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The Intervention: An Anthology
One of the most invasive, puzzling and unprecedented actions by a government in Australian history – the 2007 NT Intervention by the Howard Government- has resulted in an ongoing and flagrant breach of human rights. The introduction of this racist legislation has never been fully debated nationally nor has there ever been any significant consultation with the Indigenous communities most affected.
In this historic anthology, award-winning writers Rosie Scott and Dr Anita Heiss have gathered together the work of twenty of Australian’s finest writers both Indigenous and non-Indigenous together with powerful statements from Northern Territory Elders to bring a new dimension and urgency to an issue that has remained largely outside the public radar.
In compelling fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and communiqués, the dramatic story of the Intervention and the despair, anguish and anger of the First Nations people of the Territory comes alive.
The Intervention: an Anthology is an extraordinary document – deeply moving, impassioned, spiritual, angry and authoritative –it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this passionate opposition.
In this historic anthology, award-winning writers Rosie Scott and Dr Anita Heiss have gathered together the work of twenty of Australian’s finest writers both Indigenous and non-Indigenous together with powerful statements from Northern Territory Elders to bring a new dimension and urgency to an issue that has remained largely outside the public radar.
In compelling fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and communiqués, the dramatic story of the Intervention and the despair, anguish and anger of the First Nations people of the Territory comes alive.
The Intervention: an Anthology is an extraordinary document – deeply moving, impassioned, spiritual, angry and authoritative –it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this passionate opposition.
272 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2015
2 people are currently reading
113 people want to read
About the author
Rosie Scott
23 books15 followersDr Rosie Scott is an internationally published award-winning novelist who has also worked in many other fields centring around human rights and social justice.
Her latest novel Faith Singer was included in an international list of ‘50 Essential Reads by living Writers’ compiled by the Guardian, Orange Prize Committee and the Hay Literary Festival. The other Australian writers were Tim Winton and J. Coetzee.
A literary career which includes the publication in Australia and internationally of nine books -novels, poetry, short stories and essays- all of which have been anthologised extensively in Australia and internationally.She has also coedited three anthologies.
Her books have been finalists in most major book awards including Premiers Fiction Award, Banjo Patterson, National Book Awards, New Zealand National Book Awards.
Her national award-winning play was later made into a movie which won five international awards in Japan and France.
Served on the Committee of Management and on the Executive of the Australian Society of Authors for ten years.
Was elected Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.
Appointed to the Permanent Council of the Australian Society of Authors.
She initiated and took part in the pilot scheme of the mentoring program for ASA and since then has edited numerous books both for writer friends and for the program.
Served on the Sydney PEN committee for eight years, established and chaired Writers in Detention Committee with Tom Keneally,with whom she edited an anthology of refugee writing.
Was elected Vice President of Sydney PEN.
Nomination for a Human Rights Medal nomination together with Tom Keneally for their work on detained writers,which was also cited by the judges as instrumental in earning a Community Human Rights Award for Australia PEN.
Recipient of the Sydney PEN Award for her ‘outstanding support and commitment to the values, ideas and aims of PEN’.
Recipient of the Life Membership Award of Sydney PEN.
Recipient of STARTTs Humanitarian Award 2015 in media.
Co–founded the national reconciliation organisation Women for Wik and continues on the committee.
Recipient of three literary fellowships and a UWS university scholarship for her doctorate.
Has taught creative writing at UTS for 7 years, Long Bay high security inmates for several years and has been mentoring writers for over a decade.
She was nominated for the education section of 100 most influential people in Sydney for her work in mentoring and teaching about asylum seekers.
Her books are - Flesh and Blood - poems, Glory Days, Queen of Love, short stories, Nights with Grace, Feral City, The Red Heart - essays, Lives on Fire, Faith Singer and three anthologies Another ountry and A Country Too Far both coedited with Tom Keneally, and The Intervention: an Anthology coedited with Anita Heiss
Her latest novel Faith Singer was included in an international list of ‘50 Essential Reads by living Writers’ compiled by the Guardian, Orange Prize Committee and the Hay Literary Festival. The other Australian writers were Tim Winton and J. Coetzee.
A literary career which includes the publication in Australia and internationally of nine books -novels, poetry, short stories and essays- all of which have been anthologised extensively in Australia and internationally.She has also coedited three anthologies.
Her books have been finalists in most major book awards including Premiers Fiction Award, Banjo Patterson, National Book Awards, New Zealand National Book Awards.
Her national award-winning play was later made into a movie which won five international awards in Japan and France.
Served on the Committee of Management and on the Executive of the Australian Society of Authors for ten years.
Was elected Chair of the Australian Society of Authors.
Appointed to the Permanent Council of the Australian Society of Authors.
She initiated and took part in the pilot scheme of the mentoring program for ASA and since then has edited numerous books both for writer friends and for the program.
Served on the Sydney PEN committee for eight years, established and chaired Writers in Detention Committee with Tom Keneally,with whom she edited an anthology of refugee writing.
Was elected Vice President of Sydney PEN.
Nomination for a Human Rights Medal nomination together with Tom Keneally for their work on detained writers,which was also cited by the judges as instrumental in earning a Community Human Rights Award for Australia PEN.
Recipient of the Sydney PEN Award for her ‘outstanding support and commitment to the values, ideas and aims of PEN’.
Recipient of the Life Membership Award of Sydney PEN.
Recipient of STARTTs Humanitarian Award 2015 in media.
Co–founded the national reconciliation organisation Women for Wik and continues on the committee.
Recipient of three literary fellowships and a UWS university scholarship for her doctorate.
Has taught creative writing at UTS for 7 years, Long Bay high security inmates for several years and has been mentoring writers for over a decade.
She was nominated for the education section of 100 most influential people in Sydney for her work in mentoring and teaching about asylum seekers.
Her books are - Flesh and Blood - poems, Glory Days, Queen of Love, short stories, Nights with Grace, Feral City, The Red Heart - essays, Lives on Fire, Faith Singer and three anthologies Another ountry and A Country Too Far both coedited with Tom Keneally, and The Intervention: an Anthology coedited with Anita Heiss
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 14, 2021
I was Blown away by this. It's an incredible anthology.
Such an eye-opener.
We are so removed on the east coast of Australia from the remote Northern Territory (it's another time zone away), that we have little exposure to what is really going on in remote Indigenous communities. Also, while the mainstream media sensationalised reports of child abuse in remote communities it downplayed The intervention legislation that was passed in Parliament, which included a suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT to put the 2007 Intervention actions in place.
Rather than being a short-term intervention it has become ongoing and codified into "Stronger Futures" legislation in place today. The people affected consider it colloquially as "Stolen Futures" measures.
We really need to stop these sorts of expensive knee-jerk reactions that only accomplishes further disadvantaged and alienated and traumatised communities and channel our efforts into consultative, supportive and constructive measures that are evidence based and accountable.
This is a work that all Australians should read for greater understanding.
Highly recommended.
Such an eye-opener.
We are so removed on the east coast of Australia from the remote Northern Territory (it's another time zone away), that we have little exposure to what is really going on in remote Indigenous communities. Also, while the mainstream media sensationalised reports of child abuse in remote communities it downplayed The intervention legislation that was passed in Parliament, which included a suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act in the NT to put the 2007 Intervention actions in place.
Rather than being a short-term intervention it has become ongoing and codified into "Stronger Futures" legislation in place today. The people affected consider it colloquially as "Stolen Futures" measures.
We really need to stop these sorts of expensive knee-jerk reactions that only accomplishes further disadvantaged and alienated and traumatised communities and channel our efforts into consultative, supportive and constructive measures that are evidence based and accountable.
This is a work that all Australians should read for greater understanding.
Highly recommended.
July 3, 2015
This is an important book, one that every Australian (and non-Australian interested in the rights of First Nation peoples) ought to read. Since Prime Minister John Howard launched the military-led Intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory in 2007, there has been intermittent discussion of its methods, consequences and ongoing effects in the Australian media, but until now, it has been difficult for even sympathetic outsiders to understand the full range, import and impact of this complex, neo-paternalistic policy on life in the NT. Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss have edited an anthology that includes historical background, statements by Aboriginal community and other leaders,official statements eye-witness accounts and more by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors and powerful poetry on the subject by the award-winning Aboriginal poets Ali Cobby Eckerman and Samuel Wagan Watson. I have read Eckerman's epic 'Intervention Payback', in which she takes on the voice of an older man in the community where she lives four times: '...Mal Brough/he come with the army/we got real frightened true/thought he was gonna take the kids away/just like tjamu and nan bin tell us/I run my kids in the sand hills/took my rifle up there and sat...' This crowd-funded book will shake you and move you and make you ask: what can we do to change things?
July 9, 2015
This is really good. Standouts for me were Bruce Pascoe's essay and the one by Eva Cox.
June 20, 2020
If you don't know anything about the intervention (and if what you know is from the main stream media - that doesn't count), this is the best place to start.
This is a book to read carefully, taking time to sit with the words and supplementing with your own research. Some of the transcripts have the same authors and so there is a degree of repetition, so there I found merit in taking time between passages so that ideas were emphasised and reinforced.
This is a book to read carefully, taking time to sit with the words and supplementing with your own research. Some of the transcripts have the same authors and so there is a degree of repetition, so there I found merit in taking time between passages so that ideas were emphasised and reinforced.
September 18, 2015
A compelling collection of pieces explaining the impact of the Northern Territory Intervention and why it is bad policy.
See my review at http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/09/18/th...
See my review at http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/09/18/th...
October 23, 2016
This relatively small volume is extremely well put together, including a variety of writings by predominantly Indigenous writers about the impact of the legislation. Some of the chapters are works of imagination, others are essays written for the book, and the editors have included a number of statements and speech transcripts from communities, and their elders, directly affected by the Intervention. The last is important, because it grounds the book in a cry of protest from the heartland of the affected communities. It does make it difficult to read straight through, as I am wont to do with books, as the repetition - of the worsening health, education, violence, incarceration statistics, of the horror stories of jobs gone, people humiliated, and the dissolution pressure on homelands, which are mostly free of the social problems plaguing remote towns - becomes a little hard to take.
Through it all also comes such a bewildered anger at whitefella 'law', which changes according to the whims of small people (and can be massaged to enable land theft), so different in concept from Law in Aboriginal Australia, which is perceived as eternal and impersonal, and deeply grounded. There is also deep rage against the ALP, for stifling debate through bipartisan support that refuses to even throw sunlight on statistics, but allows the government to take and grant mining rights on, land that simply belongs to others. To believe at this point that either side of governemtn think the Intervention is in the interests of Aboriginal people beggars belief - even if it wasn't for the fact that the approach is the *direct* opposite of that proposed by the Little Children Are Sacred report, violence in communities affected has simply increased too much. The reality - that mining permits have increased, that whitefella use of Indigenous land has become 'simplified' - is much bigger.
We need a treaty in this country. We need to negotiate over land - without such a process, the outrages and tragedies of policy like the Intervention will continue, dressed up as 'closing the gao', but tightening federal control over land use throughout Australia, and ensuring our First Nations remain powerless, and devastated.
Through it all also comes such a bewildered anger at whitefella 'law', which changes according to the whims of small people (and can be massaged to enable land theft), so different in concept from Law in Aboriginal Australia, which is perceived as eternal and impersonal, and deeply grounded. There is also deep rage against the ALP, for stifling debate through bipartisan support that refuses to even throw sunlight on statistics, but allows the government to take and grant mining rights on, land that simply belongs to others. To believe at this point that either side of governemtn think the Intervention is in the interests of Aboriginal people beggars belief - even if it wasn't for the fact that the approach is the *direct* opposite of that proposed by the Little Children Are Sacred report, violence in communities affected has simply increased too much. The reality - that mining permits have increased, that whitefella use of Indigenous land has become 'simplified' - is much bigger.
We need a treaty in this country. We need to negotiate over land - without such a process, the outrages and tragedies of policy like the Intervention will continue, dressed up as 'closing the gao', but tightening federal control over land use throughout Australia, and ensuring our First Nations remain powerless, and devastated.
October 25, 2022
This was a difficult read, but I say this because I had to put it aside very often and rein in my emotions. I have read a few books that dealt with the Intervention... none were as compelling as this collection. And to think the Intervention only ended in July this year. The importance of this book cannot be overstated.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews