Streets of Your Town

While Australia’s history of blackbirding is becoming more well known and understood, there are many local histories that are only now coming to light. It’s estimated more than 62,000 Melanesians were brought to Australia to work as indentured labour on farms between 1863 and 1904.

A garden and gathering place nestled peacefully next to the Caboolture River at North Harbour just north of Brisbane, stands as tribute to the kanakas, or South Sea Islanders, many of whom were brought against their will from islands throughout the Pacific, to become labourer’s at the Moray Field plantation. 

Today their descendants, known as Australian South Sea Islanders, gather at this place to remember their ancestors, and pay tribute to the backbreaking work they did with little recompense, to establish Queensland’s agricultural prosperity. 

Daniel Awiyawi is one of them. Daniel hopes by speaking about this history on Streets of Your Town podcast, that more people will get a better understanding of blackbirding in this region, and how many islanders were deceived into coming on those ships to Australia.

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Australian singer extraordinaire Katie Noonan is refusing to let the Covid-19 pandemic get in the way of her dreams. This incredibly prolific musician has produced 20 albums, and won five Aria’s for her endlessly innovative body of work. Her creativity knows no bounds, from leading the Queensland Music Festival as artistic director, to putting a jazz spin on 80’s classics in her last album The Sweetest Taboo. Now, as Katie tells us on Streets of Your Town podcast, she is giving audiences the chance to hear Indigenous songs and newly commissioned Australian music alongside late Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces as part of the eclectic repertoire of her new Australian Vocal Ensemble, or Ave. I was lucky enough to speak to Katie in a break from final rehearsals before Ave’s debut in Brisbane on Saturday April 10, before the album's release in August and Ave tours around the country in September.

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While I was in Adelaide recently for the city’s world renowned fringe festival, it was wonderful to see the city buzzing again in the aftermath of the Covid-19 devastation on the region’s all important arts sector. All the little theatres were full of innovative creativity and people happily walking through alleyways underneath glittering lights as they made their way from one show to the next. One of these little productions I stumbled upon absolutely blew me away - Happy Go Wrong by Andi Snelling. This emotional rollercoaster of a one-woman show takes you from the heights of elation, to the depths of despair, much in the same way as Lyme disease has upended this performer’s life. Andi will tour "Happy Go Wrong" as much as her health allows this year - so keep an eye out for her show in your town. Until then, have a listen to her tell us on Streets of Your Town podcast how she had to build her life again from scratch, and is still unravelling on stage and off, the ramifications this tick-borne disease has on her existence and identity. 

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This week we celebrate International Women’s Day around the world, and the achievements of women through the ages. As part of those celebrations I was invited to speak for a group of senior hospital administrators at a celebratory breakfast for International Women’s Day. This year’s theme was Choose to Challenge - so I looked at how that has driven my journalism and inspired my love and respect for the power of audio storytelling.

Part of my speech talks about my investigation into a pivotal case, which highlighted how Australia’s justice system fails intellectually disabled victims of sexual abuse. If this is triggering for you, you may not want to listen to this episode. But I include it because it’s an important issue in Australian law that still must be addressed. South Australia remains the only state to have changed its Evidence Act, to allow people with an intellectual disability to give evidence with assistance in court. Most cases are dropped, because people with cognitive disabilities are seen by the courts as unreliable witnesses.  

I highlight in this speech how great journalism can create great change.

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Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, is the most remote island on earth, more than 3700 kilometres off the coast of Chile. 

For many people the main thing they know about Rapa Nui is the hundreds of giant stone statues standing up to 20 metres high, looking out over the island.

And while these colossal statues known as Moai are incredible, there is so much more to this remote volcanic island, where the civilisation remained largely untouched by external influence for a thousand years.

Yoyo Tuki comes from a family of storytellers going back generations on the island. He tells me on this episode of Streets of Your Town, how he now divides his time between Australia and Rapa Nui, sharing his music and songwriting with a distinct Rapa Nui flavour not only on our shores, but in music festivals around the world.

Yoyo’s music blends the influence of his sculptor grandfather, whose name Mana Roa means Great Wisdom, with Spanish influences and some of the local Rapa Nui dialect, a Polynesian dialect similar to Tahitian, with some of his more modern compositions in English. 

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How do you come back from devastating defeat? What do you do to recover when you realise something you believed in, is not anything like what you thought it was?

Mel Manley is the owner of The Imperial Hotel at Eumundi, which under her creative guidance has become the main meeting place in this bohemian hamlet in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. 

She is also a great believer in giving back, and so supported the establishment of an orphanage and charity in Nepal, in the hope of giving children there a safe place where they could receive education, good food and were safe from harm.

But years later, after gaining the trust of the children in their care, she discovered those children had living families, and were not in fact orphans. As Mel later realised, this was part of a global trend.

The number of orphanages across the developing world has grown dramatically in recent years. More than 80% of children in these orphanages are NOT orphans at all. Research shows that children are often taken from their families, trafficked into orphanages and used to generate funds, in a form of modern day slavery.

She is now the chief advocate for the charity Forget Me Not, which has reunited 700 orphans from Nepal, Uganda and India with their families, and also supported them for years to readjust to normal life.

Mel tells how she came back from the devastation of realising she had been so cruelly deceived, and how we all can learn to look for the gift in terrible events.”

https://fmn.org.au

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Today on Streets of Your Town podcast, we talk to former Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja about her appointment to a top United Nations...

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Nestled in far north Queensland Wet Tropics rainforest that stretches from the surrounding mountains to the ocean, is the small...

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Many people will remember Senator Jordon Steele-John crying as he read the names of 34 Australians with disabilities who had died from...

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Ten years ago, halfway through completing his medical degree, Dinesh Palipana's car crashed, leaving him a quadriplegic. Dinesh lost...

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