Many reckon they understand the accumulation of life stresses hurting those who live below or in close proximity to the poverty line. Poverty and suicide intersect. Poverty and incarceration intersect. Incarceration and homelessness intersect. The layers of stresses and the sense of wellbeing intersect. A pat on the shoulder is often not enough. Words alone […]
April 2018
As a predominately experiential researcher and journeyer to homeland communities, and having worked for more than two decades alongside the incarcerated, homeless and suicide affected I have looked at the national prison population numbers during the last two decades and disaggregated an estimated minimum 100,000 of First Nations people having been to prison. In comparing […]
Seven million Australians live in rural and remote Australia. There are also 1,000 remote communities, the majority with few or no services. Australians living rural and remote have shorter lives, with more than half of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders in the remote not living past a half century of years. Remote living Australians have […]
There is an under-reporting of poverty and homelessness. The horrendous lie of our generation is the one that poverty is being reduced right around the world. In fact it is increasing but there are diabolical efforts to mask this. Poverty – relative and abject – is increasing in Australia and within a couple of decades […]
Racism so deep, that it’s structural, institutional. In 1983, I wrote that despite an increasing number of overseas born culturally diverse Australians, that they and their Australian born children did not reflect in the demography of the nation’s parliaments and boardrooms. I have been writing about this for three and a half decades. More than […]
Professor Marcia Langton has highlighted that Australia’s First Nations females are at least 34 times and up to 80 times more likely to be physically assaulted as a result of family violence. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has reported that First Nations females are at least 35 times more likely to be […]
The funding for child protection totals $4 billion and we have a predicament where state and territory governments spend only 17 per cent of it on family support services. Child protection and family services should focus on assisting vulnerable families as opposed to removing children. In early January I reunited a 14-year-old girl with her […]
It was April, 1978, I was 16 years old. I walked into the kitchen as my Dad was listening to the Greek language radio news. He had paused from his morning bit of getting breakfast together for his six children. The news was reporting of a police raid on more than 100 elderly Greeks who […]
In 1983, the town of Roebourne became to Western Australia what two decades earlier Birmingham had become to Alabama. Sixteen year old John Pat was killed by inebriated police and a few years later White prejudice acquitted the police. Two-thirds of Roebourne, on Ngarluma Country, was comprised of Aboriginal peoples, mostly impoverished, and this […]
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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