Indigenous jobs scheme - to whose profit?

A two year scheme to provide training and create 50,000 jobs for Indigenous people in the private corporate sector, proposed by ‘Australia’s richest man’ the head of Fortescue Metals, Andrew Forrest, has the support of Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) and Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson.

However, Kimberley Land Council executive director Wayne Bergman points out that if the plan is going to work, pre-employment training needs to start now. Preferably yesterday. Educational opportunities for Indigenous Australians are known to be yet another area of discrimination, aggravated by inadequate services to remote areas. Les Malezer, chairman of the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, points out that 30 years ago NSW tried to move people from western areas of the state into Newcastle to work in the mining industries; Queensland also tried to move people around. It failed. Any argument forced onto people by any government, that they should leave their home and community for areas of work targeted “for” them, deserves to fail.

Several voices have commented that ‘consultation with Indigenous groups is critical to the success’ of the plan. So far, there has been none. Vice-chancellor Professor Jeannie Herbert of the Batchelor Institute gives qualified support to the plan, but “It’s obvious that the working group has already been set up but we haven’t been contacted which I find interesting as we are the only provider of tertiary education to Indigenous people”

It’s no surprise that, with economic downturn looming, the government should love the idea. For a start, the premise of the program enables them to (technically) shunt responsibility for any failings onto corporate sector.

Rudd: “A welfare-only response to these communities is precisely the wrong way to go. We’ve got to get housing right, we’ve got to get education right, we’ve got to get health right but we’ve also got to get jobs right.”

Which in Rudd-speak means, make ‘em work.

Yet government assistance/training and education schemes already exists. Further, Mezler points out that the private employment of Aboriginal people has actually shrunk rather than increased over the last 20 years. In the current economic climate that seems unlikely to improve. So first question, what does the self-designated speaker for the private sector, Andrew Forrest, want?

The Ai Group chief executive Heather Ridout knows.

“We are short of people, we are short of skills. So there is not a better time to take this initiative.”

Forrest has in the past ‘expressed concern’ that mining compensation paid to traditional land owners would require ’strict management plans’ saying, in the middle of a national reconciliation forum, Aboriginal people needed to get away from the ‘hand out mentality‘. (Yamatji and Pilbara Native Title Service have argued that advisory systems are already in place) Whats made clear is that to Forrest, Aboriginal people ‘can’t manage their money or lives’ and people ‘like us’ (executives from the corporate sector and like minded politicians) are what’s needed to ‘manage’ and control Indigenous Australia.

This, in the current job-network and Centrelink ‘managed’ job culture, is another a ‘pay for the opportunity to work’ scheme (have you tried everything? Have you tried the training provided by Forrest and Rudd? If you don’t, we have to penalise your payments) - for a paltry training wage in those Industry sectors looking for cheap labour. For a few, and the desperate, even such backhanded ‘assistance’ will be welcome. But the greatest threat behind Forrest and company’s opportunistic exploitation of the most disadvantaged group in Australia is another return to the past of White Australia - a cheap, second-class-waged, black labour pool.

One step Closer to FAT!

Huzzah! I finally knew it was the oven and not me when the fruit cake came out burnt on the outside and gloop in the centre. Now, after so many heart rending experiments with different cake tins, timers, temperatures and recipes, I can, finally, by aid of the mini 5 inch cake tins and Breville countertop convection oven, despite our explosive gas leaking el-cheapo oven, make cake.
Let us eat!

Victim of Australian ‘Detention Centres’ killed in Gaza

AUST ASYLUM SEEKER ‘KILLED IN GAZA STRIP’
So the ABC reports.

This is not the first death of a deported ‘alleged’ refugee. The nightmare of the detention centres - that are more accurately called camps - is that they are illegal. Their existences breaks the code of human rights and international law. More sinister and receiving less coverage (out of what meagre coverage the media gives the topic as it is) is the accounts of crippling trauma depression and breakdown caused by the experience of torture and trauma in Australian detention centres.

If I had doubts as to the deliberate policy of the government, I can rest assured,
the government, like all governments, knows when it is guilty:

The government is obviously aware of the possibly of future legal action because in its deal package for those who will go home “voluntarily” there is a clause they must sign guaranteeing not to pursue action for “trauma and torture ” damage experienced in Australia. If they don’t sign this they do not receive the $2000 incentive to assist their return.
Refugee Action Committee

EDIT: Akram Al Masri refugee pleas were rejected under the Howard government. In response to Akram Al Masri’s murder, the current Rudd government has come out affirming their ‘hardline stance’ on refugees. There may be a new line up, but nothing has changed.


Sydney and Melbourne Pen Centres lobbied successfully for International Pen centres to recognise the category of Writers In Detention. The page here gives succinct account of reality of detention, and (half way down the page) several excerpts of the work of ‘writers in detention’. I’ll restrict myself to citing two:

I thought about my family who are probably very happy for me. They probably think that my life of oppression is over. They think that human rights abuses only occur in Iran and the Middle Eastern countries. If only they could’ve seen me here in Australia, a country that’s supposed to be a Western democracy.
Rahman Shiri ‘Romeo and Juliet Deserted’

Rahman was recently deported back to Iran. His fate is unknown.

“The great men, have placed miserable human beings behind bars.”
Tony Zandavar

Reading Rhythm Movement Questions And Faith on the Page

// Rhythm // Movement // Questions // And Faith // // Statement //


I Get De Rhythm

Cafmiro (Uchu Nezumi) sent me this:

Comics/Manga/Graphic Novels are characterised by the fact that they are sequential art, as opposed to cartoons which are stand alone drawings. Sequential art tells a story throughout the comic, but to do that it has to use a kind of visual grammar which is born out of the combination of various intertwined artistic and linguistic element. One of those is the rhythm of the panels. Without good rhythm comics don’t makes sense. It can be like trying to read a sentence with bad or jolty grammar. …Some people are really skilled artists, but suck at the rhythm and pacing, so telling the story doesn’t work. Adversely, as we know, some people uses stick figures (xkcd for example), but write/draw awesome comics because they rock at coming up with the content, and the pacing for displaying that content.

Aha… (I thought) The rhythm of the panels, of the text – the way the language or the layout or (in some instances) the artwork itself will push, propel, drag the reader down its path. But it has to have a strong line through it. It cannot depend on a docile, obediently attentive audience. Clearest (and my favorite) example is picture books. Quentin Blake wrote somewhere in his book Words and Pictures that the picture book text must be sturdy enough to be unbreakable. (I cannot find the quote. I bet I find it now after posting this). To deal with the brief attention spans of small children, it has to be strong enough to be returned to midway through after something shiny happened by, capable of coping with being eaten juggled jumped on read backwards. (My favorite most unbreakable picture book is Blake’s Loveykins).

Two things often forgotten in teaching ‘reading skills’ – This can only happen in real time. The visual rhythm of the comic, the rhythm of prose, the rhythms of white space and poetry on the page, the rhythm of music – it carries its audience… And someone is to blame. Someone wrote the book with a pre-determined destination or ‘a journey’ in mind. It intends, deliberately, to take you ‘somewhere’.

The Movement in the Text

My literary-theory hungry little mind had a field day. Apparently Foucault is not enough (but Derrida belongs in my next life).

The success of the narrative space created by any fiction can be measured by the degree to which the reader/viewer is able to move (the assumption here of course is that we don’t want a flat linear world, it has to have two dimensions at least). A hole must be left in the text, so to speak, for the readers response.

The crassest version of this, of course, is pornography. But porn is a cruel narrative. It is premised on lack, the fact that it is a substitute for the ‘real thing’. It is absolutely essential that the promised orgasm cannot overcome that lack – it must return, post coitus, the reminder of the nothing you’ve got. It runs on a mechanics that ensures one magazine will never be enough. It takes your lack and throws it back in your face. Every time, something more and more hard core will be required to clear that hurdle, overcome the reminder of lack, achieve orgasm. Else one magazine would last a lifetime, and therein would lie the end of the industry dollar (Read Sadeian Woman by Angela Carter for more on this)

Consider instead the text that demands an investment from the reader, that demands the right to give a return. Toni Morrisson has commented (I forget where, I think it was in interview) ‘they call my writing rich, but its not. It has to be sparse, for a rich response to come from the reader’. And however rich the impressions evoked in the mind of the reader, she is right, her words are exact and sparse. From Beloved:

‘“There could have been a way. Some other way.”
”What way?”
”You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them; trackless and quiet.’

Questions

Narrative is a temporal act, in real time and space, as well as textual time and space. It requires then two questions –

where are we going; where are we now.

Questions that drag in history, drags in the trinity of money, hedonism, learning, drags in the question

what does the text want from us?

Faith

To wit, I unearthed and dusted off my Honors Thesis from Long Ago. And found two excellent examples of the above ideas (and presumably their origins). In it, rambling on about the medieval religious civic drama cycles of York and Chester, I referred to a Book of Hours, specifically, the manuscript known as The Hours of Mary of Burgundy. Two ingenious paintings by the illustrator (sadly known only as ‘Master of Mary of Burgundy’) inscribes the owner and the viewer (safely presumed one and the same, as a Book of Hours such as this were most likely private commission for private devotional use) into the central Christian drama (where we are going) - communion with Christ. The first painting depicts Mary of Burgundy herself, seated at the window to the Church, and depicted again within the Church, kneeling in adoration at the feet of Mary, mother of Christ. The painting thus underscores the privileged worship of the (rich) owner of such a book (or seat in church) to Mary, the virgin mother, and the infant Christ. But further, the second self portrait of the kneeling Mary of Burgundy also depicts a contemporary devotional ideal. (where we are now, in history) Example, the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, or the not-so-subtle Book of Margery Kempe. Recurring theme in mystical writings of the time, particularly women, is the vision of physically tending to the wounds of Christ, of experiencing in vision or meditation personal involvement in the events of Christs sacrifice. The point is clearer in the second painting. This is the actual crucifixion, just before the cross is raised. There is no portrait within the frame this time, the devotional book, the rosary, the view, instead takes the reader (presumably Mary of Burgundy) into the event of the crucifixion. She/we are are brought closer to Christ through the privilege of its literal vision (what the text wants from us), able to directly witness Christs suffering, and through suffering with Mary the mother, live the pain and the grief.


Statement

If the story is a stepping stone, then the question is where, in this world or another, can it take us.

Journal#20 Is it sentient?

Journal#19 Cold feet

Journal#18 After that I felt so bad I just had to draw her a Hug

Journal#17 Playground Politics

Language & Lies : 3 takes

If it were possible to imagine an aesthetic of textual pleasure, it would have to include: writing aloud…a whole presence of the human muzzle … to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.

Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text.

The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor’s language sometimes sounds beautiful.

Adrienne Rich. Blood Bread and Poetry Selected Prose 1979-1985

“You ain’t poisoned, Albert,” said Bill. “That was only a mere ruse de guerre, as they say in the noosepapers.”
“A what?” demanded the Puddin’ suspiciously.
“… as we haven’t time to waste talkin’ philosophy to a Puddin’, why, into the bag he goes, or we’ll never get the story finished.”

Norman Lindsay. The Magic Pudding.

Journal#16 Fatigue