actually been reduced. When prison numbers rise at the same time as savings are demanded, the funding of custodial programs will always come at the expense of rehabilitation programs. And that is to the detriment of the inmates and the budget in the long term.
    1. My final example concerns diversion from the prison system. There are plenty of established diversion and rehabilitation programs that are more effective and cheaper than prison. Drug Courts reduce offending, cognitive behavioural therapy works. Increased expenditure on all these measures would reduce imprisonment.Circle Sentencing Courts have engaged Aboriginal communities in the sentencing process and improved local relationships with the justice system, but don’t appear to be reducing offending as effectively as many of us expected a decade ago. However evaluations suggest that greater investment in support services, including drug and alcohol services and post sentencing programs linked to circles, would have a measurable effect on reoffending.”

    Bob Debus AM was an ALP member of the NSW Parliament and Attorney General, Minister for the Arts and Minister for the Environment. He was also a member of the House of Representatives and Minister for Home Affairs in the Rudd Government.

     

  • Jim Bowler. Mungo Man needs help – to come home

    It’s time for funds and a plan to preserve and commemorate this visitor from Ancient Australia, writesJim Bowler, the geologist who discovered Mungo Man’s remains.

    Forty-two years ago, on 26 February 1974, I first encountered the remains of Mungo Man eroding out of the desiccated shores of Lake Mungo. He had been ritually buried over 40,000 years earlier – at a time when the lake was full – by an ancient community that thrived in the fertile environment. The re-emergence of Mungo Man has changed the way we understand Australian history. Together with the earlier (1969) discovery of Mungo Lady, these burials provided the foundations on which the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area was defined and accepted by UNESCO in 1981. That region stands today as Australia’s richest legacy of early occupation. Yet forty-two years later, after decades of constant calls for the return of Mungo Man, none of the responsible state and federal ministers have committed to caring for these sacred remains.

    In November last year, a repatriation group of Indigenous representatives took the first step towards Mungo Man’s return. The 40,000-year-old human remains, along with the more fragmentary remains of some ninety other individuals from the Willandra Lakes area, were transferred from the Australian National University to the interim storage of the National Museum of Australia. After years of frustration, the traditional owners of the Willandra Lakes area – the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantji tribal groups – reluctantly decreed that unless appropriate keeping arrangements were made by the end of 2017, they will dispose of all Willandra remains, with the possibility of complete reburial. The possibility that the remains of Mungo Man may not be laid in a formal place – an underground sacred crypt with above-ground recognition of the dead, perhaps, in memory of deceased Elders and of those thousands who fought in defence of their lands – should stir the nation’s conscience.

    Mungo Man is acknowledged worldwide as the centrepiece of our evidence of ancient Australia. He has featured in documentaries, novels, histories and scientific papers, and he has given us an insight into life in ancient Australia through paleopathology, DNA analyses, and studies of isotopic bone and teeth structures. Moreover, the ritual nature of his burial has changed our understanding of the time-depth and complexity of Aboriginal culture. The body was coated (or heavily sprinkled) with rare ceremonial ochre – the blood-red symbol of life – which had been imported from distant sources. His grave was associated with a nearby hearth, from which smoke might have drifted over the assembled mourners on the lakeshore. The discovery stands without equal on the global stage. Politicians who frequently claim occupancy with members “of the world’s oldest continuing cultures” are denying a keeping place to the very person who provided the historical substance of that claim. The Australian nation awaits his return home.

    In Mungo Man, the interaction of climate and people come together. The cultural implications of his burial reflect complex relationships with his environment. The central function of ochre, the association with fire, and the careful details of the grave emplacement combine to define a community with connections to the land they loved. Such evidence resonates with Aboriginal connections to country today. There is great dignity here in that people–land relationship. Exemplified today in the Dreaming, song lines and creation stories, it remains of central importance in helping define traditional people’s identity with and connection to the place they call home. White Australians have something important to learn from our Aboriginal cousins.

    Stan Grant’s passionate reminder of our shameful treatment of Aboriginal Australians, and subsequent discussions of our national identity have touched new sensitivities in the fraught relationships between Aboriginal and white Australia. Two centuries of failure to acknowledge the magnitude and pain of dispossession have come back to confront us. The neglect of the human remains of Australia’s oldest identity, Mungo Man, adds yet another dark stain to our relationships with the first Australians. We now must seek new opportunities to restore fractured bonds, to help heal at least part of the pain inflicted on the original occupants of this land.

    This year marks the centenary year of the Somme and we honour the memory of those who died on the Western Front during the first world war. It is where my father spent two harrowing years navigating duckboards and dodging shell holes in Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux. A century later, the deaths of the tens of thousands of Aboriginal men and women who died in defence of their land await their memorial occasion. The continued absence of facilities in memory of Mungo Man and all he represents pales against the $100 million Villers-Bretonneux Educational Centre Tony Abbott unveiled last year. While the honouring of our war dead is essential, what is sacred in France demands equality at home.

    Unless immediate steps are taken to ensure adequate accommodation for sacred items that amplify and help define the meaning of human occupation of this continent, the iconic figure of Mungo Man could be lost forever. We have but eighteen months to ensure safe passage. The repatriation process needs realistic funding and a discretionary commitment to World Heritage management to ensure it takes place. Without state and federal assistance, the Indigenous repatriation group will be forced to rebury the remains of Mungo Man instead of preserving them for future generations in a sacred keeping place.

    We are dealing here not just with an assemblage of ancient bones, but with the dignity and cultural richness of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. As a nation, we need to seize this opportunity to release Mungo Man from his custody. The return and celebration of Mungo Man will set us on a course to heal those bleeding wounds Stan Grant so eloquently defined. It is an act of recognition to Indigenous Australians of the nation’s debt to their ancestral history.

    Jim Bowler is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences. This article was first published in Inside Story on 9 February 2016.

  • Michael Gracey AO. Grappling with the Indigenous health gap.

     

    By most recognised markers of socio-economic status, Indigenous Australians fare badly compared with their non-Indigenous counterparts. This is certainly the case where health standards are concerned. For example, rates of infections and hospitalisation for these and many other illnesses are much higher; chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke and diabetes are more prevalent; and hearing loss and blindness rates are increased as are a multitude of other disabilities. Illnesses and deaths linked to alcohol and drug abuse, and accidents and violence are more frequent, as are disorders associated with psychosocial stress. Death rates are increased across the life span and Indigenous people tend to die younger and have a life expectancy which is somewhere between 10 and 17 years shorter than that of other Australians. The statistics are stark and this situation represents one of Australia’s worst embarrassments internationally.

    But we need to understand how this situation evolved, what has and is being done about it, and whether these inequities in health and wellbeing are being corrected. It may come as a surprise to readers aged below 50 to realise that the divide between health standards among Indigenous and other Australians became generally recognised and acknowledged only within their lifetimes. The earliest reliable reports about poor Aboriginal health appeared in the mid-1960s after it was recognised that Aboriginal infants had very high rates of gastroenteritis, malnutrition and high death rates and that the life expectancy of Aboriginal people was much shorter than for other Australians. When the media reported these findings there was a public outcry and a quick but poorly organised political response was provoked to try to fix the problem. By then this was labelled the “Aboriginal Health Problem”.

    The late 1960s and early 70s brought many rapid changes into the lives of Indigenous Australians. These included: the 1967 Referendum which allowed the federal parliament to enact laws relating to Indigenous people and to include them, for the first time, in the national census; the federal court decision to grant “equal pay for equal work” for Indigenous workers; the establishment in Sydney of Australia’s first Aboriginal Medical Service in 1971; the gradual relaxation of restrictions on access to alcohol by Indigenous adults; and a rapid shift of Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas into towns and their fringes. In 1979 a federal parliamentary committee acknowledged the poor standards of Indigenous health and identified their root causes as being in deprived socio-economic circumstances and sub-standard living conditions. By that stage almost two centuries of marginalised living and social exclusion had reduced the original inhabitants to being an under-class in Australian society; the late Professor Rowley called them “Outcasts in White Australia”. This group of people by then had an entrenched core of ill-health, chronic disease and premature deaths which would be extremely difficult to correct.

    The social determinants underlying the patterns of ill health that affect Indigenous Australians must be addressed before significant and sustained improvements in health and wellbeing will occur. These contributing factors include poverty, overcrowding, unhygienic living conditions, low education standards, under-employment, social stigmatisation and marginalisation, disengagement from mainstream society, and their inadequate participation in decision-making processes which affect health and wellbeing. It must be appreciated, also, that some of the factors which have strong negative impacts on Indigenous health are trans-generational. For example, prenatal under-nutrition and impaired growth can adversely affect pregnancy outcomes over multiple generations; this means that those negative effects may take 50 years or more to be eliminated.

    In 2005 Tom Calma, then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, released a report which called on Australian governments to commit to achieving equality for Indigenous Australians in health and life expectancy within 25 years. The Federal Government then made a formal Statement of Intent in 2008 to ensure that Indigenous people would have ”equal life choices”. The target date of 2030 was set for the various goals to be reached. This ambitious strategy and program was warmly received but within a year it was being questioned whether the targets were achievable in the time allotted; in particular, the goal of removing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people was considered to be “probably unattainable” (https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/190_10_180509/hoy11300_fm.pdf . These reservations were soundly based. By then there were many thousands of Indigenous people with long-standing chronic diseases like diabetes, chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, late-stage kidney failure, irreversible visual and hearing loss and a range of other permanent disabilities. Added to that formidable burden was the increasingly heavy load of illnesses, social and stress-related disorders, and premature deaths associated with cigarette smoking, alcohol and drug abuse, in Indigenous people as well as those linked to accidents and violence. Quite clearly this wide-ranging and massive range of illnesses, disabilities and premature deaths would have no simple, single solution as, for example, could be applied to successfully control or prevent an infectious disease outbreak by a community-wide immunisation program.

    Yet, despite the timely and nationally published cautionary advice cited above, the Close the Gap Strategy and program continued. Each year a formal report has been released in parliament outlining progress towards the stated targets. There have been some improvements in Indigenous health over the past decade or so but it is difficult to attribute them to this strategy alone. For example, improved pregnancy outcomes such as heavier birth weights, suppression of childhood infections by immunisation, and lowered infant and maternal mortality, were achieved largely by other programs based on sound public health principles; that work began well before the Close the Gap initiative began. Annual report cards have mostly shown what is often officially called “mixed outcomes” – this usually means that the reporting agencies and their bureaucrats could find little that would attract a favourable headline in the press. This is disappointing because most Australians, black and white, want to see Indigenous people share the high levels of health which most of us take for granted. These mixed results in health, wellbeing, living standards, education, employment and productivity among Indigenous people have left them feeling let down. When the seventh annual Close the Gap report was presented by Prime Minister Abbott in February 2015 he acknowledged that the results were “bitterly disappointing”. Why didn’t he grab the nettle then, acknowledge that the strategy was failing, indicate that it had been introduced by former Prime Minister Rudd, and then ditch the policy and start again? That opportunity was lost and yet another year passed until the next Prime Minister, Turnbull, reported this month that the results of the eighth annual report were “mixed”.

    One of the key targets of the Close the Gap program all along has been to equalise the life expectancy of Indigenous and other Australians. However, the 2016 report acknowledged that the improvements that have occurred so far are not happening fast enough for that target to be reached within the next 20 years. Even in some instances where improvements seem to have been encouraging, closer scrutiny of the details exposes otherwise hidden obstructions. Take infant mortality rates for example. While the rates of Indigenous children dying in their first 12 months of life have dropped substantially over the past 15 years, the rates among non-Indigenous infants have also been dropping. When the relative rates, that is Indigenous compared with non-Indigenous rates, are examined it is evident that Indigenous infants are dying at about double the rate of other infants before their first birthday. Prime Minister Turnbull conceded that achieving the target to close the life expectancy gap by 2030 remains “a significant challenge” (ABC News item, 10 February 2016). Regrettably, other aspects of the 2016 Close the Gap report which have significant impacts on health were also disappointing; they include educational attainments, employment rates and housing standards.

    Repeated and protracted disappointments like these leave people feeling angry and frustrated, particularly the Indigenous community who have so much at stake for themselves and their future generations. Nationally prominent Indigenous leaders like Patrick Dodson have said recently that the Closing the Gap initiative is doomed to failure unless it is radically reformed. He added that the Prime Minister has not yet put his stamp on Indigenous affairs and has not paid sufficient attention to these issues.

    Resolving the inequities in health between Indigenous and other citizens must be done with an all-inclusive approach to all of the inter-related issues that are involved. Providing better and more accessible and appropriate health and disease care can only be part of the solution. Strategies and programs that are aimed at promoting and improving wellness as well as treating illness must be given more prominence in the clinical approaches towards better Indigenous health outcomes. A crushing disappointment for clinical carers of all types who work in this field has been to see the substantial improvements in health which have occurred over recent years, much of it in children, be undermined by high-risk attitudes and behaviours in later life which result in preventable premature deaths. Examples are the serious illnesses and deaths due to tobacco smoking, physical and mental damage and deaths from alcohol abuse and other addictive drugs, vehicle accidents and other forms of violence, and the long-term consequences of overweight and obesity including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The gains that have been made in reducing infant and young child deaths should lead to improved life expectancy but this is being thwarted by the continuing wastage of lives in adolescence and early and mid-adult life. Much of this wastage is preventable. This is where responsibility for personal, family and community-based health must become part of the equation. Indigenous acceptance of responsibility and participation must become an essential element of this process in order for real progress to occur.

    A recurring theme in the continuing debate about trying to achieve equity in health and wellbeing between Indigenous and other Australians is the need for increased participation of Indigenous people in the activities and social circumstances which affect them. Not only is there a place for enhanced Indigenous involvement in these issues, there is a real need for this to happen. Examining the way health and clinical services are currently provided to Indigenous people shows that three main sectors are involved:

    • federal and state government services
    • the specially developed and independently-run Indigenous Medical or Health Services, and
    • private or other non-government providers of clinical and related services

    If these three sectors had been working cooperatively and effectively over the past thirty or more years, Indigenous health should not be in its present sorry state. Despite past failures there is still goodwill among the wider Australian community to see that this situation is corrected. I have previously called for a fourth sector to be organised to help bring this about (Refer to earlier Gracey blog on ‘What is need to fix Aboriginal health?’ here). This new sector would be established as a community-based organisation representing ‘grass roots’ Indigenous people who are currently sidelined from the process of policy development and making decisions about running programs at the community level to suit their own needs and aspirations. Adding this new dimension would show at last that local Indigenous communities have a real contribution to make in the health improvement process. This is not being achieved by regional Indigenous Medical or Health services although they claim to be ‘community-controlled’. In fact, members of local Indigenous communities have very little or no say in the selection of such regional bodies; in effect they are voiceless. The emergence of this fourth dimension would demonstrate that local communities and their members are prepared to accept this responsibility to contribute to planning and delivering health care for their own people. Such a development should help answer the repeated calls by Indigenous leaders from different parts of Australia for their people to play a bigger role in improving health and wellbeing of the Indigenous population.

    It is time for the issues surrounding Indigenous health to be thoroughly and objectively reviewed. This would help to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated and perpetuated. Australia must be able to do better. The health needs of Indigenous people are, indeed, more demanding than for other Australians. But more funds, more doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, and related services cannot alone provide the solution. There must be a wide-ranging approach to all of the infrastructure services and other factors which influence the determinants of wellness and illness. Education, employment, housing, hygiene, access to affordable nutritious food as well as avoidance of unhealthy lifestyles must all be part of the equation towards better health. The media often sensationalise negative factors in society that contribute to the continuing poor state of Indigenous health. While many mistakes have occurred in the past and marginalisation of Indigenous people has had serious negative impacts on their wellbeing, it is time to look to the future and take a more positive outlook. Present problems should be seen as opportunities or challenges to put things right. To focus repeatedly on racism or negative stereotyping as the root cause of this continuing dilemma could be counter-productive and tend to separate Indigenous and other Australians even further. Instead, we should try to reach a situation where Indigenous people are given better chances to accept responsibility for their own health. Encouragement and cooperation will foster trust between them and the wider society and its representatives, namely governments and their agencies and bureaucrats. But all sides must accept this will be a “two-way street” where flexibility and patience will be keys to ultimate success.

    Michael Gracey AO is a paediatrician who has worked with Indigenous children, their families and communities for more than forty years. He was Australia’s first Professor of Aboriginal Health and for many years was Principal Medical Adviser on Aboriginal Health in the Western Australian Department of Health. He is a former President of the International Paediatric Association.

  • John Menadue. Australia Day doing well, but could do better.

    The following repost is from Australia Day 2014.

    I wonder what indigenous people thought when they saw Captain Phillip with his ships come uninvited and sail up Sydney Harbour in January 1788. There does not seem any doubt that despite their concerns they were less hostile than we are to boat people 226 years later.

    Succeeding generations came by boat in their millions, including my ancestors who came from agriculturally depressed Cornwall in SS Northumberland to desolate Port Willunga in SA in 1847. Migration has never stopped. It has dramatically changed Australia, mainly for the better.  I don’t think any country has done it as well. It has brought vibrancy and greater openness If I could be more precise, I think Australia has benefited most from refugees.  Whilst the first generation of refugees may often lack skills and education, they more than make up for it in enterprise, courage and risk-taking.  That enterprise and high aspirations are often expressed through their children who often outperform others in education.  Refugees are by definition risk-takers who will abandon all for a new life.  They select themselves much better than a migration officer can ever select them.

    We have seen the benefits of migration refugees and multiculturalism, but seem hesitant about new people.  But this hesitancy and sometimes hostility to newcomers, in time gives way to acceptance and pride in our common achievements.  This has been our experience with waves of newcomers.  Irish Catholics were initially depicted as different and perhaps disloyal.  We were prejudiced against Jewish newcomers.  German migrants, particularly in the Barossa Valley, were harassed for decades. We were sceptical of balts, reffos and dagos We were initially wary about the Indo-Chinese and what damage they might cause to the Australian way of life.  But over time, it changed.  Even the early Afghans who built the transport links in Central Australia now have a train, the Ghan, named in their honour.

    Whilst Australians are invariably hesitant about newcomers, what gives me confidence is our pragmatic acceptance.  That seeming contradictory response is shown consistently in opinion polling and over long periods.  We are favourably impressed with the personal experience we have of the neighbour or shopkeeper who is Italian, Chinese or Vietnamese.  Is there something in the casualness and our easy-going acceptance that overcomes ideological and philosophical opposition?  We eschew the extremes and don’t get too excited by ideologies at either end of the spectrum.  If November 11, 1975, couldn’t even provoke a general strike, what could?  Insurrection is rare.  There isn’t much blood on the wattle.  We bump into each other, but we don’t cause a great deal of hurt

    One important reason for our successful integration of newcomers has been our settlement programs, particularly English language training. Unfortunately the Abbott Government has now taken these settlement services out of the Department of Immigration which is now focussed on border protection rather than settlement and nation building.

    As the host, Australia has particular responsibility to provide opportunities for newcomers. But it is not a one way street. The leadership of the new communities also carries responsibilities. Most have provided that leadership. Some have obviously failed both their own communities but also the wider Australian community. There is a lesson to be learned here.

    I believe that we do not place sufficient emphasis on citizenship, not in the jingoistic way of the United States but as a symbol of our unity. There must be strong commitment to Australia and new comers must place that ahead of loyalties to former homelands. Australian residents or citizens who go to fight in wars in their former homelands must be dealt with very firmly.

    We welcome diversity but not for its own sake. Diversity must be of benefit to the common good. For example we fought too long and hard for the separation of church and state to be prepared to give way to sharia law. We have built a superstructure of enriching diversity. But that diversity has been built on a strong substructure of shared institutions and values…our constitution, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national language and tolerance and equal opportunity.

    In addition to time healing differences, we have also had leaders who have inspired the best in each of us or ‘touched the better angels of our nature’ (Abraham Lincoln).  Ben Chifley overcame public opposition in allowing Jewish refugees after World War II.  Robert Menzies, on coming to office, continued the acceptance of the displaced people of Europe.  Harold Holt skilfully, but in defiance of public opinion, commenced the dismantling of White Australia.  John Gorton and Gough Whitlam continued the process.  When Malcolm Fraser responded to the anguish of the Indo-Chinese people, he knew that he was acting contrary to public opinion.  Bill Hayden and then Bob Hawke supported him.  Yet no-one today would argue that these leaders got it wrong.  We applaud their courage and leadership. John Howard and Tony Abbott were the first post war leaders to break from that bi partisan tradition and engender fear of newcomers.

    Border protection is clearly necessary to maintain public confidence in migration and refugee intakes.  But it is possible to do that, as Malcolm Fraser showed without dividing the country and punishing the most vulnerable people on earth.

    What gives me confidence, is the Australian people.  I know of a Jewish refugee boy who went to school in inner Melbourne after World War II.  He told me his story.  His sister and he were called before the headmaster. As they were leaving his office, the headmaster asked them whose photo it was on the wall.  They didn’t know, but surmised that it might be head of the police or the head of the military.  The headmaster told them who it was, but the name meant nothing to them.  They then asked their schoolmates and were told it was Don Bradman.  That Jewish man said to me recently ‘I knew then that we were safe’.  If the most important public figure for the headmaster was a famous sportsman, there was little to fear and a lot to be looked forward to in Australia.

    Our nation will always be dynamic .It will be work in progress. The Australia of today is vastly different to the Australia of my childhood with its widespread racism and sectarianism. It was socially suffocating. For those changes I am very grateful. There is a lot that we can be proud of.  No country has integrated newcomers as well as we have. But there have been failures and remedial action yet to be taken. We are yet to be reconciled to our indigenous brothers and sisters who watched the European boat arrivals in 1788. We are yet to take our share of responsibility for the displaced and persecuted people of the world.

    Fear holds us back from expressing the generosity we all possess.

  • The Frontier Wars

    The following extract ‘The Frontier War’ was part of an address I gave in September 2013 for the launch of the Catholic Social Justice Statement. It was carried on this blog at the time. It was one of many blogs I have posted concerning the Frontier War and also the Maori Wars. Our military association with New Zealand did not begin in 1915 at Gallipoli. It began when we sent ships and troops to fight against the Maori people in New Zealand in the mid 19th Century.

    The Frontier War

    We have still not properly acknowledged the great damage we have done to our indigenous people. Along with the Australian War Memorial, we still blot out the Frontier War that settlers and the settler parliaments conducted right across our country from 1790 to early last century to dispossess indigenous people. There are no monuments to this long war but even the AWM concedes that 2500 settlers and police died in the war alongside 20,000 aborigines who were “believed to have been killed chiefly by mounted police.”  Informed and engaged scholars like Henry Reynolds in The Forgotten War now believe that the number of indigenous men, women and children killed was probably over 30,000. This was an epic war. Its purpose was the occupation and sovereignty over one of the great land masses of the world. It was to wrest control from a people who had lived here for 40,000 years. This was a war which was much more central to our future than any other war in which we fought. In proportion to our population in the 19th Century which was about 2 to 2.5 million people, this Frontier War was the most destructive of human life in our history. The A W M applauds indigenous people when they fought for the empire, but refuses to suitably acknowledge the 30,000 indigenous people that were killed resisting the empire that was taking their land. The AWM remembers the Sudan War of 1885 in which no Australians were killed in combat but ignores the Frontier War. We easily call to mind “Lest we forget” but it is really “best we forget” the 30,000 Australians who were killed in our Frontier War.

    The “whispering in our hearts” will continue until we are honest about our history, both its glory and its shame. Political slogans about a “black armband view of our history” are designed to avoid the truth and encourage us to forget.

  • John Menadue. Supporting Adam Goodes.

    This blog is a repost from 1 August 2015.

    Adam Goodes has been bullied and vilified because he has reminded us of our dark history and the discrimination that continues against him and many others in Australia today. We don’t like being reminded of the dispossession, killing, poisoning and discrimination against our own indigenous people. We want to forget that 30,000 indigenous people were killed in the Frontier Wars by police and white settlers. Yet we have scarcely a memorial to the 30,000 who died defending their land. The Australian War Memorial turns its back on the Frontier Wars yet with the Australian Government is spending $700 million on the centenary of WW1.

    Why can’t indigenous people behave with respect and go quietly? Why don’t they appreciate what has been done for them? Why can’t they ‘behave well like white persons’ as the CEO of Collingwood Football club said some years ago?

    Adam Goodes is proud of his history and so he should be. But that confronts many people. Their power and prejudice is being challenged.

    He said “If you say nothing or do nothing, nothing changes”. That statement makes Adam Goodes different and the focus of attacks. So many of us don’t want to change and acknowledge our own history. Adam Goodes has clearly shown that he will not “cop shit”.

    He is criticised for what is seen as a war dance, although not carrying any weapons. But we almost all enjoy and respect the Haka and what it means for all New Zealanders, Maoris and non-Maoris. In the struggle between indigenous and non-indigenous people it was Captains Cook and Phillip who introduced guns. Our own society is becoming increasingly militarised and at numerous public occasions, including Anzac, weapons are always on display.

    Adam Goodes is confronting us all and it is good that he does so, even though he is paying a heavy price. In a 2008 essay, he spoke of “being the object of racism so many times that you lose count”. .

    We are all nervous to some degree about the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different, whether it be on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or even gender. It is foolish to deny that there is racism in Australia – and indeed in each one of us. It is part of our DNA. But a part of us is also generous, open and tolerant. Theologian call it the struggle between good and evil.

    Differences can be unsettling but we can come to value them as they challenge us to think again about the way we are thinking and acting. Adam Goodes is challenging us to be more generous and accepting of difference in the human family.

    In the struggle between the darker and better angels of our nature as Abraham Lincoln called it, leadership is essential. Community and political leadership is critical to keep our prejudices under control and to encourage our better spirits of tolerance and generosity. The statement by over 150 community groups in the last couple of days focuses on just this issue. It calls on us all “to stop empowering the worst elements of human nature”. It features in the SMH poster for this weekend. We do respond to good ethical and moral leadership. And we have seen that in the last week from leaders such as Mike Baird and Jay Weatherill. That leadership has come from state capitals but not from Canberra.

    We badly need more leadership from our sporting leaders and fortunately we are seeing encouraging signs of it to push aside the comments of people like Shane Warne and Eddie McGuire. It is an old tactic to blame the victim.

    Many years ago, our footballers were working Monday to Friday in ‘other jobs’ with football on Saturday. Now many of them are well-paid professionals, like celebrities. They could stop the booing if they decided to stop work and stop playing like good unionists until the booing stops. That would show the solidarity we need from sports people today. The booers must be confronted and not allowed to hide in the crowd.

    I think that former Sydney Swans player Michael O’Loughlin, explained it all very well in the last week. ‘We won’t sit in silence, we will continue to fight for our mob. We will continue to be proud of who we are, what we stand for and what we are fighting for. We live in a great country and we want it to thrive and get better and better. In doing so you have to recognise what has happened in the past to indigenous people and what they continue to go through. For us to move forward as a great country those are the things we need to keep fighting for.’ I don’t think it could have been said better.

    Out of this current orgy of bullying, racism and prejudice we will hopefully become more honest with ourselves and build a more co-operative and tolerant society. The days look black at the moment but we may find in the years ahead that Adam Goodes has done this country another service, even at great cost to himself.

  • Stan Grant. The Australian Dream!

     

  • Bob Debus to deliver Frank Walker Memorial Lecture.

    Invitation to attend Frank Walker Memorial Lecture.

    Join us as we celebrate the life times of  former NSW Attorney-General the Hon. Frank Walker QC, with guest speaker the Hon. Bob Debus AM. This event is free to attend. Post-lecture drinks will be held at Penny Lane (the bar above the lecture theatre).

    “Over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison: The need for some genuine decision-making”

    Frank Walker grew up among tribal people in New Guinea and from a young age stood up for the rights of Aboriginal people in Australia. On the one hand concern for justice for Aboriginal people drove many of his successful reforms to the criminal law. On the other hand his landmark Aboriginal Rights Act of 1983 reflected his desire to allow Aboriginal people to take more control over their own lives.

    To our consternation however, the rate of Indigenous imprisonment has actually been rising rapidly. Last year non-Indigenous Australians were imprisoned at the rate of 146 per 100,000 citizens. The rate for Indigenous Australians was 2,253 per 100,000 citizens. Yet many solutions for the crisis of imprisonment are also known.

    Former Attorney General of New South Wales, Bob Debus, believes that Walker’s approach to the affairs of Aboriginal people remains the correct one.

    He will discuss solutions to the crisis of over-representation of Aboriginal people in the prison system and the need for a renewed political movement to drive them.

    About Bob Debus

    NSW Attorney General (2000/2007), NSW Minister for Corrective Services(1995/2001), Commonwealth Minister for Home Affairs (2007/2009), Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs (2009/2010).

    EVENT DETAILS

    RSVP: By clicking here and then scrolling to bottom of page

    When: February 16, 2016 at 6pm – 8pm

    How much does it cost ? Technically nothing, but we do have to cover costs for venue hire and bar tab so please bring your $10, $20, $50 notes so we can collect your donation on the way in.

    Where: University of Technology Sydney, Building 11, Lecture Theatre 00.401

    Where is that ?: Just a short walk from Central Station, cnr Broadway and Wattle St, enter from Broadway – see map below

  • Commercialisation and the casualness of going to war

    Repost from 23/04/2015.

    If we feel overwhelmed by the crass commercialism of Gallipoli and Anzac, take a deep breath because there are three years to go.

    Target has sponsored ‘Camp Gallipoli’, Woolworths has asked us to ‘Keep Fresh in our Memories’ the losses of Gallipoli ; VB depicted for us actors on the steps of the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance who  tell us to bow our heads and raise a glass of VB in memory of the first Australians who charged and died at Gallipoli. There have been endless advertising and sales of Gallipoli kitsch. Even our Governor General a few years ago fronted at the hotel bar for VB to raise a glass and  money for veterans.

    But the slipping TV ratings suggest we are getting tired of the saturation media coverage and the $400 m spent by the Australian Government on a whole range of Anzac ‘educational’ programs.

    When the myth making all started in 1915 Charles Bean, the official military historian carefully burnished the Anzac myth. Soldiers were strong, adaptable, cheerful, laid-back, but faithfully serving the empire. Not for Bean the harsh realities of war unless they were laced with humour. He didn’t tell us much about the fear, desertion or boredom of soldiers far from home or the horror of it all. He was gilding the lily about the terrible nature of the war in which young Australians were killing and being killed.

    We are told endlessly about how Australians fought in WW!. We are never really asked the very important question of why we fought… in the interests of Britain’s colonial and economic interests,including access to oil in the Middle East for Britain’s navy.

    The last surviving Anzac, Alec Campbell said in 2002 ‘For God’s sake don’t glorify Gallipoli..it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten’. But the Anzac obsession continues.

    To burnish the conservative interpretation of our military history we, and particularly the Australian War Memorial, are very selective about the story we tell. We have selective amnesia. We ignore the Frontier Wars, a race war by white landowners in which over 30,000 indigenous people were killed defending their homeland. In proportion to our population it was the largest loss of life in war in our history. But there is scarcely a grave or a memorial to remember the people who died in the Frontier Wars. Our first military alliance with New Zealand was not at Gallipoli but in the Maori race wars in the 1850s and 1860s.

    Best we forget the Frontier and Maori Wars.

    We choose to make WWII almost a footnote to our military history, but it was far more important to our survival than any other foreign war.

    Old soldiers will scarcely ever tell us about their experiences. They were haunted for years with the horror of it all. But today we don’t seem able to stop talking about Anzac and Gallipoli. We have seen so often on TV a long-lost cousin or a great uncle that has been forgotten. It seems more like sentimentality than grief.

    The careful selection of people and events by Bean diverted attention from the enormous political, strategic and personal tragedy of Gallipoli. We do the same today. We are encouraged to forget the blunders we made as a nation, involving ourselves in wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Bean, we divert attention by focusing on the sacrifice and losses by ordinary servicemen and women. We seem to turn ourselves into a knot to avoid facing the history of our military blunders. The same process is now under way with our expanded commitment to Iraq. What we will not acknowledge is that there was no national interest in sending Australian troops to Gallipoli just as there is no national interest in sending troops again to Iraq.

    On Anzac Cove Tony Abbott has told us that our involvement at Gallipoli was ‘right and just’. Others talk of ‘defending freedom’. In my view none of these claims stand up to serious scrutiny.. We were there for the empire.

    The Bean myth-making was essential for conservatives to divert attention from the military, political and personal tragedies; the division at home over conscription; the sectarianism of Billy Hughes and the poverty and unemployment in the great depression. It was not a land fit for heroes. WWI sundered our nation and it wasn’t until 1945 that we really started to put it together again..

    There are two bookends in our celebration of our military history. They are out dependence on the UK and the USA. We try to invent reasons why we fought at Gallipoli, but I have yet to hear a believable account of what we fought for there, except serving the empire. At Gallipoli Australian soldiers flew the Union Jack.  Today we also try to invent reasons why we are fighting in Iraq, but the real reason is the call of the latter-day imperial power, the USA.

    How can we possibly believe that Gallipoli and Iraq is about nationhood? Our involvement in both was for quite opposite reasons – serving the empire. Unfortunately some people believe that nationhood, like manhood can only only be proven in war and violence.

    My main concern about the Gallipoli myth-making and our military history is because it is pushing us steadily further and further down the military path. Our foreign policy has become overwhelmingly militarised. Combatting asylum seekers in Operation Sovereign Borders is an example of how civil policies and programs are being turned over to the military. We are again appointing military generals as governors and governor generals.

    This militarisation of Australia has contributed to making our involvement in wars a quite casual event. The latest addition of 300 Australian service people to Iraq scarcely raised any attention at all.

    Taking a country to war used to be considered the most serious step that any government could ever take. But no more. The parliament doesn’t even debate a new overseas commitment. In an almost unthinking way we decide to go to war again. We commit to war after war and then refuse properly support returning service people.

    As Henry Reynolds put it

    ‘The threshold Australian governments need to cross in order to send forces overseas is perilously low. Because there has never been an assessment of why Australia has so often been involved in war, young people must get the impression that war is a natural and inescapable part of national life. It is what we do and we are good at it. We “punch above our weight”. War is treated as though it provides the venue and the occasion for Australian heroism and martial virtuosity. While there is much talk of dying, or more commonly of sacrifice, there is little mention of killing and never any assessment of the carnage visited on distant countries in our name.’

    In Australia today it is becoming much easier to go to war. War is becoming commonplace and the celebrations surrounding Gallipoli make it more so. Step by step we are moving into very dangerous territory, something that the diggers of Gallipoli or the Western Front would have warned us about. It was so horrible; they didn’t want to talk about it. But we talk about it endlessly.

    We should behave with restraint and put some of the drums and bugles away. Let’s pause and think what we are doing.

    The lesson of Gallipoli must surely be to avoid making the same mistake again…whether it be in Vietnam,Afghanistan or Iraq.

     

  • Vale Malcolm Fraser

    Repost from 21/03/2015

    I am sure that Malcolm Fraser’s concerns for human rights were always there. But as he grew and matured, that concern flourished and became obvious to all. He became our moral compass on human rights.

    I was first conscious of Malcolm’s concern for human rights when I listened to his speech in September 1975 at a luncheon in Parliament House Canberra to honour Helen Suzman. She was an anti-apartheid campaigner who for 13 years was the sole opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa’s parliament. For the first time that I can recall, Malcolm Fraser spelled out his opposition to apartheid and white rule in Africa. It surprised me. But, I found it very encouraging. It was the beginning of my better understanding of Malcolm Fraser.

    Later he became a firm opponent of white rule, in Africa. Despite Maggie Thatcher he was determined to do what he could to end white rule in Southern Rhodesia.

    I next became aware of Malcolm Fraser’s concern for human rights in Africa in the first cabinet meeting of the Fraser government after the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

    There had been a lot of media reports in Australia that money raised by the World Council of Churches for humanitarian aid in Southern Rhodesia was being diverted to assist the underground political and military opposition to Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia. In Cabinet the issue was raised by a senior NSW minister. I was really taken by surprise by Malcolm Fraser’s pungent response. He said that Ian Smith was not only politically culpable for racism in Southern Rhodesia, but that he was ‘mad’. To my knowledge this matter was never raised again in Cabinet, or at least while I was there. No Minister dared!

    In government from 1975 to 1983, Malcolm Fraser took up many of the human rights issues that Gough Whitlam had put on the agenda. Gough Whitlam started the process to establish land rights for indigenous Australians, but it was Malcolm Fraser who had the first legislation enacted.

    From his western Sydney electorate of Werriwa, with migrants from so many countries, Gough Whitlam laid the groundwork  for multiculturalism. The fundamental principle of multiculturalism was that all people deserve dignity and respect regardless of their background. In our white Anglo-Celtic community, that was something quite new. But it was Malcolm Fraser who expanded and entrenched multiculturalism. SBS was established and settlement programs for migrants and refugees were co-ordinated and then well-funded following the Galbally Report.

    Following piecemeal reform by Holt, Gorton and McMahon, Gough Whitlam ended White Australia by legislation. But under the Whitlam Government the abolition of White Australia was never put to the test in the community. Migrant and refugee intakes in the Whitlam period were the lowest since the Great Depression.

    Malcolm Fraser put the abolition of White Australia to the test by accepting tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees.  Through the policies and programs initiated by the Fraser Government, including later family reunion, we now have 250,000 persons of Indochinese background living in Australia. What a great credit they have been to Australia, to themselves and to Malcolm Fraser’s vision.

    He broke the back of White Australia and as an anti-White Australia activist since my university days in the 1950s it was wonderful to see what Malcolm Fraser had achieved. Racism and opposition to foreigners is often a dormant but potent factor in public life, but Malcolm Fraser determined that we had a humanitarian obligation to the people who had fled Indochina.

    He didn’t wait for opinion polling or focus groups to decide what we should do. He gave us leadership. It wasn’t easy given our history of White Australia and the knowledge that fear of the foreigner could be so easily exploited. But with leadership, Malcolm Fraser showed that we all have generous instincts and with his leadership we responded because we knew in our heart of hearts that he was right. If only we had that leadership today!.

    I am certain that my appointment as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs in 1980 stemmed from Malcolm Fraser’s lively concern about racism. In my posting in Japan, I spoke to scores of community groups about Australia. On almost every occasion I would be asked about White Australia. It irritated me, particularly given Japan’s exclusivist policies on race and migration. As I came to the end of my posting Malcolm Fraser was visiting Japan and he asked me what I wanted to do when I returned.  I mentioned to him how White Australia had followed me all round Japan, so I told him I would like on return to Australia to do what I could to help bury White Australia. His response was instantaneous and to the point – ‘You’re on’!.  Within three months I was back in Canberra as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.

    In that role I was able to continue to help expand the Indochina program. But In the department I encountered programs, staff attitudes and a culture  that reflected the old days of White Australia. I set about changing it and was quite public in what I was doing. I know that Liberal Party backbenchers were concerned about my activities. But never did Ian Macphee, my minister, or Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, criticise or ask me to desist. We were all on the same page.

    Almost to the day of his death, Malcolm Fraser was in the front line to support asylum seekers and those whose human rights were being attacked. One of his latest projects was  how the community could be galvanised to support Gillian Triggs the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission who had been so unfairly attacked by our Prime Minister and the Attorney General.

    He took to twitter with enthusiasm to shed light on dark places in our public life.

    It turned out that he and Gough Whitlam had more in common than they knew in those turbulent days of 1975. They were both badly bruised but their personal relations mellowed and healed. The two political titans of our era came to terms.

    Gough Whitlam often said that he hadn’t disagreed with Malcolm Fraser for 20 years! Malcolm Fraser delivered the Whitlam Oration in 2012. He opened the oration with ‘Men and Women of Australia’.

    At the Sorry Day in Parliament House in 2008, most former Prime Ministers were photographed. together. With a walking stick, or ‘cane’ as Gough would have called it, in one hand – he put his other hand on Malcolm Fraser’s shoulder for support. It was quite moving to see the old combatants so close.

    About three months before Gough Whitlam died, Malcolm Fraser called to see him in his Sydney office. He presented Gough  with his latest book ‘Dangerous Allies’. He had inscribed in the book –

    “Dear Gough, with great respect and great affection, Malcolm.”

    It had been a long and colourful journey for both of them, but there was clear respect and affection at the end.

    We will miss Malcolm Fraser’s steadfastness on human rights.

    A light has gone out.

  • Tony Smith. There is a hole in my heart where NITV News used to be

    There are times when the rhetoric about ‘closing the gap’ between
    Indigenous Australians and the rest of the population sticks in the
    throat. This week I turned on my preferred television news source – the
    5.30 bulletin on National Indigenous TeleVision (SBS4) – and found that it
    had disappeared.

    The ‘gap’ refers to the statistics showing the disadvantages suffered by
    the Indigenous peoples relative to other Australians. In fact, there are
    numerous gaps, in almost every social indicator: employment, income,
    housing, incarceration, violence, kidney and heart disease, literacy,
    education, infant mortality and life expectancy. At times, governments
    seem committed to finding solutions to these problems. At others, they
    seem to do little more than go through the motions while tacitly endorsing
    processes of assimilation. But any realistic solutions must acknowledge
    the ravages of dispossession and make urgent attempts to allow Indigenous
    people to regain their unique identities, something they will surely do if
    the broader Australian society avoids the kind of discrimination we have
    hitherto practised.

    NITV News had the motto ‘our stories, our way’ and was faithful to this
    aim. Here were stories that were not reported on mainstream channels and
    were generally ignored by media with a few exceptions. There were reports
    about threats to sacred sites, potential damage to fragile environment,
    overt and covert racism, government policies, bureaucratic bungling and
    proposed legislation. But the reports were always presented in a humble
    fashion without the pontification customary on other news sources.
    Relevant Ministers were approached often and whenever they appeared, were
    given generous time to put the government side. Again, this is unusual in
    television today when reporters seek to provide their own context, so
    skewing stories to their own views.

    Very importantly, NITV News carried positive stories about Indigenous
    people and their achievements: positive developments in health, justice
    and employment and stories about members of the community supporting one
    another.

    NITV News provided many positive spinoffs. As a result of turning to NITV,
    I discovered programs about Indigenous cooking, traditional culture,
    dancing and music among the young, grassroots sports action, classic
    movies and even found the Maori news report on weekends.

    Successive governments have found Aboriginal affairs a difficult policy
    area. They have thrown money at Indigenous ‘problems’ but the problems
    remain. They have devised slogans such as Reconciliation. They have
    advanced a woolly idea about Constitutional recognition. But they have
    failed to create mechanisms whereby diverse Indigenous voices could be
    heard. Indigenous leaders have continually appealed for genuine
    consultation but these appeals have not been heard.

    Perhaps we really do not want to listen to what Indigenous people have to
    say. Apparently we doubt that the people who preserved the fragile
    Australian ecosystem for hundreds of bicentenaries have anything to teach
    us. Perhaps it is part of a broader re-focussing of our listening away
    from small, local communities on the ground towards what big business says
    through its mouthpieces in politics. Generally, the propaganda is about
    job creation and being able to ‘afford’ environmental concerns. We can’t
    dig up the Hunter Valley, the Liverpool Plains, the Pillaga Scrub to
    export if we listen to grassroots voices like those on NITV News, can we?

    Tony Smith is a former academic living in Wiradjuri country.

  • Sean Gorman. Goodes is gone but the confronting truth remains.

    For many AFL fans, the last week in September is the time of the year where we reflect on a season that could have been and dream of next year.

    One thing we can be sure of is that we won’t see Sydney Swans champion Adam Goodes on a football field again. This saddens me. I think the reason for this is the sense of unfinished business. What should have been the rounding out of a great career or even the saddling up for one last crack in 2016 now has a full stop on it. But even in retirement, questions about Goodes’ legacy and actions remain.

    How the debate evolved

    It has been a long and arduous journey since that fateful night in May 2013. Late in a game between Sydney and Collingwood, Goodes requested the removal of a girl from the stands for calling him an ape. A few days later, AFL powerbroker and Collingwood president Eddie McGuiure made gags about Goodes and King Kong. McGuire later admitted this amounted to racial vilification.

    These incidents polarised people. They were forced to pick sides, as opposed to participating in a more sophisticated unpacking of an issue about societal vagaries regarding race politics in Australia as seen through the prism of sport.

    But the heat really came on Goodes when he talked about race and prejudice in his 2014 Australian of the Year acceptance speech, and then again when he spoke of racism and invited Australians to see John Pilger’s film Utopia.

    Australians did not like hearing this. Goodes began to be loudly booed at some games. Talkback and tabloid news fed on it and the white noise became amplified. Outrage grew.

    Indigenous war cries became a “threat” as misinformation swirled. People were beyond angered. They were sick of the sight of Goodes. He played on.

    Even the AFL’s commissioners were reportedly divided over Goodes. This perplexed me. Whenever race issues surfaced in the past, former CEO Andrew Demetriou was not just strident in denouncing them – his message was clear.

    Goodes remained stoic as debate around him grew. Then came Round 17, 2015, and a game against West Coast at Subiaco. The booing was as loud as it has been. For Goodes it was too much. He retreated to family and friends. But not once did he complain.

    Goodes returned and treated us to some great football. And in his last game against North Melbourne he made his teammate Rhyce Shaw the story as he too retired. Shaw was chaired off, but despite Goodes having made his mind up to retire he kept it quiet. He did not need the fuss made.

    What now?

    Goodes resisted overtures to attend Monday night’s Brownlow Medal ceremony and to have one last lap on the MCG on Grand Final day.

    Some may have been happy that this uppity blackfella had left through the gift shop. Maybe some felt ripped off that they would not be able to give him one more razz as he went around the MCG in an open-top car. Maybe some felt saddened that they could not show their gratitude for all he gave to the game. Maybe some just felt indifference, believing that the bloke was just a whinger and a cheat and that they would not dignify that with anything.

    But what cannot be in dispute is Goodes’ dignified resistance. What he would do and when he would do it goes to the heart of his agency as a player, and his retirement would not be influenced by a team edict that he had adhered to for 16 seasons. Despite all the barbs and the bon mots, the decision to decline an invitation to the Brownlow – an award he won twice – was his and his alone.

    If we can do anything that is remotely respectful it is to see Goodes’ class not just as an Aboriginal or a man, but as an Australian. Don’t think so? Just as Goodes allowed Shaw’s retirement to take place by sacrificing his own, can you imagine for a moment what it would be like if, as he was being chaired off, the booing was as loud as at Subiaco?

    People in sports bars around the world would have turned to their Australian friends and said, “Why are they doing that?” The discussion would have to start again about the girl, about McGuire, about King Kong, about the war cry.

    But the subtext and reality would be that Australians can’t handle Goodes or his message because that message is too real for many of us. As a consequence we would prefer to simply look away or tell the TV image of Goodes to “piss off”, as the stories we know align more with Bradman, Bondi and Beersheba.

    Disagree? Then ask yourself this: how many of you took up Goodes’ invitation to see the Pilger documentary?

    We should be thankful that Goodes played and that we were able to watch him. The question now is: who will step in to fill his shoes? And will we boo that person when their message contains something that we don’t want to hear?

    Sean Gorman is Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Aboriginal Studies, Curtin University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 30 September 2015.

     

  • Andrew Pridham. Adam Goodes and Rosa Parks.

    Before last weekend’s match between the Sydney Swans and the Adelaide Crows, the Chairman of the Sydney Swans, Andrew Pridham, gave a very challenging speech about Adam Goodes and racism in Australia.  He said that recent events are a seminal moment in our history. He commented that Adam Goodes ‘has shaken the nation’s conscience‘.

    He added ‘Change only occurs when someone takes a stand.  Rosa Parks, who in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to stand for a white person in the coloured section of a bus. She was arrested. She was later to become the face of the civil rights movement and heralded for her actions. Despite this, she faced massive discrimination – she was fired from her job, she regularly received threats … media of the day claimed it was her own fault, she was divisive. She was uppity and she was refusing to conform to the good ways of society. Does that sound familiar?It does to me.’

    For full text of speech see link below.

    https://shar.es/1tartl

  • Marcus Woolombi Waters. We all know and admire the Haka … so why not one of our own?

    The first I heard of the Adam Goodes Bumala-y Yuurrama-y (war dance) I was in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I had been watching my son play rugby. It was a carnival (under 12s) and they had just lost the grand final. After leading for the entire game, players and parents alike watched helplessly as the opposing team swept down the field from sideline to sideline, much like the legendary Mark Coyne try in State of Origin.

    Every tackle was made but players kept offloading the ball and passes were sticking until a boy went over the try line, taking the corner post with him. We all paused, waiting, before the referee blew the whistle and raised his hand – the try had been scored.

    Our players slumped to the ground as whānau (family) and teachers alike from the opposition ran onto the field to celebrate.

    An inclusive cultural identity

    A young man then screamed a war cry in Māori. That was the signal for parents and teachers to separate in preparation for the children to perform a Haka. As the winners approached our boys, slapping their chests and screaming to their ancestors, our boys raised to take on this second challenge.

    The game was over; now it was about “Te Reo Māori”, each school’s representation of the local Iwi (tribe).

    Each school has its own Haka and our boys rose to the occasion. Supported by our whānau and teachers as mobile phones immediately uploaded images to Instagram and Facebook, I watched with mana (pride) as my Kamilaroi First Nation Aboriginal Australian boy participated in a celebration of Indigenous culture denied back in his homeland.

    These were Pākehā (European), Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island, Indian, Chinese and Māori expressing the culture of Aotearoa as one inclusive cultural identity. It was inspiring and heartbreaking. As a Kamilaroi Aboriginal father, I was left wondering if we will ever see such inclusive cultural practice back in my own traditional homelands.

    We drove home and I jumped on Facebook to discover the reaction to Adam Goodes’ Bumala-y Yuurrama-y. That was almost two months ago … but it’s still making headlines around Australia while the celebration of Te Reo Māori by 12-year-old schoolchildren has faded into the cultural landscape of Aotearoa.

    Richer for embracing Indigenous culture

    Māori culture is embedded in the cultural fabric of New Zealand – it is in evidence everywhere you look, 24 hours a day. Yet, in Australia, no matter what side of the political or culture divide you sit, we all have to admit one thing – ours is a divided nation.

    In Aotearoa, presenters, no matter what colour, continually introduce and close shows in the Māori language. My Aboriginal boys think they are in an Indigenous Heaven … or should I say an Indigenous Dreaming. The school handbooks are written in both English and Māori and “Te Reo Māori” is taught in both schools my boys attend.

    In Australia, we often hear that Māori speak only one language and that it would be too difficult to implement Aboriginal languages throughout Australia. That is simply not true – Māori has a number of dialects associated with various regions. The differences are overcome with the introduction of a pan-Māori that is spoken and understood throughout the country.

    As Aboriginal children, we are taught that when on other people’s land you respect the local culture. Therefore, the fact that many Aboriginal languages are spoken is not problematic; you teach the local language of the region. And with language comes history and place – not just for Aboriginal people but for non-Aboriginal too. Rather than divide the culture, you all become richer.

    It’s this easy … having returned from Aotearoa, I have made a conscious decision to speak an Indigenous language as often as I could. I end emails with many Kamilaroi terms and begin with Yammaa, which in my language means welcome. I do this with a translation after these words in English.

    Work colleagues return in kind. I now have a collection of phrases in German, Greek, Italian and many other languages from colleagues. This builds solidarity and respect, thereby furthering understanding in the workplace.

    Rather than Brisbane I now say Meanjin and instead of Sydney I say Warrang. Melbourne isNarrm and Perth is Boorloo. How and why is becoming educated within the local Indigenous culture so threatening?

    Ancient culture can find new expressions

    To return to Adam Goodes and that contentious dance of pride and defiance, there is a final important point to be made. Some argue that a major difference between the Haka and the Bumala-y Yuurrama-y is that the Haka has a long history and that the Bumala-y Yuurrama-y is a recent invention.

    It was only ten years ago that senior All Blacks voiced serious reservations about whether the Haka was a tradition worth preserving. The issue was that some felt the Haka had become divorced from its original significance and meaning in the 21st century as Aotearoa had so many cultures represented within the All Blacks.

    All Blacks management and the senior leaders, led by team captain Tana Umaga, held a series of discussions on how the Haka could be maintained and kept relevant. Consultations were held with the Ngāti Toa tribe to whom Ka Mate Ka Mate, the older Haka, belongs. It was decided to commission Derek Lardelli, an expert in Māori customs, to compose a new Haka tailored specifically for the All Blacks.

    And so Kapa o Pango was born. This was less than ten years ago.

    The Aboriginal Bumala-y Yuurrama-y went through this exact some process, so why is it being dismissed as not having the same cultural standing? The bottom line is that when the All Blacks do the Haka it is as an entire country: Black, White, Polynesian, Māori and Asian all standing together as one. The one time we do our Bumala-y Yuurrama-y, it is in the Aboriginal All Star games of AFL and NRL and it’s our mob against the rest.

    Cultures, no matter how ancient, are allowed to adapt and evolve, but that will not happen in Australia while we remain so divided and our Aboriginal culture excluded from mainstream education and popular culture. All Australians have a right to engage in informed discussion, but this opportunity is denied to people when the 60,000-plus years of Aboriginal occupation and culture was excluded from their formal education.

    In finishing, I just received a phone call informing me that NRL stars Johnathan Thurston and Greg Inglis will perform a traditional Aboriginal Bumala-y Yuurrama-y at matches this weekend in a rally cry of support for Adam Goodes. Now that is culture!

    Marcus Woolombi Waters, Lecturer, School of Humanities at Griffith University. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 31 July 2015.

  • Tributes to Malcolm Fraser.

    See below, tributes from Fred Chaney and Robert Manne on Malcolm Fraser’s achievements in public life. John Mendue.

    Fred Chaney in The Guardian.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/malcolm-fraser-a-leader-who-believed-there-is-a-moral-compass-in-our-nations-life

    Robert Manne in The Guardian.

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/frasers-great-conservative-achievement-cementing-whitlams-progress-on-race

  • Michael Gracey. Risks of Closing Remote Aboriginal Communities.

    Forced dislocation from traditional homelands in the late 1960s and early 1970s made many Aboriginal families and groups move, for the first time, to small towns in the north and north-west of WA. This drift to strange environments with access to alcohol and living close to people from different backgrounds, languages and alien beliefs and behaviours, had dire and long-lasting social consequences as well as negative impacts on health and well-being and contact with the police. This came with a price to the general community as well as to those who were displaced.

    The controversial proposal by the Federal and WA governments to close or remove essential services from dozens of small Aboriginal communities in WA’s remote north runs a real risk of repeating the mistakes made 40 years ago. Some Indigenous people in such communities have not experienced life beyond their traditional homelands, some of these people have limited English language skills, maintain their ancient customs, beliefs and rituals, and many have never been exposed to alcohol. The inevitable drift to towns or their fringes that would follow this forced, abrupt change to their way of life will bring immense pressures on them. This will expose these internal refugees to the real risks of an alien environment and almost certainly bring harmful impacts to their well-being in social, emotional and health terms. As with the disaster of 40 years before there would be real costs to the governments and a need for public services to manage the mess.

    If the governments’ proposal goes ahead, these risks and their consequential costs must be assessed very carefully beforehand in an open, consultative process. If this does not occur, the harm that follows will undoubtedly bring a savage and long-lasting backlash. It could also further tarnish Australia’s reputation wider afield in its record of handling issues affecting the First Australians.

    Michael Gracey AO is a Paediatrician who has worked with indigenous people, communities and organisations for over 40 years, particularly in the far north of WA. He was Principal Medical Adviser on Aboriginal Health in the Department of Health in WA for more than a decade and was Australia’s first Professor of Aboriginal Health at Curtin University in Perth. He has also been President of the International Paediatric Association.

  • The frontier wars – best we forget.

     

    I have posted many blogs about our refusal to acknowledge the frontier wars,  when we suffered the largest death toll in war in our history in relation to our population at the time. In the SMH on February 12, see link below, Tim Flannery draws our attention to the valour of 52 indigenous people who were killed near Casterton, Victoria, in the 1840s. The victors write history! These heroes have been largely expunged from our history. There were no rewards for those who were defending their homelands in the battle known as ‘Fighting Hills’. John Menadue

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-shouldn8217t-forget-the-sacrifice-of-our-aboriginal-warriors-20150212-13bzib.html

  • Michael Gracey. Why is closing the aboriginal health gap failing so badly?

    The disparity between the health of Aboriginal people and other Australians first drew wide public attention In the 1960s; it became known as “The Aboriginal Health Problem”. This awareness came from reports of widespread and severe malnutrition in Aboriginal infants and young children, high rates of infections and gut parasites, high infant mortality, and reduced life expectancy.

    This wasn’t good enough for a wealthy nation like Australia, the “Lucky Country” if you like, where the luck seemed to not extend to the First Australians. There was a public outcry at the time, followed by almost predictable political reactions aimed at correcting the inequity.

    Strategies were devised, programs planned, health professionals were employed, and huge sums of taxpayers’ dollars were allocated and spent over the next half century. So we are entitled to ask “what happened?”

    There were some gains. Aboriginal infant mortality rates fell, their average birth weights increased, rates of malnutrition dropped, vaccine-preventable infections receded, rates of severe child infections declined and deaths from childhood gastroenteritis plummeted. These encouraging improvements were mostly due to conventional public health measures including childhood vaccination, better hygiene, and earlier referral for treatment of illnesses, greatly improved treatment for childhood diarrhoea and dehydration, and employment of skilled clinical personnel. But over the past thirty or so years many aspects of the health of Indigenous people have deteriorated. Why?

    Since the 1970s there have been substantial changes in the living patterns of Aboriginal Australians, particularly in rural and remote areas. Political, legal and administrative changes occurred from the late 1960s that had profound effects on Aboriginal people and communities. Examples include the introduction of equal pay for equal work, the granting of drinking rights to Indigenous persons, various systems of welfare support and payments, increased reliance on the welfare system, and a rapid shift from traditional lifestyles to that of a typical Westernised contemporary society. This all occurred on an entrenched system where Indigenous people were disadvantaged in almost all aspects of their lives from the rest of the wider Australian society.

    Indigenous people went through a swift lifestyle shift and became less physically active, more sedentary, and consumed modern foods and drinks that were more calorie-dense, contained much more fat and salt and less fibre than in previous times. The stage was being prepared for a tidal wave of chronic so-called “lifestyle” diseases which threatened their survival. The Tsunami of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, chronic kidney disease and renal failure descended on them with a vengeance. Not only that, the stresses associated with maladjustment to these changes, socio-political disadvantage, under-education, unemployment and racial prejudice combined to make them a sub-group that was vulnerable to a heavy burden of disease, disability and excessively high mortality.

    However, increasing numbers of Indigenous Australians are not trapped in this unfavourable vortex of negative factors. Many are being well-educated, achieving high levels of competence and success in their daily lives, in business, the professions, and academia, and are becoming leaders in Australian society. These people provide encouragement towards future successes and recognition of Indigenous people as exemplars.

    But the negative impacts of various factors on the health statistics of Indigenous people over the past 30 years are a cause for serious concern.

    The persisting, yawning divide between the health statistics of Aboriginal people and other Australians has become known as “The Aboriginal Health Gap” which is one of this country’s worst embarrassments. In 2008 the then Labor government committed to “close the gap”, a phrase which in my view has been overstated. That commitment was to make the health, disease and death statistics, as well as other markers of Aboriginal well-being, match those of other Australians by the year 2030. This is not achievable. Apart from the vast discrepancies that are so entrenched in the lives of most Indigenous Australians, such as poor educational standards, high unemployment, lower per capita incomes, and unsatisfactory housing and access to services, there are many biological factors that contribute to ill-health that have strong components that persist for more than one generation. This means that issues that affect future generations, such as the health and nutrition of pregnant Aboriginal women and breast-feeding mothers, must be corrected before improvements can occur for the following generation or more. This simply cannot be done within 20 or 30 years. Similarly, the heavy chronic disease burden of, for example, diabetes and its long-term complications, chronic kidney disease and kidney failure that are so prevalent in young Aboriginal people, cannot be fully eliminated within one generation.

    Reviewing the official annual reports about progress over the past seven years is a disheartening exercise. Many of the stated targets have not been reached and, in some areas, things have deteriorated despite the immense amounts of public funds which have been used in “close the gap” programs. This was admitted in February 2015 by the Prime Minister when commenting on the seventh annual report; senior Indigenous spokespersons agreed that the findings were very disappointing. What’s gone wrong?

    Looking objectively at the situation it must be admitted that the federal government commitment in 2008 was: (a) well-intentioned; (b) ill-informed; (c) not adequately thought through; (d) bureaucratically top-heavy and clumsy; (e) naïvely optimistic; (f) culturally insensitive; (g) rhetorical rather than realistic; and (h) ignored the biological restrictions imposed by previous generations on altering health outcomes in subsequent generations of children.

    Why shouldn’t the government admit that the commitment made in 2008 was not feasible and start again? A serious problem with a failing program is that many people feel let down, disheartened and frustrated because the expectations are not being realised. This is particularly so for those who have the most to gain or lose – the Indigenous people. This won’t change until a more realistic strategy and timetable are devised, perhaps with a new name.

    Government must accept that approaches used over the past 30 years or so have, with few exceptions, like those already mentioned, not worked. This applies to different levels of service delivery; government, the private sector, and Aboriginal-controlled medical services.

    A fresh approach is needed. To date governments have given little encouragement to Indigenous people to become agents of change for their own health. Community engagement, commitment, and acceptance of responsibility must occur at the local level if real change is to be achieved. This will provide opportunities, previously denied to Indigenous communities and their members, to learn at first-hand: (1) the determinants of health; (2) what causes illness; (3) how diseases can be prevented; and (4) how health service systems operate and can be modified as required. Community involvement in these matters will provide, perhaps for the first time, a new deal with local people being real partners in programs to improve their own health. This will require collaborative teams with long experience in health and health services, community development, cross-cultural knowledge, empathy, patience, and inter-personal skills to work in small groups around Australia. This strategy uses a previously untapped resource, local Indigenous people and communities, to help “close the gap”. Governments will have to commit to radical changes in order to achieve this.

    Meanwhile, all the other social, economic and environmental factors that affect health outcomes will need to be addressed vigorously. Without such changes, for example in education and employment opportunities, the failures of the past will continue.

    Michael Gracey AO MD PhD FRACP FAAP

    Professor Gracey is a paediatrician who has worked with Aboriginal people, families, communities and organisations for more than 40 years. He was Principal Medical Adviser on Aboriginal Health in the West Australian Department of Health and was Australia’s first Professor of Aboriginal Health. He has also served as President of the International Paediatric Association.