Internet Edition Issue 4
July 2005

Editorial

Viewpoint

Pilgrims Get Ready to Travel

Caritas Australia Says
Thank-you to Broome

From the Office of Justice, Ecology & Peace

Broome Campus Library
an Award winner!

KCP Magazine

Br Shane Wood cfc

Where have all the bridge walkers gone?
By Br Shane Wood cfc

Last month we completed another national Reconciliation Week, which began on 26th of May and ended on the 3rd of June. Once again, the Indigenous people have taken an initiative to move this matter forward. They renamed Sorry Day as the Day of Healing. It aims to widen the scope of the Day to encompass the healing needed among the stolen generations, in the wider Aboriginal community and in the non- Indigenous community, and to emphasise the inter- linking of all of these.
While this means that the day itself is taking on a more positive tone, there are still tensions within the wider Australian community around the issues encompassed in the notion of reconciliation. The Co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia, Fred Chaney, spoke in 2004 about the place of a Treaty in the whole scheme of the reconciliation process, and in particular its place in the overall health profile of Aboriginal people.
He made the point that there are probably more practical things that could be done to improve the health of Aboriginal people.
He said: "We are more likely to achieve treaty-like outcomes which will benefit Indigenous health through this pragmatic process, than we are to win a theoretical debate about the relevance of treaties to Indigenous health."
Mr Chaney went on to quote Hal Wooten Q.C. who wrote elsewhere in 2001:
" By all means think about a treaty, but the devotion of large amounts of limited funds and energy to it while acute problems of alcohol abuse, family violence and economic dependence are not effectively addressed seems equivalent to fiddling while Rome burns."
At the same Conference, other speakers were keen to show a definite connection between what some might see as symbolic gestures and improved health among Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. A fact sheet given to participants in the 2004 Conference mentions:
Leading Maori health authority, Professor Mason Durie has said that well-being ‘is about the goods and services that people can count on, and the voice they have in deciding the way in which those goods and services are made available…Dependency is not compatible with human dignity or good health’ he says. ‘Autonomy is always relative, and on a continuum between total state control at one pole and indigenous sovereignty at the other, most indigenous peoples contend that they are forced to locate themselves too close to the state pole. Devolution of control to indigenous peoples has been one mechanism for shifting authority away from the centre.’
In this debate, as in many others that become politicized in Australia, we can become caught up in an ‘either/or’ argument. What we need to engage in, it seems to me, is a ‘both/and’ conversation. I wonder whether we are any closer to that goal in July 2005 than we were in the heady and hopeful days of July 1997, following the National Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne. When sufficient numbers of voters are seen to be committed to this goal, our political leaders will surely have to take more notice.

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