One Geek

Somehow I managed to put the wrong date for my birthday in my Skype profile. Sorry Howie. I have fixed it now.

Flight to Adelaide and then bus from there to Alice. About 21 hour bus ride though :-(.

Just finished watching Tsotsi. What a heartbreaking but fantastic movie. I hope I soon get a chance to engage with Africa.

Not so expensive $241 each way.. Though that is still a lot of money.

In the 38 statutes of Yolngu Law child abuse is clearly not condoned. In the sixth statute it is most clearly outlawed.

My favourite though is statute 11 “Do not speak or act carelessly or meddle with the affairs of your relatives or any other people.”

If only we obeyed and respected that law I think things would be much better. If we just took a little more care in everything we did.

Thanks Luke for your post. I found it interesting.

The question that disturbs me is we aren’t asking why there are the levels of alcoholism and abuse of all kinds that exist.

Could it be that aboriginal communities structure have been torn apart by our (white peoples)interference over the past 200 odd years?

If I have no hope, no vision for any form of future, how am I not going to enter into self-destructive behaviour?

Yes we need to deal with the problems of alcohol, substance and sexual abuse but we also need to deal with the causes of these. From my little knowledge the problems are huge, there are no simple answers and it will be time consuming and expensive to address. It can however be done.

Why Warriors Lie Down and Die provides a great explanation of why plans like the government’s won’t work and how we can do better.

I was going to write an angry blog post about the foolishness of the government’s new plan to “fix the Aboriginals”, but I think that between Howie and Steve have covered most of what I want to say. I hope that sanity somehow prevails, and also that the debate around it doesn’t just become a vehicle for racism, and colonial paternalism.

CIHSR is apparently having both major rebel groups in Nagaland attempt to extort them. Pretty poor form.

Got back last night from Canberra. It was a good trip. I think Voices for Justice went pretty well.

I am still waiting to talk to a pollie, but I am having fun.. Today I got to watch question time, I must say I wish labour would have a little more backbone and spend more of there time supporting there positions rather then attacking the government. The Liberal party seem so so much better at using question time to there advantage. Tonight I went to a climate change forum, which was quite interesting. I got the feeling that Peter Garrett wanted to offer more then he could as a Labour member. The Democrat’s and Green’s were very aware and good on the issue and the Liberal’s were entirely absent from the forum on Climate Change, which was not very suprising to anyone.

Tonight Micah Challenge put on a great cocktail evening which unfortunately few of the politician’s stayed long enough at to here a very inspirational figure from Rwanda speech about the Millennium Development Goal’s poverty, transparency and reconciliation speech. It certainly reminded me that my work on poverty reduction ain’t over.

Well I am in Canberra now for Voices for Justice(VFJ) after a long week in Muswellbrook, a night stuck in Newcastle due to trackwork.

Myself, Howie andBen came down yesterday afternoon. I’m a lobby group leader for VFJ which is basically a conference plus lobbying for the government to live up to its commitments to developing nations. My lobbying group for VFJ so far consists of me and another leader. One of the other participants in my group decided to dog my group for another without telling us. I found her and it was clear she wanted to be with her friends so I let her be. It was pretty funny though because she was using the lamest reasons for why she wanted to be in the other group. If she had just said she wanted to be with friends it would of been so much simpler.

So after last nights programs me and Howie went to our motel, where they had left out room open with the key in it. I love how trusting some people are. After hanging out in the motel long enough to see that we need to purchase WiFi cards from the closed reception we decided to go and get some food from a 24hour Coles we eventually found. It’s funny Howie is so much more healthy in his purchases since marrying Jenny.

This morning I got up at about 10am and had a shower and then Howie and I went down to reception to check in to get some WiFi.

Loc as a short form for location is my current favourite piece of engineering slang.

Just back from getting breakfast at Macca’s, for the 3rd day in a row. Waking up at six every morning is taking it’s tolll, so I am feeling rather tired. At least Mc Cafe coffee is drinkable. Almost finished my work, but the other work on site is far from finished which is what my communications work was meant to support. I am coming home tomorrow anyway.

I celebrate the Queen’s birthday today by working. I am back in Muswellbrook for work this week. All very exciting. The motel’s restaurant is closed tonight, and most of the places in town are apparently shut. However the workers club is meant to be open. That should be joyous.