Sharing our experiences

JEWISH Australians should be heartened by the words of Aboriginal rights advocate Noel Pearson, who stated this week that Jews are “at the top of the list” of peoples who have contributed to civilisation, and that indigenous Australians could learn from our communal model.

Writing in The Australian, he lauded the Jewish commitment to education, as well as skills in defending ourselves from racism, without internalising the predator’s message and morphing it into victimhood.
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GARY SAMOWITZ

LAST week, prominent Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson called on Australia’s Aboriginal community to draw on the experience of Jewish people in never forgetting their history, while striving to overcome injustice and racism.

Pearson asserted that the Jewish community provides an example of how to “maintain a community and a sense of peoplehood, religion, tradition, culture, history over millennia and yet, at the same time, engage at the cutting edge of whatever the world has to offer”.
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Kristallnacht

AJN STAFF

IN late 1938 an elderly Aboriginal man named William Cooper delivered a letter of protest to the German consulate in Melbourne over the persecution of the Jews on Kristallnacht.

He was one of very few voices of protest -– nationally and internationally – against the rise of Nazism.

A documentary program about William Cooper (1861–1941) and his passionate advocacy for human rights titled One Blood will be broadcast during ABC Radio National’s Awaye! program on December 5 at 6pm.

Freelance producer Jessica Noske-Turner has produced the documentary after being inspired by the spirit and humanity of Cooper, who lived at Cummeragunga, the former Aboriginal mission station on the Murray River in Victoria.
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Dr Howard Goldenberg in front of the painting Raft, where he drew the title of his recently released book, which recounts his experiences working as a relief doctor in Outback Australia. Photo: Brendan Finn

Dr Howard Goldenberg has spent close to two decades working as a relief doctor in remote Aboriginal Communities in Outback Australia. He spoke to Lexi Landsman about his book Raft, which recounts his experiences.

IN the Australian Outback, temperatures can soar to more than 40 degrees, the Earth is red and the sun unkind. It is in those expansive landscapes that Dr Howard Goldenberg feels the most spiritually and religiously awakened.

“Wherever you walk on the surface of the earth, where human beings haven’t trod too heavily, you have a sense of the glory of creation,” the Melbourne-based doctor says passionately when we meet in Sydney.  “It’s an every day epiphany in the Outback, so I feel that isolation from a Jewish community gives a freshness and an intensity of living my Jewishness. It’s delightful and profound.”

Dr Goldenberg is no stranger to the paradoxes of the Outback. He talks of being enamoured by its beauty and yet, it is the misfortune of the landscape’s inhabitants that has brought him to such vast locations. For the past 18 years, he has made more than 50 working visits as a relief doctor in remote Aboriginal communities and inside an Outback prison. In some cases, he has been the only doctor within 600 kilometres. It’s those experiences that the doctor and author has chronicled in his book Raft, which will be launched at the Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) on August 23.

The book follows in detail his many experiences in the earth’s “Red Centre”, or as he calls it in the opening chapter of the book – “the bleeding heart of Oz”. Throughout the interview, he speaks as he writes, as a doctor explaining things in a clear and concise manner, and as a writer adding poetic ruminations and reflections.
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Judy Watson Napangardi with her family and some of her artwork.

LEXI LANDSMAN

IT’S not often that paint and medicine are discussed in the same breath, but thanks to the Shalom Institute’s Aboriginal education scholarship program, Shalom Gamarada, art is helping Aboriginal doctors improve health outcomes for indigenous Australians.

The fifth Shalom Gamarada Art Exhibition is currently being held in Sydney at Shalom College until July 26, with a share of the proceeds used to fund residential scholarships for Aboriginal medical students at Shalom College.

“It’s a unique exhibition in that it gives the Jewish community a real opportunity at practical reconciliation in helping put these students through their courses,” Jenny Hillman, the exhibition’s curator, says.

“It’s also a fantastic opportunity for students to live in Shalom College and to be ambassadors for the community when they graduate.”
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