The inaugural Positive Pathways to local Rural Prosperity conference was held in Pickering Brook, Western Australia, September 17-20th 2024. Initiated by The Bank of Ideas which has been committed to ‘supporting the growth of enterprising, sustainable and vibrant small-town communities and economies’ since 1989. Here are a few of the cartoons drawn during the conference highlighting just some of the great ideas from the presentations and sessions. For more about small town reinvention and conference assets and presentations click here.
From the Film Festival: ‘The public is encouraged to choose one of the films they would like to champion and comment about its story/topic, before the end of May 2024. Comments can be posted on their social media using #Film4Health or through the posts inserted in those YouTube playlists‘.
Cartoons from the Auditor-General’s Department ( South Australia) ‘world cafe’ style workshop for all staff to workshop thoughts and ideas to help develop the department’s new Strategic Plan; held in Adelaide, 12th March, and facilitated by the wonderful Denis Picton, Oztrain. One key message was to better promote the range of work that the department does and its value to the community – it is annoying to staff that the department is often confused in people’s minds with the Tax Office…
Each staff member had a ‘passport’ to be stamped as they moved from table to table – each table tackled a particular aspect of the department’s work…
John Strehlow, author, theatre director and more, has lived in the Northern Territory ‘off and on since 1972 as has taken an amused interest in the practice of importing experts from the rest of Australia to aid its development, This book is the result of his observations on this fascinating phenomenon’. Here are some cartoon illustrations from The Southern Expert’s Handbook…
A running joke in the book is that if a southern expert actually does take their job seriously they will be banished to far off Borroloola. As it happens Borroloola is now one of the centres of the innovative and effective Indigenous Learning on Country Program – (as I have learned from my brother Hugh), It is about shared respect and meaning. Sharing of knowledge and experience of living and working together through two-way learning.
More seriously, John Strehlow is the author of The Tale of Frieda Keysser, the 2400 page history of his grandparents, missionaries Carl and Frieda Strehlow, sparked by the discovery ‘of Frieda’s diaries, written in old script German, and the realisation that this personal record of her life in Hermannsburg, from 1897 and 1908 which revealed previously unknown details of their lives their and happenings in the community and more generally around Central Australia.’ John Strehlow sets straight the controversy stemming from Professor Baldwin Spencer’s denigration of Carl Strehlow’s anthropological research – and ‘exposes Spencer as a major scientific fraud‘.
Chris Ategeka has created a book of one hundred ‘one-liner jokes to survive the Road Trip of Life‘.
Here is a small selection from the 100 cartoons that illustrate Chris’s witty thoughts -with a few words from the jokes added just to give you a taste of his humour. To read more you will have to buy Puns and Chuckles, One-liner Jokes to Survive the Road Trip of Life! And to discover the more serious side of Chris Ategeka’s work click here.
Simon Kneebone - cartoonist and illustrator 