Put in our place by the weather

It has been a while since i have written anything on here. The last time I was really blogging regularly was back in 2007. But i was reminded by my friend Cameron, who also has a blog I have just discovered called 'Rustry Brown Dog', that it is quite a good thing to do. So here I am returning to 'Might Be somewhere' after a bit of a sabatical.

It might also be because I find myself with some time on my hand, this week anyway! Last week in Queensland they were hit with the biggest Tropical Cyclone to ever hit the Australian shores. The trail of destruction that we have seen in its wake is something to behold and I feel great empathy for those who's lives have been picked up by the force of that wind and turned upside down.

So strong was Yasi that it's effects have been felt here in the desert too. On the weekend Alice Springs braced itself for a storm and severe flooding. As it turned out the hype about the storm turned out to carry more force than the storm itself. We did indeed get quite alot of rain and other areas in the East and to the South were quite affected.

What has happened is that almost every road in and out of Alice Springs has become impassable due to flooding or water damage.

This has meant that I cant travel out to the Community where I have gone back to teaching this year. It is a strange feeling knowing that you should be somewhere else doing something else, but that you are unable to overcome whatever is preventing you.

I think my small experience here, and in a much greater sense the experience of Queenslanders over the past month, is quite a profound reminder of our complete lack of power in the face of what Mother Nature can serve up. It is hard not to be humble in the face of such a power.

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die | Video on TED.com

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die | Video on TED.com

Christmas 2009 (part 3) - travel, visitors and other stuff

Apart from all the driving on dusty roads, I have also been doing quite a bit of flying. Work sees me traveling to Darwin on a fairly regular basis, but i have also been traveling interstate as a National Rep for the NT Greens. I have been to National meetings in Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne. This has enabled me to catch up with some friends and family throughout the year which has been nice. Being more involved in the Greens has been really interesting too and I am impressed at what integrity exists at all levels of the Party.

I had a number of visitors during the year including two brothers and their respective partners. In July Mark and Bec drove up here for a holiday and I enjoyed going out and camping with them a bit. Pete and Sue also visited in Sept and they got to see quite a bit of country in just one week. It was nice to spend more time getting to know Sue and seeing Pete so happy after a tough couple of years.

I have made a few trips back to melbourne during the year, one of them specially to see my new little niece Clara (Dave and Fran's third and final child). It is lovely to have a niece but equally lovely to see my two nephews growing up so beautifully and playing together and being so cute with their little baby sister. I am heading down to Melbourne for Christmas and New Years and am then heading off to a conference in Hawaii to present a paper at a conference in january based on some research I am doing with a colleague in Canada.

It feels like it has been another long year and I'm not sure that I got the work/life balance right all the time, something I want to work on next year. My friend Cameron, from Perth, has been writing his Masters thesis this year and sent me a copy to read recently. It focuses on Living Simply as a way to challenge the Consumption that seems to dictate everything in our modern world. Reading it has challenged me to think about some of the choices I make and I am hoping to make some meaningful changes to my life in the light of these new thoughts.

I hope that you and those you love are able to say and show how much you mean to each other this Christmas and that you are all happy living your lives wherever you are. I hope our paths will cross in 2010.

Peace xx

Christmas 2009 (part 2) - work

I have spent this year continuing the project that I started working on at the end of 2008. The name of the project is the 'Indigenous Teacher Upgrade Program' which has meant that my focus has changed from teaching children to working with indigenous teachers in remote schools around Central Australia, helping them upgrade their teaching qualifications. This has meant doing alot of travel which has meant that I have seen some pretty amazing country and experienced some great things along the way. All the travel has been very tiring though. I cant even imagine the number of kms I must have driven during the year. The work itself with the indigenous teachers was also great and I enjoyed that aspect of my job very much. Sadly I feel as though the Dept for which I work has lost it's way and is making very bad policy decisions. I am not sure how much longer I will continue to work for them. I will continue to work on this project until it's conclusion at the end of 2010, but then the path ahead is a little unknown, which is a little scary but also quite liberating.

In November I took a group of the teachers i work with down to Hobart to the National Indigenous Education conference. They presented some of the research they have been doing as part of their study and it was inspiring to hear them talk and also see how well they were received. It has not been an easy time to be indigenous in the with the continuing NT intervention and policy decisions being made that undermine indigenous language and culture. I admire these women and their resilience, but wonder how many more times they can have the rug pulled out from underneath them.

Christmas 2009 (part 1) - House and garden

In january Dad and I drove back to Alice Springs together and spent the final week of my holidays building a deck in the spa area. It turned out really well and has completely transformed that area. The plants have really grown in now and in the middle of the year I emptied and renovated the spa itself. It's such a great space now, especially when the weather is hot. Dad also helped fix the verandah at the front of the house and now that the grape vines are growing big it looks great. The front yard was ablaze with Sturt Desert Pea in the middle of the year. I had always wanted to grow them, but this was beyond my wildest imaginations. They were so prolific that taxi drivers were bringing tourists past the house to see them. I had a few great crops of veggies throughout the year, particularly after I changed that garden into a raised garden in planter boxes. The citrus trees had their first fruit and the olive tree is beginning to look like it should. I also planted a banana palm which has taken off. The garden has been a really life giving and relaxing activity for me this year.My big plan for next year is to build a granny flat in the back yard.

Bilingual Education in the NT

I have had a number of people ask me recently about my thoughts after the 4 Corners program on the ABC focused on Bilingual Education in the NT.

I actually missed the program itself but have recently caught up on it on the program's website. It also contains a number of extended interviews which are interesting and links to a number of reports and papers which highly encourage people to read as they give a fuller picture of what is happening.

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20090914/language/

Some thoughts:
I dont teach in a bilingual school. I have never taught in a official bilingual school.
Most of the remote indigenous schools in the NT are not bilingual.

The decision to introduce mandatory first 4 hours of English at school in the NT was justified as a step to improving National Literacy and Numeracy Benchmarks for NT indigenous students.
Not just students in bilingual schools, but all schools - the majority of which were already teaching in English for the first 4 hours and still not passing benchmark.

The so called 'policy' was in fact a 'Ministerial Directive' as it was not developed by the Department and presented to the Minister as a new, recommended policy. Neither the Minister at the time, nor the current Minister hold any qualification in Education ( the former was trained in book-keeping, accounting, administration and health economics and the latter is trained as a mechanical engineer) and neither are they experts in language acquisition and the role it plays in learning.

I work with a number of indigenous teachers from bilingual schools. The fact that school leaders and Communities were not consulted about this change has left many indigenous teachers feeling undermined, undervalued and disempowered.

No one seems to be willing to have the conversation about whether the problem might be in the testing itself, or in the countless other factors that prevent indigenous students from improving in schooling overall. We have swallowed the completely political line of 'Literacy and numeracy benchmarks' hook, line and sinker and seemed blinded to the fact that these are a tool of political manipulation - a way for politicians to prove that THEY have done something to 'Close the Gap' for Indigenous people.

Research shows that in order to gain deep levels of knowledge - the kind that you need to get into University for example - you need access to your first language.

If we do not respect and embrace first language as a fundamental learning resource for indigenous children then they will be dramatically short changed in their education and no gap will ever be closed.

buried in ground that remembers you

I have just been to see a beautiful film called Fugitive Pieces. It is the story of a young Jewish boy, Jakob, who is the only member of his family to escape the Nazis. He is rescued by a Greek archaeologist, Athos, who takes him in and raises him. There journey together takes them from Poland to Greece to Canada.

It is a story of grief and loss, of memories and ghosts, of generosity and love and of healing through connection.

"The mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats"

"Make sure you are buried in ground that remembers you"

Language and Culture

I was with a group of impressive Warlpiri women this week who have recently been told by Politicians that they are not allowed to teach their own children in their own language. They were angry and frustrated. Their culture and rituals are fundamental to them and their language is the vehicle for that. They said to each other and to the rest of us who were there "We ask the kardiya (non-indigneous people) Where is your culture? You got no culture!" It was hard to argue with them. When the only rituals I feel these days are singing Happy Birthday to someone, or reciting the Lord's Prayer at funerals I attend. I wonder what meaning these really have for me. My culture does feel empty and I once again am forced to cringe at government acting against indigenous people to diminish the things that mean the most to them.

How dare we! This and the intervention is what future generations will be saying SORRY for.

Obama

It's surprising to me how invested I have been in the US election. I found myself anxiously awaiting the results on Wednesday and then feeling increasingly optimistic as the votes gradually came in. Then it became clear that Obama had won and I was overcome with excitement and relief. I think I was buoyed by the fact that for so long the USA had been stuck in lowest common denominator politics - appealing to the worst aspects of human nature - division, fear, hatred, bigotry; but here was Obama - a voice that was saying something different. A voice that appealed to what is best in human nature - hope, community, optimism, cooperation. I read something the other day which talked about the human instinct to help others. I believe this to be true and have, in the past, been made to feel abnormal because of this belief. What a watershed for millions of Americans to finally collectively say that they too believe in the same spirit. What an historical moment to witness, the moment where a majority of people in a powerful western nation say that they are more interested in the collective rather than looking out for their individual needs.
Obama might not be the Messiah that he is being heralded as in some quarters, but he has been a rallying point. A leader who has dared to suggest that we can be more than we have been in the past.
When the election result was announced a friend sent me a text message say "Phew, that feels better". That sums it up for me. The world just feels better, more possible, more whole, more communal with Obama as US President than has ever been the case in my life time. And i for one am glad to have lived in a time when it has happened.