Antinuclear

He doesn’t look black but because I live in Glebe, in Sydney’s inner-west, I no longer fall for the idea that you have to ”look black” to be black. When I say ”no longer”, I still have to slap myself sometimes to remember that I am on Aboriginal land. Really, I am.

This land may be colonised but it was still Aboriginal land first. No matter what any historian may say about how this land was acquired by white people, we mustn’t erode or ignore the fact that this was Aboriginal land first.

In the city, that moment is often lost on us white folk, except for the requisite acknowledgement of country. Which often feels to me like we are running our hands under water. Do this and it’s a way of ameliorating the damage. The ongoing disasters. Incarceration. Health. Education. Income management. Someone pretending to know how to manage my money better than I know myself………

we can help communities. Ebony Allen, a project manager with indigenous consultancy Winangali and this week’s guest tweeter on @IndigenousX, visited Alice in March this year. Like me, she didn’t find Alice sad. She stood in a queue at the Commonwealth Bank branch in Todd Mall.

”Everyone around me was speaking a [traditional] language, it was like music to my ears,” she said.

The health of the local languages says to her that ”they haven’t been as colonised as the rest of Australia”. She’s an east-coast woman (Kamilaroi and Dharug) and there, local indigenous communities are often regenerating their traditional languages. Here in Alice, English is sometimes a second, third or fourth language……..

Alice is a constant and obvious reminder that blacks owned this country. And in many ways, still do. http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/the-alice-problematic-but-never-sad-for-long-20130624-2oske.html#ixzz2XGF7mFdI