Painting Fakes

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 they can walk.  Young men

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 employment opp

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 illness, people are crow

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 pearl shells, speaks of

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 rest.  This 'native title' was n

So, I'm having a change of scene for a little while.  Can you believe it, someone is paying me to travel to the other side of Australia and talk to people (or rather listen to them) about social issues for three weeks.  So here I am in the beautiful Dampier Peninsula in the far north of Western Australia, where I've never been before. Of course I'll have to work but since I've signed a confidentiality agreement I can't talk to you about that.  Instead, I just thought I'd mention that Australia is an EXTREMELY BIG PLACE.  In something like eight hours in the air we flew across over 5,000 km of territory.  As I looked out of the window I saw huge swathes of bushland, mountains, desert, coastline, and very occasionally a little sign of human habitation - a long straight road, a town, a distant light. Of course we so rarely see Australia this way because we are, naturally, always at the places where humans live.  For a city-dweller like me, I am nearly always at

Some of my family have been having a heated Facebook argument (as you do) sparked by recent troubles in the support base for Catherine Hamlin's Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia.  Sadly, there appears to be a dispute about the religious affiliations of supporters which is interfering with funding for this important work.  This charity is dear to the hearts of a number of family members and they are shocked.  I don't really understand the dispute and the ABC report of it is not all that enlightening. Still, my favourite and much-loved atheist relative's instant emotional reaction was to blame the Christian faith for the problem.  Religion poisons everything, as Christopher Hitchens would have said.  Of course Hamlin herself is also a Christian, but what are such details before the power of confirmation bias ? Anyway I know I shouldn't let my caustic wit get the better of me, but here goes.  Our current crop of New Atheists like to view religion as a product of evolution