July, 2010

In evidence given to the Committal proceeding in the Alice Springs Magistrate’s Court in December 2009, one of the campers told the Court that the “words exchanged” included “You black cunts – fuck off out of this Todd River” and “Get out of the Todd River, you motherfuckers”.

This is “Stripe“, who ended up with Gloria Morales, an animal carer that works at the Warlukurlangu Artists cooperative in Yuendumu – a remote community about 300 kilometres north-west 0f Alice Springs.

This female Pallid Cuckoo Cacomantis pallidus has been hanging around my front yard for the past week or so and I had the chance to grab a few pix of her this afternoon. She lacks the very distinctive, and often distinctly irritating, call of the male of this species.

Hell, if “friends” were votes, Warren H would be streeting his opposition right now. His personal Facebook page has 387 “friends, his recently created Green’s candidate Facebook page has 190 people that “like” it, there is a Wikipedia-based “Community” Facebook page that has 33 “friends” and his MySpace site has a whopping 1,709 “friends” With friends like that who needs voters!

Mick Dodson, an indigenous Australian and a Permanent Forum member attended these early meetings and he said “If you closed your eyes and forgot the accents and just listened to what people were saying, you would have though you were at home, because there was such a commonality of problems and issues that indigenous people elsewhere in the world were confronting. He further stated “You’d hear the same stories at any community meeting in Australia; issues about rights not being respected; human rights not being acknowledged. It’s a common problem for indigenous peoples worldwide.

In the north of Western Australia in May 1946, an estimated 600 Aboriginal stockmen went on strike until they had been guaranteed a minimum wage of thirty shillings per week. Some had previously been receiving food and clothing but no pay; others had been paid up to twelve shillings a week. Though the strike was on the face of it, for better wages, it also had a strong human rights and natural justice aspect, with the demand that Aboriginal workers be paid in cash and not in goods. This strike was organised by an Aboriginal man, Dooley Bin Bin with his friend Don McLeod acting as consultant. The organisation was a mammoth task, requiring communication between stockmen throughout northern Western Australia. The strike did not end until August 1949.

I am honoured to have been given this 2010 NAIDOC award. I remember like it was yesterday being in the audience at this event in 2007 when my former colleague Jack Ah Kit spoke after receiving the same award. It was only weeks after John Howard and Mal Brough had made their shock-and-awe Intervention announcement in 2007.

The Bush Turkey Tjukurrpa is one of two major Tjukurrpa to pass through the country of the Spinifex People. It is a Tjukurrpa that is seen by other Western Desert people as belonging to the Spinifex people…The Wati Kipara…involves the travels of an old Bustard who attempts to steal the world’s fire and drown it in the ocean at Madura. The Wati Kipara Tjukurrpa involves excruciating physical punishment, murder, betrayal, sex, deceit and intrigue, but the details of these events remain secret and privy only to senior men.

Many years ago I had a T-shirt produced by local Darwin artists Chips Mackinolty and Therese Ritchie. On the front of the shirt was a woman talking to her husband about a request from their child, who was standing before them resplendent in one of those cheap cowboy outfits we all had as children. From the foggy mists of memory she was saying something along the lines of “Johnny wanted a Cowboy Outfit for Christmas. So I got him the Northern Territory Government.” Colin Holt’s show, “30 Years of Chief Ministers – the official portraits we should have had” runs from 8 July to 4 August at the Alice Springs Public Library.

“In painting, an artist conveys his sense of form, topic, and perspective. A painting may express a clear social position, as with Picasso’s condemnation of the horrors of war in Guernica, or may express the artist’s vision of movement and color, as with “the unquestionably shielded painting of Jackson Pollock”: United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the matter of Steven C. White v the City of Sparks, Nebraska.