All together now...

I was in Alice Springs a couple of weeks or so and witnessed episodes of what they're coyly referring to as 'anti-social behaviour'.
It was generally harmless - the odd drunk humbugging for money.
But I did watch a couple of kids (black and white;14 y.o?) wind themselves up to have a fight with a German tourist.
Lots of loud and bad language.
Windmilling arms.
Ostentatious taking off of shirts.
Preparing for a fight.
It looked ugly, but didn't go much further than that.
A few days before there'd been a 'riot'.
Self-appointed vigiliantes took to the streets, but overweight men with red faces don't scare pumped-up kids who can run a lot faster.
Not much.
A few days later there were a couple of fatal stabbings.
And then the Chief Minister was in town for a regional sittingCabinet meeting of our town council sized and grandiosely -named 'Parliament'.
She copped a fair amount of abuse from people who were 'scared to go out', 'sick and tired of violence' and 'waiting for something to be done'.
The something?
More police.
Less tolerance.
Laura Norder.
But they're not yet prepared to see Alice Springs become a dry town (no public drinking whatsoever).
That's bad for business.
It's about what you'd expect, really.
No-one's prepared to look at the whys and wherefores, though.
Like, why is it happening?
I got a clue sitting in restaurant one night.
There was party of white people across the room.
Lots of wine and loud voices.
One stood out: 'The thing you have to realise about Alice Springs is that nobody comes from here; we're all from somewhere else'.
It's bullshit, of course.
It's not even true of white people: several families have been around the Centre for a few generations now; and I have friends of middle age who were born there and whose parents were born there.
But it says a lot about how some - many - whites view blacks.
They're interlopers who don't belong in a whitefella tourist-fuelled economic wet dream that only exists in this arid, but long-peopled landscape, because their culture lives and tourists want to experience it before it too dies.
Forget about the Mparntwe people, the custodians of Yeperenye, the Caterpillar Dreaming.
Forget about the fact that you're as likely to hear Arrernte on the radio as you are English.
To the nouveau Alice Springs resident, they're invisible.
Marginalised.
And what is the last desperate resort of marginalised people?
All together now....

Travelling North: On the Road

The term 'desert' doesn't do justice to the amazing variety of micro-environments that pattern the arid inland of Australia.

Think about the complexity in so-called 'dot' painting, then look at Google Earth's view of the Centre from the sky.

I travelled both south and north in a round trip of more than 8000km last month.

We drove to Melbourne for my eldest son's wedding and then I drove back solo, accompanied only by Warren Zevon, The Chieftains, Lyle Lovett, JS Bach, WA Mozart, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Alison Krauss and Guy Clark.

This is one of the amazing views from the road - the top end of a large complex of salt lakes in the country to the south-west of Woomera.

Day 1 I drove from just out of Melbourne to Burra, in mid-north south Aust, via Mildura, Renmark and Morgan.

Day 2 was Burra to Coober Pedy via Horrocks Gap into Port Augusta.

Day 3 Coober Pedy to Alice Springs.

Day 4 Alice Springs to the Highway Inn.

And Day 5 Highway Inn to Darwin.

See more pics on our web album.

Vale Kurt Vonnegut

Dry insights, mordant wit and spare prose: his writing shone in my youth, although I felt that in his later years, which were marked by depression, he tended to lapse into self-parody.
Now old Kurt has been swallowed up by the great chronosynclastic infundibulum in the sky.
So it goes.
Poot-tee-wheet

It might be neat and tidy, but is it democratic?

Back in the bad old days of serious machine politics in the various state Labor parties, the numbers men exhorted the faithful to 'vote early and vote often'.
In some wards, the dead rose from their graves to vote repeatedly at different polling booths.
That was then.
We've since got an independent statutory body - the Australian Electoral Commission - which oversees elections at every level.
Our elections - apart from the extremely rare occurrence of missing ballot boxes in some organisational elections - are usually straight.
We have a formal electoral roll and what used to be a pretty straightforward enrolment process with a reasonable period for enrolment after elections are called.
But that's changing as of 16 April this year.
For the rest of this week, you can enrol by giving name, address, citizenship status and birthdate and getting someone who is already on the roll to witness your signature.
Next week, you'll have to provide full ID and choose from a small menu of authorised people to both view your ID and witness your enrolment application.
If you're in prison, you now lose the right to vote.
Forget about internationally-recognised civil and political rights.
Cons will not be able to exercise them
And if they called an election tomorrow, you'd have until 8pm the same day to register if you'd forgotten to do it beforehand.
In a literate society, this should not be a problem.
But what about in remote areas, where many Aboriginal people - particularly the young - are barely literate?
Many simply do not carry their own documentation, leaving banks, stores and health clinics to look after ATM cards, Medicare cards and the like.
In order to enrol, they'd have to round up their ID, then find one of the authorised people and then fill out the form - or get someone to do it for them.
If they live on an outstation, they might not hear about an election being called.
So if they haven't enrolled, the chances of rounding up the ID, getting an authorised person to witness the form and then faxing it off to the Electoral Commission in time are pretty slim.
There's a big enrolment drive on in the territory at the moment, to try and make sure that Aboriginal people aren't disenfranchised by the move.
Funnily enough, not that many of them are likely to vote for the current government, whose Indigenous policies derive their intellectual foundations from the philosophy of assimilation.
They're also pretty good at blaming the victim, too.
The Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - a member of the governing party - said, without going into specifics, that the changes would stop the 'deluge of last-minute enrolments', which increased the scope for fraud and manipulation of electoral roll.
But as one of the activists who run the GetUp website pointed out, new technology should make voting easier and if the the government wanted the roll to be accurate and up to date, they should be allowing people to enrol.
Not making it harder and harder for them.
But no, they pushed the legislation through Parliament last year and it's sat there waiting for deadline - pretty well unnoticed by all but a few.
I took part in a survey by my union - the Media Alliance - and was asked if I was aware of the coming changes to the Electoral Act.
I think I surprised the interviewer with the extent of my knowledge.
She told me after the interview that only one in 30 members - yes folks, about three per cent - of the membership were aware of what was happening.
So if the media doesn't know, how are the punters going to find out?
Unnoticed changes might make the process neater.
But are they democratic?

No, Minister

It's months since I've posted.
Christmas intervened and then it got harder and harder to sit down and write something.
But I'm back!

The state of education has hit the news recently; more specifically the low levels of literacy and numeracy recorded in the Northern Territory as compared with other States and Territories.
We know we don't perform as well because the national benchmarking Multilevel Assessment Program tests (the MAP tests) say so.
What the MAP tests actually show is that the performance in urban and regional schools compares favourably with Down South.
It's the remote schools in Aboriginal communities, however, that show very poor returns: in some cases only around 30 per cent of kids actually perform at benchmark level.
And that's a terrific opportunity for talkback radio to get into the whys and wherefores.
So they wheel out the Minister for Education for an explanation.
A practised politician, he has no difficulty - nor hesitation - in fluently repeating the advice his Department has given him.
Kids in remote Aboriginal schools don't perform as well because they don't attend school.
All we have to do is attend regularly and everything will be hunky-dory.
Right.
The reality is a bit more complex than that.
What we're talking about - remote schooling - is still essentially a colonialist enterprise.
It's a valiant attempt to impart Western values and styles of knowledge that blithely ignores the complexities of working across languages and cultures.
In this context, it's not simply enough to provide schools and teachers and expect kids will automatically turn up.
You have to give them a reason for being there.
You have to bend your pedagogy and then your curriculum to accommodate cross-cultural, multilingual contexts, such as schools where kids may speak up to five languages and may speak Aboriginal English or Kriol as a sixth, but they don't speak, read or write a more formal English.
You have to make sure your teachers are fully trained, sensitive and mature enough to meet the demands; not simply recruit warm bodies to front a classroom and emerge at the end of the day more or less sane.
You have to work out the conditions that are necessary to keep teachers out bush, so that you've got continuity in people and programs.
And you have to have consistent and sustained support from your department.
Blaming kids can't hide the fact that the department is doing none of the above.
But it's what many people in the Territory want to hear.
It's yet more 'proof' that blackfellas are to lazy to get off their arses and make sure their kids go to school so they can get the benefits that we're supposedly offering.
That the assertion doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny doesn't stop the department running the line.
Fortunately, I was interviewed as a representative of the school councils' combined organisation and I got a good response to my suggestion that we needed to look at our own performance - as I've listed above - before we start blaming kids for their failure to perform at level.
I was followed by a senior bureaucrat who stuck to the line, which by then had become slightly modified to: 'well kids who do attend school have no problems with their literacy'.
No, Minister, this simply ain't good enough.
Aboriginal kids are the fastest-growing cohort in our schools and unless we tailor the system to meet their complex needs, they're missing out.
Dealing with this is not just a matter of equity.
It ought to be, to use a classic piece of modern bureaucratic cant, 'core business'.