“The roadside memorial is particularly important because it indicates to us that there is a new way looking at grief and mourning.” Jennifer Clark, UNE.
I was trawling through an old notebook today and came across some spider-scrawled notes from my 400 mile road-trip from Cleveland in central Mississippi to Baton Rouge in Louisiana on Easter Sunday this year.
Roadkill – armadillo, cats, dogs, birds (various), opossums, squirrels, snakes, skunk, toads, raccoon, deer, Turkey Vulture…
All about me lay the scattered, shattered remains – here the severed head, there a leg, stripped of flesh, next to the road another head, ten feet away a razor-taloned foot, wing and tail. Whatever had happened here had been brief and incredibly brutal.
The folks over at the oddly named spellr.us really do have a point – if the biggest and brightest universities can’t get it right – who is left that we can trust? Governments? Though you would think that spellr.us would at least have a typo-free public face.
Until we give back to the black man just a bit of land that was his and give it back without provisos, without strings to snatch it back, without anything but complete generosity of spirit in concession for the evil we have done him – until we do that, we shall remain what we have always been so far: a community of thieves – Xavier Herbert, Poor Fellow My Country.
By Bob Gosford
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Posted in Australian politics, Northern Territory politics, The NT Intervention
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Tagged Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788-2001, Bain Attwood, C. D. Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, Chris Cuneen and Terry Libesman, Indigenous People and the Law in Australia, Marcia Langton, Michael Meadows, Minister Macklin, NAIDOC, NT Chief Minister Henderson, Peter Sutton, Poor Fellow My Country, Prime Minister Rudd, Representations and Indigenous Images, Richard Broome, Rosalind Kidd, Rosemary Neill, The Making of the Aborigines, The Politics of Suffering, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs - The Untold Story, Voices in the Wilderness, White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia, Xavier Herbert
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