Wrong side of great divide (fwd link)

[phil cash cash]

Wrong side of great divide

September 27, 2008
The Sydney Morning Herald
Sydney, Australia

The government intervention in Territory Aboriginal life has thrown out the baby
with the bathwater, writes Lindsay Murdoch.

Arnhem Land's red dust swirls in gusts across Gurrumuru, a tiny desolate outpost
on a treeless plain near a river that snakes to the sea. Crumpled shells mark
where grass fires destroyed two houses, and the windows are missing from the
corrugated iron school. On frequently stifling hot days, the nine children of
Gurrumuru are caked red from the dust blowing through the schoolroom.

But Barayuwa Mununggurr has a message for white people who told the Rudd
Government that communities like Gurrumuru should be starved of services,
causing residents to move to small, fully resourced towns. "We won't be moving

 please write that," says the custodian for Gurrumuru, population 50, which
was built in the early 1970s as part of the so-called homelands movement, when
thousands of Aborigines moved back to ancestral lands from mission settlements.

Access full article below:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/wrong-side-of-great-divide/2008/09/26/1222217517616.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1