An exciting and innovative new children’s TV series was launched on NITV on August 13 as part of National Science Week.
Indigenous rights
In the very early hours of Sunday, July 29, the federal government carried out a highly secretive transport of spent nuclear fuel. Helicopters and hundreds of police accompanied trucks from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology’s reactor at Lucas Heights to Port Kembla in Wollongong.
Indigenous women in north-eastern India are calling on the Meghalaya state government to block a bill that would deny them rights, including the ability to inherit land if they marry outside their tribe.
Khasi women are the latest to join a growing movement in the country challenging discriminatory legislation and practices.
The bill was passed last month by the tribe’s governing body, which said it is a measure to protect the group’s indigenous identity.
Young Aboriginal man David Dungay jnr died on December 29, 2015 after pleading for his life in the mental health wing of Sydney’s Long Bay jail.
The 26-year-old Dunghutti man from Kempsey, a known diabetic, suffered a cardiac arrest when he was pinned down by four members of the prison’s Immediate Action Team (IAT) for refusing to stop eating biscuits and injected with two strong sedatives. He was due to be released three weeks later.
Among the first laws passed by the new Australian parliament in 1901 when the Commonwealth of Australia came into being was the Pacific Island Labourers Act, ordering the deportation of black Melanesian workers known as kanakas.
Other aspects of what became known as the White Australia Policy have since been rectified, but this shameful stain on our past has yet to be properly addressed.
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.
Family members and supporters of Eric Whittaker rallied outside NSW Parliament on on July 4, the first anniversary of his murder.
Speakers at the action included Eric's mother, Margaret Hall, Diane Whittaker, Elizabeth Jarrett, Padraic Gibson, Raul Bassi and Ken Canning.
Whittaker was a 35-year-old Kamilaroi man put in Parklea Prison for an alleged breach of bail conditions.
The Walgett father of four was imprisoned for only two days before he was fatally injured in the prison.
Many Australians have probably never heard some of these Australian languages before Yothu Yindi, Gurrumul, Shellie Morris and others brought them to broader ears. But they are the languages of this continent: they grew up with this land, evolved with it, and have much to tell us about its histories, ecologies and peoples.
All 38 children held in detention in the Northern Territory — 17 in Darwin’s Don Dale detention centre and 21 in Alice Springs — are Aboriginal, a parliamentary committee was told on June 20.
Deputy chief executive of the NT Families Department Jeanette Kerr was being questioned about how the rate of Aboriginal children in detention had changed since the Royal Commission into Juvenile Detention.
“As of today, 100% of the children in detention are Aboriginal,” she said. “The proportions have not changed since the royal commission."
A community campaign has successfully pushed for the Melbourne electorate of Batman to be renamed Cooper after Yorta Yorta political activist and Aboriginal community leader William Cooper.
The electorate had been named after Melbourne founder John Batman, who was involved in massacres of Aboriginal people in Tasmania before he “bought” land around Port Phillip Bay from the Wurundjeri people.
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