Objective: To adapt the Family Wellbeing empowerment program, which was initially designed to support adults to take greater control and responsibility for their decisions and lives, to the needs of Indigenous school children living in remote communities. Method: At the request of two schools in remote Indigenous communities in far north Queensland, a pilot personal development and empowerment program based on the adult Family Wellbeing principles was developed, conducted and evaluated in the schools. The main aims of the program were to build personal identity and to encourage students to recognise their future potential and be more aware of their place in the community and wider society. Results: Participation in the program resulted in significant social and emotional growth for the students. Outcomes described by participating students and teachers included increased analytical and reflective skills, greater ability to think for oneself and set goals, less teasing and bullying in the school environment, and an enhanced sense of identity, friendship and ‘social relatedness’. Conclusion: This pilot implementation of the Family Wellbeing Program adapted for schools demonstrated the program's potential to enhance Indigenous young people's personal growth and development. Challenges remain in increasing parental/ family involvement and ensuring the program's sustainability and transferability. The team has been working with relevant stakeholders to further develop and package the School‐based Family Wellbeing program for Education Queensland's New Basics curriculum framework.
Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury (1992), K.S. Maniam’s Haunting the Tiger (1996), and Shirley Lim’s Life’s Mysteries (1995) articulate the ambivalence of interpreting the cultural beliefs of the Malays, Chinese, and Indians of the former Malaya with the evolving spiritual beliefs of Christianity and Catholicism influenced by British colonisation. In Beth Yahp’s The Crocodile Fury the ghosts of the colonial past vie for power with the demons of Chinese cultural beliefs in a convent situated in the liminal space between the jungle and the urban environment. The convent is a “civilised space” with the jungle as an encroaching wilderness haunted by Chinese gods and the female vampire ghost Pontianak of the Malay cultural tradition. Similarly, Maniam’s short stories in Haunting the Tiger situate the supernatural and the abject in the liminal spaces between the city and the jungle to express the metaphorical exile experienced by the Indian and Chinese diaspora in Malaysia. The trope of liminality is most evident in Shirley Lim’s short stories in Life’s Mysteries where the domestic and urban space of culture are viewed through prisms of imprisonment and disempowerment. The authors uncover the psychological and social exile experienced by colonised subjects through the gothic themes of shadows, darkness and the underworld.
What is the relationship between the conversion (1) of the elements into the (real) Body of Christ and (2) of the participants into the (mystical) Body of Christ? When we bring this and related questions to the early church, the Middle Ages, and the Reformation, we find that the conversion of the eucharistic elements has indeed been understood by unimpeachably sincere Christians in a broad variety of ways. In contrast, there has been a remarkably constant convergence regarding the all-importance of the conversion of the participants. Were this taken as the starting point, we might discover that we have much more ecumenical unity regarding the Eucharist than is usually thought to be the case.
The Speccie Thawley Essay Prize had me thinking about a person or event that helped shape modern Australia. Much has been said about Gough Whitlam and his influence on Australian history. In the contemporary period North Queenslander Noel Pearson, an Indigenous leader, educator and activist has dominated debates in Australian society about Indigenous Rights, education and recognition. I wondered, however, if individuals alone can influence and shape a society, or whether it is the collective consciousness of the people of a country that impacts upon history. This essay therefore is a questioning of modern Australia’s perception as an egalitarian society, with its ethos of ‘A Fair Go for All’, and if it extends to Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders, the original inhabitants of Terra Australis? My thoughts have been provoked by the failure of successive governments to address the recognition of Indigenous and Torres Islander people in the Australian Constitution.
Literature is the ideal medium for understanding the creative flow of energy that occurs through reading and the way in which it may provide interpretations of culture, language and the creative imagination. This paper analyses Lloyd Jones’s novel, Mister Pip (2006), from an ecosublime perspective of the crucial link between place, literature, and the creative<br />imagination in mediating transformations of culture and identity. In Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones explores subtle ways in which literature mediates personal and cultural transformations through the unspoken and invisible and through voices of places and habitus. The setting is Bougainville in 1990 at the height of Papua New Guinea’s blockade of the beautiful, but copper -mine dependant, island. The physical setting of the novel plays a major role in the plot, with the jungle environment and military metaphors of conquest used to narrate the chaos and terror following the blockade. The awe and terror of the physical destruction of the environment is offset by the power of the creative imagination to provide an escape from the nightmare world of the physical and psychological destruction wrought by the blockade. Told through the eyes of a young native girl, Matilda, Mister Pip is a stunning portrayal of an island at the mercy of outside forces. With all western contact withdrawn, the one remaining white man, Mr Watts, re-opens the school to restore hope to the villagers. Unqualified and<br />armed with only a copy of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, he begins to narrate the story of Pip to the children, and through this narration Matilda finds a friend in Pip. This paper will discuss how Lloyd Jones uses the creative space of literature to explore the personal and cultural transformations of a society besieged by a repressive political regime.
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