Gerry Georgatos is a life-long human rights and social justice campaigner, and an award winning investigative journalist. He forayed into journalism for several years. His predominant work is in suicide prevention research and in unveiling racism and in articulating the ways forward. In 2011, he left a management background and the tertiary sector and found […]
Contributor Biographies
Brian Butler was born in Darwin in the Northern Territory, following his Mother’s (Emily Ann Gordon) forced removal from his Grandmother (Nana Eliza Gordon) where together they had lived in the detention centre known as ‘The Bungalow’ in Alice Springs. Emily was taken to the ‘Bagot Reserve’ detention centre in Darwin and it was here […]
Nicola Butler was born in Rose Park South Australia. Nicola’s family descends from the Eastern Aranda and Luritja peoples of the central desert regions on her Father’s side and Scottish, English, German and Swedish on her Mother’s side. Nicola’s partner Andrew descends from the Ngarrindjeri peoples from the Coorong and the Barngala peoples from the […]
Suresh Rajan is a former president of the Ethnic Communities Council of Western Australia. He is a regular contributor on the subject of multiculturalism to media in Perth and has been so for many years. Suresh is also an Ambassador for people with disabilities and is the President of the National Ethnic Disabilities Alliance (NEDA). […]
Ramdas Sankaran is a professional medical and psychiatric social worker with substantial senior managerial experience within Commonwealth & State public services and the community services sector. He has extensive experience in implementing a range of programs and projects and has advanced the cause of Human rights, multiculturalism, Aboriginal Reconciliation and substantive equality for thirty years. […]
Lester Ranby is a television news producer and journalist. All his working life he has worked in the television industry, mainly in news and documentary production. In recent years he has worked for the Reuters news agency, bringing Australian news to an international audience.
Four Arrows (Wahinkpe Topa), aka Don Trent Jacobs, has doctorates in health psychology and in curriculum. Former Dean of Education at Oglala Lakota College and a tenured professor at Northern Arizona University, he is currently on faculty in the College of Educational Leadership and Change at Fielding Graduate University. Author of numerous articles, chapters and […]
Dr Brian Steels is Director of the Asia Pacific Forum for Restorative Justice and coordinates the Institute for Restorative Justice & Penal Reform in Australia. Dr Steels is also a Researcher at Curtin University at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies and his work among Aboriginal Communities as a researcher and counselor is well known. Brian […]
Debbie Kilroy OAM MLB, BSocWk, GDFMenH, GDLPrac and former prisoner, is the CEO of Sisters Inside Inc., an independent community organisation which advocates for the human rights of women who have been criminalised. Debbie is a passionate activist for the implementation and monitoring of human rights within women’s prisons and advocates strongly against discriminatory and […]
Jess Beckerling is the convenor of the WA Forest Alliance. She has been campaigning for native forest protection since she was 17 when she deferred from her degree in politics and economics to join an old growth forest blockade near Pemberton. Jess is now living in WA’s south west with two young children while studying […]
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in history. He currently lectures in Law, Global Studies and Social Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne and writes extensively for independent journalism outlets. Dr Kampmark teaches core legal courses within the Legal and Dispute Studies program for the Bachelor […]
Mr. Ali Gohar, who is London and Pakistan-based, is the founder of Justice Peace Initiatives and remains an advisor to the organisation. He has a degree in International Relations from Quaid-E-Azam University, Pakistan. For thirteen years, Mr Gohar served as the Additional Commissioner Social Welfare Cell for Afghan refugees–a project of (UNHCR). In 2002 he […]
Sallie Coulson is the Secretary of the Preston Environment Group, a not for profit grassroots community group in the South West of Australia. The group have campaigned to end all logging in Western Australia’s native forests since the early 1980s. After many years of campaigning to protect WA’s native forest and writing countless submissions, thereby […]
Mia Pepper works with the Conservation Council of Western Australia as the nuclear free campaigner and is a board member of the Mineral Policy Institute. Mia studied at RMIT university in Melbourne in environment and social science, where she was also the environment officer with the student union. Her time in Melbourne was spent between […]
Dr Alice Clark is the Executive Director of Shelter SA, the peak body for housing in South Australia. Alice has an extensive background in housing, the community sector, research and policy analysis and is also an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Quality Use of Medicines and Pharmacy Research Centre, University of South Australia. A published […]
Professor Dreisinger earned her PhD in English from Columbia University, where she specialised in American and African-American studies. Her book, Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) was featured in the New York Times Book Review and on National Public Radio. She is the founder and Academic Director of John Jay’s Prison-to-College […]
Yumarri gululgulul jawari ngaba Mick Estens, ngina da stogmen warg nemberli bulugi dejin. barmarr lilmi maluga sgul nyaga dururrdururr da bulugi wanji njarramala. Mick Estens grew up in Coonabarabran NSW. He writes that the land and its people were always with and around him in his youth. In school holidays he would travel with his […]
Michael Barker is currently interning at Justice Action in Sydney fighting to restore prisoners basic human rights across Australia. He graduated from the University of Western Sydney in 2012 with a Bachelor of Psychology. His thesis examined the effects of emotion on classification learning.
During each of 11 recent trips to Afghanistan, Kathy Kelly, as an invited guest of the Afghan Peace Volunteers, has lived alongside ordinary Afghan people in a working class neighborhood in Kabul. She and her companions in Voices for Creative Nonviolence believe that “where you stand determines what you see.” They are resolved not to […]
“My mother was a Ngunnawal Woman whose parents were both of Ngunnawal decent – of the Brungle and Cowra regions. My mother was removed from her homelands late 1940s. My father’s dad was Cuban and his mum a French immigrant.” “I was born in 1974. I grew up on NSW’s Central Coast – Woy-Woy or […]
Poppy recently completed an Honours degree in sociology at the University of Sydney. Her research focused on the representation of asylum seekers in Australian media, an area in which she has a continuing interest. Working in arts administration, she is also a musician and a spoken word poet.
Kellie Tranter is a lawyer and activist who stood as an Independent candidate for the NSW Parliament with an unsolicited endorsement of her candidature by anti-corruption fighter John Hatton AO. She has delivered addresses, chaired workshops and participated in public debates on issues like climate change, human rights and gender equality at local, national and […]
Avantika Mehta is a lawyer, fiction writer and freelance journalist. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Sunday Guardian, Tehelka magazine and Times of India. Her fiction has appeared in The Asia Literary Review. Follow her on @OventikkaM
Celeste Liddle is the current National Indigenous Organiser at the NTEU and prior to that worked in Indigenous university student support for 8 years. She is also a freelance writer and has been published in Daily Life (Fairfax), The Guardian, Tracker and a few other places. She blogs personally at “Rantings of an Aboriginal Feminist”.
Associate Prof Joseph Ting – MBBS MSc (Lond) BMedSc PGDipEpi DipLSTHM FACEM Joseph was a member of the Advisory Council of Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services, is adjunct associate professor for clinical research methods and prehospital care at Queensland University of Technology’s School of Public Health and Social Work, and clinical senior lecturer in the Division of Anaesthesiology and […]
Samantha Connor is a disability advocate from Western Australia. She has lived experience of disability and is a wheelchair user. Samantha is a board member at People with Disability Australia, the WA Ministerial Advisory Council on Disability and People with Disability WA. She recently contributed to the expert committee on Workforce and Sector Capacity for […]
Brian Terrel is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence. He lives and works at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa, where he helps tend a large garden and small herd of goats and chickens. From this little farm, Brian travels around Iowa and beyond, speaking and acting with communities that are […]
Dr Woolombi Waters is a Kamilaroi Aboriginal man with six children. His PhD “Contemporary Urban Indigenous ‘Dreamings’: interaction, engagement and creative practice,” documents surviving Kamilaroi epistemologies essential to cultural maintenance and trans-generational pedagogy. A published playwright screenwriter and academic, Woolombi is the Convener of Screenwriting at Griffith University having won the Griffith University Excellence in […]
Ingetje Tadros was born in Holland and now lives in Broome Australia. In her formative years, Ingetje constantly documented life and people around her. Ingetje extended her photographic practice by combining her passion to travel with photography. Leaving Holland to travel globally Ingetje has photographed exhaustively in scores of countries. She is the recipient of […]
Syed Fakhar KaKaKhel is a well known journalist, producer, trainer and researcher based in Peshawar, Pakistan. He has more than a decade long history of covering conflict in the Af-Pak region. Armed with masters degrees in both Journalism and English literature, Mr KaKaKhel has experience working in print and electronic media for local and international […]
Alan Austin is an Australian freelance journalist now living near Nîmes in the South of France. His special interests are the news media, religious affairs and economic and social issues which impact the disadvantaged. Alan has written for many media outlets and been published in most Australian newspapers and online publications. For 20 years from the […]
Colin Penter lives in Perth but was born in Albany on WA’s southern coast where his family ran a small business for over 60 years. He left Albany at 17 and moved to the city for tertiary study and sport. He holds graduate and post graduate qualifications and for the last 20 years has worked […]
Dr Meg Perkins was born in colonial Africa, studied sociology and psychology in South Africa, and has worked with people involved in the Australian criminal justice system since 1991. Her PhD studies were in criminology, community psychology and cultural studies. Meg still sees people suffering from the after-effects of trauma in her private practice.
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