indigenous
What colonialism has perpetrated and the activists fighting back
“Pardon me for being born into a nation of racists”
An iconic image showing Aboriginal rights activist, Gary Foley with a placard reading, “Pardon me for being born into a nation of racists”. It was part of a protest against the South African Springboks rugby tour of Australia in 1971 during apartheid.
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Hating Australia Day from afar
Today is the second Australia Day since I moved to the United States. One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it? And personally, I hate that. I hate that there is such a strong implicit idea of who an Australian “is,” and how racist and dependent on assimilation that is. I hate the way that is enforced with violence and ugly rhetoric, and I hate the policies that our country mobilises against Aboriginal communities and refugees.
And yet. For all that I hate what Australia Day represents, I am more homesick than usual today.
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2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge Review: Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
Jo Tamar’s first review for the 2012 Australian Women Writer’s Challenge – Carpentaria by Alexis Wright.
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Sunday Singalong: Violeta Parra
OK, this one is Violeta Parra, an incredibly haunting Chilean folk singer who saw folk music as a “weapon against oppression”. Yeah which revolutionary didn’t? She and her children became the song-writers of the left-wing political movement of her country. Not only that, Parra went to huge lengths to archive and legitimise Chilean folk music [...]
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Do you see Indigenous men as role models?
Aboriginal and Islander men, so readily demonised in Australia, held a march last Saturday in Melbourne in the name of reclaiming, respecting and protecting themselves and their communities.
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Andrew Bolt has been found in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act
… with respect to statements made by the serial trollumnist in published articles from 2009/2010 questioning whether the Aboriginality of certain pale-skinned indigenous people was genuine…”contained errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”
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“Life in paradise. Death in custody”.
I recently read Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, upon which this documentary is based and it’s a terrific read. (You can get a taste of it here). Kinda like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in terms of genre, but a lot more political. Although the politics isn’t clobbering, so don’t be afraid of the politics. [...]
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Remembering Bobbi Sykes 1944-2010
Dr Sykes (although she had not yet even begun her PhD) was the first woman I ever saw referred to as an activist on the TV news, when she was arrested in 1972 as the police overran the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra. There will be no picture of her here now that she is deceased.
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Did you see this?
No, me neither. Until Crikey. As Bob Gosford points out, when hundreds of Aboriginal men get together we’re just not interested in reporting on them unless they’re doing something bad.
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2010 National NAIDOC Poster
The artwork depicts an Aboriginal mother who is an ‘unsung hero’ leading her children through example, showing that actions can speak louder than words.
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Climbing Uluru and disrespect
Perhaps revelations over the last week regarding disrespectful shenanigans on top of Uluru will finally push the govt to honour the promises it made in 1983 to stop people climbing the rock?
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