materialworld:

(via the tiger’s mouth · The real face of White Australia)

In October 1911, the Sydney Morning Herald published a short article under the headline, ‘An indignity: photographs and finger-prints’. The article discussed the situation of Charles Yee Wing, a wealthy and respected Sydney businessman, who had asked to be exempted from having to supply his handprint and photograph as part of the process of being issued a CEDT.

Yee Wing had travelled before and was well-known to Customs officials. … Yee Wing’s primary objection was that the officials insisted upon photographing him, in various positions, ‘just like a criminal’.

+++

As part of our Invisible Australians project, Tim Sherratt has recently been experimenting with facial detection technology to automatically extract and crop photographs from CEDTs. You can read Tim’s discussion of what he’s done over at his blog. After extracting 7,000 photographs from Sydney series ST84/1, about a seventh of which is digitised in RecordSearch, Tim built an interface to display them as an interactive wall of faces. As Tim was putting it all together, I thought of Sophie’s critique of the use of photographs of Chinese people in the Forgotten Faces exhibition and of the way the images had been assembled together in rows as a kind of rogues gallery. I also thought of Charles Yee Wing’s comments a hundred years ago about the indignity of having to provide his photograph for a CEDT.

Could the same kind of criticisms be levelled at our wall of faces as at Forgotten Faces? Are we representing our subjects as more than passive victims of a racist bureaucracy? Are we using their images respectfully and decently? Are their images able to be understood by our contemporary audience? And how should we acknowledge the resistance and opposition of people like Charles Yee Wing?

Kate Bagnall on the ethics of using POC imagery/records obtained coercively, in media addressing racist coercion and ommission in historic archives.

Invisible Australian’s is an online gallery project, documenting the thousands of Chinese, Malay, Japanese, Afghani, Indian and Syrian people subject to state surveillance - as migrants at the commencement of the now infamous White Australia Policy.

+ the archive they’re creating counters white nationalist denial of POC contributions to nation building. Their ‘about’ page states: “They celebrated Federation. They fought at Gallipoli. They struggled through the Depression. And they battled for freedom in the Pacific.”

Whatever you think about the links between militarism and nation, this and the photos of families of primarily Asian Australians who served in military and civic roles are a visible counter to current aggressively ahistoric, white nationalist myth building around Gallipolli, the ANZACs etc.

-although these people are now deceased, their descendents may recognize them, using the gallery. You can access the project via a blog - which does have posts describing lives and politics at the time of the photos - acknowledging whatever is known about the subjects, their self perception and how this was disregarded by the WAP. Or you can access a photo browser that directly clips photos of these people with their original migration dept. ‘Excemption from Dictation Test” paperwork.*

That part - the separation of any subjectivity, context, consent etc. from what remains a demeaning white supremist mode of archiving - remains jarring and ethically dubious imo. 

- otoh, much work being done in Asian Australian histories is very academic or highly localized and not public searchable atm. I suppose the thing this prompts and why I’m tumbling it is, because there is a lot of scope for online curation in addressing the legacy of the WAP, just thinking about the how, who, where aspects.   

*dictation tests were English language skills tests that Australian immigration staff could apply randomly at the border. They were manipulated to discriminate against POC or non-British migrants, to whom they were given far more than white Brits, although they could involve esoteric questions that even mother tongue English speakers probably wouldn’t know.

materialworld:

We request the refunding for critical support services and counselling for criminalised women pre and post release prison in North Queensland by the LNP who cut the funding last week.

Why is this important? Criminalised women have the highest rate of sexual and physical abuse perpetrated against them in our community. Due to this horrendous abuse women turn to self medication with illiiegal drugs and / or alcohol. Nearly 60% of the women have a mental illness.

In Townsville women’s prison over 80% of women are Aboriginal and over 90% of the women cannot read and write. These issues have to be addressed, so that women when released into the community can move on with their lives and not return to drug and alcohol abuse and offending to feed their addiction.

Housing is also a fundamental part of their success on release. The support of our services assists women in healing their traumas and practical needs so when released they can reconnect with their children and families and move towards their goals and being a part of their communities.

(via Save Sisters Inside | CommunityRun)

Sister’s Inside is founded and run by primarily ex-inmate women and some lawyers. It’s been an internationally recognized success model of a service that helps;

- inmate mothers and their children re-establishing or maintain functional relationships during/after imprisonment.

- improved prospects of literacy, safe accommodation and finding work on release.

Allowing how many female inmates in Qld are ATSI women being punished for defending themselves in domestic violence situations, or arrested for petty ‘offences’ related to homelessness, this being top of the list for service shut down tells you exactly where real state priorities are.

Probably not coincidentally: they host the Is Prison Obsolete? Conferences, being one of the few regional public forums about changing the overall high imprisonment of marginalized people, not just services.

Oz folk - pls. signal boost on your other networks, not many politics Oz folk on tumblr.  Non-Oz folk - ATSI = Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Native + Black.

najalater:

thesavagesalad:

Some information regarding to the health and well being Aboriginal Australians. 

Because some douche in the tags seems well convinced that the community is “thriving” 

Close the fucking gap.

ourcatastrophe:

AS THE state government prepares to restructure public housing, feedback surveys given to tenants this month are available only in English, a foreign language for about half of residents.

Mere-Paore Epere, chairwoman of an inner-suburban tenants’ group, said the survey is a mystery to many residents. Ms Epere said the 4000 tenants represented by her group included African, Arabic, Chinese, Greek and Turkish speakers.

When she rang a contact number supplied with the document to ask if the survey had been translated Ms Epere was told it was available only in English. ”They said to get a friend of a friend to translate the questions, or a family member.”

While the 12-page survey is in English, it strays into a form of the language that might be described as bureaucratic gobbledegook, with questions such as: ”How can good tenant behaviour and mutual obligation be incentivised?”

“incentivised”, for realsies? omg

i’m not gonna lie, i just spent ten minutes trying to decide the best way to translate ‘incentivesed’ into mandarin. 

asunburntcountry:

withthebrightestofeyes:

The random things you come across while walking through the City.

Perth CBD

nixwilliams:

littlenymphs:

flamingdoodlem0nster:

rats-in-the-walls:

tumblarghdotcom:

I always forget that “Nar Nar Goon” Is actually a place  hahahaha

omfg

Victoria is cooler then where ever the fuck you’re from

LOOK AT ALL THOSE MELBOURNE HIPSTERS.

always the best

ourcatastrophe:

contains graphic descriptions of racist violence. 

The 24-year-old student calling himself “Xuanhao” wrote on his Weibo microblog that he and his friend were on a train heading to the Wolli Creek in the south of the city at about 11:45pm on Sunday when a group of Australians rushed into their compartment, trying to rob them.

“They wanted money so we gave them money. But then a caucasian woman sitting opposite told the robbers she just broken up with her boyfriend who had taken her purse,” the student wrote.

“She pointed to us and shouted to the robbers: ‘Rob them, they are Chinese, they are rich’.”

The student said the robbers then started beating them, breaking his nose and the jaw of his friend and repeatedly calling them “Asian dogs.”

…”It was the second time that I took a train in Sydney. I thought there were policemen in each compartment so I tried to run and screamed loudly for help, but the robbers pulled me back and beat me,” he wrote.

“There were no policemen in the train, but there were many other people and even train crews.” He said no one had offered help.

this is all-around horrifying, but I particularly want to highlight just how dangerous the idea that “international student = rich” is. 

leonineantiheroine:

vivianemae:

everythingbutharleyquinn:

leonineantiheroine:

http://m.news.com.au/TopStories/pg/0/fi1171757.htm

A POLICE officer unleashed a series of savage blows to the head of a teenager bleeding from a bullet wound to the neck during a brutal arrest early yesterday.

Moments after he was pulled from a mangled car wreck in Kings Cross, Sydney, shocking footage shows police repeatedly striking Troy Taylor before dragging his limp body across the street.

An officer then places a knee on the teen’s blood-soaked back to handcuff him.

The 18-year-old, one of two teenagers shot by police during a dramatic chase, is then left lying in a pool of blood as dozens of stunned bystanders look on.

The teenagers, one just 14, were in a serious condition in St Vincent’s Hospital last night.

—-

All of the boys and young men are Aboriginal. Yep they did the wrong thing by driving the car onto the pavement but also they seemed to be frightened of the police and there was no need for the cop to bash the kid after the car crashed. 

This is what Mick Mundine had to say:

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/mick-mundine-horrified-by-video-of-arrest-of-shooting-victim-troy-taylor-in-kings-cross/story-e6freuy9-1226335217914

“ABORIGINAL elder Mick Mundine was shocked and stunned by the way police arrested shooting victim Troy Taylor, 18, describing it as “pathetic.”

“It’s very wrong - this has to stop,” Mr Mundine said.

The respected Aboriginal community leader watched the dramatic and disturbing video footage in the offices of The Sunday Telegraph yesterday.

“I mean, how are they training them? What’s the training for? Where’s the commonsense?” said an emotional Mr Mundine, who is working with respected Redfern police commander, Superintendent Luke Freudenstein, to calm tensions in the inner-city suburb.

“They never had guns in the car, so why did they even shoot the kids?”

White Australia has this baffling conceit this is not a racist country.

HOLY FUCK

you know the story I heard on Twitter from the mainstream media?

Their line is that these teen’s struck a 29 yr old woman, then was revving the engine with cops telling them to get out, with the woman still under the tyres, and so they were shot at.

Obviously the video shows otherwise.

I hate mainstream media.

Hi everyone,

Via the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on Facebook, more info and rally:

“Via Raul Bassi

THIS TUESDAY 24TH AT 1.30 NSW PARLIAMENT HOUSE

Dear friends:
Indigenous Social Justice Association is calling for an emergency rally this Tuesday, the 24th, at 1.30, at the NSW Parliament House to demand two points: first, stop the police investigating police and second, organize a credible independent investigation to start to give justice to the victims of police violence. The footage of what happened has been publicized in couple of the papers and is graphic enough. (See at the bottom.) The way that these young aboriginal people have been treated by police is anything but human. They were injured people, couple with bullets, incapable of offer any resistance, let alone been of any danger to the officers. Never the less couple of them, already bleeding, one in coma, were thrown from the car as a sack of potatoes, handcuffed and in some cases repeatedly beaten.
The police, even that has presented different versions, is justifying all, the Assistant commissioner said yesterday that the shootings were justified because there were people in danger with the car running on the footpath. The Police Association has said that they will be backing the police offices regardless. The police also, have said that they recognized the suspects. So quick questions arise. Why instead of shooting people 13 and 14 years old, that they knew, they didn’t try to stop the car shooting the tyres?
So, even still none has die and is our heartfelt wish none will, are we confronting another similar situations to TJ or Roberto Laudiscio Curti?
So came on Tuesday to tell the government, the parliament and the police, that we had enough and we demand justice.
Family members of the people involved, have invited to participate of the rally.
More information Raul Bassi 0403037376”

Also these young people are from western Sydney. 

asunburntcountry:

ritapseudonym:

TOO MANY POSTS THIS EVENING IKNOWIKNOWSORRY, LAST ONE, I PROMISE. WORTH IT. MODIGLIANA WAS/IS MY ROLE MODEL.

The Ferals (ABC TV). Clearly I’m the Gen-Y contributor to this tumblr. - L