Comments on: Museum-pieces

By: jangari

jangari — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:44:50 +0000

Neither surprising nor uncommon, unfortunately.

Just 2 days or so after this happened, another case was made public, from Western Sydney a few months (or even years) ago. A group of white Australians drove to the family home of an aboriginal family and assaulted two brothers. Someone called the police, who subsequently arrested the aboriginal brothers and let the white guys go.

I believe they’re still trying to have their criminal record amended.

By: Bill Poser

Bill Poser — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 23:10:36 +0000

This is disturbing, of course, but not surprising. Similar things happen in Canada.

I’m curious as to why the hotel waited until they had arrived to turn them away. Wouldn’t they know that a group from Yuendumu was very likely to be aboriginal?

I must say that I’m impressed by the three-month old who is training to be a life-guard.

By: jangari

jangari — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:19:15 +0000

Thanks Mark, I installed and configured it today, just gave it a try on the previous post to this one. Unfortunately though, the plugin doesn’t support footnotes inside footnotes, like I’ve done here. I’ve even emailed the plugin creator and he assures me that footnotes inside footnotes isn’t possible with this plugin as it is. But, since it’s really only used for literary effect here, I might give recursive footnoting a miss.

By: mark

mark — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:51:49 +0000

a novel that had footnotes which constituted in themselves, an entire nother storyline beyond the novel itself.

That is beautiful! If you need any help configuring the plugin, just let me know.

By: jangari

jangari — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:36:55 +0000

Mark, since that’s what you use, and since your footnotes are so professional, with links back and forth and so on (which is sort of what I wanted to get happening), I’ll certainly give it a go.

I remember talking with another blogger about the literary use of footnotes, and in the conversation it emerged that there was a novel that had footnotes which constituted in themselves, an entire nother storyline beyond the novel itself.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:56:23 +0000

Seeing that you like footnotes, and that your blog runs on Wordpress, I thought you might like the WP Footnotes plugin. I use it on The Ideophone and it really makes using footnotes a breeze, apart from providing visitors with nice clickable back and forth links.

By: tigtog

tigtog — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 00:22:41 +0000

What it shows to me is that poverty, lack of prospects or ambitions and boredom are the key risk factors. It just so happens that aboriginal people are grossly overrepresented at the very bottom of the socio-economic scale, ergo, aboriginal people are also grossly overrepresented in statistics relating to such things as sexual abuse, neglect and the like.

Bingo. This appears to me to be the crux of the criticisms against the NT intervention plan – it seems so punitive, as if it’s actual aboriginality which is causing their social problems, and that if they’d just assimilate more to whitefella culture then the petrol-sniffing and abuse would somehow dry up and blow away.

There seems to be very little concentration on building sustainable independent income streams (the generators of prospects and ambitions) and far too much glee at the thought of outsiders licensing commercial endeavours on aboriginal land with a resident cheap labour force to hand.

I can’t see how transitioning to what could well be virtually indentured labour is going to magically “fix” abuse problems.