By Four Arrows and Barbara Mann, Peter Lang Publishers | Book Excerpt The following are excerpts from Teaching Truly: A Curriculum to Indigenize Mainstream Education By Four Arrows (May, 2013 Peter Lang Publishers) From the Preface: Many say that public schooling is failing. The evidence offered depends upon the critic’s viewpoint. Policymakers, politicians and the private education industry […]
June 2013 – Page 2
Six years ago my family watched the TV in my living room as John Howard announced he would be sending in the military and taking control of our communities. I have never been more frightened in my life. I locked the gate of my town camp and kept the kids inside for two weeks for […]
By Mick Estens – Opinion Piece It is not until you spend time at the Court House in Katherine Northern Territory that you get to see and feel what Aboriginal people have accepted in their life. On the day I was there the reality of 220 years of English law and failure of successive governments […]
There has been another death in Australian immigration detention. 26 year old Afghan asylum seeker Ali Ahmed Jafari collapsed last night in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre. He was taken to Liverpool hospital where he died shortly after arrival having suffered what is believed to have been a heart attack. According to the Refugee Action Coalition, […]
A Senate Committee initiated and then chaired by Australian Greens Senator Penny Wright has found significant failures in the prison system. Senator Wright said that a new approach has to be taken to crime and justice in Australia. In light of the doubling of the prison population in the last two decades and with the […]
Composed as winter started to close in on Poland in late 1976 the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is a symphony in three movements for orchestra and soprano. Whilst Górecki was determined that the symphony be regarded as more than a reflection on war alone it is hard to move past this concept and indeed the […]
Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula is home to the world’s largest and oldest collection of rock art and petroglyphs, more than one million of them – tens of thousands of years of recorded Aboriginal culture. The Save the Burrup campaigners led by local Elder Wilfred Hicks have campaigned furiously for nearly a decade to have the […]
Civil disobedience is the only strategy left to fight the near unwinnable battle to get Governments acting on the urgent need to reverse some of the effects of climate change. Most Governments have done either so little or next-to-nothing that by the end of the century the planet will be at least 2 degrees and […]
In a decade of teaching, I have approached many a semester’s end wistfully: another goodbye to students I have, week after week, intellectually bonded with. But this semester, wistful feels more like the blues. I am soon to be exiled from pedagogical heaven: an English 101 class so academically voracious, they rendered my job effortless. […]
Despite a sense of certainty that Prime Minister Julia Gillard will be at the helm when she wakes up on September 14 parliamentary insiders on both sides of the Gillard/Rudd fence are embroiled in the silly battle of wills. Some are teetering, some have given up all sense of hope, some believe that Kevin Rudd […]
General News
- March 9, 2021
Australia’s governments must end health discrimination in its prisons. An incarcerated child must not be a second-class citizen. Nor any adult. We must ask, why are our governments dishing the vulnerable jailed, second-class healthcare? When evaluating the nation’s carceral system, we are […]
- February 2, 2021
When will the cries of the homeless be heard? Is there some sort of grotesque caste system in Western Australia? The anti-humanism is a brutal public spectacle. On the last day of January, the Western Australian Government actuated five days […]
- December 3, 2020
West Australia is the nation’s backwater. It is the mother of injustices, inequalities and the draconian. West Australia and the Northern Territory leave the have-nots that far behind, for many their lot appears irreparable. If there is a Mason-Dixon line […]
- September 22, 2020
There are many faces to homelessness. A 51-year-old woman walked into my Perth office. She has lived thirteen consecutive years street-homeless. Not long ago, she spent eighteen months sleeping her nights in the same park. She is weary, harrowed by […]
- September 3, 2020
Often beleaguered by international aid work I have lifelong been involved in; the increasing unmet needs, the mongrel injustices, I have argued the horrendous lie of our generation is that poverty is being reduced around the world. There are countries […]
- March 10, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – In 2014, I disaggregated to the Kimberley’s First Nations peoples, the nation’s highest suicide rate, one of the world’s highest, at over 70 suicides per 100,000 population (First Nations), thereabouts seven times the national rate. Fortunately, although […]
- February 18, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – More than 51 months ago I wrote an article on the imperatives of forgiveness and redemption. This remains true. We journey together in one form or another, we can either salt the earth or jag the road, […]
- January 29, 2020
By Gerry Georgatos – Trae lost his eleven-year-old brother to suicide. Nine months later he lost his mother to suicide. Trae was the last to see his brother. Half an hour later he went looking for his little brother. In the […]
- January 21, 2020
Gerry Georgatos – Children as young as 9 years have been lost to suicide, three in fact in recent years. Australians should ask, why? Proportionally, more children aged 14 years and less have been lost so far this century compared […]
- December 10, 2019
Gerry Georgatos – A mother suicides, a father suicides, their child was a suicide. Not once has this occurred but untold times. Over the years I have warned of mothers and fathers that would be near certain lost to suicide […]
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