In Australia – and throughout much of the western world – racism is bound in a cast of aspersions that it is borne of Whiteness despite that racism has nothing to do with Whiteness. Racism is borne of exploitation, of the oppressor and the oppressed dichotomy and its dynamical structures. The rest – the cruelty, […]
April 2016
In societies where the people are exposed to relentless oppression, suicide is a normal response – the ultimate form of resistance to the prolonged violence of oppression. It is not the individual who takes her or his life who is responsible for this culmination but the act of relentless oppression that is responsible. The impacts […]
There is a tyranny of greed that keeps humanity downtrodden and the best that people can hope is the indenture of wage slavery. We opine for drudgery. Humanity tinkers with the belief that it can improve the financial systems of the world to reduce poverty. Nothing improves only the impression that is sold to us […]
Academics, bureaucrats and policy makers, far too many of them, are a defining part of the problems and worse are who get in the way of what needs to be understood and done to address the wrongs that blight the poorest and marginalised and for many culminate in prison and suicide. A relative minority of […]
Suicide is on the increase – the last annual national toll increased by 300 suicides. A significant proportion of the increase was made up of migrants. Nearly 3,000 Australians took their lives in 2014. We know of the humanitarian crisis with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicides but little is known about the high suicide […]
It is estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ life expectancy is 10.6 years lower than that of the non-Aboriginal population. Is this really true or are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples dying decades earlier than what is being sold to us. I have long been […]
Nearly 90 per cent of the Australian prison population did not complete a secondary education, with nearly 40 per cent not getting past Year 9. Noongar man, Mervyn Eades knows the inside of prisons all too well. He visits prisons and juvenile detention facilities to inspire hope and ways forward. In 2002, Mervyn founded Ngalla Maya […]
Birri Gubba Gungalu and Murri man, Tiga Bayles, 62, has passed away. Only rarely do I write about the passing of anyone – each day millions of us pass from this world, our souls roll over. However Tiga Bayles was one of those individuals whose great works have left behind a legacy of improved lives […]
It is 25 years since the end of the four-year Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and today marks 24 years since the tabling of the Final Report and its 339 recommendations from the royal commission. We know the horrible statistical narrative – the numbers are people – and the worsening trends – generations […]
Suicide among the descendants of the First Peoples of nations with relatively recent colonial oppressor histories has reached humanitarian crisis levels with arguably the Australian experience the worst. The sense of hopelessness among descendants of First Peoples in middle and high income nations such as Australia, Canada and the United States has reached catastrophic crisis […]
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