From the dim recesses of memory I recall that Mandawuy turned up one night while we were on tour in Sydney with an old battered guitar, a swag of great songs and a keen desire to get them heard by as many people as possible.
What Rothwell is of course talking about here is localised Aboriginal self-determination, an aspiration that he has frequently condemned to the dustbin of Australian political history: “For some time it has been clear Aboriginal self-determination has had its day.”
Gerry Wood only needed to make one deal to maintain Labor in power. If he had supported the CLP there would have been three deals – between Wood and CLP opposition leader Terry Mills, between Mills and Alison Anderson and between Wood and Anderson and the risk of any of those three deals going pear-shaped was substantial.
The Australian maintains it’s bizarre position that Alison Anderson was a visionary that could do no wrong and was now a victim of a dastardly conspiracy by a manipulative Gerry Wood and the forces of absolute evil behind NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson.
Henderson’s failures are all his own doing, led by a poor set of polices that attack his electoral heartland and a supine surrender to the Federal government’s directions — but he hasn’t been helped by the loose cannons rolling around the deck of what passes for the sinking ship of state in the NT.
Under the Senate’s spotlight are the arrangements between the Tiwi Land Council and Great Southern, the promoter of broad-acre MIS forestry schemes on the islands that have seen vast swathes of virgin tropical savanna transformed into a monocrop of the fast growing Acacia mangium.
No-one in NT Chief Minister’s Henderson’s now-marginal, single-seat majority government has the intellectual or moral wit, rigour or vigour to think outside of the prevailing assimilationist paradigm that now runs in Australia’s management of indigenous affairs.
As Crikey and The Northern Myth have reported and discussed on Tuesday and Wednesday this week there are real concerns at Yuendumu and across central Australia about the way that some journalists went about their business reporting on what should have been, and largely was, a good news story.
The opening this past Monday of the [...]
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