1240

Well-documented corruption on a huge scale has dried out the Murray-Darling river system. Aboriginal communities along the rivers and its tributaries are calling it genocide. From September 28 to October 4, Aboriginal activist Bruce Shillingsworth helped those communities hold the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival. Green Left Weekly's Mat Ward, who took his nine-year-old son on the second bus, gives a blow-by-blow account of the trip.

Day 1: Sydney to Brewarrina

After 10 weeks of protected strike action, Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) members and hazardous waste removal company Gbar have reached an agreement for a better enterprise agreement.

One of the more atypical protesters at the September 20 Climate Strike was Newcastle coal miner Ian Hodgson. But he exemplifies a large number of workers, including those in the fossil fuel industry, who want real action on the climate emergency, including new secure jobs for those who may lose theirs in any transition.

A media conference in Geraldton, Western Australia,  on October 2.

Social justice workers and local First Nations community members spoke out about the dire need for action in the Yamatji region, at a media conference in Geraldton, Western Australia, on October 2.

An abortion rights rally outside NSW parliament on July 31.

Abortion has finally been decriminalised in New South Wales, after decades of campaigning and nearly 40 hours of parliamentary “debate” that generated widespread anguish around what should be a basic health matter.

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.

On December 9, 1966, the Australian government signed a public agreement with the United States to build what both countries misleadingly called a “Joint Defence Space Research Facility” at Pine Gap, just outside Alice Springs.

Officially, Pine Gap is a collaboration between the Australian Department of Defence and the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency. In reality this conceals the real purpose of Pine Gap as a CIA-run spy base designed to collect signals from US surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit over the equator.

Family members of three Aboriginal children murdered in Bowraville on the mid north coast of NSW between 1990 and 1991, together with Black Lives Matter supporters, marched through Sydney CBD on September 29 to demand that NSW Parliament change the law so that a new trial can be held.

Below are the opening remarks by long-established West Australian artist, Lynne Tinley at the opening night of Earth Grief, a retrospective exhibition of her art. The exhibition was displayed at the Sustainable Housing for Artists and Creatives (SHAC) Colab2, White Gum Valley, Fremantle beginning on September 27.

***

Grief is a passion, an emotional force; it is the dark cloud that brings the rain.

This Australian-made film dramatises the experience of a 14-year-old Cambodian boy who is tricked into boarding a fishing vessel, where he is enslaved.