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Dubbo Photo News February 16-22, 2017
OPINION & ANALYSIS The Trump effect
Keep on closing that gap Yvette AubussonFoley OPINION When the PM released the latest ‘Closing the Gap’ report on Tuesday this week, it revealed not a lot has changed in terms of life expectancy, health or other outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The government’s purpose to halve the gap in Indigenous students getting their Year 12 education by 2020 is well on track, however, and Dubbo is a shining example of what can be achieved. A record total of 58 Aboriginal HSC students graduated from Dubbo College Senior Campus in 2016 which demonstrated a 21 per cent increase on the total graduates compared to the previous year. I sat in on the graduation ceremony last year and it was quite apparent the significance of their achievement was not lost on the Indigenous graduates. The College Clontarf Academies are contributing to these strong figures with the number of graduating boys more than doubling from 11 in 2015, to 26 in 2016. These are really great stats and Dubbo is at the forefront of a genuine education movement. Worth noting too is that the graduating Aboriginal class of 2016 represented the largest number from any school in Australia, and a national Clontarf record. More than 250 boys throughout Dubbo College are members of the Clontarf Academies at either Delroy, South or Senior Campus. The Clontarf program has now been operating at the College for three years, under the guidance of a dedicated group of staff. The boys are involved in a range of activities focused on education, wellbeing, leadership, corporate partnerships, sport and employment, all aimed at improving student outcomes – and it is working.
What the latest findings show is that targets to close the gap in other critical areas like life expectancy, infant mortality and employment remain elusive. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people still suffer from poorer health outcomes and a shorter life expectancy than non-Indigenous Australians, and there’s a clear sign more can be done. The lack of access is the nature of the beast that is our wide brown land but, in many locations, culturally-appropriate health services simply don’t exist. During the time the petition to get a dedicated cancer service situated in Dubbo was gathering signatures, it became starkly apparent that Indigenous people living west of here will choose death over leaving “country” for treatments they neither understand nor trust. That point is very hard to understand if you are the kind of person who is willing to engage in any western medicine for a chance at a longer life. We need to keep finding new ways to understand the different culture and different ways of thinking. It’s not enough really to teach Wiradjuri in school to non-Indigenous kids, though that does break down barriers. It takes a special kind of person to put aside any prejudice they may have toward another person because of their skin colour, religion, language or cultural nuances. It’s hard to simply wander into an Indigenous community and say, ‘Hey, what gives?’ I say that with respect because there are so many examples of research done by people unaware of their own blinkers and asking the wrong questions.
Dubbo College Clontarf member and Year 12 graduate Zaiden Britt, pictured in December with Senior Campus principal Andrew Jones. PHOTO: DUBBO COLLEGE
I watched a documentary this week called White Helmets, about the heroes of our time. Arab men embittered by conflict in Syria who have been risking their lives and putting into jeopardy their opportunity to raise their own children so they can don their white helmets to run under the bombs and pull other people’s children from under the rubble. I’m used to listening to the Arab
` It’s hard to simply wander into an Indigenous community and say, ‘Hey, what gives?’ I say that with respect because there are so many examples of research done by people unaware of their own blinkers and asking the wrong questions... a
language spoken with six years under my belt working in the Middle East, and I can even understand some of it, but it struck me as these grown men wept at the news of their children or brothers being killed by Russian jetfighters, how demonised their fascinating language has become, along with their appearance and their apparent lack of humanity. So I turned off the sound, and read the subtitles instead. And I wondered how those who think that Vladimir Putin is a good leader, or that all Muslims are terrorists, would perceive vision of these brave dads and men caked in dust from crawling over the chaos of broken buildings, weeping as they rescue a one-week-old baby from an impossible area of debris, and weeping again, a year or so later, when reunited with a curlytopped toddler bemused by what all the fuss is about.
He was their miracle baby, of course. He embodied why they did what they did. Hope. My point is this. Clontarf works because it’s parked what Indigenous kids were stereotyped to be, and painted a different picture of what they can become. When we stop looking at Indigenous communities as destitute, doomed backwaters, and see them instead as somewhere that humans deserving of dignity, in an age when technology makes us all a little bit magic and able to do things and communicate in ways like never before, and have no excuse for not seeking solutions to this tired problem of culturally ignorant medical practices, maybe then we will witness the woeful statistics becoming a thing of the past. For more information visit www.closingthegap.pmc.gov.au.