I was in the paper yesterday. Well sort of. A group of us are sleeping out on the Todd Mall (the main drag of Alice) every three weeks in protest of some proposed council by-laws that would no longer allow people to beg or protest and would allow the police the right to move people on (for no particular reason) and take people’s blankets and dispose of them. Nice isn’t taking blankets from the homeless and fining people who are begging now that’s a smart way to solve the problem.

Anyway yesterday I did an interview with a guy from our local paper. We chatted for awhile about how we as a group believe that these laws are unjust and unfairly target the indigenous population. We also talked about the fact that we as a group are having a really profound time sleeping out as the local homeless community (all indiegnous) have been so welcoming of us into their space and many have joined us to sleep. We are all learning more about each other and building some relationships across cultures. In a town where in the last month or so we have had a young indigenous man murdered by a group of white men; someone giving away white pride shirts on the mall and a massive increase of break and enters into people’s homes and businesses this is much needed. Not much of this was mentioned in the article though. In fact the article was only about 10 lines long and I was quoted out of context a few time. The guy talked mostly about how the police and rangers have not done anything about us. If this was made in comparison to what they do to the indigenous people sleeping out this may have been okay but it seemed more an encouragement to get the police to arrest us than anything else.

There is another protest going on in town though about the changerooms at the local football oval not been up to scratch. A couple of citizens have got together and are encouraging the council to build better ones. This protest got over half a page dedicated to it and the second page (we were on at least the fifth)!!! There was a big emotive headline and big picture of some white men looking very cross and ready for a fight.

Is it only me or is there something seriously wrong when people fighting for a better changerooms for footballers get more attention than people fighting for just treatment of the marginalised in our community.