Mining company Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Caves in the Hamersley Range, Western Australia, provoked Parry Agius of Linking Futures to develop a series of images targeting investors in mining companies. The aim is to encourage investors to consider indigenous heritage sites as libraries of knowledge, history and humanity spanning thousands of years and appeal to their moral judgement in reassessing their investment. The Juukan Caves site showed evidence of 47,000 years of human occupation. Other sites across the country show evidence of up to 60,000 years. Here are some of the images:
Black lives matter, by Kate Auty, the Last Word article in the next quarterly issue of The Alternative Law Journal. Auty refers to Chris Owen’s 2016 book on the Western Australian policing of Aboriginal people – Every Mother’s son is guilty, and in particular the cover photograph, taken around 1900, of nearly 100 Aboriginal men and boys neck chained for ‘cattle killing’. The significance of the woodpile in the background is explained. Auty underlines the links between the needs expressed in the Uluru Statement – voice, treaty and truth telling – ‘with both the colonial past and the contemporary anger and grief which sits under the campaign about why black lives matter and why protest is critically important.’
Here is my cartoon to illustrate the article and the cover of the book.
Yesterday’s Pro Bono news cartoon.
Cartoon recording at the final Waterways of the West – Community Vision deliberative democracy gathering, with strong indigenous voices, completing the communities’ vision and priorities for the waterways of Melbourne’s west until 2070.
Only two of the seven Closing the Gap targets to fix indigenous disadvantage are on track. This week’s Pro Bono News cartoon, read more here.
