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Alternative Interventions: Aboriginal homelands, Outback Australia and the Centre for Appropriate Technology
Not all interventions in Aboriginal Australia are inspired by external agents, politics or ideology. Some arise from simple, pragmatic responses to community needs where people and their aspirations are central.
Historian Alan Mayne unravels a story of people, place and relationships. At once both personal and intensely political, this is a journey of ideas into action; intervention through innovation.
In 2010, thirty years after an initial start-up grant of $40,000, an Aboriginal owned science and technology organisation (CAT) was operating with an annual turnover in excess of $20 million and a staff of 130 providing technical services to over 500 remote Aboriginal communities spread across the northern half of Australia. An institution linking people with technology, sustaining livelihoods on country.
'This remarkable story of persistence and purpose should be told as an inspiration to all concerned with the development of appropriate technologies to meet new challenges in human societies. It encourages optimism about the future of Aboriginal people in a climate of uncertainty.' - Professor Basil Hetzel AC - former Chancellor University of South Australia and Emeritus Professor University of Adelaide
'It is clear that it is the human dimension of science and technology about which the least is known.' - Bruce Walker, founder, Centre for Appropriate Technology
Alan Mayne holds a ResearchSA Chair at the University of South Australia, where he is Professor of Social History in the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, and the Hawke Research Institute. He holds a PhD (1980) from the Australian National University and worked until 2005 at the University of Melbourne. He has also been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Washington DC, a Senior Fulbright scholar at Boston and Berkeley, and a visiting Professorial Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. His core interests relate to social equity and sustainability.
Historian Alan Mayne unravels a story of people, place and relationships. At once both personal and intensely political, this is a journey of ideas into action; intervention through innovation.
In 2010, thirty years after an initial start-up grant of $40,000, an Aboriginal owned science and technology organisation (CAT) was operating with an annual turnover in excess of $20 million and a staff of 130 providing technical services to over 500 remote Aboriginal communities spread across the northern half of Australia. An institution linking people with technology, sustaining livelihoods on country.
'This remarkable story of persistence and purpose should be told as an inspiration to all concerned with the development of appropriate technologies to meet new challenges in human societies. It encourages optimism about the future of Aboriginal people in a climate of uncertainty.' - Professor Basil Hetzel AC - former Chancellor University of South Australia and Emeritus Professor University of Adelaide
'It is clear that it is the human dimension of science and technology about which the least is known.' - Bruce Walker, founder, Centre for Appropriate Technology
Alan Mayne holds a ResearchSA Chair at the University of South Australia, where he is Professor of Social History in the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research, and the Hawke Research Institute. He holds a PhD (1980) from the Australian National University and worked until 2005 at the University of Melbourne. He has also been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Washington DC, a Senior Fulbright scholar at Boston and Berkeley, and a visiting Professorial Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. His core interests relate to social equity and sustainability.
200 pages, Paperback
Published July 1, 2019
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January 8, 2018
This section of recent Australian History has been kept off the radar but for me and think for many others, it has an irresistibly urgent aspect. An idea whose time has come .
Displaying 1 of 1 review