December 2009

I once asked an old Warlpiri man from Yuendumu, who’d worked as a police tracker for many years, why there were so many young Aboriginal blokes locked up in the Alice Springs jail. He answered; “There’s yapa (Aboriginal law) here,” indicating with his raised right hand, “and there’s kardiya (whitefella law) here,” raising his left hand. “Those young fellas are running around in the middle. They don’t know.” This same olRead More....

Delivered to the Australian Lawyers Alliance National Conference, Alice Springs - Saturday 23 October 2010 My mother and father were born in the desert. They lived their childhood out of contact with whitefellas. They were terrified when they first saw a whitefella. They taught me the Old Law that our people lived by. That Law worked when we were living in tiny family groups taking everything that we needed from the desert. It is Sacred Law. There was strong Law for sacred business.Read More....

Delivered in Melbourne, November 2009. I want to thank the Bennelong Society for giving me the opportunity to speak and to be able to give you an insight into how I think and feel about how our people see themselves. There are many more out there who are not given an opportunity like this to tell their story and how it is. My name is Bess Nyirringali Nungarrayi Price, My first language is Warlpiri, English is my second and there are five other languages that I understand. I was boRead More....

Published in Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues Vol1, No2. 1998, Andrew Gunstone, Editor.

Preliminaries

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Tags: human rights, Indigenous Issues, yapa
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