High profile and well known Noongars – Elders, community leaders and academics – are questioning the validity and the intentions of the Western Australian Government’s $1.3 billion Native Title offer after the High Court of Australia unanimously held that the grant of a mineral lease in the 1960s does not extinguish Native Title rights and […]
March 2014
Western Australia’s Premier Colin Barnett ordered the deplorable Kafkaesque act to demolish the Swan Valley Nyungah Community’s homes without any notice or courtesy to the former residents, many of whom are homeless. The demolishing occurred at the crack of dawn with a huge contingent of security and with the police at the ready. But to […]
Those are two of the lines of the English translation of the National Anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2011 there were 2813 people in WA who were born in Bosnia Herzegovina. This is a New and Emerging community in WA with the vast majority (72%) having arrived here between 1991 and 2000, primarily as […]
Elders have condemned a move by Toro Energy to expand their yet unrealised Wiluna mine plan into a much larger uranium precinct spanning 100km and which will destroy ecologically sensitive lake systems. Local Wiluna Elder Glen Cooke said everything must be done to prevent this mine which is intended as Western Australia’s first uranium mine […]
Last summer, my family and I travelled to post-revolution Libya to celebrate Ramadan. I expected, in my naiveté, an experience of Ramadan more authentic than the one I experienced routinely in the U.S.; I expected Ramadan to be more spiritually fulfilling in Libya than it was back home— somehow more satisfying. But I was disappointed […]
i. “Your name is Tasbeeh. Don’t let them call you by anything else.” My mother speaks to me in Arabic; the command sounds more forceful in her mother tongue, a Libyan dialect that is all sharp edges and hard, guttural sounds. I am seven years old and it has never occurred to me to disobey […]
*** WARNING *** This post contains disability and racial hate speech. This is Neil. Neil is a retard. Imbecile, dummy, stupid, idiot, subnormal, a mongol, defective, dimwitted, mentally defective, moronic, slow, shall we continue? Then there are the clever analogies – a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, not playing with a full deck, […]
Mandatory sentencing negatively impacts First Peoples in ways and in rates of incarceration that prove that they are targeted – racialised. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in Western Australia where First Peoples adult males are incarcerated, from a racialised measure, at the world’s highest rate. With recent debates for more mandatory policies, penalties and […]
Horror figures reveal 1 in 10 people, largely First Peoples, including women and children, are forced to live rough right throughout the Kimberley. The tourist mecca, Broome, is skirted by shanty towns, but they are soon to be got rid of and the homeless forgotten to somewhere else – same old story. Same old racism. […]
We know of Marlon Noble and of Rosie Anne Fulton but what about the rest? According to Australia’s Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes there may be more than 30 First Peoples with disabilities languishing in Western Australian and Northern Territory prisons. According to the First Peoples Disability Network, it could be as many as 50. […]
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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