Joe, to hell with 18C. What you just said is true. It is about time political correctness went out the window and someone with some guys introduced these people to what a day's work really consists of. On a trip up to the Top End a few years ago we called in at Woomers and I wondered why it wasn't being used to accomodate people. Then we called in at Batchelor where I used to live in the sixties when it was a mining town. It used to be a tidy town. Now it looks like nobody cares because actually, nobody does care. That would be a good place to start a project to get people of their bums. When I was there, Jack English had a vegetable farm up the road. There is no shortage of water and good soil. If the people of Lake Cargellico in NSW can make a go of a vinyard and a winery, it can be done anywhere.

David

Hi David,

Maybe there is some sort of informational misunderstanding going on ? As a very experienced friend has pointed out to me, many Aboriginal people in remote settlements assume that if white people have provided something, say housing or vehicles, it is their responsibility to maintain it. Packaging is seen as a white fellas' invention, so it is up to white fellas to keep communities clean of rubbish. White fellas' crap-food, such as Coke or fast-foods, will not have health effects on Aboriginal people, only on white fellas, so if Aboriginal people get unhealthy from it, it's up to white fellas to fix them up.

The key aspect is that Aboriginal people are not responsible for anything which in any way comes from white fellas. That they may benefit from something is neither here nor there.

So, if this is so, how to change people's misunderstandings ? How to get across that, in this world, nothing comes from nothing, everything has to be worked for, Black or white, nobody is owed anything merely by being ?

Of course, colonialism has provided a rich vein of rationales for how things got the way they are now. I couldn't possibly comment on whether people in remote settlements have copped more from colonialism than people in the cities, more apartheid maybe, if that's what is meant by 'colonialism' but I would have thought that 'southern' people, especially 'southern' urban people, might have had at least their share of colonialism. Even those 36,000 graduates :)

And if so, then many, many of them have done something about it, so it seems. I suspect that this has been the case from the very earliest days - some grabbed opportunities, some sat around and waited for more cargo.

The world moves on, it doesn't stop and come back to pick up the pieces.

Joe

It doesn't take long for the same old ideological talk fest about the so called Indigenous 'problem'. Here's how I see it. Western paradigms cannot hold up under the weight of Indigenous epistemology. This is the problem. It is a fact. There, I said it! I am not pretending to be the 'authoritative' voice on Indigenous people but from where I stand, my ways of knowing, and understanding come through interconnected familial relationships I have with metaphysical and natural knowledge entities: my epistemology. To state the obvious, western ways of knowing is compartmentalised into four major abstract "pillars" of knowledge: critical theory, positivist and post positivist, feminist, and constructivist-interpretivist. Basically, the imposition of these or combination of these means that fitting square pegs into round holes becomes the dominant lens through which a field of view can be seen as the only right and white way to privilege knowledge production through linear processing. I am not the first to write about this, many Indigenous scholars have been emerging here in Australia and overseas, are doing this, writing about our research philosophy. Here in Australia, Indigenous scholars such as; Arbon, Rigney, Gaeia, Moreton-Robinson, West, Fredericks, and Nakata are the vanguard of this emerging renaissance of postgraduate which I am one making my meaning contributions. Read their interpretations of Indigenous philosophy and maybe some of what i am writing about here will make sense.

Numnul
" Here's how I see it. Western paradigms cannot hold up under the weight of Indigenous epistemology."
I think you have got the horse by the tail. The real truth is that " Indigenous paradigms cannot hold up under the weight of Western epistemology."
Until your people get this into their brains they will be forever in the stone age.

David

David, shift your brain out of phrenology mode. There you go, does that feel better now?