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The Intervention: An Anthology
In compelling fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and communiques, 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 what the Intervention is all about, and why it prompts such passionate opposition."
256 pages, ebook
First published July 1, 2015
About the author
Anita Heiss
43 books601 followersProfessor Anita Heiss – bio
Anita is a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, and is one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors, publishing across genres, including non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial fiction and children’s novels.
Her adult fiction includes Not Meeting Mr Right, Avoiding Mr Right, Manhattan Dreaming, Paris Dreaming and Tiddas. Her most recent books include Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms which was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize and was named the University of Canberra’s 2020 Book of the Year.
The anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia which Anita edited, was named the Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Anita’s children’s literature includes Kicking Goals with Goodesy and Magic, co-written with Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin. She also wrote two kids’ novels with students from La Perouse Public School - Yirra and her deadly dog Demon and Demon Guards the School Yard, and more recently, Harry’s Secret and Matty’s Comeback.
Anita’s other published works also include the historical novel Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937, non-fiction text Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight) – Publishing Aboriginal Literature, and The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, which she co-authored with Peter Minter.
In 2004 Anita was listed in The Bulletin magazine’s “Smart 100”. Her memoir Am I Black Enough for You? was a finalist in the 2012 Human Rights Awards and she was a finalist in the 2013 Australian of the Year Awards (Local Hero).
As an advocate for Indigenous literacy, Anita has worked in remote communities as a role model and encouraging young Indigenous Australians to write their own stories. On an international level she has performed her own work and lectured on Aboriginal literature across the globe at universities and conferences, consulates and embassies in the USA, Canada, the UK, Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, Spain, Japan, Austria, Germany and New Zealand.
Anita is proud to be a Lifetime Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and an Ambassador of Worawa Aboriginal College, the GO Foundation and the Sydney Swans.
She is on the Board of the State Library of Queensland, CIRCA and the University of QLD Press. In 2019 Anita was appointed a Professor of Communications at the University of QLD and in 2020 is the Artist in Residence at La Boitte Theatre.
Anita’s website: www.anitaheiss.com
Storytime with Aunty Nita: https://www.moretonbay.qld.gov.au/lib...
Anita is a proud member of the Wiradjuri nation of central New South Wales, and is one of Australia’s most prolific and well-known authors, publishing across genres, including non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial fiction and children’s novels.
Her adult fiction includes Not Meeting Mr Right, Avoiding Mr Right, Manhattan Dreaming, Paris Dreaming and Tiddas. Her most recent books include Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms which was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Prize and was named the University of Canberra’s 2020 Book of the Year.
The anthology Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia which Anita edited, was named the Small Publisher Adult Book of the Year at the 2019 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Anita’s children’s literature includes Kicking Goals with Goodesy and Magic, co-written with Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin. She also wrote two kids’ novels with students from La Perouse Public School - Yirra and her deadly dog Demon and Demon Guards the School Yard, and more recently, Harry’s Secret and Matty’s Comeback.
Anita’s other published works also include the historical novel Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937, non-fiction text Dhuuluu-Yala (To Talk Straight) – Publishing Aboriginal Literature, and The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, which she co-authored with Peter Minter.
In 2004 Anita was listed in The Bulletin magazine’s “Smart 100”. Her memoir Am I Black Enough for You? was a finalist in the 2012 Human Rights Awards and she was a finalist in the 2013 Australian of the Year Awards (Local Hero).
As an advocate for Indigenous literacy, Anita has worked in remote communities as a role model and encouraging young Indigenous Australians to write their own stories. On an international level she has performed her own work and lectured on Aboriginal literature across the globe at universities and conferences, consulates and embassies in the USA, Canada, the UK, Tahiti, Fiji, New Caledonia, Spain, Japan, Austria, Germany and New Zealand.
Anita is proud to be a Lifetime Ambassador for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and an Ambassador of Worawa Aboriginal College, the GO Foundation and the Sydney Swans.
She is on the Board of the State Library of Queensland, CIRCA and the University of QLD Press. In 2019 Anita was appointed a Professor of Communications at the University of QLD and in 2020 is the Artist in Residence at La Boitte Theatre.
Anita’s website: www.anitaheiss.com
Storytime with Aunty Nita: https://www.moretonbay.qld.gov.au/lib...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 8, 2019
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 2, 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 8, 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 4, 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