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Koala, Bushfire Survivor

// February 11th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized

This is incredibly Australian on about fourteen different levels.

The Victorian Bushfires

// February 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry, World Issues

Putuwa

// May 12th, 2008 // No Comments » // World Issues

The Cammeraygal were the Aboriginal group living near my home in Sydney at the time of the European settlement in 1788. They were members of the Eora language family group, one of hundreds of languages and dialects native to Australia.

In Eora, the word Putuwa means “to warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person.”

The language was first documented by William Dawes, a member of the First Fleet to Australa, a surveyor, engineer, astronomer and botanist. Dawes learnt Eora from a Cammeraygal girl called Patyegarang, being the first European to learn an Aboriginal language- a feat Europeans found incredibly difficult, although the Eora had no problems mimicking English.

Against his wishes Dawes was sent from Australia on the first voyage of marines back to Britain, for his refusal to join punitive expeditions against aborigines. By the early 19th century the Eora people had become extinct, due to European disease and decline in natural food sources.

“Putuwa” and the acts of Dawes are a reminder of how kind humans can be when we choose. The settlement, his expulsion and the extinction of the Eora people seem a clear lesson of the destructive danger of indifference.

With thanks to “Cacophony“, by Lewis Nowra, The Best Australian Essays 2005.

Speak Truth to Power

// April 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // World Issues

Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd “is the highest-profile western leader to visit China since unrest erupted in Tibet last month. Speaking in fluent Mandarin to students at Beijing University, he began by defying his hosts and voicing concern over human rights in the Himalayan region.

“Australia like most other countries recognises China’s sovereignty over Tibet. But we also believe it is necessary to recognise there are significant human rights problem in Tibet. The current situation in Tibet is of concern to Australians.

We recognise the need for all parties to avoid violence and find a solution through dialogue. As a long-standing friend of China I intend to have a straightforward discussion with China’s leaders on this.

We wish to see the year 2008 as one of harmony, and celebration – not one of conflict and contention. “

The Australian, April 09, 2008

Deep Listening

// October 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

An extract from an edition of the ABC podcast All in the Mind, on how non-Indigenous mental health professionals entering Aboriginal communities can be adequately equipped to work with the particular psychological distress they encounter. Natasha Mitchell interviews Dennis McDermott, psychologist and senior lecturer in Indigenous health at the Muru Marri Indigenous Health Unit at the University of NSW.

Natasha Mitchell: Well the key Indigenous way that you weave in to your workshops is this concept of deep listening — tell me what it is.

Dennis McDermott: It’s definitely not an original idea, definitely not. I’ve picked it up from a number of sources, most notably from a woman called Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann who is from the Daly River mob in the Northern Territory. But from her cultural group comes this notion of dadirri, and she describes it as a kind of inner deep listening, a kind of still awareness.

But there’s similar ideas I found when I started to look around, around various Indigenous cultures around Australia, in Sydney from the Eora language there’s a word called ngara. And ngara in this language means to hear, to listen. But with the added dimension of thinking at the same time, a self reflection. And as a Victorian Koori organisation board member pointed it out to me just this last week in Melbourne, it has the additional dimension of actually finishing off what you’re hearing with an action. So if someone is actually telling you something, your obligation, if you like, is to follow that through. So it’s a link and a reciprocity going on.

So from these and lots of other cultural notions I started to pay serious attention to this idea of deep listening, Indigenous ways of listening, that involve tuning in with the whole being if you like, of listening to the silence, or listening to that noise as well as the signal. It makes sense — the hiss.

Race Riots in Sydney

// December 11th, 2005 // 12 Comments » // World Issues

BACKGROUND

SYDNEY, Dec 12 (Reuters) – Australian Prime Minister John Howard called for ethnic and religious tolerance on Monday after racial violence, spurred on police say by white supremacists, erupted in parts of Sydney. Racial tension sparked violence on Cronulla Beach on Sunday when around 5,000 people, some yelling racist chants, attacked youths of Middle Eastern background, saying they were defending their beach after lifesavers were attacked there last week. Violence then spread to a second beach, Maroubra, where scores of men armed with baseball bats smashed about 100 cars. At Botany Bay, riot police confronted hundreds of youths and police said a man was stabbed in the back in a southern Sydney suburb in what media reports said appeared to be racial violence.

“Two youths, who looked Middle Eastern, on a train at Cronulla are jeered by a mob outside.
Photo: Brad Hunter” SMH.

Photos of the mob from the Sydney Morning Herald.

OPINION

I arrived back in Australia on Saturday morning and began lapping up the wonderful Sydney summer; the blue skies quickly sending European winter into forgotten memory. Of course my first hours at home were filled with fine moments of family reunion, but interesting enough (and most enjoyably) it was followed by a solid 36 hours of Chinese food- spent in the world’s second biggest Chinatown. Chinese food in Europe doesn’t quite cut it. We have it incredibly good in OZ- fresh produce, world class chefs and a large and demanding consumer base make for excellent and authentic Chinese cuisine. It was great to be back in the streets of Chinatown where I have spent so much of my university days, and the difference from Europe is striking- 15% of Sydney residents are of Asian decent, as much a part of Sydney as Chinatown in the heart of the city itself. But there weren’t racials slurs or violence in these streets I walked. No, despite the fact that a full third of Sydney’s population is foreign born, it was the relativey small (3.1%) population of North African and Middle Eastern decent who became the focus of hate from Sunday’s ignorant mob.

I suppose I show these stats to try and demonstrate the diversity and peace which forms Sydney, and that has always been a valued part of our society here. I find it a deep shame that our reputation is being tarnished- as if we are not one of the most inclusive societies in the world- as if 97% of us are not immigrants or descendents of immigrants.

Are there racists in Australia? Of course, and there always have been. But usually we ignore this minority. As a rule we don’t publish their narrow minded half-thoughts in our national papers. Every city has its uneducated yobs who claim to be patriots. In fact such low end patriotism is much rarer in Australia then most places in the world because we don’t really care. Our national identity is rarely challenged because we are an island and thus we rarely find reason to express it, save perhaps on the sporting field. It scares me to think that these ignorants have such a lacking sense of identity that they keenly rally around minority scapegoating while glorifying such meaningless and pitiful icons that they try and tag to our nation identity.

There are many ignorant and narrow minded humans, in Australia and everywhere else. In every country they are xenophobic and parochial. In Australia this minority has been fueled and directed by a culture of fear of Islam and the Arab world that has been set in much of West. There are genuine issues- increased unemployment and crime in a number of communities- but these are local problems confined to fraction of society- it is not a clash of civilisations in greater Australia. Where these local problems coincide with the ignorant we see some violent tremors. But the patchwork and melting pot of Australia is far more robust- we have bridged deeper valleys in the past and will do so again to benefit our future.

As an Australian, I find these mob actions completely unacceptable. I find these ignorant viewpoints unfit to be published in any paper of credibility- except perhaps in combination with scathing editorial. I do not believe that we need rely on our institutional guardians and the press to demonstrate the clear moral highground on this issue. I feel it is something that disgusts the vast majority of our citizens, something that runs against the “fair go” and decency we hold high in our culture, and something that we refuse to accept as being what it means to be an Aussie.

I find it sickening that the mob was singing our national anthem amidst the racist chants. If they had the sense to remember the second verse they would have wisely recalled,

“For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.”

Indeed.

Aussie Scientists Kick Ass and Get A Million Bucks

// October 3rd, 2005 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

In my previous post I described a mock prayer from an Aussie to the sun-god “Sol Invictus”, mentioning his crook guts. Now “Crook Guts” is aussie slang for stomach trouble. If you get food poisoning the source is pretty obvious, its those prawns you ate on the Air Gabon flight, but for millions of sufferers around the world this gastritis and peptic ulcers had nothing to do with the food they ate.

The prevailing wisdom for the majority of the 21st Century was that these ulcers came from stress and lifestyle factors. This was until 1982, when two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, isolated and cultured a, then unknown, bacterium from human stomachs claimin that it was the cause of this common stomach illness. The theory was ridiculed by the establishment scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic stomach. To force people to pay attention to this theory, Marshall drank a test tube of the bacteria and soon developed gastric ulcers, which he then cured by antibiotics. Go Aussie.

The bacteria was eventually named Helicobacter pylori and twenty-three years later, around 2 hours ago in fact, the two Aussie scientists were named winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine- and thus got the million bucks as cash component of the prize. And to wrap it up, the stomach problems caused by this H.pylori are the very same ulcers Charleze Theron “braved” to film Aeon Flux, and Charlize was of course in “Trapped” with Kevin Bacon…. Done. And made you read about science.