Photo: National Indigenous Times This Musical Dispatch from the Front is a guest post by my old—in both senses of that word—friend Frank Baarda,* a long-term resident of Yuendumu. Hiya Folks, I consider myself lucky to have experienced an age when nuclear submarines didn’t cost $5 billion and to keep an almost vacant offshore asylum [...]
By Mark Butler* FARRAGO 9 – Waterman: A Picaresque Tale of Old Sydney I HAVE always wanted to write something to live up (or down) to that headline which, throughout my many years as a newspaper subeditor never lost its place as one of the top five banned hackneyed puns, so i hope this makes [...]
This is a guest post by legal commentator Hector Lung. Jack Karczewski KC was admitted to practice in the NT in 1984 and provided almost 40 years of service to the Territory’s criminal justice system. He passed away in late 2023. In early 2024 a few rather brief and underwhelming notices appeared to mark his [...]
President Joseph Biden’s re-election campaign speech earlier today US time at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania was a speech for the ages and has set the tone for the campaign that will run for the next 10 months until election day. Hang on, it will be a great ride. At nearly 4,000 words the transcript is a [...]
For various reasons I missed the email from Jane alerting me to the opening of what looks like a great exhibition at the Post Irving gallery in Fremantle, WA. By all accounts the show went off with a bang, with red dots on all of the works within an hour of opening! As the handbill [...]
© K Roussos, 2023 This is a guest post by artist, curator and barrister-at-law Koulla Roussos* I watched “Barbie” the other night. I took my mother, sister, nephews and a 5 year-old niece and two friends, and left the cinema with a brain in toxic shock convulsing with mixed messages. It has taken a few [...]
NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage at NT police HQ. Photo: Melissa Mackay, ABC In January 2012 Crikey published a piece I wrote ($) looking at the concerns expressed by an Aboriginal law and justice support group from the about-as-remote-as-you-can-get NT community of Lajamanu—800 kilometres southwest of Darwin and 900 hundred north-west of Alice Springs—in reaction to [...]
Concerns about the Northern Territory Police triple-0 communications system have been around for a while. This is a re-post of a piece I wrote for Crikey in January 2012 on problems with police communications in a very remote community in the Northern Territory. To see how little has changed since that time see this piece [...]
By Mark Butler This is the second of an occasional series of articles by contributing authors under the general title of FARRAGO*. MY initiation in 1956 as a seven-year-old into the realities of sporting fervour was terrifying. My father, who was taking my older brother and me on one of his post-desertion, pre-divorce excursions out of [...]
We may never get to a “true” version of what happened on that dirt road forty-one years ago. Further crucial details may be found in the many thousands of pages of Court, Coronial and RCDIAC transcripts and the numerous submissions, statements, correspondence and exhibits used in those matters.
