seeking utopia

 Subtitle: serendipity?

  (and 'sorry' doesn't help much, but had to be said...)

-=*=-

G'day Dan... - err, David,

On May 24, 2006 - 9:23am 'someone' wrote:

«... there's a great disconnect here vis-à-vis Aboriginal people, seems to me; an' years long too - far too many years. It's just not good, parking the Aboriginal people in some settlement somewhere out the back'a Whoop-whoop (y'don't call Whoop-whoop Whoop) - without giving them something useful & meaningful to do, in their own terms of reference. Has all that been tried? And they still get roaring drunk & beat their wives up? Sniff petrol till they fall off the twig? I mean, like, die? If all else fails, then they ort'a get a drug that makes them happy & harmless...»

I've also had the thought, that 'something useful & meaningful to do' might be to return our wide-brown's original owners to something approaching their natural state; give them jobs as park carers, for example. They could wander their area of responsibility, caring for the environment - just as they did, way back then.

Well, seems that something like that has actually happened:

«Professor Ian Anderson from the University of Melbourne says the results strongly suggest that self-determination leads to improved health conditions.
"The fact that the community is decentralised, they've got good primary health care services," he said.
"They are able to have a good diet, they can hunt and they're getting good physical activity and they can have a degree of control over their affairs, so this is I guess really a good news story about things that can be different within communities."»
[AusBC/Utopia finds key to Indigenous health]

The Indigenes in Utopia live much the same life-style as in 'the good old days'- i.e. hunter-gathering, plus (a smidgen of) modern health care. And it works for them - in a big way, with half-decent life-expectancies, and less grog, one assumes. Bloody good show!

[Cross-posted]