that munanga linguist

I'm reading about so many foul and disgusting things that white people did to Aboriginal people when they first arrived in the Northern Territory. It's kinda unbearable and makes it starkly clear that white Australia has blood on their hands. And the names that come up in the history books! The one I'm most surprised at is former Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer 's grandfather, Sir John Downer , who was premier of South Australia and a lawyer (and has a suburb in Canberra named after him). John Downer "played an active role" when "successive South Australian governments masterminded, condoned, or concealed the violent dispossession and oppression of Aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory to 1910" ( Roberts 2009 : 22). And don't be fooled - the violence and atrocities that white people carried out on the frontier is not something buried. It's in government reports, newspapers, memoirs and diaries, letters of officials, the r...

I’m reasonably familiar with Urapunga, though not many Australians – nor even Territorians - are. It’s a little community of 80 or so people about half an hour’s drive from Ngukurr. It’s nestled between the two big river crossings – the Wilton and the Roper. I used to go there once or twice a week in 2006 and 2007 to help Hannah and Hazel run Ngalakgan classes at the local school. It’s a great little tight-knit community, built, as many remote communities are, on the site of a former pastoral station.  Opening of Urapunga store in 2010 (Source: Fred Hollows Foundation) A few years ago, I was wasting time on Google Maps, looking at Ngukurr and surrounds, curious to see how well they’ve mapped probably one of the most isolated-but-populated areas on the globe. And I found something rather weird when I scanned over the map of Roper Bar crossing. There were these faint gridlines superimposed on the map that made it look like a neat little town was about to be build on the b...