A truth-telling exhibition
Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience

"Our artwork and culture is somehow revered on the international stage and high enough for an exchange at that level, but yet, we're the most incarcerated people on the planet.”

"Since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, Indigenous incarceration rates have more than doubled, and deaths in custody have continued to rise."

"It's a huge stain on this nation...White Australia's support is crucial."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-02/blak-in-justice-exhibition-heide-museum-torch-project/105356854
#IndigenousPeoples #FirstNationsPeoples #Australia #violence #incarceration #HyperIncarceration #biopolitics #necropolitics #TruthTelling #art

Unfinished business

"A shameful death after a supermarket scuffle shines a light on Australia’s unfinished business. From compensation for the Stolen Generations to Indigenous recognition, Australia must follow words with actions."

"There is unfinished business in this country, and there can be no excuses for not knowing or understanding. We need to change direction and remove the burden from the most vulnerable."

"In a land of home improvers surely the principle of fixing the foundations first if you want to really close the gaps is obvious."
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/01/a-shameful-death-after-a-supermarket-scuffle-shines-a-light-on-australias-unfinished-business-ntwnfb

A First Nations Voice to Parliament. Australia’s Constitutional Referendum Explained
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https://verfassungsblog.de/a-first-nations-voice-to-parliament/
#FirstNationsPeoples #IndigenousAustralians #recognition #Voice #Constitution #foundations #referendum #law #violence #Civics #education #Australia #TruthTelling

Culturally modified trees in New South Wales

"In NSW, scarred, marked and ring trees are protected under the National Parks and Wildlife Act, but trees-in-trees are not recognised as "culturally modified trees". Trees-in-trees" are tree species growing out of another tree species, often with stone-axe cut marks visible around the guest tree's graft. All trees have an identity, they have roles and responsibilities in the family unit, like people...They have their own spirit, like people...What makes them unusual is that neither species is an epiphyte: the type of plant that grows on another plant but is sustained by airborne nutrients...These are living cultural memory embodied in trees. All over Australia, trees have been modified by Aboriginal people but are vanishing due to logging, agricultural expansion and urban sprawl. Land clearing is a really big concern."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-09/culturally-modified-trees-a-national-treasure-in-outback-nsw/104557536

Culturally modified trees by settler society:
Trees are regularly butchered to make way for power lines.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-07/tree-canopy-cover-urban-heat-island/104567914
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-18/pruning-street-trees-around-powerlines-ausgrid-compromise/101538168
#trees #FirstNationsPeoples #water #NSW #entanglement #relationality #IntraAction #IndigenousKnowledge #SettlerSociety #culture #sprawl #logging #energy #PowerLines

After the closure of VicForests, The Healthy Forests Foundation is reborn - the new face of logging in Victoria

"VicForests' June 30 closure followed allegations of widespread and illegal logging, referrals to corruption watchdogs and revelations the organisation had spied on conservationists."

The Healthy Forests Foundation
""The aim is just to work out ways to keep cutting the forest. It's a front — it's just a way of keeping the [logging] industry going. It's kind of like the 'healthy smoking foundation'..Professor Lindenmayer, who spent decades studying the impacts of logging on forests, described the Healthy Forests Foundation as "greenwashing on steroids".

"The Healthy Forests Foundation says its purpose is to promote First Nations forest management, which proponents admit will also supply timber. One Indigenous leader said the Healthy Forests Foundation looked like "black cladding" — a way for largely non-Indigenous industries to gain access to resources by taking advantage of Indigenous peoples' access...It is not self-determination. It is tokenism."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-08/vicforests-closure-healthy-forests-foundation-logging/104194836
#LoggingIndustry #VicForests #ImpressionManagement #GeenWashing #BlackCladding #extractivism #EndNativeForestLogging #FirstNationsPeoples #NativeForests #conservation #biodiversity #ClimateCrisis

Black Witness, Amy McQuire’s book delivers a critique of the way mainstream media operates

"Amy McQuire has been writing on Indigenous affairs since she was 17 years old. Over the past two decades, she has reported on most of the key events involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including numerous deaths in custody, the Palm Island uprising, the Bowraville murders and the Northern Territory Intervention. She has also exposed the misrepresentations and violence of the mainstream media’s reports, as well as their omissions and silences altogether in regards to Indigenous matters."
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https://www.uqp.com.au/books/black-witness

Review by Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University
https://theconversation.com/is-objectivity-colonial-amy-mcquire-argues-black-activist-journalism-must-compensate-for-our-mainstream-medias-blindness-232513

McQuire currently co-hosts Curtain The Podcast
https://curtainthepodcast.wordpress.com/
#FirstNationsPeoples #IndigenousPeoples #Bowraville #violence #journalism #MSM #MediaBias #AgendasSetting #framing #Injustice #SettlerSociety

The fires of human-caused climate disruption are raging though California right now

"For millions of years the world’s tallest trees (Giant sequoias) have graced California peaks and coastlines, growing through centuries of changes."

"But those landscapes have seen significant shifts over the past century and the forests have suffered. Spurred by the climate crisis, devastating droughts and scorching temperatures have added new stressors for the redwoods, particularly the famous giant sequoias, which now struggle to bounce back after big wildfires."

"Part of the problem stems from California’s gold rush era, when settlers descended with an overzealous appetite for good timber, cutting down much of the old-growth forests. They also suppressed indigenous land management techniques, which included setting “healthy” fires that cleared out the forest. A century of fire suppression created an overabundance of vegetation that set the stage for larger, more catastrophic blazes."
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#SettlerSocieties #fires #trees #LandUse #NativeForests #FossilFuels #ExtremeHeat #climate #bushfires #FirstNationsPeoples

The unfinished business of the post-referendum pathway

“One of the reasons the referendum didn’t succeed was people were too unfamiliar with the truth and who First Nations people are...This is a country that still needs to reconcile with itself, and find itself. That’s what a Makarrata commission would do. It continues to be important.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/16/albanese-open-to-makarrata-commission-for-truth-and-treaty-for-indigenous-australians
#voice #FirstNationsPeoples #IndigenousPeoples #Makarrata #TruthTelling #Australia #truth

Tasmanian logging protestor Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta is due in court on Monday. But as an Aboriginal ‘non-Australian citizen’, he doesn’t recognise its jurisdiction

"Regardless, he does fully expect, at some point, to be rearrested and charged with failing to appear on the trespass charges. He also anticipates the ultimate penalty could be a significant prison sentence or a fine of up to $45,000."

"Beyond his 50-plus years of environmental activism and protest against the wholesale destruction of Tasmania’s culturally totemic old growth forests, Everett-puralia meenamatta’s desire to be arrested and eventually rearrested – and perhaps jailed or fined – is strategically aimed to highlight issues of Indigenous sovereignty, legal jurisdiction, colonialism and the citizenship status of Indigenous people on this continent."
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/01/im-ready-for-everything-and-i-dont-care-the-man-refusing-to-turn-up-at-an-australian-colonial-court
#LoggingImpacts #NativeForests #destruction #environmentalists #activism #FirstNationsPeoples #treaty #TruthTelling #IndigenousPeople #law #Australia

‘The perpetrators of injustice should be named' - Dhoombak Goobgoowana – translated as “truth-telling”

Melbourne "university’s continued commemoration of individuals discussed in this book prolongs trauma. Correcting history by merely adding the long-suppressed details of the fatal impact of the colonial mission on tens of thousands of Aboriginal people is rightly regarded as an insufficient response. Finding an “honourable” solution – including renaming – must involve telling the whole truth about history."

“The perpetrators of injustice should be named, and their roles in historical events fully recounted. However, merely deleting their names from buildings, rooms, courtyards and roads, and not explaining why, compounds the injustices with further acts of denial."

“This kind of truth-telling is necessary … if our community is to prevent the repetition of commemorative rituals that honour racists, thieves and body snatchers. Denying parts of our history is simply lying. And this is why racism persists.The lying in Australian history – the lying about Australian history – is one of the major contributors to racism.” - Marcia Langton
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/28/denying-history-is-simply-lying-how-the-university-of-melbourne-honoured-racists-thieves-and-body-snatchers

Ross L Jones, James Waghorne, Marcia Langton, Dhoombak Goobgoowana - A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne - Volume 1: Truth
(free e book)
https://www.mup.com.au/books/dhoombak-goobgoowana-electronic-book-text
#TruthTelling #university #Injustice #history #denial #racism #naming #book #FirstNationsPeoples #Australia

Bigambul and Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore wins the Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale

"Country is more than just a setting, it's a collaborative partner and "this sense of belonging [is] deeply rooted in the landscape from birth until death. Aboriginal kinship systems include all living things from the environment in a larger network of relatedness, the land itself can be a mentor or a parent to a child. We are all one and share a responsibility of care to all living things now and into the future."

To Moore, "it signals that — at least in the 14th century — English people thought about their connection to land in the same way as First Nations people still do today."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-29/venice-biennale-golden-lion-australia-archie-moore-artist/103730100
#Country #care #FirstNationsPeoples #incarceration #SettlerSociety #VeniceBiennale

Killing for Country

" ‘I can’t argue away the shame’: frontier violence and family history converge in David Marr’s harrowing and important new book"

"A monumental study of the on-the-ground nature of colonisation in New South Wales and Queensland... His forebears’ role in murdering scores of First Peoples during the land grabs that preceded the creation of Australia."

"At the core of this narrative is a simple truism of colonialism: land is the ultimate commodity, the raw material."
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https://theconversation.com/i-cant-argue-away-the-shame-frontier-violence-and-family-history-converge-in-david-marrs-harrowing-and-important-new-book-215050
#TruthTelling #colonialism #Australia #frontier #violence #SettlerSociety #FamilyTruthTelling #families #NSW #Queensland #archives #trove #book #FirstNationsPeoples #FrontierWars

"About 300 hundred Indigenous languages were spoken across Australia at the time of colonisation. But the nation has since seen one of the highest rates of language loss in the world, with less than 30 Indigenous languages spoken as a first language today."

"Every one of these 85 languages in Western Australia are libraries of knowledge."
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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-29/indigenous-languages-call-for-legislative-protection/103033234
#Linguistic #Rights #FirstNationsPeoples #IndigenousKnowledge #naming #languages #colonialism #RestrictedLanguageCode #monolingualism

We have unfinished constitutional business with the 123-year-old constitution

"We still have the problem that potentially up to 60 per cent of the community cannot stand for federal parliament because of that clause — because of dual citizenship and a range of other problems."

"The issues with race ("our constitution still has clauses that recognise it's OK to discriminate on the basis of race. I don't know any other constitution in the world that still has clauses like that") and federal-state relations ("The High Court has found that there are really impediments to the Commonwealth and states cooperating when it comes to judicial processes or regulatory agencies. Millions of dollars are wasted every year because we just can't have an efficient and smooth-running federal system")."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-29/voice-referendum-defeat-will-australia-ever-change-constitution/103018686
#referendum #Australia #citizenship #constitution #exclusion #recognition #FirstNationsPeoples #discrimination

Who owns Australia?
Complex web of data reveals large swathes of country controlled by small number of billionaires and large companies
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2021/may/17/who-owns-australia
#FirstNationsPeoples #FirstNations #Country #ownership #control #pastoralism #SettlerSociety #LandTenure #LandUse #corporations

"It is a blight on Australia’s history that successive governments of various political persuasions have failed to uphold the rights of First Nations people. In deciding next steps, the Australian government should prioritize the views of Indigenous communities."

https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/14/australia-setback-indigenous-rights
#Australia #SettlerSociety
#referendum #governance #FirstNationsPeoples #HumanRights #failure

"It will be a dull march back into history, a return to the denialism and silence that has defined white Australia. Honesty will be torn from the trees. Any notion of shared understanding will be shredded."

"For all the misinformation and deceit, all the lies of the campaign, we will be left with one ugly truth: given the chance, Australia would still sooner destroy Indigenous people than listen to them as equals. The central impulses of colonisation are all still there, brutal and unrepentant."
>
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/editorial/2023/10/14/mothball-politics#mtr
#Australia #culture #denial #dispossession #FirstNationsPeoples #indigenousPeoples #recognition #constitution #democracy #VoicetoParliament #SettlerSociety #TerraNullius #21stCentury

Rejecting the voice shows Australia is still in denial, its history of forgetting a festering wrong

"Australia has overwhelmingly voted not to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution, and the nation has changed forever."

"The referendum became by proxy a vote on Indigenous peoples’ right to exist in our own land. Imagine – just try – how that feels today...Why are all these people deciding whether we belong or not?"
"White Australia doesn’t want to give blackfellas anything, even when it’s nothing." Melissa Lukashenko

"Australia urgently needs a national anti-racism framework and bipartisan response to racism, Race commissioner Chin Tan."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/oct/14/rejecting-the-voice-shows-australia-is-still-in-denial-its-history-of-forgetting-a-festering-wrong
#denial #Australia #Voice #referendum #FirstNationsPeoples #TerraNullius #21stCentury #referendum #FesteringSore #SettlerSociety

Australia - “Still stuck in its colonial past”

"“Stuck in a colonial past” – the world condemns Australia’s “No” vote on The Voice...Australia stands alone – ‘a bad faith braggart on human rights’"

"In the Asia-Pacific region, a ‘No’ vote is seen as yet another case of Australia clinging to its White Anglo Saxon past and remaining aloof from its neighbours."
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https://michaelwest.com.au/stuck-in-a-colonial-past-the-world-condemns-australias-no-vote-on-the-voice/
#Australia #zeitgeist #denial #referendum #indigenousPeoples #FirstNationsPeoples #exclusion #SettlerSociety #HumanRights