Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has pledged to take direct responsibility for Indigenous Policy…

TONY ABBOTT: Under an incoming Coalition government, Indigenous affairs will be handled within the department of prime minister and cabinet. There will be, in effect, a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs.

… in a speech given to the Sydney Institute on April 15th.

While there was not much detail it certainly sounds impressive. A Prime Minister forcing improvements in Indigenous lives, closing the gap. But what sort of people would in effect be running the portfolio?

On April 18th at a Qantas function his Director of Policy Dr Mark Roberts made a throat-slitting motion and threatened to “cut the throat” of funding to Andrew Penfold the CEO of the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation.

Not only that, but when he realised there was a witness, Peter van Onselon, Mr Roberts apparently offered to become a deep throat from within Abbott’s office if van Onselon kept his mouth shut.

The possible Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs only action was to not sack but only demote his Director of Policy.

Makes me wonder how Indigenous Affairs will progress under Abbott.

Luke Pearson set up the IndigenousX account up on Twitter and has a different Indigenous Australian tweet from it each week.

He has a big plans for IndigenousX and yesterday (Saturday) on Twitter he said if he could get to 10,000 followers by Thursday (just over 6000 at the time) he’d donate a $100 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (@ILF).

@urthboy said he would triple that and the promotion of the IndigenousX account and offers of donations (currently about $5685 with some already donated) to ILF started flowing in.

IndigenousX received several hundred new followers in a few hours and on New Year’s Day evening has over 7700 followers

Now I am not saying to follow IndigenousX because he’s trying to increase his followers. Look at the aims Luke has for the account:

1. The main goal is to have a safe space for Indigenous tweeps to share their stories. Their hopes, dreams, goals, & also their frustrations.

2. To network & make new friendships & connections between like-minded tweeps from any & all backgrounds.

3.To allow non-Indigenous tweeps to hear from Indigenous voices.

If you want to learn from our Indigenous Australians, to see aspirations and worries they have as a people and as individuals I urge you to follow IndigenousX.

Preferably by Thursday.

And if you want to donate to a charity you can’t do better than by assisting kids out bush to read. Donate to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Luke has assisted me in the past with obtaining a large box of books which sit on my bookshelf for visiting kids and families to read (although most have made their way to homes).

Luke has written about the follower drive and fundraising.

reposted from Sunday

Luke Pearson set up the IndigenousX account up on Twitter and has a different Indigenous Australian tweet from it each week.

He has a big plans for IndigenousX and yesterday (Saturday) on Twitter he said if he could get to 10,000 followers by Thursday (just over 6000 at the time) he’d donate a $100 to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation (@ILF).

@urthboy said he would triple that and the promotion of the IndigenousX account and offers of donations (currently about $3600 with some already donated) to ILF started.

IndigenousX received several hundred new followers in a few hours.

Now I am not saying to follow IndigenousX because he’s trying to increase his followers. Look at the aims Luke has for the account:

1. The main goal is to have a safe space for Indigenous tweeps to share their stories. Their hopes, dreams, goals, & also their frustrations.

2. To network & make new friendships & connections between like-minded tweeps from any & all backgrounds.

3.To allow non-Indigenous tweeps to hear from Indigenous voices.

If you want to learn from our Indigenous Australians, to see aspirations and worries they have as a people and as individuals I urge you to follow IndigenousX.

Preferably by Thursday.

And if you want to donate to a charity you can’t do better than by assisting kids out bush to read. Donate to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.

Luke has assisted me in the past with obtaining a large box of books which sit on my bookshelf for kids to read (although most have made their way to homes).

apologies – though links look broken they do work. Hoping to have it fixed soon

By Claire Bowern, Yale University

It is not often that the opportunity comes along to make a real difference, but a new report into Indigenous languages in Australia has the potential to do just that.

Our Land, Our Languages has already been likened to the momentous Mabo decision. But where Mabo helped change our legal and cultural understanding of Indigenous land rights, this report highlights the fiction of a monolingual Australia and calls for recognition of Australia’s Indigenous linguistic diversity.

We have seen many reports on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and their lives: “Bringing Them Home”, reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody, education reports, and the Ampe Akelyernemane (“Little Children are Sacred”) report, which sparked the Northern Territory Intervention.

This report is different. Rather than treating Aboriginal people as a problem to be solved, or adding yet another layer of bureaucracy onto already micro-managed lives, this report is about finding solutions within communities. Many previous reports have exposed a shameful history of abuse and neglect. This time, we see case after case of people doing the best they can under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

The findings should not be another opportunity for white Australia to spend a week of soul searching and brow beating before forgetting yet again about our vow that this time we’ll be different. It’s a chance to see what local communities have been doing and to support those efforts.

What are the recommendations?

The report’s 30 recommendations range from raising the profile of Indigenous languages in the Australian community through increased signage to making it easier for Aboriginal people to get qualifications to teach their own languages. Other recommendations include provisions for sharing language resources between schools, documenting languages under threat, supporting bilingual education early childhood initiatives, and providing archival resources.

Many of the recommendations are straightforward to implement. They are concrete and do not rely on the creation of extensive new infrastructure. Unlike the Northern Territory intervention, there’ll be no need to send in the army this time.

Rather, many of the recommendations focus on capitalising on existing infrastructure and making existing programs more effective. For example, the library of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is already the country’s de facto national archive for Indigenous materials, but is acutely understaffed and underfunded.

A complex solution

The solutions are not a one-size fits all response either. The Australian linguistic scene is very complex, with languages needing different degrees of support. There is no point in advocating bilingual education or interpreters for communities where the Indigenous languages are not the primary modes of communication. But such language support is desperately needed across the Kriol – and Language – speaking parts of Northern Australia.

In contrast, language reclamation has an important role to play in the areas where the languages have already gone.

Will this “save” languages? It’s hard to say. What we do know, however, is that good language and education programs have knock-on effects far beyond the school. It isn’t rocket science to see that kids who are taught in a language they speak are going to do better than kids who are aren’t.

We have long known that bilingual and culturally relevant education boosts attendance across the board, and that spotty attendance is one of the biggest causes of poor test scores. We have long known about the benefits of speaking more than one language. Those benefits apply, no matter what the race or the language.

Passing the test

These recommendations are not shots in the dark; they are not guesses at a solution. They are the outcomes of a year of interviews and sifting of research which shows what communities have done to help their languages survive. The committee has documented what can be achieved on a shoe-string and in the face of national apathy and often unhelpful or hostile policies.

Let’s make the question no longer one of survival: this is a chance for the languages and their speakers to flourish.

We’ve had more than five years of the Intervention in the Northern Territory, and while many things have changed, it’s not at all clear that much has changed for the better. Now is an excellent time to enact recommendations based on respect, rather than on bullying.

More than 200 years of aggression, assimilation and annihilation has failed, and thankfully so. But it’s done a lot of damage. Australia is a world leader in endangered languages. This is a great chance for us to be world leaders in language reclamation and support instead.

Paul Keating, in his 1992 Redfern Speech, called the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous people “the test which so far we have always failed.”

Twenty years later, we are still failing. But now is an incredible opportunity to do better. Let’s not waste it.

Claire Bowern receives research funding from the National Science Foundation (USA) for work on Australian Indigenous languages. Her submission to the Inquiry can be found here: (http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=atsia/languages/submissions.htm; submission 83)

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

In my view Indigenous education cannot wait for Gonski. This article by Marie Brennan, Victoria University

In all the discussion, media releases, press conferences and TV coverage of this week’s government response to the Gonski review, it was fascinating that the issue of Indigenous education rated such little mention.

More than the divisions between private and government schooling, the division between the access and experience of education by Indigenous families and non-Indigenous families is most telling about quality and equity in Australia’s schools.

We know there are strong links between low achievement and socio-economic positioning and a growing gap in achievement between those achieving highly and those at the bottom of the scale. But Indigenous students lose out on both counts: they are over-represented in the bottom quartile of achievement and there is a growing distance between their achievement and those at the top.

You would think this would be at the forefront of concerns but the government’s response provided little detail in this area. That is until fortunately The Australian newspaper reported that “the government told The Australian” they would change the Gonski recommendation funding for Indigenous schooling. Instead of the recommended loading for schools with 5% – 25% Indigenous student enrolment with a sliding scale to 100% Indigenous, the government now apparently will fund every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child in a school.

The overall direction of the announcements Monday and this reassurance on Tuesday were a welcome reversal of a slide in overall education funding per student in which Australia was well below average of OECD countries’ funding. However, we still do not know any details of what is yet to be discussed with the states and territories.

At the moment, we know nothing about the standard base-funding formula per capita to be made available to all schools; the basis of deciding the loading for disadvantage; and the processes for accountability.

Until these core issues are negotiated and made public, it will be almost impossible to tell what differences the funding will make for Indigenous education – particularly whether there is any likelihood of decreasing the gap between Indigenous students and the higher socio-economic students currently privileged in school curriculum and access.

Improvements in Indigenous education will require significant injections of money. As the Gonski report noted, many Indigenous children experience multiple and deeper forms of disadvantage than other groups. Previous targeted programs from states, territories and the Commonwealth have not provided the necessary funding, nor the flexibility and stability of funding, which are required to reverse more than 200 years of colonial treatment.

However, money alone will not make the difference needed. As the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples this week welcomed the government’s positive response to their criticism of the initial Gonski proposal, a spokesperson also underscored the relationship between funding, community-school connection and culturally relevant curriculum:

“Our children perform well at school when the connections between families, home and school are strong, when quality teachers are in front of classes, when curriculum is culturally relevant and inclusive, and when school infrastructure and resources are tailored to local circumstances.”

For remote and regional schools with large numbers of Indigenous students, high teacher turnover, an over-representation of inexperienced teachers, lack of familiarity with Indigenous languages and cultural protocols, and lack of Indigenous teachers all add to the problem of culturally irrelevant curriculum and teaching methods.

As importantly, there are few schools in provincial cities or metropolitan areas where Indigenous students receive the kind of curriculum or culturally appropriate learning and teaching that would raise the overall levels of achievement. Aboriginal and Torres Strait parents have often had a history of poor relations with schools, yet need to be involved in their children’s education, formally and informally.

As the National Congress itself noted in response to Gonski, ATSI peoples need to be represented on the stakeholder group which decides funding and accountability processes, as well as at the local school level. The Howard government’s removal of the Aboriginal Student Support and Parent Awareness scheme in the 2005-2008 funding cycle significantly undermined Indigenous parent engagement in schooling and will need to be replaced, with links from local groups to Australia-wide policy and program decisions.

So while everyone waits to find out the details yet to be negotiated – and the timeline for even beginning the process is lengthy – education for Indigenous students receives only sporadic attention.

Early learnings from the government’s National Partnership programs appear to have something to say but this will need expert advice which is currently in short supply in most states and territories, which have been reducing their education infrastructure.

Indigenous Education simply cannot afford to wait until 2025 for the level of improvement needed.

Marie Brennan currently receives funding from the ARC in three grants with colleagues: 1) Capacitating Student Aspirations in Classrooms and Communities in a High Poverty Region (DP120101492; 2012-2014); 2) Pursuing Equity in High Poverty Rural Schools: Improving learning through rich accountabilities (LP100200841; 2010-2014, partnered with DET Queensland); and 3) Renewing the Teaching Profession in Regional Areas through Community Partnerships. (LP100200499: with partner investigators RDA Limestone Coast, Catholic Education South Australia, DECS, SA, And the City of Mt Gambier). She has received previous funding from the ARC and commissioned projects from state education authorities over the past 21 years.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

I’ve written in the early days of my blog about the effect of fly in – fly out miners on rural and remote communities.

This article by Stephen Duckett, La Trobe University looks at the effect of fly in fly out health services.

This is a story about two small Aboriginal communities in the Gulf region of North Queensland: Mornington Island and Doomadgee. They share two key characteristics with many other remote communities: very poor health status on every dimension and fragile permanent staffing of their health services. But they also share an increasingly common third characteristic: an abundance of fly-in, fly-out siloed health services.

I recently visited Mornington Island to learn more about primary health-care delivery in the region. Getting off the plane with me was a renal nurse practitioner, a sexual health nurse, an alcohol and drug worker and a mental health worker, all arriving for their regular visits and clinics. The Royal Flying Doctor Service wasn’t in town for its clinics that day, and, of course, specialist doctors normally come by charter. The same sort of pattern applies in Doomadgee.

I spent about an hour in Mornington talking to an elder, whose main message to me was not about the key health problems in her community but that the community had established mechanisms for consultation that were being ignored.

Aunty Pearl (not her real name) made a heartfelt plea for the community to be consulted before new services were helicoptered in, and for community leaders to be apprised of new clinics being established, so that if they were local priorities, the leaders could work with the whole community to build awareness of the new clinics and hence increase their effectiveness.

In Doomadgee, a whole new service is being established by a new-to-the-town non-government agency. Local health services know it will provide health services for kids but have no idea about the specifics, whether it will duplicate what they are doing already, or how it will integrate with existing services and existing staff.

I asked staff to estimate what sort of contribution the existing fly-in fly-out services were making: were they mostly bringing skills or just time to do things the overworked locals didn’t have time to do? The answer in this non-scientific survey was about 90% skill, 10% time.

The follow-up, then, was whether, with purposive effort (which isn’t seriously occurring now), that ratio could change, by how much and by when? The response was it could shift to 50/50 over an 18-month period.

So here’s the rub. We are all full of good intentions, we want to do something about the Aboriginal health tragedy, and do it now.

But what we are doing is not creating a sustainable service. Staffing by locums, agency and fly-in fly-out staff is expensive. They generally don’t provide continuity of care. And we get the dismal trifecta because they disempower the locals and don’t build a sustainable, local workforce.

The international development literature is full of papers on the distorting effects of siloed funding: specialist disease-specific funding agencies establishing narrowly-defined, specific programs available to developing countries with no one willing to fund the broad primary health-care infrastructure which is necessary for a sustainable and effective health system.

We are doing the same in Australia with special funding programs by state, Commonwealth and non-government agencies. Which brings me back to Aunty Pearl. What we need is good local priority setting: working with the community to determine the local health-care needs.

But let’s not be naive: local planning is hard. Humans and local communities suffer from bounded rationality: we don’t know what we don’t know. So local planning needs to be supported and informed by planning in the larger region or district.

We also need ongoing effective mechanisms to ensure local collaboration among service providers, which do something about long-term workforce sustainability. The 50/50 skill-to-time ratio or even the 90/10 one begs the question of whether the benefits of higher order skills being provided to these communities are greater than the coordination costs created.

For communities where chronic disease is so prevalent, the place to start is clearly to ensure a good primary care foundation. Wagner’s chronic care model now forms the base of chronic disease management and promotes the idea of “productive interaction” between an “informed, activated patient” and a “prepared, proactive practice team”. Both sides of this interaction require support to be effective.

In Wagner’s model, support comes both from the community (in terms of resources, policies, and self-management support) and from the health system, involving improvements to the organisation of health care, delivery system design, decision support, and clinical information systems.

This does not appear to be happening in either Doomadgee or on Mornington Island, or at least, is happening only in fits and starts.

The fly-in, fly-out model of siloed care I saw is certainly responding to the immediate needs of those communities. But it may be doing so in a way that inhibits a long-term improvement in the health of these communities.

Stephen Duckett was Thinker in Residence at Mt Isa Centre for Rural and Remote Health

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

It’s been a few months but in case you missed it here is the Prime Minister’s Closing the Gap speech delivered to Parliament on 9th February 2012. Following that is a copy of the report.

2011 Closing the Gap

Rather than cut parents’ welfare payments when their kids don’t attend school how about adopting some strategies that work and also improve community relationships with the school.

I have seen many of his strategies work. In some it relies on teachers being around long enough to build up relationships.

Positive strategies will be more effective than further alienating Indigenous Australians.

This is worth watching.

From The Conversation:

Indigenous Australians systematically burnt grasslands to reduce fuel and stop fires raging out of control.
Flickr/pietroizzo

Aboriginal people worked hard to make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable.

By distributing plants and associating them in mosaics, then using these to lure and locate animals, Aborigines made Australia as it was in 1788, when Europeans arrived.

Where it suited they worked with the country, accepting or consolidating its character, but if it didn’t suit they changed the country, sometimes dramatically, with fire or no fire.

“No fire” because a conscious decision not to burn also regulates plants and animals. They judged equally what to burn and what not, when, how often, and how hot. They cleared undergrowth, and they put grass on good soil, clearings in dense and open forest, and tree or scrub clumps in grassland.

A common management system can be recognised in enough dispersed places to say that the system was universal – that Australia was,
as the title says, a single estate, and that in this sense Aborigines made Australia.

A history of observation

Observant travellers such as Edward Eyre, Ludwig Leichhardt and Thomas Mitchell reported what Rhys Jones later neatly called “fire-stick farming”: grass burnt in mosaics to reduce fuel and to bring on green pick to lure grazing animals.

From the late 1960s researchers like Duncan Merrilees, Ian Thomas and Eric Rolls revived this insight, and Sylvia Hallam showed conclusively that
Aborigines managed southwest Australia intensively and systematically.

Ted Strehlow, Debbie Rose, Peter Sutton and others offered insights on Aboriginal belief and practice, especially in the centre and north where traditional management survives best.

I learnt too from seeing in the bush how plant responses to fire or no fire declared their history, and from how people like Alfred Howitt, Bill Jackson, Beth Gott, Peter Latz and Daphne Nash related this to Aboriginal management.

Building on these resources

Bushes and trees, as well as grass, were necessarily associated and distributed. Grass eaters seek shelter as well as feed, and feed-shelter associations (“templates”) must be carefully placed so as not to disrupt each other, as this would make target animals unpredictable and the system pointless.

Given how long eucalypts live, templates might take centuries to set up. Each needed several distinct fire regimes, continuously managed and integrated with neighbours, to maintain the necessary conditions for fire-stick farming.

This system could hardly have land boundaries. There could not be a place where it was practised, and next to it a place where it wasn’t. Australia was inevitably a single estate, albeit with many managers.

Two factors blended to entrench this, one ecological, the other religious. Ecologically, once you lay out country variably to suit all other species, you are committed to complex and long-term land management. Aboriginal religious philosophy explained and enforced this, chiefly via totems. All things were responsible for others of its totem and their habitats.

For example, emu people must care for emus and emu habitats, and emus must care for them. There was too a lesser but still strong responsibility to other totems and habitats, ensuring that all things were always under care.

Totems underwrote the ecological arrangement of Australia, creating an entire continent managed under the same Law for similar biodiverse purposes, no matter what the vegetation.

Despite vastly different plant communities, from spinifex to rainforest, from Tasmania to the Kimberleys, there were the same plant patterns – the same relationship between food or medicine plants and shelter plants.

Blinkered to the obvious

Why has it taken so long to see the obvious?

Put simply, farming peoples see differently. Like our draught horses, we wear the blinkers agriculture imposes. Australia is not like the northern Europe from which most early settlers came. Burn Australia’s perennials and they come back green; burn Europe’s annuals and they die.

Again, you can predictably lure and locate Australia’s animals because there were almost no predators, whereas Europe’s many predators scattered prey, so the notion of using fire to locate resources was foreign there.

But above all we don’t see because farmers don’t think like hunter-gatherers. For us “wilderness” lies just beyond our boundaries; for them wilderness does not exist. Fences on the ground make fences in the mind.

Until Europeans came, Australia had no wilderness, and no terra nullius.

Today, amid the wreck of what Aborigines made, there remain relics of their management. They depended not on chance, but on policy. They shaped Australia to ensure continuity, balance, abundance and predictability. All are now in doubt.

In the face of such doubt, so basic and so sweeping, can we really say we are managing our country? Can we really say we are Australian?

Bill Gammage is the author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

]]> http://bitethedust.com.au/bitingthedust/2011/12/22/the-biggest-estate-on-earth-how-aborigines-made-australia/feed/ 0 http://bitethedust.com.au/bitingthedust/2011/12/19/changes-needed-to-close-the-gap-for-indigenous-australians-with-disabilities/ http://bitethedust.com.au/bitingthedust/2011/12/19/changes-needed-to-close-the-gap-for-indigenous-australians-with-disabilities/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:00:15 +0000 Robbo http://bitethedust.com.au/bitingthedust/?p=11012 Continue reading →]]> Tweet

Occasionally I will be republishing articles from “The Conversation” that look at Indigenous issues.

Government data shows Aboriginal people are twice as likely to have a core activity limitation as non-Aboriginal people. AAP Image/Karen Michelmore

Alongside high rates of incarceration, unemployment, homelessness and some of the poorest health outcomes in Australia, Indigenous people’s access and use of disability services is under-representative of the total Aboriginal population.

The high prevalence of disability in the Aboriginal population results from poor social health status and disadvantage that are a legacy of European colonisation and dispossession. Many Aboriginal communities experience inter-generational depression and trauma as a direct consequence of cultural dispossession, racism and social segregation.

Government data shows Aboriginal people are twice as likely to have a core activity limitation as non-Aboriginal people. And they’re more likely to be caring for a person with a disability than non-Aboriginal people.

Earlier this year, the Productivity Commission reported the need for a targeted approach to improve the participation of Aboriginal people in government-funded disability supports and services. As a result, the government is undertaking a number of pilot programs in response to the recommendations of Commission’s report on the Disability Care and Support Scheme.

Current limitations

Disability service providers adopt two common strategies that fail to establish a culturally responsive service system for Aboriginal people.

Firstly, they invest in staff training programs in Aboriginal cultural awareness. This appears to be a positive step, showing that disability service providers acknowledge cultural differences between Aboriginal communities and mainstream community services.

Such programs aim to educate non-Aboriginal workers on Aboriginal cultures, politics and history. But cultural awareness training doesn’t work if the disability service provider is not committed to network and engage with local Aboriginal communities on a regular basis.

Research undertaken by the National Disability Services Association found that some non-Aboriginal workers get caught up in a permanent state of self-consciousness when interacting with Aboriginal people. As a result, non-Aboriginal workers are disinclined to work with Indigenous families as they fear they may offend them.

Second, some disability service providers have undertaken Aboriginal recruitment initiatives to establish a culturally safe environment for Aboriginal people. Research indicates that many Aboriginal people prefer to work with an Aboriginal person than a non-Aboriginal person.

So management committees and staff wrongly assume that placing responsibility for all “Aboriginal matters” and Aboriginal clients onto the Aboriginal workers is culturally respectful. Putting this into practice means non-Aboriginal workers don’t have to engage in Aboriginal communities. And it’s result is that the non-Aboriginal workforce doesn’t learn about local Aboriginal community cultural protocols and practices.

Meanwhile Aboriginal workers develop high workloads and are limited in their career development. The end result is that Aboriginal workers become dissatisfied with their workplace and resign.

These two strategies inevitably fail when used in isolation because there’s limited emphasis on relationship building between disability stakeholders and Aboriginal communities.

The focus on cultural and language differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities emphasises such differences and disregards the diversity of cultures and experiences within the Aboriginal population, perpetuating the myth of Aboriginal homogeneity.

Better approaches

Disability stakeholders and Aboriginal communities need to interact at the cultural interface to improve the level of engagement between Aboriginal communities and disability service providers.

The cultural interface is the realm where the trajectories of cultures, histories, beliefs and experiences of both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people intersect, creating tensions and challenges for both cultural groups.

We need to resolve this contestation and tensions to overcome barriers to participation and access for Aboriginal people in the disability service system. The key to this is having Aboriginal communities and disability stakeholders improve communication and relationships under the reforms to the aged care and disability services sector.

One such strategy is creating community interagency forums. This would require stakeholders and Aboriginal communities to establish local networks to identify and address service and program priority areas.

Many disability service providers and Aboriginal communities in New South Wales have developed such networks, which have improved relationships and opened dialogue between the two groups. These networks have undertaken disability awareness campaigns, hosted Aboriginal carer workshops and Aboriginal cultural awareness programs.

The initiatives have helped establish a shared understanding of disability and the benefits in accessing disability services for Aboriginal communities.

Tomorrow (December 3) is International Day of Persons with Disabilities, designated for celebrating and commemorating the successes of the disability rights movement. The theme this year is “Together for a better world for all: including persons with disabilities in development”. Hopefully, it will inspire the sector and the government to make the changes needed to change the fate of Indigenous people with disability.

John Gilroy will be presenting a paper at the World Report on Disability: Implications for Asia and the Pacific Symposium at The University of Sydney on December 5 & 6.

Many years ago Hugh Jackman spent a few months in remote Indigenous communities. It seems to have left his mark on him.

When this loan shark was exposed exploiting remote Aboriginal Australians he made the news headlines across Australia.

He has since been to court and been found guilty. But from what I could find it was only the Kalgoorlie and Perth ABC that reported on the sentencing of this crook

“It’s an important case really Australia wide, in a sense of taking action against people who are targeting aboriginal consumers” – Gary Newcombe, Consumer Protection.

He received a $9000 fine (maximum penalty is a fine of $10000) and ordered to pay $24000 in court costs.

And he obviously felt remorse for his actions:

“$34,000 lighter, that’s how I feel,”

Tomarchio decided to represent himself and declared himself unfit to stand trial due to epileptic fits that affect his memory. The magistrate ordered a neuropsychiatric assessment which found his claim was…. well…. not substantiated.

Evidence showed that people had no idea how much money he had taken from their account to pay back loans. As the ABC reported:

But, one of his own witnesses admitted under cross-examination that he thought Mr Tomarchio had taken $2,000 to $3,000 out of his account despite financial records showing the lender had taken more than $12,000.

But the man is misunderstood. He’s a good Samaritan. From the same report:

Mr Tomarchio told the court he was providing a service to help underprivileged Aboriginal people in Laverton.

He said he was not a moneylender but a concerned Australian worried about his fellow citizens.

The good news is that along the way Consumer Protection was going to return the $150,000 to the 229, mainly very remote people who borrowed money from Sam Tomarchio. This was one year of fleecing people (Jan 2009-Jan 2010).

Tomarchio in his final submission said he was not operating a money lending business (he charged 50% interest so what was it?)…

he never believed helping starving human beings would see him in the situation he was now facing.

Poor Mr Tomarchio.

I have updated the news links at Sam Tomarchio Loan Shark – Link to News Articles

I have written twice previously about Tomarchio when he was initially arrested and again when some loon came out in support of his actions.

Just how bad are we in promoting good health to Indigenous youth. My mate Kishan Kariippanon who puts all his energy into what he does says it needs a serious rethink.

“Social media is becoming a source of information and a tool for communication for Indigenous youth because the social network functions like a typical Indigenous community. When promoting health through education, it is not about ‘teaching’ or ‘training’ young people but about developing the potential of young people to do it themselves. Social media and mobile technology is a tool that surpasses language, cultural and communication barriers.”

The 2011 Deadlys have been chosen. Below are the winners for each category. Biographies and photos (unfortunately photos come as a 67MB download) are available here. Follow the links to learn more about these Indigenous Australians.

MUSIC

Most Promising New Talent in Music – Iwantja Band

Single of the Year Happy People – The Last Kinection

Album of the Year Rrakala – Gurrumul Yunupingu

Band of the Year – The Last Kinection

Male Artist of the Year – Gurrumul Yunupingu

Female Artist of the Year – Jessica Mauboy

THE ARTS

Dancer of the Year – Kathy Marika

Male Actor of the Year Aaron Pedersen – City Homicide

Female Actor of the Year Deborah Mailman – Offspring

Visual Artist of the Year – Michael Cook

Film of the Year – Mad Bastards

TV Show of the Year – Living Black – SBS

Outstanding Achievement in Literature – Anita Heiss – Paris Dreaming

SPORT

Outstanding Achievement in AFL – Andrew Walker – Carlton

Outstanding Achievement in NRL – Johnathan Thurston – Cowboys

Female Sportsperson of the Year – Rohanee Cox – Basketball

Male Sportsperson of the Year – Patrick Mills – Basketball

Most Promising New Talent in Sport – Tanisha Stanton – Netball

COMMUNITY

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Worker of the Year – Muriel Jaragba, Aboriginal Mental Health Worker, Groote Eylandt NT

Outstanding Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health – NPY Women’s Council (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council Aboriginal Corporation) – “No Safe Amount – The Effects of Alcohol in Pregnancy”, Alice Springs NT

Outstanding Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Deadly Ute Project – Goolum Goolum Aboriginal Co-operative through Wimmera Hub, Horsham VIC

Outstanding Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment – Brian Dowd – Black on Track, NSW

Broadcaster of the Year – Karla Hart – Noongar Radio, 100.9FM Perth WA

ELLA AWARDS

The Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sport – Evonne Goolagong Cawley

The Jimmy Little Award for Lifetime Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Music – Col Hardy

It’s Indigenous Literacy day on Wednesday. The aim of the day is to raise funds to support the work of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation to assist in raising literacy levels and thus improve the lives and increase the opportunities of our remote living Indigenous Australians. Money raised goes into buying books and resources for individuals and communities.

There are a few ways you can help.

Place a bid in a silent auction to buy a number of books by Australian authors. Some of these, including the books by Anita Heiss will be personally dedicated.

To bid SMS the title of the book pack you are interested in, and your bid price to 0487759393 or phone 08 92282688. You can listen to the results of the auction by listening from 3PM EST to Noongar Radio streamed on the web.

Donate directly to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

Purchase a painting at the Art for Country auction in Melbourne this Friday evening

Purchase a copy of The Naked Boy and the Crocodile, a series of stories from thirteen Indigenous students from around Australia

Buy a book. 5% of takings on books sold on Wednesday these publishers or book shops goes to the Foundation

Attend a The Great Book Swap Challenge. There are a number of schools, businesses and other organisations taking part.

There are a number of other activities held on the day and throughout the year. I urge you to get involved.

If you doubt that there is a need for you to get involved, read this post by Indigenous Literacy Foundation Ambassador, Andy Griffiths.

Who ever thought I’d be talking about the X-Factor on a Remote/Health/Indigenous blog. But I’ve had a stream of kids and young adults in to use my computer to watch this clip after seeing it on tv on Thursday night or on Facebook.

A young Aboriginal man, Zacchariaha Fielding, from Mimili in the APY lands of northwest South Australia is on the X Factor and through to the next round. Mimili is a community of about 350 people.
Keep an eye out for him over the next few weeks. Here is his version of Tracy Chapman’s song Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution.

I couldn’t make it to the biannual National Rural Health Conference this year.

One of the speakers was Tom Calma. Below is a video of his short presentation (8 mins in) and the slide show titled “Indigenous Health and Closing the Gap”. I urge you to watch it

During September 2010 the 14th Annual Chronic Diseases Network Conference was held in Darwin. The theme was “Health Literacy: Opening Doors to Health and Wellbeing“, focusing on how important health literacy is to treating and preventing chronic conditions.

Low health literacy can be the cause of poor health status and management of chronic conditions.

I couldn’t attend last September so I was delighted to find many of the presentations on the website available for down load. I have placed three of the keynote addresses below. The Department of Health and Families has more presentations to view at the Chronic Disease Network conference page

Well that’s what I think these are. The CSIRO estimate there are 250,000 types of fungi in Australia. 5% of these have been identified.

This ugly looking thing has a much more slender “puff” early on. The Stalked Puffball can be up to 15cm high and inside contains lots of purplish black spores.

It has a number of names depending on the language. Pitjantjantjara ilpatilpata, Western Arrente kwepe-kwepe and Warlpiri ngupu-ngupu
are just a few.

Apparently, though I have never seen it used at all, kids can paint their bodies with the spores or draw pictures. In the old days it was used to darken the white hair in old man’s whiskers! The Warlpiri people further north supposedly use the same spores as a fly repellent.

The stalked puffball has a close relative, Podaxis beringamensis, which only grows on termite mounds. That’s specialisation for you. It was used the same way.

Next time I see one I might have to give it a go.

Click on the pictures gives a bigger image

References
CSIRO Fungi of Australia accessed 31 Dec 2010
Aboriginal Use of Fungi Australian Fungi Website, Australian National Botanic Gardens accessed 31 Dec 2010
Bushfires and BushTucker: Aboriginal Plant Use in Central Australia by Peter Latz. IAD Press

I have a post on Gurrumul Yunupingu somewhere in my blog. It includes this song “I Was Born Blind“. This version was recorded at the Union Chapel in London.