not the motorcycle diaries

Currently on Indymedia Sydney:

Driving 1,500 km to shop - “Rudd should hold his head in shame”
Posted February 17th, 2008
By Diet Simon

Sydney, 17 February 2008 — How would you feel having to drive 1,500 kilometres to buy your household supplies, limited to 60 dollars per person?

How would you feel about police and troops with guns swarming through your community, your house, your possessions totally accessible to them without any legal instrument?

How would you feel about not being able to spend your own or your dead husband’s war veterans pension after he served in Vietnam?

All of that and more is happening in the intervention in the Northern Territory, which is moving up community after community from the South Australian border to the coast, terrifying people.

And now the architect of it, former army man and minister for Aboriginal affairs under John Howard, Mal Brough, has been invited by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to be part of his “war cabinet” to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage.

“The people are screaming in horror at this,” says Aboriginal leader Michael Anderson, “in one fell swoop he has unwound all his good intentions in the sorry speech.”

“People are terrorised by the number of police around them, their limitless powers, soldiers with guns.”

Workshop with elders

The prime minister should hold his head in shame, says Anderson, who workshopped on Tuesday with key leaders from NT communities in Canberra before parliament opened. The workshop was held in the grounds of the Aboriginal Embassy, founded in 1972 by four black power activists, of whom Anderson, aged 56, is the sole survivor.

Those leaders described what was happening in the communities as the imposition of martial law and charged that the media and politicians are misrepresenting the whole situation.

“They told me of extreme police powers, with total access to communities, vehicles, homes – they need no legal instrument to do whatever they want, they can stop and search wherever and whoever they want,” Anderson told me.

Anyone found with an empty beer can in their car faces a fine of $1,000 the first time, $2,500 the second time, Anderson reports from the meeting. “At the third time they are classified as a supplier – without any definition of quantity – which carries a minimum fine of 75,000 dollars.”

No vehicles of white people, just those of Aborigines are searched, the elders told the workshop, which they ran to try to get public attention.

“The quarantining of war widows’ or veterans pensions is hurting in a big way, it’s the biggest hurt,” Anderson quotes the community leaders as saying.

Shopping 750 km away

Most of the people in the communities affected by the intervention have to shop at Centrelink-approved stores a long way from their homes in the bush, up to 750 kilometres in some cases. They’re all Coles, Woolworths and K-Mart stores. They are not allowed to shop in their own community stores.

“The leaders say this is forcing people off their land to come into the cities. They see it as a stealthy move to seize Aboriginal lands,” Anderson quotes from the workshop. “It’s a very well thought-out move.”

To shop and get their welfare benefits, people have to prove their identity to get ID cards, usually by birth certificate. “Most of the old people were never recorded, they don’t have a piece of paper on them. That even applies to some of the younger ones because they were born in the bush.”

“So, they get no card and get no money. How are they supposed to live? And on $60 dollars per person per week no-one can feed and clothe kids. How do they survive? This is worse than the original situation.”

“We don’t need to be treated like this, it’s gone back to the 50s, it’s more of John Howard.”

Anderson, a lawyer by training and the elected leader of the 16 Gumilaroi clans in northwest NSW and southwest Queensland, accused Rudd of “shallow dealing” with Aboriginal affairs.

Talks on the ground

“He has to open his eyes a little wider. He has to talk to the people in the communities, not some bureaucrats in Sydney or Canberra.

“This has to be fixed from the bottom up. He has to get out there and listen to them, community after community. He should just look at his own speech.

“One size does not fit all. There’s been much talk of the culturally appropriate approach. Well, in these communities, not by their choice, there are mixtures of clans and tribes who don’t get on.

“In past mistakes bureaucrats and pollies saw single, homogenous communities and policies have been very divisive.”
Michael Anderson can be contacted at 02 68296355 landline, 04272 92 492 mobile, 02 68296375 fax, ngurampaa@bigpond.com.au.

A little more here, see also here.

Well, you can’t hurry love I guess.

It’s endlessly fascinating and frustrating to follow the e-debates going on about the apology. I’ve been idly watching the ones going on under news items on the ABC website and that of the Daily Telegraph (if I didn’t have a thesis to write, I just know I’d start up a website like this one).

I am so struck by the way in which ‘debates’ like these open up a space for white settler descended Australians to, seemingly unconsciously, pour out so much of their own hurt and bitterness: ‘My Mum was white and taken away too, where’s her apology?’, in other words, ‘I’ve been so hurt in my life and no one came to help. Where’s my apology?’, ‘Aboriginal kids were taken away because they were NEGLECTED. They are still being NEGLECTED.’, in other words, ‘I have been NEGLECTED. I feel NEGLECTED’. Or, ‘I didn’t do anything, why should I have to apologise?’, i.e. ‘OGOD PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME CONFRONT WHAT THIS MEANS I LIKED THAT JOHN HOWARD FELLOW MUCH BETTER’.

So many seem so unable to give any ground because they are so obsessed with holding onto their own victimage: my ‘personal property’ is painful, poisoned - but goddamn it it’s mineminemine.

“You can look at a war as a massing of arms and matériel and troops, but you can also see it as something else - as a delicate web of interwoven choices made by human beings, made out of a certain consciousness. The decision to order an attack, the choice to obey or disobey an order, to fire or not to fire a weapon. Armies and indeed, any culture that supports them must convince the people that all the decisions are made already, and they have no choice. But that is never true. So, mad as it may seem, this is the terrain upon which we base our defence of this city - the landscape of consciousness.”

- Lily Fong in The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk.

A reminder, to me anyway, of how to explain why nationality and sexuality should be, and are, studied together:

“the national project - animating the raison d’etre of every country and political society in the history of the world - maintains itself in complicated ways by regulating kinship, that is, by enforcing rules that reproduce the membership of that society and by establishing zones of legitimate sexual relationships.”

- Jacqueline Stevens, ‘The Politics of LGBTQ Scholarship’, GLQ Forum, 10:3, 2004.

Other Me gets up at 7am and does yoga before downing a wheatgrass shot, a fresh lemon tisane and something involving LSA.  Then she rides her bike to uni and is at the desk before 8.30am.  She checks her email three times a day and occasionally reads and writes blogs in her lunch breaks.  The rest of the time she is Working on her Thesis, to which she has a balanced approach.

In the evening she rides home and performs some kind of wholesome, relaxing relationship building activity with her partner and/or friends.  She goes to bed well before midnight.  She is not afraid of the telephone or indeed of sociality in general.

She most certainly does not write “Ana - Misanthropology - Compulsory Sociality” on the form that is on display in the centre of the postgraduate research centre she works in where people are sunnily invited to fill out their name, discipline and area of research towards a friendlier communal Vibe and productive, collaborative Research Culture.

She meets deadlines, rarely drinks alcohol and has one cup of coffee a day.