BBC Audio The Aboriginal professor who was expelled from school at 13
Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producer: May Cameron
Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707
(Photo: Jack Beetson. Credit: Joy Lai/State Library NSW)
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Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Ben and Dino thought they had found the perfect rental... then they were given 24 hours to leave as a glaring issue exposes the dire reality for millions
Two housemates were evicted from their rental at just a day's notice after part of the ceiling became detached from the walls and the house began to sink. Ben Pierpoint and Dino Dimitriadis were initially happy when they moved into their refurbished home in Marrickville, in Sydney 's Inner West, two years ago. A year later, they started to see small cracks in the walls that they thought were just normal wear and tear. But on July 22 this year, Mr Pierpoint's wall tore away from the ceiling and the house sank by six centimetres. He said there was a 'significant gap' where the wall disconnected from the ceiling. They quickly told their landlord, and an engineer found the house was no longer safe to live in, and they had 24 hours to pack their belongings and leave. The pair wondered if construction work next door, where a 10metre deep hole was dug for a basement car park, had anything to do with their home's damage. They questioned whether the excavation caused a seepage failure, meaning the ground on their side of the building had sunk, causing their walls to separate from the ceilings. They lodged compensation claims with the owner's insurance company, but they were refused because the insurance company argued the damage was just normal wear and tear. Mr Pierpoint said it was a 'traumatic' ordeal which forced them to spend thousands of dollars on removalists, storage units and temporary accommodation, and they were also forced to take time off work. NSW Fair Trading, the Inner West Council and the Building Commission all told them that no one had any legal responsibility to compensate them financially. NSW Fair Trading said the Residential Tenancies Act did not cover relationships with third parties. Mr Pierpoint and Mr Dimitriadis said their situation highlighted a gap in tenancy laws. The law says landlords have a legal duty to provide a safe home, but if it becomes uninhabitable and unsafe to live in, they can cease the lease right away. Mr Pierpoint and Mr Dimitriadis want to be compensated, but a legal fight against their landlord, or a third party, would cost them too much. Tenants' Union of NSW chief executive Leo Patterson Ross told the Sydney Morning Herald that the costs of legal action outstripped the amount people wanted to be compensated. 'Just a filing fee alone could start at $500, and that's before you hire a solicitor – there might be many people who wouldn't pursue it because of the high costs and risk of not being successful,' he said. Mr Pierpoint and Mr Dimitriadis said things would only 'get worse and worse, unless something changes'. They are calling on the government to amend tenancy laws to provide renters with a safety net if they are evicted for reasons beyond their control. 'Or, forcing the landlord's insurance to cover those costs – but we all know insurance companies will do anything to not have to pay anything,' Pierpoint told the Sydney Morning Herald. 'If we didn't have the financial means to move that quickly, our stuff would just be on the street. If we didn't have community and friends around us, we would actually be homeless.' Mr Pierpoint and Mr Dimitriadis who have run into trouble with the quality of their rental. Ksenia Pavlovskaya, 43, previously claimed she was living with health problems because of the mould at her unit in North Curl Curl, on Sydney 's leafy Northern Beaches. Daily Mail Australia contacted Mr Pierpoint and Mr Patterson Ross for further comment.


The Guardian
16 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘Breaking down the walls': the long journey towards Indigenous inclusion at University of Melbourne
It took more than 100 years after universities were established in Australia for an Indigenous student to graduate. Margaret Williams-Weir, a Gumbaynggirr and Malera Bundjalung woman, completed a diploma in physical education at the University of Melbourne in 1959. Since Williams-Weir, more than 1,400 Indigenous students have graduated from the sandstone university, and a record 536 were enrolled in 2023. But that is still only 1.27% of students, compared with 3.8% of the general population who are Indigenous. The university has also failed to reach its targets for Indigenous staff. Amid efforts to improve Indigenous representation, the university has released the second volume of Dhoombak Goobgoowana – translated as 'truth-telling' in the Woi Wurrung language of the traditional owners of the land on which the university was built. The first volume, published last year, laid bare the dark side of the university's history, revealing how Nazi apologists, massacre perpetrators, grave robbers, racists and eugenicists had been celebrated as hugely influential heroes of academia. The second volume, Voice, does not shy away from the the university's troubled historical relationship with Indigenous people, but shifts its focus to stories of resilience, resistance and reform, which its editors hope will contribute to reconciliation. The deputy vice-chancellor (Indigenous) , Prof Barry Judd, says Voice is about 'who gets to speak, who gets heard, and what it takes to create space for Indigenous leadership in systems not built for us'. 'This volume documents progress, but also calls us to go further,' he says. 'It is both a record of progress and a foundation for ongoing cultural transformation.' The work was commissioned as part of the university's commitment to truth telling. Both volumes were submitted to the Yoorrook Justice Commission, the first formal truth-telling process into injustices experienced by Indigenous people in Victoria. Prof Marcia Langton, who co-wrote and edited the book, says the works of Indigenous staff and students to turn the university towards respect for Indigenous knowledge 'echo across history and continue to inspire'. When Langton was hired in 2000 to construct an undergraduate program in Australian Indigenous studies, she was the first Aboriginal professor at the university and among only a handful of full-time Indigenous academic staff. She says Dhoombak Goobgoowana would have been 'impossible to write' when her tenure began. 'There were no Indigenous studies programs at all,' she says. 'Today we are the only university in the world that has reckoned with its Indigenous history and its engagement with Indigenous people honestly and truthfully. 'Before we were able to do this, it was a matter of great shame to many Indigenous people that our university had this past and didn't acknowledge it.' Sign up: AU Breaking News email When Williams-Weir began at the university, campus racism was overt. In 1951, the book recounts, first year students were greeted at the university's official welcome by white students in blackface dressed as 'spear-waving 'aborigines''. Six years later, when a fundraising body for Indigenous tertiary education, Abschol, advertised it would sell buttons, a group of students hung an effigy of an Indigenous person from a tree outside Union House. An article published in the student newspaper Farrago in 1959 mocking Abschol's work said attempts to offer charity to Indigenous people produced an 'apathetic, disease-ridden, violent, metho-drinking community who have no other values than the satisfaction of their desires'. Abschol students' own efforts also demonstrated a limited connection to the Indigenous community at the university. Their float for the 1956 Moomba parade featured five white students who had blackened their skin and wore headdresses taken from communities in far north Queensland. This was the environment the university's first Aboriginal liaison officer, Destiny Deacon, entered when she began her role in 1975. She resigned a year later over 'intractable disagreements' about her autonomy and under-resourcing. Deacon went on to complete a bachelor of arts degree in 1979 and became a celebrated artist, broadcaster, academic and political activist, but during her tenure she came up against persistently racist ideas about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Launching the first Black Week of the Students Representative Council in 1974, Deacon lamented: 'Some of us think the dishonest acquisition of our land by the whites happened because we, at the time, had no concept of the white man's irrational notion of his divine right to plunder the lands and property of human beings whom he considers to be 'primitive', 'barbaric' or 'uncivilised',' she told the crowd. 'They conned us into believing that they were superior'. Langton says Deakin did an 'extraordinary job' supporting the students and 'breaking down the walls of exclusion' at the university. '[Her speech] represents the tipping point from the view of Aboriginal people as primitives, which had been the subject of so much pseudoscience at the university,' she says. 'Change really began to accelerate from the advocacy of a few enlightened individuals.' Despite the efforts of students such as Deakin, the university's colonial past remained evidenced in the names of buildings promoting eugenicists, and tucked behind closed doors. In 2002, a collection of more than 800 Indigenous remains was discovered by chance in a locked basement storeroom. The remains had been collected by Richard Berry, a professor of anatomy at the university in the early 1900s and prominent eugenicist. He was one of multiple academics who took remains from Indigenous communities as late as the 1950s. After amendments to the Victorian government's Relics Preservation Act in the 1980s, Gunditjmara elder Uncle Jim Berg arrived at the UoM with the legal injunction to repatriate the stolen items. The book recounts Berg's recollection that the then vice-chancellor, David Caro, met him in his office and shouted: 'Who in the hell do you think you are, taking on the University of Melbourne?' A collection of about 800 Indigenous remains, excavated from gravesites on the Murray River by George Murray Black, was returned. But despite the injunction explicitly including Berry's collection as well as Black's, it would sit in the Medical Building for another two decades, and even now families are waiting for their ancestors to be repatriated. A subsequent audit by the university found about two dozen Aboriginal remains and cultural artefacts, including the skull of a tribal leader stored alongside animal specimens and Aboriginal stone artefacts stored in a service duct. There were some academics who championed Indigenous knowledge, including Dr Leonhard Adam, Baldwin Spencer and Donald Thomson, whose collection consists of more than 10,000 Indigenous objects. This year, the university's Potter Museum unveiled the jestingly-titled exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, featuring more than 400 artworks and cultural objects from the university's collection, many of which had rarely been seen by the public, including segments of Thomson's collection. Co-curated by Langton, the exhibition confronts Australia's colonial history and the process of collection from Indigenous lands, as well as the belated acceptance of Aboriginal art into the fine art canon. Langton says academics such as Thomson were 'collecting vast amounts of Aboriginal cultural heritage, but after they retired or passed, those collections sat in storerooms and were rarely seen by the public … Our exhibition puts their collections in their historical context.' This, co-editor Dr James Waghorne says, is what a history of inclusion looks like: 'Imperfect, overdue and then often painfully slow, but marked by stories of courage and hope. 'Dhoombak Goobgoowana traces a series of beginnings,' he says. 'When academic leaders repudiated race science with growing insistence, when pioneering Indigenous students made the most of their chances, and their allies in student clubs and societies championed their cause. 'When the first staff broke through, and when the university established partnerships with Indigenous groups beyond its gates.'


The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Why doesn't Adani pay any corporate tax?
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