Photos from Pushkar, India

Apparently the Laughing Buddha is recommended by lonely people :)

Pushkar is a beautiful small and ancient town in the desert in Rajastan. It is based around a lake,  so all the buildings around the water open onto ghats - which I guess are steps/esplenades that lead into the water. The ghats are where people bathe, wash clothes, perform  religious ceremonies etc.

We were woken early each morning (i.e. pre-dawn) by chanting emanating from the various temples around the ghats. Indeed, night-time noise of one description or another was an ongoing issue in India.... one night there even seemed to be a circular saw below Killa's window, competing with the chanting.

Meals on trains in India

Long bus journeys on the subcontinent can be quite harrowing, but I discovered train rides are great! We caught the early morning train from Delhi to Haridwar, and were very impressed with the fabulously dinky complimentary breakfast.

We'd only just got over the excitement of getting a whole thermos of tea each when the conductor brought around lunch!

Turns out one can enjoy India

After a rather lengthy absence from the blog (absence, indeed, from many things but that's another story), here I am, back to tell you I have just been in India.

I have been to India before, and had quite  traumatic experiences. Indeed I was more surprised than anybody when I decided to head back to the subcontinent this year to celebrate a friend's 60th birthday - India is pretty much his second home these days, so he decided to celebrate the event Indian-style, and invite a few of his Australian friends along.

Off I went, slightly trepidatious but willing to give it a go, knowing I'd be with lots of "grown-ups" this time (last time I was a slightly naive 19 year old who insisted on learning everything the hard way).

It certainly  is different travelling with a man in India - for all the wrong reasons, I suppose, as it does say something about the position of women in India. But I have to say being totally utterly ignored by men, who would automatically speak only to my father, was a slight improvement on the sorts of attention I got from men last time I was there.

Enough said on that topic, methinks.

The point is, I discovered beautiful things about the county. Even, dare I say it, peace and calm - quite a departure more the chaotic madness that is Delhi and other large cities I've visited there in the past.

Some photos are in the next post. More will come, especially if someone can tell me a  quick way to post many photos online at once.... :)

Some pics from India

tjilari_emma's photostream on Flickr.

More to come... I became impatient with the slow photo uploading process...

Memery

Briscoe inquest: 'Lessons learnt' - but will justice be done?

On September 17, NT Coroner Greg Cavanagh handed down his damning findings regarding the death in custody of Kwementyaye Briscoe in the Alice Springs watch house in January.

Briscoe, a young Aboriginal man, had committed no crime, but was taken into so-called protective custody for being excessively drunk.  He was found dead in his cell before the night was through.

He was found to have consumed most of a bottle of rum in the police van, which he obtained from another prisoner. He was dragged through the watch house and shoved down against a bench, where he hit his head and arm.

During the inquest, other prisoners reported having seen Briscoe bleeding from the head and gasping for air. He was left un-attended for two hours, despite prisoners asking police to check on him.

Cavanagh found the police on duty that night were “utterly derelict” in their failure to keep Briscoe under observation. He found they were distracted “by various things including an iPhone, iPad and the internet”, according to the September 17 Sydney Morning Herald.

But Cavanagh’s criticism reached beyond those directly involved on the night. According to ABC Online on September 17 he said: "In my view the catalogue of errors is so extensive and involves so many police officers of various rank as to suggest mismanagement for a period of time by police command at a level higher than just local."

However, justice campaigners fear nothing will change in relation to police treatment of Aboriginal prisoners. The SMH said up to 10 officers had been disciplined in relation to the event but confirmed none had been sacked. NT Police Commissioner John McRoberts said “lessons had been learnt”, the paper said.

NT Aboriginal leader Barb Shaw has called for constable Gareth Evans to be sacked. Evans was recorded dragging Briscoe through the watch-house.

Cavanagh recommended police avoid dragging prisoners, suggesting wheelchairs or stretchers be used when people are unable to walk.  He also said nurses must be made available in watch-houses.

New NT Chief Minister Terry Mills has vowed to implement the recommendations, and promised a “genuine change of culture within the police force”. But the recommendations have been criticized as inadequate by justice campaigners.

Hilary Tyler, a friend of Briscoe’s family, said on September 18:  “The recommendations are a farce, and do not address the systemic issues. The NT Police needs to take ownership of this, and Constable Evans should lose his job.”

Bipartisan support for bilingual ed?

"Our language is like a pearl inside a shell. The shell is like the people that carry the language. If the language is taken away, then that would be like a pearl is gone. We would be like an empty oyster shell."

-Yurranydjil Dhurrkay, Galiwin'ku, Elcho Island, North-East Arnhem Land

Emma Murphy, Darwin

On September 17, the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs tabled its much-anticipated inquiry into language learning on Aboriginal communities: Our Land Our Language.

The report unashamedly puts language front and centre not just to Aboriginal identity but also health and wellbeing. It says, for example, that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who speak an Indigenous language enjoy “markedly” better health and are more likely to: be employed, attend school and receive a post-school qualification than those who don’t. They are also less like to abuse alcohol, be charged by police or to have been a victim of violence.

Aboriginal languages are dying at a horrifying rate: of the around 250 languages spoken at the time of invasion, around half have disappeared. The report found that only about 18 are spoken today – many others are being painstakingly revived, recovered and recorded. Greg Dickson, writing on Crikey.com on September 17, said that National Geographic has identified northern Australia as a “global hotspot”, where endangered languages face a “severe threat” of extinction.

It is with this sense of urgency that Aboriginal communities and bilingual education advocates have long rallied for more support and funding for the urgent work of teaching children to speak, read and write their own language.

The recommendations in Our Land Our Language have been welcomed by bilingual education advocates, and are implicitly highly critical of current approaches – especially in the Northern Territory, where bilingual education was dramatically shut down four years ago by the then Labor government.

For example, it recommends “resourcing bilingual school education programs for Indigenous communities where the child’s first language is and Indigenous language” – in the NT, about 40% of children speak a language other than English at home. It also recommends compulsory cultural awareness training, and training in “English as an additional language” teaching for all teachers working in Aboriginal communities.

Beyond the classroom, the report recommends establish a national interpreting service for Indigenous languages, expanding the Indigenous Languages Support Program and establish improving community access to language archive at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

It also recommends constitutional recognition of Indigenous languages.

While it is unclear how many of the recommendations will be implemented, both Labor and the Coalition were quick to welcome the report.  The September 18 Australian said School Education Minister Peter Garrett had promised to “talk to state governments about adopting bilingual education for Indigenous children”. He acknowledged attendance would improve if children were taught in their own languages for the early years.

Opposition Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion said education was a matter for state and territory governments, but conceded “I generally support bilingual education as a transitional program from preschool to Year 5”, the Australian said.

However in the recent past, both Labor and Coalition governments have stressed the importance of English as the predominant language in education.

Labor MP Shayne Neumann, who chairs the standing committee, told media on September 17 that the result of NT Labor’s English-only policy, introduced in 2008, was “a decline in school attendance and educational outcomes”. He said Territory Labor defended the policy at the committee hearing in Darwin early this year, only to quietly drop it soon after.

This report was released less than a month after the NT elections, which saw a CLP government swept to power on a strong bush vote. On the campaign trail, and during community visits since, the CLP has talked up the importance of first-language learning – without committing to any detailed policy or funding commitments.

The task now for Aboriginal communities and defenders of bilingual education will be to make sure governments start putting funding and resource commitments on the table. It will be a large task to rebuild abandoned bilingual programs in the NT, for example. We must ensure governments don’t adopt the easier, more symbolic recommendations and let the actual hard work fall by the wayside.

[Our Land Our Language can be accessed here.]