This website - Setting the scene

This website has been constructed to store the interests of the author in his quest for a better life for remote living Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia.
On this site the word Aboriginal will be used to indicate all Australians from an Indigenous origin within Australia. This includes the Tiwi Islands and the Torres Strait Islands, all part of the Federation of Australian States.
The subjects are those which the author believes are of particular interest especially when discussing the “where have I come from” and “where am I going” in relation to Aboriginal people.
One element that should come through to the reader is the urgency of the situation and the need for quick action if Australia as a Nation is going to work as one in helping to arrest the downward spiral in the health status of its Aboriginal people.
The life expectancy of the 100,000 people that still live in remote and isolated communities across the North of Australia continue to fall. This will continue while they are unable to embrace modern European living. They need to be sensitized to the changes this needs to lifestyle, nutrition, exercise and an understanding of the language, values and customs of the modern day mainstream Australian.
The more the process of assimilation and reconciliation is seen at work the more one realizes that for those alive today it may be too late. Their lives have already been moulded into one which crosses two barriers and fails to properly reach a satisfactory balance of equilibrium. The two cultures will only be brought together after generations of trying, testing and developing. For the one alive today (2005) it may be too late and so the need to concentrate on the child. In the wonderful words of Chilean born poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Gabriel Mistral:

Many things we need can wait, the child cannot. Now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, his mind is being developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.

The needs of the child should come before all else.
The young mothers of today – often in their teenage years – have to be helped to understand the important role they are taking on as custodians of the next generation.
Through the pages of this website you will be able to get a view on how these challenges can be met and the actions that are needed to help make the change from ancient culture to a new world of beginning for a new race of people. These will be the true Aboriginal Australians – happy in the transition they have been able to make from their forefathers to their after fathers – those of us that want to help.

“Give us the fortitude to endure the things which cannot be changed, and the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other.”
– Oliver J Hart