“The problem is mismanagement of the Barwon-Darling rivers” activist Fleur Thompson told the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival bus tour, as it passed through the western New South Wales town of Bourke on September 30.
“The federal and state governments could step in anytime and fix it, but they don’t and won’t. To do that the governments would have to admit fault.”
Bruce Shillingsworth, the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival tour organiser, said on October 1 that First Nations people need to be given back the power to make key decisions about water flow and the rivers.
People from across the nation are heading up to the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland to put themselves on the line to stop Adani’s coal mine going ahead. Green Left Weekly’s Coral Wynter has just returned from a week at the Frontline Action on Coal (FLAC) protest camp.
During a recent visit to the far-western NSW city of Broken Hill, Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter travelled to Menindee and spoke to people involved in the struggle to save the Darling (Baaka) River and Menindee Lakes, now mostly an empty, barren depression in the surrounding plain, dotted with the skeletons of dead trees.
The Murray-Darling river system is the lifeblood of Australian agriculture, but it is now in serious crisis.
Solidarity activists who recently returned from a fact-finding tour of Venezuela are calling for concrete actions by the Australian community to assist the Venezuelan people currently facing economic hardship, primarily as a result of harsh US sanctions.
Sunburnt Country: The History & Future of Climate Change in Australia
By Joelle Gergis
Melbourne University Press, 2018
This is a very readable book written by a climatologist, an expert on the weather in the Southern Hemisphere from the University of Melbourne, writes Coral Wynter.
Njabulanj Helen Williams, a Kunibídji woman of the Wurnal clan, lived most of her life in Maningrida, about 500 kilometres east of Darwin in Arnhem Land.
She was born in 1956 on Mardbalk (Goulburn Island). Her father, a pastor, relocated from Goulburn Island to Maningrida when the Japanese threatened to invade during World War II. As a child, she travelled back and forth in a dugout canoe, “Ibidjbat”, on the Liverpool River between Maningrida and the surrounding coastal homelands.
In his early 20s, James was denied full life insurance cover because he revealed that he had discussed genetic testing with a genetic counsellor, as his mother had bowel cancer and carried a gene mutation.
He was tested and found to carry a mutation in the MSH6 gene, one of the DNA mismatch repair genes in Lynch syndrome.
More than 300 people joined a forest camp in the Pilliga State Forest in north-west New South Wales during the weekend of November 11–12 to protest against coal seam gas (CSG) mining.
The protest culminated in a convoy of about 100 cars filled with locals, farmers and environmental activists making their way into the forest to create a human sign on the sand beds of the river spelling out “NO CSG”.
Venezuela’s Revolutionary Sex and Gender Diversity Alliance (ASGDRe) was set up in 2009 as a collective to fight for gender diversity rights and against discrimination based on sexuality.
What separated ASGDRe from other similar groups was that they openly supported the revolutionary process taking place in Venezuela.
Speaking with members of ASGDRe, as part of the international solidarity delegation organised by Venezuela Analysis in August, they told us that the group began with about 10 members, mainly friends.
The Canaima Industries factory in Caracas is the assembly point for computers that are given to students for free across Venezuela. Its name comes from the huge Canaima National Park in the south of Venezuela, home to extraordinary landscapes and the highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls.
We visited the small computer factory, located in the middle of a military base in the east of the capital, as part of the international solidarity delegation organised by Venezuela Analysis in August.