Terri Janke: the Australian lawyer trying to stop Indigenous cultural theft theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Aboriginal groups from Perth to the Kimberley are campaigning against an updated Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act which still leaves it up to a government minister as to whether significant sites can be damaged.
Photo: Mint Images/Frans Lanting/AFP
At 16 years of age, she was sent to work as a domestic servant, the beginning of years of working in houses on farms across Western Australia s south-west. You do the cooking, you do housework such as it was. Just every day work, you did it, she said. It was a lonely life, I did practically everything.
Weston is one of thousands of Aboriginal people who worked across Western Australia under wage control legislation, which allowed the State Government to withhold wages from Aboriginal people over a period from the late 1800s until the early 1970s.
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The Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Sector (ACCHOS) has been widely lauded for its success with managing the spread of COVID-19 in Indigenous communities - its approach has even been said to be ‘leading the way’ in how to deal with the virus.
Out of 28,000 COVID cases recorded in Australia, as of September only 145 of those were Indigenous Australians - or 0.005%.
Multiple leaders in the sector have cited autonomy and the connection its services have with their local communities as one of the key reasons for its success. But they also acted fast - in many cases, ahead of the federal government, and used common-sense and effective approaches involving face-to-face contact and bringing rapid testing into remote areas to prevent, rather than patch pandemic issues.