Painting Fakes

Towards the end of last year I had a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Commonwealth Government's marketing of the Carbon Tax.  My problem was that they were marketing the tax as if it was a problem.  The purpose of the Carbon Tax - combating global warming by reducing carbon pollution - was hardly mentioned in their marketing materials.  Instead they majored on the details of compensation.  The government gave the impression that they were creating a problem, and then fixing it. Yesterday's mailbox reveals Stage 2 of this marketing strategy and now it's beginning to make more sense.  My local Labor MP Graham Perrett's Moreton Report lists, in huge bright letters, "6 ways our strong economy is working for Moreton."  These publications are of course approved by the government's marketing people, and Labor members around the country will be distributing newsletters with similar headlines. He lists "Schoolkids Bonus", "New $600 increa...

Last year I wrote a review of The Doors which for some reason is the most visited post on this blog, perhaps because it includes a couple of pictures of Jim Morrison.  Anyway, on the plane home from the Kimberleys I had a read of John Densmore's Riders on the Storm, published in 1990. For those who missed it, the Doors represent the dark side of the late 60s and early 70s.  Their songs portray a world of despair, confusion and nihilism far removed from the peace, love and harmony of Woodstock, where they refused an invitation to perform.  Their live performances, fuelled by singer Jim Morrison's erratic moods and alcohol addiction, were unpredictable and at times dangerous.  Their brief career ended in 1971 with Morrison's death, apparently from a heroin overdose, in a Paris hotel room. Densmore, the Doors' drummer, is so far the only member of the band to tell his story.  This may be because the story is not pleasant, and perhaps all of them are...

I'm going to stop banging on about the Kimberley after this, but I didn't want to finish on a down note in case you think that I went off to visit some sort of post-colonial dystopia.  There are some hard aspects to life on the Dampier Peninsula but wonderful people, a great place and a lot to like.  So instead I want to tell you about two things - cups and fishing. First of all, to paraphrase Crocodile Dundee, this is not a cup. THIS is a cup! People in the Dampier Peninsula communities do not drink small cups of tea.  If we stayed in a hotel, my local co-workers would despair because their rooms had thimble-like cups which would only just give you a taste.  Any cup of tea smaller than half a litre is not worth making. And then, of course, no conversation on the Dampier Peninsula is complete without some mention of fishing.  Of course they live by the sea, but more than that, they spend a lot of time on it.  Kids can handle boats before ...

Here's another snippet from the far north-west, this time about something a little closer to my normal field of knowledge - the Community Development Employment Program or CDEP.  This program was once the jewel in the crown of Aboriginal employment programs.  First trialled in 1977, by the early 2000s the program catered for over 40,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander job seekers. CDEP was basically a "work for the dole" program, introduced on Aboriginal communities at their own request long before there was any such thing in the mainstream social security system.  It allowed communities to convert unemployment benefits into wages and pay unemployed people to work on community projects.  An unemployment benefit is equivalent to a bit under half a full time wage for an unskilled worker, so participants were treated as having a part-time job, 16 hours a week.  It was a creative response to two pressing problems on those communities - extremely limited empl...

Well I'm back home in the cold country after three weeks on the Dampier Peninsula and surrounds.  Still a lot to think about and sort through, though. One of the things that really became clearer to me over my three weeks was the extent to which the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley are living in two worlds.  On the one hand, they are participating in the modern Western society and economy.  They wear European clothes (with a distinctive Aboriginal style!) and drive cars, they go to school and university or TAFE, hold down jobs, run businesses and manage large complex community organisations.  A lot of them are very successful at doing this.  One of my local co-workers, in his mid-30s, has half a university degree in marine biology, plus tickets in motor mechanics and construction, and has worked on a number of mine sites as well as in more mundane town jobs.  Others struggle - levels of unemployment are high, there's a lot of alcoholism and mental ill...

On Monday we paid a visit to Beagle Bay .  After doing our business during the morning, we managed to take a moment to visit the Sacred Heart Church. Beagle Bay is an Aboriginal Mission, started by the Catholic Church in the 1890s and run by them until handover to a local community council in the 1970s.  The mission history means many residents, particularly older ones, are still devout Catholics and nothing symbolises this devotion more than the Sacred Heart Church, the town's main tourist attraction, built during the First World War. From the outside it's pretty but not all that special - a whitewashed little chapel in rendered brick.  However, the inside is truly remarkable as you can see from the photos.  Whole pearl shells are inlaid into the window frames, and the altar, stations of the cross and other fittings are intricately ornamented with pearl shell fragments.  The care and effort that's gone into these, not to mention the value of the p...

I've just finished the first of three weeks in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, working on a project that at least indirectly relates to Native Title issues.  Of course I've been thinking of the whole Native Title thing and it strikes me that it mixes triumph and tragedy on a grand scale. Native Title law in Australia is based the famous Mabo Case , in the High Court of Australia in 1989, in which Eddie Mabo (pictured) and other applicants from Murray Island in the Torres Strait claimed they had a form of traditional title to their land which should be recognised under Australian law. The court had to decide two things.  The first was essentially a question of fact - was there a recognisable system of land ownership in traditional Indigenous Australian societies?  Their answer to this was very clearly yes, and the convenient myth of terra nullius, the empty land the British explorers supposedly found, was finally laid to...