Mr Paulo Flores is today’s guest poster on Blak and Black. Paulo is a European trained and qualified Psychologist, Lawyer, Mediator and Human Rights Activist. He is currently working in…
First, democracy implies processes of communication through which individuals come to know as individuals what they want or think is right. Individuals should be the owners of their beliefs and…
Detachment 88's major facility at the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Co-operation was established in 2004 with almost $40 million of Australian funding. According to its website, most of the…
The attached video shows very clearly what I mean by torture of West Papuan by Detachment 88. What this video shows is a clear violation of international law. Detachment 88…
I was recently discussing the genteel art of bullying with a former associate, Paulo Flores, who is a psychologist and mediator and Watershedd, a recent contributor to Blak and Black.…
Some observations on the realities of being and Aborigine in 21stcentury Australia by an observer who isn’t. One of my piano teachers was the sole child of Polish Holocaust survivors.…
I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by…
The following article written by Ednal Palmer appeared in the Solomon Star on Saturday 15th January, 2011. While the article is ostensibly about the tenure of the outgoing Taiwanese (ROC)…
While strolling along the foreshore of Botany Bay today I spotted a Kingfisher. In Classical Greek mythology "Halcyon" is associated with the Kingfisher. There was an ancient belief that the…
The Rule of Law, in its most basic form, is the principle that no one is above the law. The rule follows logically from the idea that truth, and therefore…
Kevin Spratt, an Aboriginal man from Western Australia, was tasered up to 41 times in a week and went to hospital with fractures, a collapsed lung and a dislocated shoulder…
Anna Bligh you’re a disgrace, a racist and potentially a war criminal! Yes, you the Premier of the rotten state. You know when I worked in PNG in the 90s…
Lord, how this world is given to lying. Quite so, Falstaff, but there is lying and lying. No, not another diatribe on police mendaciousness or theft or even racism, but…
The first thing we should learn Epictetus was a stoic and the Enchiridion, from which the following extract is taken, was one of the principal manuals of Stoic philosophy. The…
“We are told the devil is the father of lies, and was a liar from the beginning; so that, beyond contradiction, the invention is old: and, which is more, his…
As society becomes more narcissistic, as we push ourselves harder and harder in the name of status at the expense of everything else, society starts heading towards the unknown. It…
In my post titled Angelique, I noted that she was not the only Aboriginal person to have been discriminated against and forced out of the Australian Capital Territory Revenue Office…
While sitting in my office this morning I received a phone call from a distraught friend, advising me that a mutual friend, an Indigenous Australian Artist, had become the latest…
The Cold Joke has subtle application for the Way Australia's Indigenous peoples are treated by our own Government. White the torture we are subjected to on a daily basis is…
So says Ralph Waldo Emerson, but what do the police and bureaucracy say in Australia? Well it’s something like: “If you don’t give us the respect we believe you owe…