Archives July 2014

The British have waged undeclared wars on First Nations peoples ever since 1788.

The murder and misery inflicted today reminds us of when settlers rode into communities on horse back and cut down extended families. In current times, the government does not only allow multi-national mining giants to rape the country and destroy ancient cultures, but they are trying to force First Nations people to live with the poisonous waste.

The book argues the idea that the first Australians were hunter gatherers has been invented to undermine Aboriginal people.

"My message to my own people," he says, "is the rest of the country's not going to change if we don't stick up for our culture; and our culture was one where we had an agricultural economy. If we stick up for our culture, it'll be useful not just for us but for the whole of Australia, because some of those crops that our people were growing are going to be useful in the future."

A great overview of the proposed changes in the WA heritage Act - The new and the old - the good and the bad by Nicholas Herriman of Latrobe University.

The fast pace of development in WA has destroyed much First Nations heritage. In recognition of this, WA’s parliament passed, in 1972, the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Now they propose an updated model but the revisions will make it easier for developers to disturb heritage sites.

An explorer who had at least two conflicts with First Nations people in the nineteenth century was commemorated with a statue of him holding a gun on a Masonic symbol platform right in the centre of Alice Springs

The statue is of John McDouall Stuart, a Scottish explorer who had at least two conflicts with First Nations people during his explorations moving northerly from Adelaide, in the 19th Century.

A Queensland policewoman who launched a racist internet attack against an Aboriginal activist under a fake Facebook profile, where she also called for the banning of Muslims in western society, has escaped disciplinary action after undergoing "cultural training".

Leanne Rissman, who uses the pseudonym "Sharia Anne", was confirmed by an internal police investigation as being behind internet posts and emails in which she calls Aborigines "oxygen thieves" with a "disgusting aversion to work".

A Manunda grandmother has been left "gobsmacked and humiliated" after police sent to investigate a crime at her home arrested her over a $20 parking fine incurred 22 years ago. The incident occurred after Ms Deshong reported a break-and-enter at her home in the early hours of last Friday morning, during which thieves stole her handbag containing valuable items including a diamond engagement ring.

She said police told her a forensics team might attend the scene for fingerprinting, but come Saturday morning she was told this wouldn't occur, instead on the following Monday, she awoke to three police officers arrived to arrest her for a 20yo parking ticket.

None of the recognition proposals confer any right on Aborigines to sue, nor do they impose any obligation on government to act, writes First Nations Activist, Michael Mansell.

"New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia have already recognised indigenous people in their state constitutions and the Federal Parliament passed the Act of Recognition in 2013. Not a single benefit to anyone has flowed from those measures, writes Michael Mansell, a Lawyer and First Nations Activist from Tasmania."

In the seven years the Bogimbah Creek mission was open, more than 100 First Nations people perished from illness and malnutrition - the result of appalling living conditions ... Now scientists from the University of the Sunshine Coast will try to return that knowledge to the island's K'Gari community, with the help of ground-penetrating radar.
In 1897, members of Butchulla clans on the island and on the mainland were rounded up and forced to live in the notorious Bogimbah Creek mission, under governments genocidal policy.

First Nations children are eight times more likely to be receiving child protection services than non-Indigenous kids, and more than 10 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care, a report has revealed.

Across Australia, 68% of children placed in care are placed with relatives or kin, other Indigenous caregivers or in Indigenous residential care, in line with the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle.

Summary by Helen Davidson (Guardian) and link to Full Report