New Canberrans craft connection to community

Moving country not only means leaving your home and family but also removes you from connection with the community. Coming to a new place, that connection can be hard to find.

The Migrant Women’s Art Group helps women find connection with others adjusting to a new home in Canberra, while also expressing themselves through art.

Group members have come from across the globe, including places like Ghana, India, Colombia, America and the UK. It doesn’t matter if they come in as established artists or have never picked up a pencil; some stay for a term, some for longer – but all leave with a connection.

“Art has no mistakes, it’s the way you can express yourself; nobody else can express that because there’s only one of you,” says Migrant Women’s Art Group facilitator,

Kiran Grewal.

Originally from India, Kiran has spent many years living abroad and travelling the world. The idea for an art group for migrant women came to her during her travels throughout Australia where she saw common issues being faced by others in situations like her.

“I started writing up this idea that there should be a safe space where we can connect in a new space where we get to know each other.”

Invited to live in Australia by the Australian Government, when Kiran’s family first arrived in Tasmania, they were one of only two Sikh families on the whole island. She found herself explaining who they were, and their belief system. While Kiran says she didn’t mind this, it was isolating.

Arriving in Canberra for the first time in 2003, Kiran and her family stayed for only a year before going back to Tasmania. However, they loved Canberra and decided to return.

Meeting with the team from Gungahlin Arts in 2019, Kiran wanted a space where everybody was comfortable sharing their culture with one another, a place where they could gather as women. Using art as the focus, she believes it is a powerful medium that can create harmony in society.

“There’s less judgement around it and I felt I can encourage them to share their own culture through art. What happens in their home countries that gets shared within the group, and that information and participants won’t even know that they are breaking down these social barriers,” Kiran says.

Full story online.

To craft a connection with Migrant Women’s Art Group, visit belcoarts. com.au/migrant-art

- Jessica Cordwell

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7 Pitman St, Greenway ACT 2900 Gold coin donation entry

‘Mountains of cash’

Given that the ACT government has been unable to demonstrate any ecological justification for shooting thousands of healthy adult and juvenile kangaroos and bludgeoning thousands of infants, I suggest the following might be a plausible agenda for the killing. (For those who know it, the tune is ‘The Ash Grove’).

The ash blows! How grateful we are for this burning!

It’s turned all this parkland to smouldering ash.

We’ll make it a carpark, and soon we’ll be turning all this burnt-out nature to mountains of cash.

‘Twas there when the reptiles were all disappearing we made sure the weeds grew by killing the roos, and then when the drought brought us days that were searing we’d just need some vandal to kindle the fuse.

The white glow of sunlight on concrete is blinding.

Oh, why did we waste all this land for so long?

And those that think nature is nice need reminding that nature is nasty and messy and wrong.

And now on the concrete we’ll install the meters.

From workers and shoppers we rake in the dough.

It’s so much more useful than those worthless creatures.

Those lizards and sun moths, they just had to go!

- Frankie Seymour, Queanbeyan

Roos at Red Hill

I have read with sympathy those concerned regarding kangaroos that there are “hardly any left after the cull last year” on the Red Hill reserve. The mystery is solved. There are hundreds and hundreds on the Federal Golf course. I invite all those concerned to drive or walk into the clubhouse, relax, enjoy a coffee and ask at the pro shop where to walk in the tree line between the fairways. Visiting twice a week, I can vouch for the fact that there are usually mobs of 250 or more enjoying the grass, shade and water facilities. Many also enjoy a rollicking in the sand bunkers. Members frequently have difficulty moving them out of harm’s way, they are so tame. They arrived in the drought, multiplied, and have never left. Rest assured there is no shortage of kangaroos in the Red Hill vicinity. The club values and protects them as an asset to the natural beauty of the course.

- Mike Prunty, Monash

Electricity Bill

Bill Stefaniak (CW 25 May) congratulates Finland on dropping the wholesale price of electricity by 75% by opening its newest nuclear power plant. Yet a Google search of power prices to Finnish domestic consumers appears to be in the order of 42-euro cents per kwh (around 50-70 Australian cents). In his tirade on renewables a week later (CW 1 June) he notes he’s paying 21.7 cents. I could be wrong but that does look cheaper.

Bill also congratulates Peter Dutton for saying nuclear power has to be in the mix if we’re to get to net zero by 2050. If the decision were taken today to go nuclear, think about the process. Which of our states would take it on? Which private generator have you identified would take it on? Environmental clearances, waste storage, build time, where does the fuel come from, do we have the expertise and trained personnel? All in the next 25 years. You might as well congratulate Dutton for saying we should cure cancer.

He castigates us for the rush to unreliable renewables; hardly supported by the take up of solar panels by households. Bill states that 10 years ago we had some of the cheapest electricity in the world. What happened 10 years ago (election of a Liberal government maybe)? Does Bill know where we stand globally on electricity rates today? Who’s cheaper? We feel for those struggling in meeting energy costs but methinks it’s a global problem. And Australian power suppliers spent years gold-plating their supply systems and increasing their prices to us.

- Alma Quick, Garran

‘One but many’ or not?

Letters (CW 15 June): “NonIndigenous belong”, highlights, once again, how overt political correctness has muddied our relationship with Indigenous Australians.

I do not see the need to act out a welcome to country at every conceivable opportunity. Nor am I apologising to someone who may or may not be related to any currently living Indigenous person or people, who may or may not have been the victim of some alleged atrocity or colonised, by someone who may or may not be related to me.

Australia is rapidly heading down the slippery path where anything bad that has happened in the past, the present, or that will happen in the future to Indigenous Australians is the fault of its colonists – the good things, conveniently forgotten, such as … institutions, infrastructure, and the very democracy we, all mobs included, cherish and enjoy.

Neither am I interested in “my culture is older, bigger and better than yours” comparisons and discussions that we constantly hear from many Indigenous activists.

We, Australians all, have acknowledged the past, colonisation, the Stolen Generation and finally –thanks to Kevin Rudd – made our sincerest apologies. Successive federal governments have continued, and will continue, to address these inequalities in our society.

I fully embrace the Australian anthem that “we are one, but we are many” – problem is we are not and, ironically, it is often Indigenous Australians, albeit a loud minority, who are undermining this ideal. If we continue to look back in anger, we cannot move forward unified.

- Declan McGrath, Gordon

Non-Indigenous belong

Thank you, Vi Evans, for your timely letter (CW 15 June) expressing views about the overuse of welcome to country and challenging the need for this to be in our face with frequency. I could not agree more and think it distressing that this sensitive act, which would normally be given by Indigenous folk, has been ripped off by whites in the mistaken belief that it’s politically correct and culturally sensitive, when in fact it’s negative and divisional. After reading the government’s letterbox drop ‘Our Canberra June 2023 Belconnen’ it’s hard to refrain from calling our Chief Minister “Two-bob eachway Andrew” when his politically correct feel-good acknowledges the Ngunnawal peoples as the traditional custodians of the ACT and with last thought also recognises any other people or family with connection to the lands of the ACT and region. A real neat fail-safe, just throw a blanket over everyone and cross your fingers.

Just exactly who anchors what because the way it’s published drives a wedge, and leaves those contemplating a green light voice vote in the upcoming referendum wondering who the hell the voice will be if this gets up, and the babble also possibly confuses Indigenous people. Would the Chief Minister clarify this in consultation with Indigenous leaders and respectable authority because this isn’t going away.

- John Lawrence, Flynn

The right to know

Like many others, I want the Voice referendum to succeed, but not under the proposed flawed, divisive model. The Voice appears to have been hijacked by the (continued next page)

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Indigenous well-off of the ilk of professors Tom Calma and Marcia Langton, meanwhile the Indigenous outback community, together with the voters, are left in the dark about how the Voice might improve their lifestyle in practice. As it is up the Parliament to finalise the minutiae, this is an unacceptable situation as voters have a right to know beforehand what they are going to vote for or against. The government has to date obfuscated, intimidated and indulged in secrecy regarding the Voice, which begs the question: what have they got to hide?

- Mario Stivala, Belconnen

Errors of fact

Ian Pilsner (Letters, CW 22 June) makes several errors of fact. Ben RobertsSmith personally murdered at least one unarmed Afghani and ordered the execution of another. In my view he is not worthy of a Victoria Cross.

Mr Pilsner defends the use of nuclear energy in Australia on the grounds that it has been used in 30 countries and produces isotopes for medical use at Lucas Heights south-west of Sydney. Has he forgotten about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Fukushima? Furthermore, there is simply insufficient time to build and commission a nuclear reactor in Australia before the world comes dangerously close to climatic tipping point.

- Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin

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