This brings us back to the Notice at the Nyirripi Store and begs the following question. Has anyone bothered to ask the locals if they want the Police to shoot their dogs? No? I thought not.
Pornography Drop-off Point. "This one is at the airstrip and is one of a pair. The other one is at the entrance to Yuendumu near the patronising “Look for People” sign. We inspect the bins daily. So far nothing has been placed in them. Anything we recover from the bins, we will incinerate."
Central Australian government schools have lost their last linguist. The funding allocated for the salary for the remainder of the year will go to the Darwin Languages Centre, which deals with non-Indigenous and Indigenous languages, but is mostly about teaching as a second language.1 No funding has been allocated for a Central Australian linguist in 2012. There’s an Indigenous Language and Culture Officer position who supports schools, but again no funding is guaranteed for 2012.
Pastoralism in the Northern Territory is really a form of strip mining. The pastoralists are mining some of the soil nutrient elements (chemicals) out of the grasses and other leaves and exporting them in live cattle. This is happening to some of the poorest soils and ecosystems in Australia. The operation is being subsidised by the government to a considerable extent. Cattle are little more than parasitic grit in the machinery of our ecosystem. How could it be otherwise? How could the pastoral industry possibly be ecologically sustainable in the Northern Territory?
There isn't much more that I can say about this that the pictures don't - other than a call for people to slow down when they see wildlife on the roads - but your thoughts are more than welcome...
According to the Shitbox Rally organisers "it isn't a race". But from what I saw over these two days last week some of the contestants thought that the Stuart Highway was their own personal dragstrip. Throw in - as on this past Thursday - a setting sun drilling straight through your bug-encrusted windscreen, more than a few triple-trailer road-trains and the plague-locust army of caravans - travelling at 80 km/h - that infests the Stuart Highway at this time of year and it can be a positively dangerous stretch. Particularly for those - such as most of the Shitboxers - that have never driven the road before.
"With my small pocket camera I managed to film young people protesting against Ben Ali. To be able to photograph such things was impossible in the past. I also had the opportunity to join people calling for Ben Ali's removal. The people's demands were simple. We Australians take a lot of those simple demands for granted - like free elections and freedom of expression. Tunisians have never enjoyed such freedoms and were not used to being in a position to even demand such things."
Celebrating their 20th anniversary, revolutionary rock journalism act DARWIN'S 4TH ESTATE will be unveiling new songs and old at the Railway Club, Somerville Gardens Rd Parap, from 8pm on Friday April 29. With bass, drums, guitar, sax and ten typewriters driven by some of the city's finest journalists, writers and broadcasters, guest vocalists will include Shellie Morris, Tracey Bunn and Mary Anne Butler. Other special guests will be announced soon.
Andrew Bolt - your anti-Aboriginal stance and arrogant white superiority has no place in today’s Australia. Believe it or not, in Australia at least, that terrifying arrogance and assumption that people like you believe you should determine which people should inhabit this country, and how they should identify, is so passé.
Over the weekend just passed I found this reference to the LIVESTRONG trademark in the Initial Public offering (the IPO) for the US "content farmer" Demand Media that seems to raise yet more questions. “The Lance Armstrong Foundation is a party to a license agreement with us under which the Lance Armstrong Foundation grants us a perpetual, worldwide, exclusive license to use the LIVESTRONG.com brand, trademark and certain website names associated therewith, including LIVESTRONG.com.”
