Forwarded for Christine Howes
"Christine Howes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
[Christine is subscribed to the Reconnet-l list but has given me permission to
forward anything she writes to Recoznet2 if I think it is of interest. - Trudy]
Hi Trudy and all....
Re Sunday, Cherbourg & Palm Island - there are a coupla articles I wrote
for the Aboriginal Coordinating Council newsletter
which are relevent if anyone wants some copies (or should I post them?)
They were published in one form or another in the
Koori Mail so you may have already seen bits of them. If you are
interested I also have some more material on the Palm
Island Vision Plan or the Cherbourg men's & women's groups (some of which
were also published in the Koori Mail) and
another article I have which is going into tomorrow's Koori Mail is about
Kowanyama's recent award win during domestic
violence week.
Re the Nine program. I only read the transcript (although I was in
Cherbourg when they did the filming and was irritated
when I spotted them filming some young kids wandering about at sunset -
could see how that was going to be used) and I
haven't seen any other media which may have followed.
>From what I could gather I feel the program was pretty negative and short
on discussing solutions which have worked in
some places. There certainly there ARE some positive spins they could have
developed a little more. The Palm Island Vision
Plan, for example, or the fact the day these people were actually in
Cherbourg was their first mens' group meeting (about 50
turned up) which was about men becoming active in looking for solutions,
working with women and looking for solutions
together. This has worked in lots of places but always with some variation
and until men, women, police, health services,
councils, schools, etc start coming together on it, nothing else seems to
work as effectively. But there are some places which
don't even have the basics such as resource centres or even safe shelters.
Often these same places have restricted medical
services and are remote from any other help - eg state police (felt to be
helpful because they can remove troublemakers).
The other thing I felt they missed was they seemed to be implying someone
or something should come up with some kind of
across the board solutions. The only solutions I've seen which have had an
impact (and they all take time) have been
whole-of-community solutions worked out by themselves. There is no way
some sweeping government policy is going to fix
this. Even funding is irrelevent, in some cases - eg the Palm Island
Vision Plan has been coming together for the last 3-4
years at least and has only this year received funding from Qld govt for
admin/info distribution work.
What can we do? I suppose I have no real idea except if people are
pressuring government to do something, make sure it's
about letting each and every community decide for themselves how to tackle
it.
Cheers all....Christine
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