Because of the amount of discussion and public debate focusing on Aboriginal Culture being responsible for child and sexual abuse I wanted to write this week on non-Indigenous “White” Australian communities. I started by researching a number of stories over the last week that showed examples of sexual abuse within their culture. The outcome is […]
Dr Woolombi Waters – Page 2
The article I wrote in response to Andrew Bolt’s piece “Our fear of seeming racist hurts Aboriginal children” (Herald Sun, 10 September, 2014) certainly gained some attention attracting a large number of e-mails both for and against. What amazes me is the sense of superiority and lack of understanding that comes from many of those […]
“After the Creation, brothers, sisters and others of the closest kin, intermarried promiscuously – the evil effects of these alliances becoming manifest – a council of chiefs (elders) was assembled to consider in what way they might be averted, the result of their deliberations being a petition to the Muramura (Good Spirit), in answer to […]
A little over a month ago it was reported Tony Abbott as the Prime Minister of Australia made a political gaffe or blunder when he stated “I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land.” But […]
Courtesy of The National Indigenous Times Noel Pearson said the Forrest report struck at the “roots of the passive-welfare predicament of Indigenous Australians”. He said the Forrest reforms did not displace the welfare safety-net system but rather built “a new opportunity staircase as an alternative pathway for individuals and families to climb out of disadvantage […]
The Western world is in mourning over the sons, daughters, couples, parents and grandparents who never made it home after the tragic Malaysia Airlines disaster. Days on from the horrific crash the official Australian death toll from flight MH17 has been updated to 37 and the total deaths remains at 298. World headlines have included […]
So here we are NAIDOC Week for 2014 and the theme is: Serving Country: Centenary & Beyond in honour of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who have fought in defence of country. I remember reading this when it was first announced and thinking to myself, really? I hope those frontier warriors, […]
I am sitting in the middle of a pristine untouched rainforest that belongs to the Maroon people of Jamaica. With no taxes, no police and hardly any crime, the independent town of Accompong is in western Jamaica. ‘A nation within a nation,’ is the legal status and autonomy of these Indigenous Peoples who helped runaway […]
I’m just getting my things together to fly out of Australia. Those of you who have read my articles from the very beginning will remember this same time last year I was in the Caribbean speaking at the Caribbean Studies Association Conference. I gave a paper on “Black Consciousness’. I remember it like it was […]
It’s the weekend and I am at Nudgee College to watch my son, Ngiyaani play his first game of Rugby Union for the school. He is there on both an equity and rugby scholarship after making the Brisbane Junior Rugby Union development side last year. He’s just turned 13 years old, is bigger than me, […]
General News
- 30 Aug 2018
The death of a child is always heartbreaking but when it is by suicide it is as devastating as it gets, with long term negative psychosocial effects for those left behind. There is a whole different level of anguish and […]
(0) - 22 Aug 2018
Future generations will damn the present for its atrocities as we damn and indict the past for theirs. The offshore custodial predicaments that have degenerated to indefinite immigration detention will cast a dark pall of grimness and aspersions into the […]
(0) - 8 Jun 2018
It’s been many a year since I reviewed my position in so far as an Australian republic is concerned. I know that from my arrival here 43 years ago I have always felt extremely uneasy about the fact that the […]
(0) - 3 May 2018
Over the last five or six years I have written extensively about the sheer discrimination that is present in our migration system here in Australia. That discrimination is not on the basis of race (that is another angle altogether – […]
(1) - 24 Apr 2018
Many reckon they understand the accumulation of life stresses hurting those who live below or in close proximity to the poverty line. Poverty and suicide intersect. Poverty and incarceration intersect. Incarceration and homelessness intersect. The layers of stresses and the […]
(0) - 22 Apr 2018
Wheelchairs for Kids is one of those one in a million charities where everyone is a volunteer, where no one draws any form of remuneration. In its three decades since establishment, it has donated rough terrain children’s wheelchairs to 73 […]
(0) - 17 Apr 2018
Seven million Australians live in rural and remote Australia. There are also 1,000 remote communities, the majority with few or no services. Australians living rural and remote have shorter lives, with more than half of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders […]
(0) - 17 Apr 2018
There have been millions of casualties as a result of the catastrophes in Syria, with a half million dead, with millions of refugees, with collective human consciousness diminished and reduced to the aberrant. It is said that no lie lives […]
(1) - 14 Apr 2018
There is an under-reporting of poverty and homelessness. The horrendous lie of our generation is the one that poverty is being reduced right around the world. In fact it is increasing but there are diabolical efforts to mask this. Poverty […]
(0) - 11 Apr 2018
Racism so deep, that it’s structural, institutional. In 1983, I wrote that despite an increasing number of overseas born culturally diverse Australians, that they and their Australian born children did not reflect in the demography of the nation’s parliaments and […]
(0)
Join us on