Good Reads

Because I was so young when I had my stroke, our health system ‘failed me’. They couldn’t help provide Len with some nursing support in our home because all that was available was the Aged Care Assessment Team (ACAT) and that only applied to aged or people in hospital who needed 24hr care and there was no other option other than what our doctor said, to take me back to the hospital, because someone had to be there to raise our daughter.

Love, protection, beauty, royalty are all things that have all too readily been denied to Black women. Instead our expected role has been one of servitude, sexually, domestically, and politically, for White men and White women, and even Black men.

I cried and he cried and he held me crying, then he told the nurse that I understood him and could respond by blinking. They didn’t believe him at first, but they eventually asked me questions, and I responded to them all.

I was the first in my family to attend University and I remember my father being less than impressed at my decision to study rather than do real work. “Places like that weren’t meant for people like us”, he stated.

Australia has always wanted to stake a claim on Aboriginal culture – but only when it benefits them. They remain ignorant when the legislative bullets are fired to weaken and destroy it, and do not seek to protect it when the right to culture and ceremony is in the way of profit and white prosperity.

Aboriginal people are over-represented in most of the negative statistics and under-represented in most of the positive ones. This is the fundamental reality underpinning government programs like ‘Closing the Gap’.

Harmony Day first started in 1999, under the Howard government, and was its way of finding a warm and positive way of not actually doing anything about the issue of racial discrimination in an increasingly multicultural society.

I want you to know why finding out where we are from, where our country is, is so important to me.  I believe that all the beauty of the Australian landscape, the stillness and the tidal lapping, the food to be foraged, and the fresh morning air is where our beauty is.

Alice Springs town councillor Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been at the receiving end of community criticism from groups in Alice Springs recently. Last week a petition was circulated on social media to protest against mainstream media’s representation of Ms Price as a community leader.

Opponents to Australia Day are invariably criticised in two ways. The first is a favoured manoeuvre for establishment media pundits: claim the focus on 26 January is trivial while more pressing Indigenous issues are neglected.

Aboriginal Peoples and Nations are subjects in international law: always was and always will be. We have held our relationship to country from time immemorial and we are still here today. We survive under the duress of an ongoing colonialism, but we continue to maintain our relationships with land and peoples to this day.

Hey ancestor, you talking to me? Country time everyday. I know, I know, but wouldn’t you know it, it’s the 26th of January again, old Whitefella Day. Party time for some, sad day for others.

We cannot seek an end to the oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by cajoling the broad majority of Australians with soft entreaties of ‘change the date’. As rightly pointed out by many, changing the date of Australia Day – without the achievement of social justice or legal restitution in the form of Land Rights and Treaty – only moves the celebration of unfinished business to another date.

As a health researcher I am troubled by the predatory possibilities of “the Aboriginal problem”. Many a mortgage has been paid off the back of knowing “the Aboriginal problem” or claiming to solve “the Aboriginal problem” as advancing new knowledge. Within Indigenous health research, people (and by people, I mean predominantly white people) make money from knowing “the Aboriginal problem” under the premise that a deeper understanding of “the Aboriginal problem” will somehow fix it.

The visit of the founders of Black Lives Matter to accept the Sydney peace prize should be leveraged by First Nations, indeed by all people of colour in Australia plus our allies and advocates, as a mechanism to have our agendas infiltrate mainstream forums at an international level and work towards redressing the raft of issues that affect us.

The past few weeks in Australian media and political life have been a bit of a blur. Even trying to recount them now sounds far fetched.

There has been a lot of talk from both the Northern Territory and federal governments recently about the rivers of royalties, jobs and other benefits they claim will come from opening up the Territory to vast new shale fracking gas fields.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a Whovian. Even when the original series of Doctor Who came to an end in 1989, I continued adding to my collection of memorabilia, reading the novels and hoping that one day, the show might come back.