11 September 2015
(Image source: ABC News Pic: Hunter Water)
Work on the pipeline that delivers drinking water to 40 per cent of the Hunter region has led to around three-thousand Aboriginal artefacts being uncovered near Maitland.
Ancient Indigenous Australian bush-burning could be used around the world to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to United Nations research, which also challenges Prime Minister Tony Abbott's refusal to embrace the purchase of international carbon credits. Abbott has previously said buying overseas offsets sends money "offshore into dodgy carbon farms in Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan".
The government this month delayed considering the measure until 2017 or later, saying it would rather make cuts domestically.
A new genetic study is threatening to transform theories about who the original Native Americans were after finding certain tribes in the Amazon are related to Aborigines in Australia. Researchers believe these stories could constitute some of the oldest accurate oral histories in the world, passing through some 300 generations. Traditional stories passed down through generations by Australian Aborigines may be among the oldest accurate oral histories in the world. 'About 2 per cent of the ancestry of Amazonians today comes from this Australasian lineage that's not present in the same way elsewhere in the Americas.'
Throughout Australian history, principle has been overwhelmed by economic interest, and the idea of justice embodied in natural rights is voted down by justice made in the image of the majority. The Mabo decision of the High Court in 1992 might be taken as a paradigm case of what has been called "complex space." Instead of assuming a homogenous jurisdiction over Australian territory, the court had to acknowledge the validity of a different legal system and "storied" country inside the national borders. - Theological Critique by Mark Brett, Professor of Old Testament
An Aboriginal elder in Central Australia has shed tears of joy upon the rediscovery of a sacred site lost for the past 70 years. Previous attempts to find the Tanami Desert site, known as Kurlpurlunu, had proved fruitless until Warlpiri elders, George Jungarrayi Ryder and Molly Nappururla Tasman flew over the area in a helicopter last week. The elderly pair had visited the site as children and recognised some of the features, including a distinctive tree and a rock. The site's identity was confirmed by 82-year-old Jerry Jangala.
Kitty Wallaby's life was linked with the Dreamtime, and her people, the Gunditjmara in Western Victoria, built sprawling villages of stone houses and an aquaculture system that pre-dated Egypt's pyramids and Stonehenge. When Kitty told the invading pastoralists that is was her country, they were not interested in listening or understanding.
The first proof that humans lived in Western Australia's Mid West at the same time as humans in the Pilbara and South West regions has been found in a cave 50 kilometres north-west of Cue.
Previously, archaeologists had no established evidence that humans occupied the Mid West region more than 10,000 years ago. But charcoal associated with stone artefacts excavated in the Yalibirri Mindi rock shelter in the Weld Range have been shown to belong to ancestors of the Wajarri native title claimants living 30,000 years ago.
Nigel Scullion, federal Indigenous affairs minister said
the commonwealth did not seek an assurance from the Northern Territory government that remote Indigenous communities would remain open before it proposed a change in funding arrangements. The federal government set aside a one-off payment of $155m in the budget for the territory government to take full control of municipal services. In the 2014-15 financial year, the commonwealth provided nearly $21m for municipal services in 376 NT outstations and homelands.
Retired magistrate Pat O'Shane has criticised the Intervention and called on the Abbott government to put more resources into Indigenous affairs. "It's racist, in a word," she said.
"It's discriminatory; it is not applied to other communities in this society."
Ms O'Shane said the Howard government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act specifically to implement the policy in Indigenous communities.
Homelands are communities established by Aboriginal people so that they can maintain their connection with their traditional, ancestral land. These communities have lower levels of social problems and significantly better health outcomes for Aboriginal people -- as well as a strengthened connection to culture, language and spirituality.