Comments on my Health

Comments on my Health

(I’m just home from my Heart Specialist and he is very pleased. Both my Diabetes and my CCF appear to be well in hand, so I don’t have to see him for six months,  Everything is AOK.)

Red Bingham asked about my health on the facebook page that I seldom look at.  I’m a lazy correspondent!  But as some people know I am suffering from CCF (Congestive Coronary Failure) being a very common complaint that is going to catch up with a lot of us in the end – statistically speaking.  I also have Diabetes,  Hypertension, and arthritis in the spine and disintegrating discs, so I ride around on an electric mobility scooter.

During May/June (2011) I suffered 3 exacerbations (what I call episodes) of the CCF, the last of which was complicated by a touch of Pneumonia following my trip to Canberra for the Aboriginal Embassy Symposium. While in Canberra the temperature on one day rose as high a four degrees at midday.

I take so many pills I rattle, and have two types of insulin.  If my blood sugars go very high I suffer great pangs of thirst, which makes life very difficult because I am on very rigid restrictions of my  fluids intake. Soups, stews, most desserts and all fruits (fresh or canned) are classed as fluids. During most of the past winter you could have found me sucking on ice (Brrr) while trying to balance blood sugars and fluids.

My best friend is my bathroom scales.  I usually weigh myself twice a day to watch for fluid retention, the first warning of another CCF episode.

Well you know what they say “ Life is a terminal condition that no-one seems to survive”. But I do object to drowning in one’s own juices. I tell the family that I’m not going  anywhere soon, as I am waiting for an elephant to fall on me from a great height.

Recently some very large bill-boards have had a new advertisement put up featuring the picture of an elephant sitting on some person. Just two legs stick out from underneath the animal. These hoardings tend to be placed on the roofs of four or five story buildings. Now I have to stay indoors on windy days!

Poems from an Atheist.

Poems from an Atheist.

Please start at the bottom of my blog page as this is more personal and you may find my poetry amateurish and depressing. (which it is!) 

It is now one year since my eldest son, Greg, died. He had a heart attack on the evening of Julia Gillards’ election, while the hung parliament had yet to be resolved.  He was well enough to walk down all the stairs to the waiting ambulance, but had another attack on the Sunday night.  One by one his organs folded up and he died officially on

 Tuesday 24 th August 2010 at the age of 51. As with many Aboriginal men, hard drinking and self abuse as a younger man caused liver damage to strike him down at an early age.

Greg was committed to Aboriginal Rights and worked for many years with his sister Cathy, Helen Boyle, the Murray family and many others on the campaign to Stop Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.  This resulted in the Royal Commission of twenty years ago. He spent a further six years helping to establish the NIMAA communications organisation  and trying to build Perleeka Aboriginal Television to operate channel 31 (Community Television Sydney) – and that’s another long sad story.  

Greg and I also established the Aboriginal Rights Coalition  to protest the Northern Territory Intervention.  Cathy and I are currently doing what we can to reestablish and reinvigorate the Aboriginal Rights Coalition (Sydney) and will include a wider ambit of Aboriginal issues as well as the Intervention. See, for example, the piece on Aboriginal health and homelessness in Port Hedland (WA), where Aboriginal patients have to camp outside the Hospital, living in the open and nursed by their families.  (ABC 24 hrs news on 15/08/11 –EST time 19.03 hrs.) .  Or the article on the mining trainees at Port Hedland, where some of the 900 Aboriginals forced to taker up any offered training and employment in the mines that are gutting the country, regardless if it is located hundreds of kilometers  away from their homelands or lose their unemployment benefits. Note that taxpayers have paid the mine owners hundreds of thousands of dollars for the training and employment of these Aboriginal people. (ABC17/08/11 –EST 15.32 hrs-). Yet only 300  ex trainees are employed (at virtual slave labour rates of $50 per day) and are not given access to the skilled employment for which they have been trained.

Next week, on August 24th 2011, my ex-husband, his partner and Greg’s sisters and surviving brother will be in Carnarvon Gorge in Central Queensland, to return Greg’s ashes to our Home Country. Unfortunately my doctor says I can’t go up there as I would be 70 or 80 k’s from the nearest town, (Rolliston) and probably much further from a hospital.

It was only when Greg died that I started writing poetry.  I couldn’t seem to find anything hat had been written from the point of view of an atheist or an agnostic to use at his cremation. At first I tried to be sensitive to the beliefs of others but later I felt that the agnostic position was not satisfactory for me. So here it is…. for what it’s worth.

                    Big

 by Pat Eatock

We never talk of death in this society

Well, not much; not often;  --

A subject that we all can do without, or so we think.

We see enough of death on our TVs

The news, far away wars that barely get a mention:

We see a body in a street and think of it no more

As long as it was not an Aussi soldier

We pay scant attention

Around the world calamaties abound

Tornadoes, with drenching rain and plunging waves

Mountains slide towards the sea

Earth shakes and houses by the dozen collapse in rubble.

While floods take weeks or months to work their wrack and ruin.

We hear the numbers but for the most part death here is well hidden

Tsunami, disease, starvation:

Where does it stop?

We see it everywhere

And when we’ve seen enough

Turn on some film for entertainment.

Reassured that as a favourite actor dies

Tomorrow he will rise, miraculously alive

And ready to die for us in some other guise

Although we know, of course, its him.

A friend of mine once made casual comment

(I don’t recall the words).  He spoke of death as of some minor irritation,

like missing a plane, an inconvenience. I turned on him, insistent

But Death is Big I said.

Its not some silly game that lets you get up and dust yourself off again

Death is being dead  I said . It lasts forever.

You may believe some other world exists,

 or reincarnation may be your thing

Yet buried deep, or when only ash remains.

The mechanism for thought and memory is gone.

So where do we go? What happens to our life?

Are our spirits, our souls, like God,

concepts designed by man to comfort us in grief

or hide our fear behind?

DEATH IS BIG!     Too big to comprehend!

Like the Hubble floating out far above the earth

Ignoring all the millions of suns that we call stars,

 diminishing their enormity in our ignorance

By use of such a small, small word.

The billions of planets,  the plethora of pulsating galaxies:

But Hubble aimed its view at a small blank slice of space

And cranking up its telescope again,   and again,     and again,

Revealed far distant galaxies

with more beyond,   and more,    and more.

We strain our brains and try to comprehend.

 This is  our universe, like time itself,

 Never ending and without beginning

Before “our” Big Bang, the Bangs of others,   and of others,   and of others

So to each and every individual,  death is like the universe.

Death is BIG!       Death is GIGANTIC!

Death of ourselves or the death of others close to us,

Impossible to comprehend.

Stretching our small brains,

Trying to expand our understanding

To wrap our heads around it all…

Straining…      Head aching…     aching…      aching…,

DEATH IS GY-NORM-OUS!

But I only know little things.

I know he isn’t here.

A Call for an INTERACTIVE BLOG for ABORIGINAL RIGHTS COALITION (SYDNEY)

A Call for an INTERACTIVE BLOG for ABORIGINAL RIGHTS COALITION (SYDNEY)

ABORIGINAL NEWS THIS WEEK (20th August 2011)

I was just watching the News on ABC 24 (12 noon) when Marcia Langton was introduced as an “honored and respected” Aboriginal academic and Aboriginal spokesperson who had just delivered a speech honoring Vincent Lingiari and his struggle for Land Rights. Almost as an afterthought the commentator added at the end of his report the fact that the Lingiari family had boycotted the speech and had refused to be there to listen to Langton as she gave the 12^th Annual Vincent Lingiari Lecture at the Charles Darwin University because of her long term support for the NT Intervention.

When is the Greater Australian Community (GAC) and its political commentators and journalists going to wake up to the fact that we are sick and tired of THEM trying to select our spokespersons and “leaders” for us?  One of the earliest episodes of  ‘THE DRUM” on ABC 24 had the moderator lean forward and intently demand (on some Aboriginal issue)  “WHAT DOES NOEL PEARSON SAY ABOUT THIS?  WHY HASN’T  HE BEEN ASKED?”

Frankly we are fed up to the back teeth of having Langton and Pearson rammed down our throats.  These two extreme right-wing political apologists both started out their political careers as comparatively ‘left-wing” idealists.  When I first met Langton she was a 17 year old student who addressed the ‘Women in Politics Conference’ during the 1975  International Women’s Year gathering in Canberra where more than 2000 women discussed everything of any importance to women throughout Australia.  DURING THE CONFERENCE A GROUP OF WOMEN FROM WESTERN QUEENSLAND ACTUALLY TRIED TO HAVE ALL ABORIGINAL WOMEN REMOVED AND BANNED FROM ATTENDING ON THE GROUNDS THAT ABORIGINAL WERE NOT REALLY HUMAN (TRUE!)

At that time Matcia showed such promise.  Similarly, when Noel Pearson first gained access to television, he was not the narrow minded Lutheran of his childhood and latter years. His big swing and return to the Political/Religio Right reflects his becoming a favoured  protégée of the Howard administration (and of Howard himself). 

I have discussed the process by which the right subornes Aboriginal leaders elsewhere, but I will add that article on for those who may be interested but have missed the opportunity of reading  it when it was first published in the Green Left Weekly.

GOOD ON YOU, THE LINGIARI FAMILY! 

ABORIGINAL PEOPLE SHOULD ALSO BOYCOTT PEARSON!

LET OUR FEELINGS BE KNOWN!

Also this week on ABC24.

Aboriginal patients from the new Port Hedland hospital  (many receiving daily dialysis for kidney failure) are living rough on an almost bare patch of scrub land (where nothing grows higher than knee height) and being nursed by their family members.   The “hostel” that was shown in the background had nothing to do with extending hospital facilities for patients and their families.  The money allocated for hostels in the mining areas of north western Australia by the Federal government was earmarked for Aboriginal trainees and employees of mining companies,  One glance was enough to confirm that this accommodation was designed to house single men and had nothing to do with the hospital.

A second article a few days later proved that accommodation for Aboriginal trainees and employees is also sorely needed in Port Hedland.   Do you remember Forrest, the head of Rio Tinto (I think) when he promised Howard that he could find 50,000 jobs for Aboriginals in the mining industry?   Well the government has paid thousands of dollars in subsidies for more than 900 Aboriginal trainees, of whom only 300 are employed.  A few Aboriginal people from the south and from the eastern states have obtained appropriate employment but the majority of the 300 (from the NT and the north of WA) are employed as industrial cleaners using industrial strength solvents and high pressure hoses, despite being trained for higher duties as drivers and mechanics. Some trainees are earning only fifty dollars a day (less than the dole) and are sleeping rough in the bush while attending Port Hedland TAFE as they have no hope of paying the high rents of  P.H.

Only last week a maintenance worker was crushed to death . It is not known if he was Aboriginal, or not, but any death is to be abhorred.  Remember that Aboriginal workers are often at the mines because of a little known aspect of the Labor government’s version of NT Intervention , “Closing the Gap”,  requires unemployed Aboriginals to accept any job offered regardless of how far removed it is from their home country, or loose their benefits.

These are issues not necessarily taken up by organisations that concentrate on the NT Intervention.

The Aboriginal Rights Coalition (Sydney) can no longer organize meetings and demonstrations or provide speakers on such issues as the above. However my daughter Cathy, myself and some others feel the need to find alternative ways to develop actions and protests around such issues. There are two things that are influencing our thinking, firstly “I.T.” (Internet Technology) which I am not very good at.  The second is “Individual Responsibility”.

It is time to become self motivated and take responsibility for one’s own actions.   What can you do? Who can you write to?.  Who can you text/?  Who can you talk to?  How can you protest and support Aboriginal people? If you are more canny than me about the Internet, is there any way that we can set up an open blog where everyone can contribute?

We need people to express their thoughts on Aboriginal Issues, not just another site for news.

The Aboriginal Rights Coalition needs an interactive blog,

Eatock vs Andrew Bolt and Herald @ Weekly Times

Eatock vs Andrew Bolt and Herald @ Weekly Times:

Not an attack on Free Speech.

Although I am constrained from discussing this case in detail until after the Judge gives his ruling, I think it is OK for me to make some general comments

This action has been taken under the Racial Villification Act.  It is not a class action as there are no financial remedies available to me if I win this case (and of course I expect to win) and I am the sole litigant.  All other Aboriginal participants are present as witnesses to confirm that they also have been offended and insulted by the original Bolt articles and that my being offended was a reasonable response that was foreseen and expected by both Bolt and his publisher.

My witnesses may, if they so choose, take Bolt and HWT to court at a later date on the issue of ”Defamation”. Such witnesses can only benefit if they can establish that Bolt’s comments about each individual person were not just derogatory and insulting but that they also have, or can be expected to have, a negative impact on the current or future earning capacity of those people he attacked..

“Defamation” is not and never has been an option for me;

·  I am an age pensioner and at the age of  73 I have no potential earning capacity, so I have no potential earnings to defend.

·  I live in a one-bedroom Department of Housing unit and I do not own a car. I have no property or financial reserves to convert to the down payment of about $130,000 needed in order to commence a Defamation action.

·  Defamation cases are hard to win and are too risky for “pro bono” legal work where the legal team can only expect to be paid if they win a case

·  Should I loose a Defamation case I would then be liable for the costs of the defendants’ legal team, which could be much higher than my own costs.

·  Defamation has nothing to do with truth and veracity.  A thing may be true and still besmirch the reputation of a person if it was previously not generally known.

·  Defamation is an action that is of possible benefit only to those rich enough to be able to afford such a huge gamble.

“Freedom of speech” is not the issue either. Unlike in the U.S., Australia does not have any guarantee of Free Speech in the constitution.  Our use of language is constrained on all sides.  We may not swear in a public place where we may give offence to others. You can be arrested for offending public morality by the written or spoken word.  If you stand on a soapbox outside your own door the police can move you on or arrest you for being a public nuisance,

You do, of course, have the freedom to have your opinions known by writing letters to the editor of newspapers and magazines, but those editors have the freedom to refuse to publish your letters, should they so choose.

Journalists kike Andrew Bolt have almost unlimited power over ordinary people because they have almost unlimited access to print media (and sometimes even radio and television) compared to my own powerlessness.

Mr Bolt still has the freedom to think and say what he likes.  His only constraint is that he may not select a particular racial group, or members of that group, in order to deliberately

and maliciously besmirch the character and reputation of that person or group.  Well, this is my interpretation, not a literal extract from the Racial Vilification Act.

But the final judgement in “Pat Eatock vs Andrew Bolt and HWT” will determine exactly how the Act should be applied.

eatock vs

Embassy Symposium

POLITICAL

Notes for the Embassy Symposium. ANU 20/22 June 2011

I have been to any number of Conferences.  I have attended the odd Seminar or two.  And I have even been in the audience of one Symposium (strangely enough that was also at ANU) and the subject matter was FREUD AND FEMINISM. That was not very entertaining!  But this is the first time I have been asked to speak at a symposium.  SYMPOSIUM.  The very word itself makes me want to lie down and go to sleep..

But I’ll try to stay awake if you will!

A Symposium.   An academic gathering intended to deeply examine all aspects of the chosen subject!  And we sitting up here on the panel are supposed to be your primary source. Every undergraduates dream…. NO BIBLIOGRAPHY REQUIRED!

But I don’t really know what people want me to say that I haven’t said somewhere else or some time before. If you have seen the film Ningla A-Na  then you don’t need to hear me repeat how I went to the FAACTSI conference in Alice Springs (Easter, 1972) and attended what can only be described as the first National Aboriginal Land Rights  conference and how I pushed my three month baby in a broken stroller through the scalding hot sands of the Todd River (although I was a bit older than most, we all went barefoot in the Flower Power generation). And it was in the Todd river-bed that people said to me;

“We are hungry for Our Land, like a baby is hungry for its mother’s titty. The Land is our mother. We are hungry for Our Land”. 

That is the meaning of  NINGLA A-NA,

You also probably don’t need me to tell again of how, on the day the Embassy first came under attack, I was at work in the Government Printer’s Office.  At about 8.50in the morning a door had been left a few inches ajar and someone was saying quite loudly that the police were waiting for the first issue of the Government Gazette to come off the presses so they could take down the Embassy.  We had been waiting for weeks with this threat hanging over us and I had recently been removed from the Office of Aboriginal Affairs Switchboard because I had been identified as a possible security threat.  I  had written an article on the real estate developers who were trying to take over the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Reserve for redevelopment for tourism. 

So there I was ideally placed to get the word out that the ordnance prohibiting camping on Crown Land was to be used to shut down the Embassy.  I told the boss I was ill and that was that. I just walked out.  I rang my baby sitter to let her know that someone else would be picking up the baby. I rang a friend and organized for the baby to be picked up. And I rang the house of students and young socialists who flew the Eureka Flag on their front lawn and said the Embassy was about to be attacked. By the time the police arrived there were about thirty people ready to defend the Embassy instead of just the six or seven Koories (Aboriginal people) who would normally have been there. 

Bolstered by about 20 young activist students by ten o’clock we had about thirty defenders at the Aboriginal Embassy when we were attacked by about seventy police and the tent was pulled down for the first time.

That was the day Paul Coe was kicked unconscious by seven policemen and ended up in hospital for three days!

Nine days later and in front of several hundred spectators and supporters about seventy or eighty of us re-established the Embassy tent and linked arms in three rows ready to defend the Embassy again .  This time the police came around from behind the old Parliament House building like a battalion of Nazi storm troopers entering the Warsaw Ghetto.  I was on the side that couldn’t see them coming and the only time I really felt scared was that night when I saw them on TV. Then I started to shake and couldn’t stop. Even when I was on the ground under five or six rows of blue serge legs and shiny boots and was calmly thinking “so this is what it’s like to be trampled to death”. Even that was not as terrible as seeing those rows and rows of police later that night on the TV.

But this story has been told before.  As have many others.

There are four hours of tapes in the Australian Womens’ Register at the National Library that I did a few years ago with Ann-Marie Jordens. There are a further twelve hours of video interviews that I did with Peter Reid (Canberra University) a couple of years ago which focus more on my experiences as an Aboriginal than as a woman.  Thankfully these have been edited down and four or five short sets of clips, each about three or four minutes long, are available and are on show here or are being released on the Internet.

What I haven’t said elsewhere ?  Well I have been asked about the role of the Communist Party in the Embassy or in my actions in standing for the Federal Elections in 1972, which was only a few months after the Embassy.  Frankly I heard a rumour that the CPA may have given some petrol money for the car that came to Canberra with four Koories who established the Embassy after  Prime Minister Billy McMahon had stated on 26 January 1972 that there would be no Land Rights for Aboriginal People. (Sorry, Gordon Briscoe but your dates are out by a year.)   I don’t know about this myself.  I do know that after the Embassy, and after I had stood as an Independent candidate in the December 1972 Federal Elections, there was a very long and nasty campaign to discredit me both politically and personally by denying my Aboriginality and claiming my “identity” was nothing but a political ploy.

It is true that in the early 1960’s I joined the Communist Party of Australia in response to the initially ‘secret war’ in Vietnam.  The fictional “torpedo attack” on an American warship which brought the US officially took place in July 1964, while I was in hospital delivering my fifth child in less than seven years. Obviously I was a bit too busy with domestic duties to be much of a threat to the political system, and although I supported the Moritorium Anti-war movement where I could, my CPA membership lapsed. 

Later when my youngest son sustained serious brain damage and severe epilepsy, it was some of the women from the CPA who offered me the support I needed. My son actually died from the effects of his triple antigen immunizations not long after his 27^th birthday.

But back in the 1960’s, on top of everything else my marriage also came to an end and in April 1972 I moved to Canberra.

Obviously ASIO considered me to be a major threat.  My ASIO file is publicly available at the State Library… Well, at least Vol. 1. is there.  I never bothered to read  the whole thing. I think there were still forty seven pages to go or something when I gave up. It was so full of clap-trap.  There was only one person who ever called me Patty in all of the nine years that I lived in Canberra . This was because when we were first introduced he thought my name was Patty Tock instead of Pat Eatock.  By the time he understood his mistake he was so used to calling me Patty and he was so patronizing towards me that nothing would change his misnaming of me.  So much for the secrets of the spy industry

Did you know that ASIO is having a display of some of their work down in Sydney this wee? (June 2011) One of the best entries in my ASIO file was the response they gave to someone’s request for information about the Canberra Branch of the CPA.  It is such a classic!  It starts off by saying that they have no information because they have no one in a position to report on this issue.  However, they continue, IF there is a Branch of the CPA in Canberra, THEN it is possible/probable that such a branch would have 19 or 20 members. It then lists about nine people who might possibly be members of the branch if such a branch exists and state that it is UNABLE TO OFFER ANY OTHER NAMES for the remaining members that it is UNABLE TO CONFIRM as existing!!   Have you ever heard

“As I was walking down the stairs,

  I met a man who wasn’t there. 

  He wasn’t there again today.  

  I wish that man would go away!”

Well enough Clap-trap! What else needs to be said.  What did the Embassy achieve? 

Well, not on its own.   There were three major campaigns effecting basic human rights for Aboriginal people.…

• We had The Freedom Ride in late ‘sixties – on ordinary civil rights.  
• The Referendum (67) seeking  constitutional reforms

                ie. Federal responsibility; and inclusion in the census. 

• And then the Embassy  --seeking recognition of our problems, Soverignty, and International Awareness

                                                    

During the period from the Referendum to the late 1990’s we, the Aboriginal people had gotten free from a system that had previously controlled our whole lives and kept most of us incarcerated in Government run communities (Reserves) or trapped in religious Missions. In Victoria  there are historical  records of the process of religious “conversions” that were based on the stealing the of children and encouraging mothers to follow the kids into religious compounds, where the men were excluded. While the women and kids were taught Christianity and Housekeeping Skills, the men were thought to be an unruly influence and were denigrated as “Myalls” (wild and untrustworthy “bad blacks”.)

Between the Referendum (1967) and the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy (1972) the number of Reserves in New South Wales was reduced from about 86 to 18, These last few saw the keys to all the community owned buildings (managers’ houses and offices, community halls, training centres, clinics and sporting equipment – if any) handed over to arbitrarily determined “Aboriginal leaders”. But at least we stopped being treated as children. Then after the Embassy the Whitlam Government promised Land Rights and Mabo took action for land rights in the Torres Straits followed by Aboriginal communities across Northern Australia who were given recognition of land claims, granted in perpetuity. Aboriginal people were given welfare entitlements on an individual basis instead of the previously rough ‘guesstimates’ being allocated as lump sum payments to Community managements (either church groups or government administrators) and the homelands movement and “two-way” education were introduced.

As Martin Luther King once said: FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST.

THEN came the Howard government (1996-2007) followed by Rudd and the Gillard versions of Labor morality. It is difficult to determine which side of the current Australian Political divide is the more immoral on both Refugee and Aboriginal issues!

During the past 10 years Aboriginal people have lost EVERYTHING we ever gained during the previous forty years!

The keys are back, even if a few of the administrators may be Aboriginal. Homelands are being destroyed,  People are foced into “Hub Townships” by the denial of all support services; ie health and education, home and utilities maintenances (roads and sewerage) Even the traditional Aboriginal Tribal Councils are disregarded or cease to exist, replaced by mixed race Shire Councils where those station owners, white settlers and townspeople -descendants of those who originally stole and pillaged the land – again dominate the decision making processes that govern the lives of the Aboriginal majority. Read also the recent Amnesty International Report “The Land Holds Us” at  publications@amnesty.org.au

For the full report of the Aboriginal Embassy Symposium (1972) held at the Australian National University (20-23 June 2011) see recordings made by Eleanor Gilbert at <enlightening.productions@gmail.com >  For my personal contributions see the opening session on 20^th and again during the afternoon session on the 21^st June.  You might notice that this latter session was chaired by the very volluble Gary Foley who spoke among other things about my current court case on Racial Villification against the right wing political journalist Andrew Bolt.  That Gary did not mention my name or indicate even that I was in the audience is typical of the ignorant way that some people have attempted to squeeze me out of any active role in Aboriginal politics. Similarly Nicole Watson  delivered a paper at an Aboriginal Law conference in Sydney on 12^th August 2011 and even commented that the Judge was expected to bring down his decision in the near future. As I am the only named litigant in the case of “Pat Eatock verses Andrew Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times” all other Aboriginals have appeared only as my witnesses. Neither Gary Foley nor Nicole Watson were witnesses and neither Nicole nor Gary were unaware of my interest and active involvement in this case.