August 2007 Newsletter from didjshop.com

Editorial

In this newsletter we are dealing with a very touchy issue, the high incidence of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. As we have reported in our last newsletter, the Australian government has started a massive intervention into Aboriginal communities involving the army, doctors and massive changes to existing legislation. This action is supposed to remedy the reported child sexual abuse.
In the main article of this newsletter (see below) we look at the report that triggered this massive intervention, trying to give you some valuable background information, that most Australians do not get in their daily news.
The Australian press sadly paints a picture of Aboriginal people being paedophiles, which is only a small part of the real picture, so please read below for a comprehensive analysis of how the present situation came about.

In an amazing co-incidence that shortly after the 2007 emPower Energy Fest and global warming exhibition I helped to organise UNESCO hosted a meeting on "Indigenous Knowledge and Changing Environments" in Cairns. With my passion in both things Aboriginal as well as climate change, I gladly took up an invitation to attend the forum on 'Climate Change and Indigenous People' which was very inspiring and in below article I report about some of the many exiting findings and discussions.
While it is certainly important and wonderful that western science can learn about many small aspects of indigenous knowledge like medicinal plants or fire practices etc, I personally believe that traditional knowledge has a far more important role to play. Take Australia: The holistic approach of traditional knowledge has helped Aboriginal people to sustainably live in and look after this country for over 40,000 years while the lack of a holistic view in western science in just two hundred years has poisoned the waters, polluted the air, eroded the soil and disrupted indigenous fire management. So while it is important for western science to learn as many pieces of traditional knowledge as possible, I believe that the main lesson traditional knowledge can offer western science is it's holistic approach.

Regular readers would remember my whine in the May newsletter about Google dropping Didjshop.com from the first or second page down to page 50 or lower. We want to say a big thank you to those three readers who contacted us afterwards, promising to try and do something about that. We are glad to announce that we are back onto the first two pages again. As many of our visitors keep on saying we do have the most and best information about didgeridoos and the most and best didjes, so really we should be at the very top on Google. Especially since we also have the biggest worldwide didj community discussing didj related issues in our Forum and hundreds of people offering didj related services or finding each other in our Didjnet.

Which reminds me that the next Worldwide Didgeridoo Meditation is coming up soon. Please make sure you mark the 23rd September on your calendar and join this huge synchronised didj wave all around the world. Just imagine, the sound of didjes following sunset all around the world! Invite some friends over, contact other didj players in your area and enjoy the deeply relaxing feeling of an hour with your didj.
Please do send us an email and let us know in which town and country you will be participating. Feel free to tell some friends about it. And please feel free to send us some pictures from your local events.

There are three winners of our monthly shopping vouchers, and the Aboriginal news section is also a bit bigger this month.

Enjoy the rest of this newsletter....

Svargo

Child Sexual Abuse in Aboriginal Communities

The Northern Territory government established a board of inquiry into the protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse on the 8th of August 2006. The inquiry was asked to look into how and why Aboriginal children were abused, identify problems with government responses and look into how government agencies can better cooperate and support Aboriginal communities to prevent child sexual abuse. Over nearly one year the inquiry held over 250 meetings in 45 different Aboriginal communities and received 65 written submissions.
The inquiry was co-chaired by Lawyer Rex Wilde QC and Aboriginal leader Pat Anderson, who wrote a report titled 'Little Children Are Sacred', in which they detailed child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities. That report was released on 15th June 2007 and made 97 recommendations on how to address this serious problem, which has been ignored by too many Australian governments for too long.

The inquiry identified poverty, unemployment, lack of education, boredom and overcrowded and inadequate housing as the basic underlying problems in Aboriginal communities. Those basic problems lead to excessive use of alcohol, drugs and petrol sniffing, which in turn lead to excessive violence and in the worst cases to sexual abuse of children.
The report identified two main ways to reverse the situation: education and conquering alcoholism. Unless those two are successfully dealt with there is no point in addressing any of the other recommendations of the inquiry.

The Australian media has beat up stories of traditional marriages and suggested that child sexual abuse happens as part of them. This requires a clarification of what traditional Aboriginal marriages are:
In Aboriginal society traditionally marriage contracts were made between different families, neither the girl nor the man involved had any say in the matter. Typically very young girls were married to older men. A man usually had to be about thirty years of age before he could be married, while girls were married well before sexual maturity, sometimes even soon after birth. This system developed to ensure protection of girls and women (by experienced men) and to ensure healthy offspring and genetic integrity by allowing marriage only between the 'right skins'. The girl was encouraged to spend time with her husband, but only once she reached puberty did she have to go and live with him. The man was forbidden to have any sexual contact with the girl until she was a woman. Before white settlement women in Aboriginal society were considered sacred and extra-marital rape was very rare as in traditional Aboriginal society rape was a crime worse than murder and punishable by death.
The Aboriginal marriage custom was pretty much in line with western laws until 1883, when the age of consent was increased from 12 years to 16. Since then however there is potential conflict as Aboriginal custom would allow sexual contact before the age of 16 (only if the two parties are married and the girl has reached puberty).
Consent to sex inside of a marriage was not an issue in Aboriginal society and in western society rape inside of marriage became an offence only in the mid 1980's and in the NT only in 1994.
So while there is some potential for what we today consider to be child sexual abuse to happen in traditional Aboriginal marriages, the real problem lies elsewhere and almost all of the reported sexual abuse of children happens outside of traditional marriage.

How did they come about when before white settlement such abuse rarely happened?
The inquiry has reported on incidences that might explain how tolerance for such abuse has increased in Aboriginal society and not surprisingly (at least to us) it has to do with the behaviour of non-Aboriginal people in Aboriginal communities.
In at least three communities non-Aboriginal people got away with child sexual abuse for years because they lived in 'tow worlds'. Typically the families of the girls received direct or indirect financial benefits and consequently turned a blind eye and discouraged others in the community to speak up. Such experiences usually leads to a wider prevalence of child sexual abuse eg Aboriginal males who previously would have never even dreamt of doing anything like this now have a much lower threshold which typically is lowered further by excessive alcohol consumption. Many Aboriginal child sexual offenders also report having been victims themselves.
There is even evidence for organised paedophilia. In one community young girls are made available to non-Aboriginal workers at a nearby mine, in other communities taxi drivers either take advantage of under age girls themselves or drive them to their clients, in yet another a non-Aboriginal person took Aboriginal girls to town and trade sex with those girls for drugs. He would give the girls some of the drugs and buy Aboriginal paintings with the rest, selling those paintings to fund overseas travel and plastic surgery.

Another contributing factor is that while Aboriginal elders are trying to teach their teenagers respect for Aboriginal culture, those same teenagers are exposed to western society and education which encourages 'free' sex, leading to Aboriginal teenagers seeking extra-marital sex as young as ten or twelve years. Some girls would try to get pregnant at that age to then have some 'protection' from boys, other teenage girls would coax each other to have sex with multiple partners. The wide availability of pornography, adult movies, drugs, petrol sniffing and alcohol exasperate the situation. An already severely weakened traditional culture is unable to stem the flow, Aboriginal elders are at the end of their wits and the inappropriate behaviour of teenagers further weakens traditional culture. It also leads to very high rates of STD's and AIDS.
Again the inquiry found that education is the most effective and important tool available to turn these developments around.

What is most sobering is to read that these are not new revelations, but that for example Davis & Leitenberg reported similar incidences back in 1987.

These are but a few glimpses of an excellent but very sobering report, a report that elicited a surprisingly immediate and massive response by the Australian federal government, which only five days later announced a massive intervention plan including the federal government taking control of NT Aboriginal communities for at least five years, the Australian army being sent into Aboriginal communities, medical checks on all Aboriginal children being promised and the scrapping of the permit system.

In Summary my understanding of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities after reading only some of the over three hundred pages is as follows:
Child sexual abuse and for that fact any rape in traditional Aboriginal society is a crime considered worse than murder and punishable by death. However since white settlement many Aboriginal communities have experienced child sexual abuses perpetrated by non-Aboriginal people (often in positions of power) living in or near Aboriginal communities. This has been going on for decades and authorities have failed to act on it, making it an accepted thing. This experience combined with heavy alcohol use has lead to some Aboriginal people going against their tribal law and tradition when engaging in child sexual abuse.
I totally agree with the authors of the report that significant reduction of alcohol abuse is most important as those same Aboriginal perpetrators would be very unlikely to engage in such activities were they sober. The alcohol removes their cultural inhibitions. Secondly and just as importantly education can help to turn the present silent acceptance of such incidences around and reinforce traditional values.

However the Australian government seems to be less concerned with these two solutions and pushes a very different agenda. Read next month on how this massive intervention is unfolding, it's pros and cons as well as the Northern Territory governments response to both the federal intervention as well as the inquiries report.

Please read the summary of the original report.

The full 'Little Children Are Sacred' report is at times chilling but also very interesting reading and is available here.

Climate Change and Indigenous People

Most of you know how passionate I feel about the threat of climate change, so you can imagine how privileged I felt when I was offered the opportunity to attend a forum on 'Climate Change and Indigenous People' which was organised by UNSECO and held recently in Cairns as part of an international experts meeting on "Indigenous Knowledge and Changing Environments".
The experts were addressing the following questions:
How can indigenous knowledge
- broaden the understanding of climate change - including monitoring and predictions
- reduce vulnerability
- mitigate impacts
- expand the capacity to cope

After the traditional welcome by local elder Henrietta Marie, we heard four rapporteurs summarise the papers which were presented to the UNESCO anthropology conference. I will tell you only about a few of the studies which I found particularly interesting.

The first is a finding by Professor Edyard Hyiding from the University in Bergen, Norway, who found that Pacific fishermen were forced to increase fishing (to possibly unsustainable levels) after the purchase of outboard motors - paying for fuel and bank loans forces them to fish much more. This is a chilling reminder of the environmental cost of 'progress'.

Next I liked a study on the Lihir Island in Papua New Guinea, where a large gold mine was established. The study attempts to monitor and model the impact of the mine directly (eg dumping of waste in pristine water around the island) as well as indirectly (eg more people on the island stretching natural resources and introducing a cash economy). What I remembered from the presentation was that the islanders blame poor harvests and environmental degradation on the mine, but not because of the scientific facts but because of their belief systems. They believe that acid (coming from the mine smokestacks and affecting their fields) is poison and that smoke (also coming from the mine) is proof of dark sorcery. So they believe the mine is poisoning their island. While they are totally correct, their concerns are dismissed because of their traditional rather than scientific approach. This shows the importance of recognising and valuing traditional knowledge.

Another study showed that indigenous people with the help of traditional knowledge can recognise danger signs and also have systems to deal with climate change. For example some indigenous tribes in the Pacific grow over thirty different varieties of basic grains despite most showing very poor harvests. They do it because in rare but extreme climate events those varieties are essential in ensuring any harvest at all. Western agriculture with its addiction to minimise plant variety, hybrids and tissue culture should certainly heed this lesson as we are heading into less and less predictable and more extreme whether and climate.

And the last but probably most interesting research I wish to share with you is by Professor Vishvagit Pandya from the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute for Information and Communication Technology in India: 'Tsunami and the Onge of Little Adaman Island'.
Many of you might remember a story after the destructive Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 about the natives on Andaman Island shooting with arrows at an Indian government helicopter sent to see whether they survived and needed any help. Well, all of the Ongees did survive, while over three hundred thousand more westernised people around the Indian ocean failed to realise what was happening and died.
The Ongee's traditional knowledge system is about 'push and pull', human and ancestral spirits, land and sea animals being related and cause and effect. This helped them to immediately recognise that the earthquake and the receding ocean were acute warning signs and they immediately took their ancestral bones and headed about four kilometres inland, which saved their lives.
In their view the tsunami actually brought good things. Not only was the 97th Ongee born soon after, but also their government built houses, which they did not really like anyway, were totally destroyed by the tsunami, allowing the Ongee to now live in more traditional housing that is much easier to maintain.
This story beautifully illustrates the importance and relevance of traditional knowledge in surviving natural disasters and preparing for rapidly changing climate.

Here finally a list of issues from the presentation:
- Climate change is likely to lead to the transformation of land and sea scapes
- Indigenous people are part of those land scapes and will be affected
- Revival of subsistence practices eg a shifting cultivation
- Research on creative human capacity to respond to rapid environmental changes
- Local knowledge is part of place, social institutions, cultural values, status, prestige, and leisure, emotion, religion and political and economic policies
- Importance of social relations and wild food sources
- Preparing for an uncertain future
- Limitations of the predictive models of climate change need to be recognised
- Indigenous people trust their flexibility and adaptability
- To be safe, it is important to feel safe
- Modern technology cannot be relied on all the time
- Expect shocks and uncertain surprises
- Indigenous knowledge and practices such as fire management can increase carbon sequestration and create income through carbon trading
- Western science must interface with Indigenous knowledge
- Climate change responses need old, introduced, scientific and new knowledge
- Careful and accurate interpretation of local knowledge
- Need for long term monitoring

It was a very informative and inspiring forum and I sincerely believe that we need to acknowledge and honour traditional knowledge a lot more than we have in the past. After all it has helped Australian Aboriginal people to survive for over 40,000 years, while we are facing environmental ruin after a few hundred years of western science. And this does not mean that western science is the problem or not useful. It is tremendously important and useful, but it needs to become holistic so every scientific discovery and every new technology is put into context so we can preserve this beautiful planet for thousands of generations to come....

Worldwide Visitors and Customers

We sell quite a few didjes (many to previous customers) and receive every month many excellent comments from those customers such as these:

• Andrejs from Latvia: "Very good service, very fast handling. The ah838 have a more powerful, loud sound and cool overtones. This didge is very resonate."
• Mickael Forsberg from Sweden: "I am amazed by your quickness and service. I can't find words for it. You are PRO. The didj is great"
• Jorge from Portugal: "The service and workmanship is excellent, the best I know in the world of didgeridoo. It's the only didj where i get a satisfying sound. It sounds stronger and clearer"
• Earl Tharp from USA: "Really fast shipment. This didj is very well made. It is very well sealed. Apparently the outside was trimmed down to make it lighter. This exposed different colors of wood. I like that."
• Doron from Israel: "This isn't my first didge from didjshop. the service is immaculate, and as I've mentioned to you before, the packaging is just perfect. i also found all the information regarding the order and its tracking to be helpful. The didj is good on sound, and light enough to easily travel with."

• Angel Cabrera Rodriguez from Spain: "Your service and workmanship are excellent"

Check out some more customer comments here. If you are a customer, and have not yet answered our customer questionnaire, please do so for your chance to win a fantastic Brad Gosam didj valued at over A$1500..

Please read just a few of the hundreds of positive comments we got from web site visitors in the last three month:

• John from USA: "You guys clearly have the best site. You know what you are talking about and you define standards in the industry. You are the only people that I would ever trust when it comes to the purchase of a genuine didgeridoo. (especially when it comes to sound quality)"
• Asheen Muhammad from USA: "Very comprehensive. As a healer practitioner I would recommend this website to my colleagues for reference and information on vibrational healing as it pertains to the Didgeridoo as well as obtaining one for healing purposes."
• Uwe Naeger from Australia: "I'm impressed - there is a lot of info that I did not know -until now. I would and will recommend this site to anybody that may be in the market for a didj or other items that you may offer. Well done and at the same time you may have just saved me several thousand Dollars on almost purchasing perhaps a non aboriginal . Thanks again and keep up the support for the aboriginal people."
• Philip from United Kingdom: "I visited two other sites but i can't remember them because as soon as i saw yours i loved it 3 of my friends have bought a didgeridoo from you. I wish i had the money to buy more that's why i enter these competitions."
• Anonymous: "Not only do you offer quality in the way of products but quality of how you conduct your business. Your site and company are adding value and enrichment to a way of life and an indigenous people. I tell everyone to go here."
• Lieber from Brazil: "The best didgeridoo website for sure. best information best products You have all my respect for your fight on keeping australian aboriginal culture safe."
• Eleanor Hjemmet from USA: "This is perhaps the most compelling website I have ever visited. I come for the education and to hear how experts sound playing the didge. I come to be inspired. I come because this website plays a significant part in healing our sick world. Bless you all."

Thanks to all visitors and customers for their wonderful comments and feedback, it means a lot to us.
You can read more Didjshop comments here or learn about people's experience of didj healing or meditation.
If you haven't filled out our 2007 Visitor Questionnaire, please do so for your chance to win a magnificent Brad Gosam didj.

June, July and August Winners!

Here the monthly winners for our June, July and August A$50.- Didjshop shopping vouchers as promised in the last newsletter. Sorry again for the delay in announcing the June and July winners.

The winner of the June A$50 shopping voucher is: Lee Stewart from Decatur, Georgia, USA This is what Lee said about Didjshop.com in his winning competition entry: "Professional - good content... kept my interest." Congratulations, Lee, and we hope this shopping voucher will satisfy some of your interest :-) .

The winner of the July A$50 shopping voucher is : Dan Snell from St. Peters, USA In his winning competition entry, Dan says this about Didjshop.com: "I like your site it informs the viewer on more of the history of the didgeridoo than other sites and it really focus's on authentic didgeridoos" Congratulations, Dan, and we trust you will put this voucher to good use...

The winner of the August A$50 shopping voucher is: Diederick Neels from Torhout in Belgium Diederick earned his winning entry when he bought two didjes from us and here is his comment on Didjshop.com: "It's a really good website with a lot of information and wicked stuff" Congratulations, Diederick, and we look forward to hear from you soon when you redeem this voucher.

Aboriginal News

In this month Aboriginal news you will find updates and in-depth analysis on several long running issues of some new ones. We hope you'll appreciate this service:

• Regular readers would be aware of the Aboriginal death in custody on Palm Island that resulted in the first ever policeman being charged with manslaughter. Well, Senior Police Sergeant Chris Hurley was acquitted. It was a rather unusual string of events which led up to this court case and the acquittal.
  While the court was told that the injuries sustained by Mulunjri, a split liver and broken ribs, could not have been sustained in a simple fall as claimed by the defence, evidence form another Aboriginal inmate, which could have described the events inside of the police station, was not permitted, because the witness was not considered reliable.
  Hurley was also acquitted of assault, the 2nd charge, despite witness statements.
  Here we have a situation where a Queensland police officer, who actually admitted to the court that he must have caused Mulrunji's fatal injuries, is walking free. That the police officer apparently ignored the screams for help from the dying man seems to have been ignored by the court. That the police officer changed his story, that vital witnesses were not allowed to testify, that another vital witness committed suicide, that there were many irregularities all did not matter; the jury did not dare to convict a policeman for killing an Aboriginal person despite clear evidence.
  This judgement is not going to install any respect or trust in the police force. Would the judgement have been the same if the police officer was black and the victim non-Aboriginal? Somehow we have our doubts....
  A black day in the history of reconciliation.
  
• As part of the Commonwealth intervention in Aboriginal communities from 14th September alcohol will be banned in Uluru and Kata Tjuta national park. Some tourist operators are worried that this might have an effect on tourist numbers, but the government maintains there is no problem as people can still drink in the nearby resorts and camping places, just not in the park itself. So if you plan to visit the park, please be aware of these changes
• In our October newsletter and again in our April newsletter we reported on the giant open-cut Xstrata mine in Borroloola which would divert the Mc Arthur river. The local Yanyuwa Elders believe that the local rainbow snake would be disturbed by the planned diversion.
  The mine has been approved and when Aboriginal elder Jackie Green recently wanted to perform a cultural dance on land just inside the boundaries of the mine, he and 25 others were stopped at the gate. The manager of the mine even flew in with his helicopter to ensure the Aboriginal people were not allowed inside. "We can't exercise our culture any more because they've got that lease and they're stopping us from doing that," a very disappointed Jackie Green said.
  
• Elders of the Ngapa clan at Muckaty Station in the Northern Territory have signed a conditional agreement with the Australian federal government to lease part of their land to the government for the construction of Australia's nuclear waste dump. The lease is supposed to go for 200 years, after which the land is to be returned to the Aboriginal owners. The government considers the land to be safe by that time, a claim that seems dubious when considering the 25,000 year half-life of the nuclear material to be buried there.
  In exchange the Northern Lands Council is to receive 12 million dollars into a trust fund, that is mostly to pay for education, health and infrastructure. We note that non-indigenous communities receive funds for such causes without being forced to accept radioactive waste in their back yard.
  It is worth noting that the agreement is conditional to successful scientific assessment of the site. So the government has first made sure to have agreement from the traditional owners before they even consider whether the site is feasible, a rather back to front approach. Considering that the government is facing resistance in the three other alternative NT sites, our money is on the scientific evaluation coming out in favour of a nuclear waste facility at Muckaty...
  One needs to understand the political process to recognise how sinister this whole affair is: the Australian federal government has tried since years to establish a nuclear waste dump in Southern Australia, which was heavily opposed by many Aboriginal people, who were successful in stopping the establishment of a nuclear dump. Consequently the government started looking at the Northern Territory which led to the NT government passing legislation banning nuclear waste. The federal government responded with special legislation to override the NT ban if private land holders offer their land for a nuclear dump. So this is a huge coupe for the federal government. Not only have they managed to get some Aboriginal elders to agree to a dump on their land, they have also gotten the agreement for peanuts - 12 million dollars of infrastructure others get for free in return for nuclear waste that will be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years!
  However not all elders agreed and Bindi Martin, a Ngapa elder from the Muckaty area said he still has strong opposition to the dump proposal and other reports speak of Ngapa elders to have said: "you sell the land, you sell your soul."
  We hope that the Northern Land Council sees the gravity of their decision and they change their minds on this.
• At a recent Sotheby's auction a Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri painting sold for AUS$2.4 million, the highest price ever paid for an Aboriginal painting. This came shortly after a work by Emily Kngwarreye set a new record of $1.56 million.
• Federal Environment minister Malcolm Turnbull has placed a 240 square kilometre area of the Burrup peninsular in Western Australia on the National Heritage list. Sadly it comes too late for thousands of unique rock engravings he allowed to be destroyed or relocated to make way for a huge liquefied natural gas plant. There is also concerns that the fumes form the plant could affect the rock carvings in the now protected area. This is like the Egyptians protecting the pyramids after allowing a multinational to remove the corners of the three biggest ones....
• Latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistic show that the Australian Indigenous population has grown to just over 500,000, or about 2.5 % of the total population, an increase of about 60,000 in the last five years.
• Archaeologist Tom Richards from Aboriginal Affairs Victoria reported that a known archeological site at Box Gully, near Lake Tyrell is at least 44,000 years old as tests on charcoal and stone fragments from the site have revealed. This is another important indicator that Australia has been settled by Aboriginal people for a very long time. Assuming that the first settlers came from the north, settlement of the continent is likely to have occurred around fifty to sixty thousand years ago.

Keep on didjing until next month and please participate in the next Worldwide Didj Circle on 22 June...

from Svargo and the DIDJSHOP.COM team