On the 7th of August 2007 the then Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, introduced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 (the NTNER legislation) in response to what he and Prime Minister John Howard described as a “national emergency” in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities that required the exercise of extraordinary powers.
Chief amongst those powers was the control over access to grog.
This is an extended version of the piece published in the email edition of Crikey earlier today. I’ve added a few more thoughts and more from Mildren J’s Sentencing Remarks in this matter.
In April this year, Kevin Rudd, maintaining the fine Australian political tradition of vilifying people you’ve not met and never will, told the world that:
“People smugglers are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth. We see this lowest form of human life at work in what we saw on the high seas yesterday.”
I’m away in far-off Arnhem land but Gloria Morales is at home at Yuendumu and sent me through a few photos and a short story about this little fellow that she looked after for a few days before passing him on to someone in Alice Springs.
Ding the Dingo pup. Photo: Gloria Morales
This is what Gloria told me:
The Northern Territory has seen a number of what might politely be called “adventurous” broad-acre agricultural schemes that have resulted in inglorious failure.
Readers will know that I have borrowed the name for this blog – The Northern Myth – from a favourite book of mine of the same name published in 1965 and written by the distinguished agricultural scientist and economist Dr Bruce R. Davidson.
Davidson was a man well before his time and of whom many of the current boosters of the mantra of “develop the north” should take notice.
He was highly sceptical of the overblown claims being made by politicians, commentators and other boosters in the 1950’s and 1960’s of the potential of the north as an unburdened paradise for broad-scale agricultural development.
In last evening’s Four Corners Quentin McDermott examined the serial failures of Police services around the country to deal appropriately with the ever-growing number of mentally ill people that they encounter in the course of their duties.
Perhaps McDermott could have looked at the NT, where more traditional policing methods – like the use of the “three point hold” also known as “‘ground stabilisation’ or ‘take-down’ – has been implicated in a number of recent deaths.
I am at a loss as to why this marine disaster has hardly registered on the Australian radar – press coverage appears to have been piecemeal at best, with little comprehensive coverage of the local, regional and international consequences.
The political response has been limited to hand-wringing stop-gap measures and to paying for a series of failed attempts to plug the spill and some apparently ineffective mopping-up operations.
Atlas West oil rig. Photograph: Chris Twomey, office of Ausralian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert
These photographs comes from my friend and fellow ethno-ornithologist Mercy Njeri, a young Kenyan woman studying in the US.
We share a fascination with raptors and in her most recent message she said:
Well, if they aren’t they should be.
I’ve written about the NT Ombudsman’s annual reports and the small glimpses that they provide into the various instances of misconduct by the NT Police before here – noting that her annual reports to the NT Parliament only document those matters that come to her by way of formal complaint.
This is the second – and final – part of an interview with Marie Munkara, the author of Every Secret Thing.
Marie Munkara
In Part One of this interview here we talked about the great threads of humour and sarcasm that run through the Every Secret Thing and what seemed like an amazingly easy run that Marie had writing this book.
My friend Roger Stolle from the wonderful Cathead Music store in downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi – the heart of the Mississippi Delta – is selling his house for the re-priced bargain-basement price of $79,000.
111 Catalpa St, Clarksdale, Mississippi
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