Good Reads

To celebrate the 115th birthday of Albert (Elea) Namatjira, Google has published a doodle painted by his granddaughter, Gloria Pannka, but for all the acclaim that the Western Arrernte artist was showered with during his lifetime, Namatjira still found himself being regarded as less than the average white man.

Growing up, I was a huge comic book fan, but I often wondered why there weren’t many Aboriginal comic book heroes (or villains). I knew of Gateway from Marvel’s X-Men comics, and Condoman from health promotion posters and … Well, that’s about it actually.

On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, in a sunset ceremony in central Australia, approximately 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates from across Australia delivered the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Convened by the Referendum Council, the statement put forth an Indigenous Australian position on proposed constitutional reform, rejecting constitutional recognition in favour of a treaty.

I was three at the time, so I don’t remember any of it, but the impacts on my life are profound. 27 May 1967 is widely understood as the day Australia stood as a nation almost unanimously in support of Aboriginal people and their right to be citizens of this country.

Australia ‘has systematically implemented policies that are born of a rhetoric suggesting that the state is somehow protecting Aboriginal children better than their families’.

Grandmothers Against Removals say too many Indigenous children are being removed from their culture when Aboriginal family or community members would be able to care for them.

Bronwyn Carlson: ‘Many of my students hold the belief that the 1967 referendum was about giving Aboriginal people the vote. They have very little knowledge about the Australian constitution.’

My grandfather, Colin Walker, is a Yorta Yorta man born on the banks of Dhunagla (the Murray River) at Cummeragunja in a small tin hut with a dirt floor, no windows – a corrugated iron structure that is long gone. A stone’s throw from the site of Pop’s birth is the Cummeragunja School House where my mother May went to school.

Unless you have been living under a rock, by now you would of heard that Sam Thaiday attempted to be funny while on the Footy Show on Thursday night.

The furore over Bill Leak’s death, and the effect it had on the RDA shows again that the dominant class do not value Aboriginal life, writes Amy McQuire.

The Barkly region is a hot spot for family violence and child abuse. The community is crying out for a strong response but the resources they have are inadequate, writes @IndigenousX host Fiona Hamilton, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman of the Trawlwulwuy Nation, a writer, artist, family violence educator and activist. She is a survivor of family violence.

‘I see that on that journey toward a treaty, there is the potential for many great things, for great seeds to be planted.’ 

Light-skinned Aboriginal kids were hated more than the darker kids because we were seen to have a choice of identity.

My name is Clinton Benjamin, I belong to the Bardi, Yawuru, and Kija people from in and around Broome in the Kimberley region in the far North-West of Western Australia.

"By putting a whole range of projects together that mark out some kind of broad perimeter that Aboriginality can exist inside of, it’s offering more than a tick-the-box example, or a single way of thinking of our world. We’re pulling Aboriginality out in lots of different directions because we are more diverse. And no one else gets to define who we are. We get to define who we are," says 2017 festival director Wesley Enoch.

Social media users are perfectly aware that they’re ensconced in a bubble, and prefer it that way. It is a wilful ignorance. Conflicting perspectives, regardless of their substance, are flatly rejected or simply blocked. Self-affirmation is the objective. And in a climate of socioeconomic disenfranchisement and political disaffection, that participation imparts a measure of agency. This is the much vaunted democratising affordance of social media, and a cruel irony.

Putting face to the many loving and intact Aboriginal families and engaged and active #IndigenousDads is necessary to reject Leak’s caricature of us, equally we need to find a way to talk about some sad realities beyond the reach of the Bill Leaks of the world and beyond the reach of those who fight with or against him over the top of us.

National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day has been formally celebrated since 1988, when we took to the streets in protest. In truth, Children’s Day has been celebrated in community, in some form or another, for much longer than that.