Keywords: Aboriginal Australians
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 29 November 2011
19 Comments
Protocol dictated that he could not wear Aboriginal colours. But local custom won out when he donned a black, red and yellow stole given to him on the track. His speech put strong challenges to the Church, but offered too optimistic a reading of the prospects of Aboriginal Australians taking their rightful place in it.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 22 November 2011
16 Comments
The National Apology began a process of relationship-building with Aboriginal Australians. This process has come to an end, with ministerial calls for racially targeted docking of welfare payments for parents whose children are not attending school on remote communities.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 09 November 2011
10 Comments
I had time to spare, so I grabbed a bite to eat and found a bench in the park opposite the cathedral. I was approached by four young Aboriginal people. I told them I'd come for a funeral: 'You might have known him, Father Mick Hayes?' 'He, that tall grey one? He knew me when I was a little fella.'
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AUSTRALIA
- Dan O'Donovan
- 28 October 2011
6 Comments
Noel Pearson sees self-interest as key to the flourishing of Aboriginal communities. But traditionally self-interest did not occur to the Aboriginal mentality. In the pre-'scientific kinship system, everything was inter-related and inter-dependent. Can the concepts co-exist?
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Chalk
- 11 October 2011
5 Comments
Many Australians have reached a point of believing that the difficulties afflicting Aboriginal communities demand the heavy handed, and often humiliating, approach. But the Philppine grassroots Gawad Kalinga model, based on 'the giving of care', offers a realistic alternative.
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AUSTRALIA
I have just returned from visiting friends in remote Aboriginal communities. It was a sad trip. A large number of young people have died in recent years, some close friends. They represent the trifecta of young peoples' deaths: car accidents, suicides and chronic disease.
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AUSTRALIA
- Paul W. Newbury
- 19 April 2011
21 Comments
In 1790, resistance hero Pemulwuy killed Governor Phillip's convict gamekeeper for his abuse of Aboriginal women. The subsequent Frontier Wars raged for 140 years. Anzac celebrations tend to neglect the many Indigenous Australians who died in defence of their land.
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RELIGION
- Frank Brennan
- 06 April 2011
7 Comments
We need clever strategic and moral thinkers among our health professionals, who can engage with the demands of an aging population, with the gap in life-expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, and with the increasingly politically correct debate about euthanasia.
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AUSTRALIA
- Virginia Millen
- 12 January 2011
He had the emaciated cheeks of an addict. She was smaller, toothless and aged beyond her years. As we closed our gate he struck her. She fell on the bitumen, lit by the headlight of a passing car. 'You touch her and I'll belt you too,' the man yelled to my partner.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 01 December 2010
5 Comments
The debate about the Indigenous constitutional referendum proposed by the Gillard Government is heading in a dangerous direction. Naysayers will not defeat it. What may defeat it is division among those who are supporters in principle but not supporters of the particular proposal.
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EUREKA STREET TV
- Peter Kirkwood
- 05 November 2010
7 Comments
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EUREKA STREET TV
- Peter Kirkwood
- 05 November 2010
Prominent Aboriginal elder Tom Calma was brought up Catholic but no longer sees himself as a Christian. While he has gravitated towards his Aboriginal spiritual heritage, he envisions a positive engagement between Christianity and Aboriginal spirituality, and urges the Churches to be open to a hybrid Christianity that embraces both.
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