Our Dispatch today was first published on 23 March 2011. The racist Intervention continues with white Australia’s complicity.
Kon nichi wa watashi-no friends こんにちは私の友人
Japan is suffering a hat trick of disasters.
Geobiosis is greatly underrated. Google “symbiosis” and you get 13.6 million results. Google “geobiosis” and you get a bit more than two thousand.
Ethnobiology: 139 thousand results. Ethnogeology: 5,350 results.
What do Lybia, Timor Leste, Iraq, Bahrain, Côte d’Ivoire and Angola have in common. A history of civil unrest and military intervention you say? How about hydrocarbon rich sedimentary basins?
What do Japan, New Zealand, Chile and Haiti have in common. Earthquakes you say? I rest my case.
The enormity of the Japanese disasters is no reason to forget the people of Port-Au-Prince or Christchurch, nor the flooded Queenslanders and Victorians, nor the remaining “non combatants” languishing in Guantanamo Bay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bgmHPwnVug
Nor is it a reason to pretend that the Intervention in the Northern Territory never happened and that we must “move forward” and that “Closing the Gap” isn’t a perpetuation of the grave injustice being visited upon remote Aboriginal Australia.
When UN special Rapporteur James Anaya came to Yuendumu I said to him that compared to the Peruvian Amazonians that had recently been massacred, Yuendumu’s woes were rather minor. Not at all he replied. Injustice had to be opposed regardless. Magnitude did not come into it.
There is no Richter Scale for Injustice.
This from my dad’s anecdotes:
Toen Kropveld, een Joodse kennis van ons, eens langs kwam droeg hij zo’n gele ster. “Ben je belazerd dat ding te dragen?”zei Guurt, en heeft het voor hem eraf gehaald. Zover ik weet, heeft hij, ondanks dat hij er als vijf joden uitzag, de oorlog overleefd. Hij handelde stoffen, en vroeg mij om hem te helpen aan de Duitsers te verkopen. “Zeg niets, laat mij maar handelen” (Kropveld kon namelijk geen Duits spreken). Keller had een hele stapel stof gekozen, en het kwam op 3,200 gulden. Kropveld kon het niet laten en bood korting aan “Hij mag het voor 3,000 gulden hebben”(ik had hem wel kunnen wurgen!) “Was sagt er?” Toen ik Keller vertelde wat Kropveld had gezegd, zei hij “Ha, Ha, Ha, das hat er wohl von den Juden gelernt!”
Once, when Kropveld, a Jewish aquaintance, came to visit, he was wearing the yellow Star of David. “Are you crazy, wearing that thing?” said Guurt, and took it off. Despite looking very Jewish, as far as I know, Kropveld survived the war. He dealt in textiles, and asked me to help him sell to the Germans. “Say nothing, let me handle this” (Kropveld couldn’t speak German). Keller chose a pile of material that amounted to 3,200 guilders. Kropveld couldn’t control himself: “Tell him he can have the lot for 3,000 guilders” (I could have strangled him!) “What did he say?” When I told Keller, he replied “Ha, Ha, Ha, he must have learnt that from the Jews!”
Googling I discover that Kropveld did indeed survive the war as did his youngest daughter. Mrs.Kropveld and their elder daughter were picked up in Amsterdam on the 10th.May 1943 (the third anniversary of the invasion of the Netherlands) and gassed at Sobibor (Poland) eleven days later. At Sobibor there were 34,313 victims from the Netherlands. Lest we forget.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74foIhhlXbE
Not since 1972 has so much rain fallen in Central Australia. Our roads keep getting closed. The Ginger Bread Man came and saw me: “I’m worried about Food Security for Yuendumu”. I told him that if FaHCSIA were truly worried about Food Security they would not have pursued a deliberate policy of trying to send the “non Income Management” stores broke.
The GBM said “Some people are in favour of Income Management”. Yes, and some people think the earth is flat, and that if we keep looking we will find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and that the Holocaust did not happen, and neither did the Armenian one.
In the 2000 Sydney Paralympics, the Spanish basketball team won gold in the intellectually handicapped section. They were subsequently exposed as being of sound mind and had to hand back their medals. In 2008 Jenny Macklin boasted that the Nguru Walaltja store was a great success (“After opening in July, the shop was an instant success, with turnover doubling in months”). She won a gold medal. When it becomes generally known that customers had nowhere else to go with their Income Managed money, and that the other stores were deliberately handicapped, will she be asked to hand back her medal?
“Food Security” is the new mantra. The Nguru Walaltja store has run out of bread. Yuendumu residents are presently unable to buy bread with their Basic Card. Basic Card cannot be used at the other two locally owned stores that have ample stocks of bread. Basic Card can be used at one of the stores to buy fuel.
There are well founded rumours that fuel pumps and tanks are being considered for the Nguru Walaltja store. Yuendumu will have three fuel outlets, how is that for Food Security?
A multi million dollar new store, funded by ABA money, is planned for Yuendumu. Yuendumu is also getting a new Centrelink building. We have been declared a “Growth Town”!
La Macklin is aiming for another gold medal. Not satisfied with not being handicapped herself, she is making sure the other competitors are. All in the name of Food Security.
All in the name of Liberty….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmiF1JQvf_A
Man does not live by bread alone. Food Security isn’t worth much without respect and dignity….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FOUqQt3Kg0
Respect and dignity- I am a Man…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBDgH435oaU
My parents survived the war with not much bread but lots of Dignity. They were much better off than the disempowered marginalised members of Australian Society.
People in detention centres and the Intervention Refugees in Alice Springs have no shortage of bread, yet they set fire to buildings or drink and fight themselves to death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdEQkRq_xrw
Man does not live by bread alone.
Oid mortales el grito sagrado: ¡Libertad! ¡Libertad! ¡Libertad!… Hear ye mortals the sacred cry: Liberty! Liberty! Liberty! (from the Argentine National Anthem)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njp7yLtOLtU
Ngakarnanyara nyanyi
Jungarrayi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etaZPzVXTeg
PS- a little known fact: the NTER (Intervention) legislation not only suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, but also certain parts of the Trades Practices Act dealing with unfair competition.
FaHCSIA controls ORIC (the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations), Outback Stores (that manages the Nguru Walaltja store), the ABA (Aboriginal Benefits Account- a large pot of money derived from mineral royalties on Aboriginal Land) and the Community Stores Licencing process.
They are their own umpires. They move the goal posts and then tell us that we missed.