Tuesday 23rd of April 2024
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welcome...

token

from an SMH editorial

Ian Conway is the Aboriginal man who rescued a lost Tony Abbott and his quad bike-borne party from the gathering dark in the central Australian desert recently. The Opposition Leader could do with a similar guide through the tricky ground into which he has just wandered with his jibe at ''welcome to country'' greetings by Aboriginal elders at important functions.

The Aboriginal people Abbott has met on his several forays into Northern and central Australia have a link with land, ethnicity and tradition that is quite obvious. The vast majority of the half million-plus Australians identifying as Aboriginal have more tenuous links, resulting from decimation and displacement in the early days of white settlement and more recent policies aimed at absorbing them into the majority culture.

How much easier to visit the remote traditional communities in their harshly scenic localities, especially when they throw up self-help, anti-welfare figures like Conway or Cape York's Noel Pearson, than to mingle with the people left by dispersal and attempted assimilation. These are battlers, mostly living and working in the wider community, but proud to preserve and pass on the cultural threads from their forebears.

Their elders, as the NSW Aboriginal Land Council's Bev Manton points out, tend to be those who were moved onto reserves and missions, sometimes taken from their parents, and stopped from speaking their own languages or learning traditions. The welcome-to-country ceremonies they have come to provide may be thin and simple cultural vestiges, and their bodies no longer those of hunters and warriors - something knockers like the Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey derides - but these brief greetings are an opening for our imaginations into a world that has disappeared, a country in a more pristine form.

Tuckey says he feels no need to thank ''anyone for the right to be on the soil that is Australia''. On the contrary, most of us do feel thankful for being in this land, and appreciate the hand of friendship Aborigines are still holding out, after all that has been done to them.

see second part of editorial:

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/editorial/what-are-you-bid-mothers-20100316-qcjm.html


Meanwhile in the land of questions with the wrong answers from Ms Devine...
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from Q&A...


MICAELA CALLAN: Many politicians do not practice any religious faith, yet, sittings of parliament are opened with a Christian prayer. In this time of multicultural sensibilities, why is this form of ceremony considered appropriate and relevant, yet ceremonies acknowledging the original inhabitants of Australia are considered tokenistic or a farce?

TONY JONES: Okay, well, Tony Abbott started this debate by saying the acknowledgement of public events is often just tokenism. Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey today described it as a farce. Eric Abetz says it's a fad. Miranda Devine, what's your view?

MIRANDA DEVINE: Well, I think that it was a nice idea to start with, but I think it's overused. If it's not done with any feeling, if it's done as a sort of a mandated practice, then it loses its meaning and I think you had Sue Gordon today and Warren Mundine both describing it as being tokenism and a sort of a white man's guilt. I think there's a danger with any of these sorts of things that they do become ritualistic and useless.

...

TONY JONES: Catherine?

CATHERINE DEVENY: Oh, look, the Welcome to Country I think it really important to just to remind everybody exactly how far we are behind in acknowledging the traditional owners of our land, and I don't think that we can be reminded of that enough but, quite frankly, I find the fact that we open parliament with the Lord's Prayer incredible offensive against our constitution. I actually find the fact that any civilisation which is based on a book written 2000 years ago with rocks, which is - really if you read it, it's just deliberately incomprehensible and irrational and discriminatory - sexism, homophobia, racism, xenophobia. I'm still not - nobody can actually explain to me why we've based our belief system, let alone our civilisation on that and every time that they say the Lord's Prayer that excludes absolutely everybody apart from people who believe that the Bible is the word of God, which is - you know, only nine per cent of people go to church and they're not all Christian.

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GUS: THANKS FOR THE WELCOME TO COUNTRY...

tuckey is a farce....

from the ABC

Tuckey told to apologise for Aboriginal remarks

 

Mr Tuckey says acknowledging traditional owners of land at official functions is a farce and should not be done.

"I have never thanked anyone for the right to be on the soil that is Australian," he said.

He also says some performers of welcome-to-country ceremonies are "grossly overweight".

Greens leader Bob Brown says Mr Tuckey should apologise.

"If Wilson Tuckey does not have the common sense or grace or decency to withdraw, he should be removed from the Liberal Party," Senator Brown said.

"They should not be harbouring somebody who's capable of making such obnoxious statements.

"[Opposition Leader] Tony Abbott should demand an apology from Wilson Tuckey."

But Liberal frontbencher Peter Dutton says Mr Tuckey has a right to speak his mind even if people disagree with the comments.

"I don't have any issue with what Wilson said frankly or his right to say it."

Mr Abbott believes acknowledging Indigenous ownership as a matter of course is tokenistic and that it should only be done at suitable events.

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GUS: THANKS FOR THE WELCOME TO COUNTRY...

beware of the triffids...

In her inimitable style Ms Devine starts her usual bile-ish anti-Rudd column with a few shakespearian lines apparently quoted in Liberal party rooms and used to compare Abbott as a weed that smells better than a Rudd-lilly that fester... It must have been someone other than Herfernan who knew about this sonnet, as he's never read a book since he left school unless he has a fantastic memory which I think he has in regard to dirt files... 

Then Ms Devine regals us with more titbits...:

 

At the Sydney Institute's annual dinner on Tuesday night, at which historian Simon Schama delivered the keynote address, the newly invigorated political contest was the hot topic of conversation among the 850 business media and political types. On one table the discussion was about the growing realisation in the business community of Rudd's oddness. The example cited was of a recent dinner in Canberra at which guests expected a Schama-type engaging after-dinner speech and instead received a management consultant's lecture from the Prime Minister, complete with whiteboards and charts.

On another table, Liberals expressed delight with Abbott and growing confidence the Coalition could win the next election. They spoke of money pouring into coffers like it never had during the reign of the investment banker Turnbull.

But at a different table, grumbling Liberals expressed outrage at his parental leave scheme and declared, ''Tony has peaked''. With such antagonism from the "doctors' wives" set and criticism yesterday from Peter Costello for being fiscally impure (like Howard), it seems Abbott is on track to win over the people he really needs to have on side if he is to do well at the next election - the middle class mortgage belt, aka "working families".

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Gus: please note that the Sydney Institute is the think tank of the rabid-right. Not that I am one to criticise historians, hum hum, I will introduce you here to extracts from the wikipedia entry of Mr Schama...

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Israel

Schama was critical of a call by British novelist John Berger for an academic boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians. Writing in The Guardian in an article co-authored with lawyer Anthony Julius, Schama compared Berger's academic boycott to policies adopted by Nazi Germany, noting “This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On 1 April 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores.”[13]

In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated with Vivienne Westwood the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war.[14] He characterized Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centers as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah.[14] With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view." [14]

[edit] United States

Schama is a vocal supporter of Barack Obama[15] and critic of George W. Bush.[16] He appeared on the BBC's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, clashing with John Bolton.[17]

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Gus: fascinating conflicts of interest here... But in the end, Abbott may be weedy in appearance, but as he emerges from the Bondi surf with seaweed on his head, he's more like the exotic water Hyacinth...

Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) has been called the world's worst aquatic weed. It is a free floating water plant that is native to South America. It can vary in size from a few inches tall to over three feet.  This plant has blue-green leaves, thick stalks and a showy purple or lavender flower. It thrives in tropical regions and in waters that are high in nutrients. Its beautiful, large purple and violet flowers have made it a popular ornamental, and the plant is now naturalized in most of the southern United States. It reproduces mostly by clonal propagation, but seeds also play a role in its survival and colonization. Massive weed colonies can grow when introduced into areas that are conducive for their proliferation. In addition, infestation can occur given a disruption in the natural ecological balance by human activities such as impounding of flowing waters by dams, channeling and allowing the buildup of eutrophication.

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Gus: yes these plants usually end up killing everthing else to survive. They're the triffids that garrot your crops while you look at the pretty flowers... in a few word : TRIFFID WEEDS.

GUS: THANKS FOR THE WELCOME TO COUNTRY...

go figure...

In the comment above. I raised the possibility of conflicts in the mind of historian Simon Schama. He may not have any.

Yet, he seems to be a person who understands the foible of humankind as well the genius of some of us. He grasps the intricacies of exquisite art, grubby politics and irrational religion, yet he spoke at the rabid-right conservative think-tank "the Sydney Institute", he supports Israel anihilation of half the population of Lebanon, and supports Obama, he hated Bush but supported the illegal war against Iraq. Go figure...

Did I mention his parents were Jewish...?