I'm not sure how much longer this podcast will be available at the ABC Radio National site, so go listen now: the Good Spirit Festival was a remarkable meeting between Indigneous Australians and African immigrants held in Tasmania. As well as songs and dancing, the participants shared their experiences of dispossession. Shamefully, for some of the ( Read more... )

Had a little moment of hope and pride, reading this morning about practical responses to the Sydney race riot of 2005: Anglo women volunteered as English teachers, Muslim women volunteered as surf lifesavers.

Then Tony Abbot went and &*%*&%ed it up for me by characterising migrants as criminals. Thanks for that, mate. ("Migrants" here is code for ( Read more... )

Google removes links to racist page on Encyclopedia DramaticaLooked at the page so you don't have to. :) It's either as bad as you imagine, or it's worse. ED defends the page as "satire", and there are indeed a handful of satirical remarks about Australia's treatment of its Indigenous peoples; but most of it is dribble which most Australians would ( Read more... )

Since I'm here, have some history from Down Under.

Australia honours Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels - thousands of Papua New Guinean civilians who helped Australian troops during WWII. (Better late than never, I suppose.)

Brown to apologise to care home children sent to Australia and Canada: to ensure a supply of "white stock", poor children were sent from ( Read more... )

Labor acts to close Aboriginal health gap, 3 July 2009

Australian of the Year Professor Mick Dodson criticises the government's indigenous health targets: "The shortest timeline to achieve any one of these targets is a decade. And several of the targets are not about achieving equality, but merely a 50 per cent reduction of the present levels of ( Read more... )

Lemme start with some good news. Tolerance wins by a head and shoulders: study shows that "Australians are overwhelmingly accepting of Muslim women who wear a scarf or hijab". (I think this refers to a chapter in the new book Beyond the Hijab Debate: New Conversations on Gender, Race and Religion.)

Millions allocated to protect pupils from race- ( Read more... )

beccaelizabeth has begun to do what I still haven't got around to: Counting the POC in Torchwood.

And now, some local news. In no particular order:

Lexicographers note the rise of Lebanese Australian English, amongst other "ethnolects".

What the-! Ku Klux Klan recruiting in New Zealand. (I still have to report on our New Zealand trip.)

The guvmint's Diverse ( Read more... )

Making progress: the health, development and wellbeing of Australia's children and young people. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare report, 24 September 2008

The report found that Indigenous Australian infants were three times as likely as other Australian children to die in the first year of life.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ( Read more... )

'Sausage factory' NT courts cited in crime squeeze: The Northern Territory "leads the rest of Australia for locking up its citizens"; "83 per cent of prisoners in the NT's overcrowded jails are Aborigines".

Deadly intimacy for black victims: fewer Indigenous Australians are being murdered; most Indigenous murder victims knew their killer. The full ( Read more... )

There's some good news on race gap, but it's mostly bad

Indigenous maternal death rate alarming: "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are almost three times more likely to die while pregnant, during labour or up to six weeks after giving birth than non-indigenous women."

Indigenous miss out on vital treatment: "Indigenous Queenslanders ( Read more... )