Jennifer Marohasy

Good news! Traditional hunters have agreed to suspend the hunting of dugongs and turtles in North Queensland. More here.

GARY Johns, a former colleague and friend of many years, has just had a book published by Connor Court entitled ‘Aboriginal self-determination: The Whiteman’s dream’.   I haven’t got my copy yet, so can’t provide a review, but no doubt it will be hard hitting.   Gary believes in integration, not self determination, for Australia’s aborigines.  According to Gary: “Aboriginal self-determination [...]

On the 11th July 1987, Australians voted the ALP and Bob Hawke into federal government. Labor’s campaign promise, to stop logging within Queensland’s Wet Tropical rainforests via World Heritage nomination, was well supported and true to its word, inscription was ratified a mere sixteen months later. World Heritage listing for the area’s Cultural Heritage was [...]

“For many aboriginal people, wilderness offers no cause for fond nostalgia. Rather, it represents a tract of land without custodians.” Martin Thomas, 2003, The Artificial Horizon. pg 29. ‘The Three Sisters’ – A rock formation in The Blue Mountains. Photographed May 4, 2008. ——————— What is Wilderness? Part 1, August 15, 2005

No, this is not a photograph of my two left feet … I will only claim the shod one at the left. Australia’s heaviest native land animal, the adult female Southern Cassowary Casuarius casuarius johnsonii, left the imprint of the other. As can be seen against my size-10 clodhopper, this is a bird that would [...]

According to a report in today’s Cairns Post, the Federal Court of Australia has made a consent determination, handing over a major management role of 126,000 hectares in the Daintree, to the Eastern Kuku Yalanji native title holders. The determination has resulted in a major reconfiguration of land ownership and management arrangements across a complex [...]

According to Zoie Jones of ABC News, University of Western Sydney Researcher, Sarah James has found that attitudes to climbing Uluru have changed, and the time might be right to close the climb altogether. Interesting that it has taken so long to come to such a reckoning, when Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park became [...]

The progress of the Cape York Conservation Agenda is carving a deepening rift between indigenous interests and those of metropolitan-based ‘green’ groups. Whilst the former lobbies for social engagement within real economies, the latter crusades for an often over-simplified notion of environmental protection. Over-arching this ideological tussle, government verily executes authority for the political rewards [...]

I have long held the view that the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia is self-defeating. Belonging to the same landscape; bound together in territorial respect for the aspirations, life and memory of our own constituents; surely it can be agreed that the dislocation of indigenous peoples from their living cultural landscape is as abhorrent [...]

Mr. Gerhardt Pearson (Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation CEO), Professsor Tim Flannery (2007 Australian of the Year) and Ms. Tania Major (2007 Young Australian of the Year) introduced the Cape York Conservation Agenda at a public seminar yesterday, at the Shangri La Hotel in Cairns. The Cape York Heads of Agreement, signed off on the [...]