Koonibba born whale dreamer, medicine man, song man, musician and Mirning Elder, Bunna Rupert Lawrie has been driving a petition since last week to stop a Native Title meeting from proceeding this Saturday in Ceduna. He said that the meeting could be the death knell for the whale dreaming Country of the Mirning people along […]
October 2013
Social justice campaigners and rights advocates are calling for the end to indiscriminate use of restraints and shackling of prisoners while they are in hospital care. Many have called the wholesale use of restraints as draconian, inhumane – Aboriginal mothers have been shackled to stirrups during birth, heart patients shackled by their ankles to a […]
“My heart was shattered, my soul broken, and now I wish I took him for a walk outside for his last bit of fresh air as a free man,” said Kylie Hampton to the Alice Springs Coroner’s Court of her father’s last day of life. Ms Hampton’s father died in prison custody – in Alice […]
Several weeks ago I identified that there have been 996 reported Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicides between 2001 and 2010; from a racialised vantage this statistic is one of the world’s worst rates of suicide. Each year, at least one in four Aboriginal deaths is by suicide. I estimate that the actual number of […]
Jerzy Ficowski’s poem 5.8.1942 In Memory of Janusz Korczak can be found in Hilda Schiff’s book Holocaust Poetry.The poem is an elegy to the final act of Janusz Korczak, a Polish-Jewish pediatrician, educator, author who established and run orphanages in Warsaw for 30 years. As the principal for children houses (orphanages), a doctor, a publisher […]
Thanks to my local Inglewood Public Library I am re- reading Elisabeth Wynhausen‘s wonderful book The Short Goodbye in honor of my friend and colleague who died recently. Elisabeth was a magnificent journalist and a fearless warrior for social justice who died recently after a short illness. In a long career she worked as a […]
Scott Morrison has indicated that he wants people seeking asylum here in Australia referred to as Illegal Maritime Arrivals and that they are referred to as detainees rather than clients of the department. Of course as expected, some talkback show hosts jumped in fawning admiration of the Immigration minister. One talkback show host here in […]
With due acknowledgement to the scriptwriters of the movie, “Cool Hand Luke” I have borrowed the phrase above to describe an incident that occurred in Sydney yesterday (26th October 2013). In the incident four men and a woman were walking home from the synagogue in Bondi shortly after midnight when a group of about eight […]
It has been touted that $25.4 billion annually is invested in Aboriginal peoples – in order to raise those among them out of abject poverty –“through 86 initiatives”. This claim has dangerously washed through the Australian consciousness as ‘fact’ but it is instead a crock of shit. It is claimed this $25.4 billion spend represents […]
“At about 2am of 13 April 2000, when I was still in a deep sleep, I was taken by the police from home and was sent to the detention centre for the third time – without any explanation from the police,” said Jennifer Zeng. “Several days later the police showed me a letter I wrote […]
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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