Black communities have to change themselves...no one can change things for them;
White people/other people can help, but real change must come from within.
I've been at this a while...long before BLM.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/toomelah-lesson-20080621-gdsixl.htmlJune 21, 2008
Toomelah lesson
It's 1987, and welcome to Toomelah, a small Aboriginal community on a former mission station on the NSW-Queensland border, and the subject of Australia's first intervention.
Twenty-one years ago, Toomelah had one water tap for 500 people, and it flowed twice a day for just 15 minutes. Some houses had 30 people sleeping in them, and Goondiwindi High School, just across the border, had a blackboard for the whites and a blackboard for the blacks. And when the children came home, they played in the raw sewage of Toomelah's fetid, fouled streets.
Then Marcus Einfeld, president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, pulled into town to investigate conditions after a race riot in "Goondi". Suddenly, like manna from Sydney, houses were built, the dirt road sealed, a sewerage system materialised and a new bore, pumping station and tanks dried up the line at the water tap. But a drink of water could not banish the devil.
Then Einfeld turned the spotlight on neglect by walking with his trousers rolled up through the muddy, soiled streets of Toomelah and crying tears of shame and pity.
Tall, patrician, with Cecil B. De Mille-epic looks ready-made for the night's television news, Einfeld put Toomelah's plight on the front page.
The son of a Wran government minister, Einfeld faces perjury and traffic charges. Back then, he was a famed human rights activist who, in 1963, his eyes welling with tears, had stood among 200,000 people at the Washington Monument listening to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" address.
Fourteen years later, Einfeld cried at Toomelah, too, as Aborigines testified to their disadvantage. "It is beyond belief that Australian citizens could be asked to live in those circumstances," he said at the end of the first day's hearings.
Einfeld's report damned all tiers of government for neglecting housing, health and education. It found Moree Plains Shire Council levied rates and accepted Commonwealth and state Aboriginal funding, but refused to service Toomelah.
etc #####
Long ago, mrs bambu drove me around there, showed and told me all.
Einfield spent two years in prison.
They don't like perjury by judges, even if for traffic offences.
Not sure what Toomelah is like now, hopefully it's better, we have lobbied for better for many years.
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