Our Last Arts grant Application at the Australia Council, asking $20,000 to produce puppet show about coral reef wonders 1988. It took 3months to fill. Education and arts means learning about the Natural World and it’s intersection with us. We listen to the ABCRadio Nation Science Show every Saturday at midday so we were well informed on the latest news about carbon pollution causing global warming 25 years ago. It was rejected. It was our last gasp in puppetry after 30 yrs. The PM had $440million up his sleeve for his mates projects. Apart from the corosion in governance and the institutions like the CSIRO it went to a NGO packed with CEO’s who we know could have dug deep in their own pockets. Nature and Kids come first – ban Coal.
Foam rubber puppet making workshop with Master Puppeteer Roy McNeill (with New Zealand Puppet Theatre 1990)
Australian Citizenship but did I renounce my British citizenship? I can’t remember….
If your ancestors were dispossessed, slaughtered and had their land and their children stolen, would you celebrate the date on which that all began?#changethedate
Another Australia Day 26th January long weekend. It was the arrival of the First Fleet of British convicts. 200+ years later I discover my ancient rights and liberties are thwarted by the Tories of today,(LNP) a legacy of Westminster’s punitive policy against the disadvantaged.
Westminster rejected her base born, poverty stricken and protesting peasantry to the land Captain James Cooke had reported on in his scientific mission of 1770.
JANUARY 2018 – 30 YEARS since my arrival as a teenager in 1978. The Ministers of the Commonwealth have as much disregard and resistance to redistribution of that Commonwealth to the poorest and sickest of it’s citizens, whilst declaring Jesus as their guiding Light!
You always know you’re in for a kicking when the politicians come out and reckon all dole recipients are bludgers and fraudsters. Nothing to do with the nuances of the individual or the economic failures of their policies.
Transfering the poor buggers to a lesser payment whilst they get a pay rise! The Audacity! Hang on isn’t this a worker’s Paradise? State and Citizen partners in the Commonwealth. A safety-net to stop anybody becoming destitute?
The News is, Australia has become more unequal by the incompetency and greedy self-interest of those with power and influence.
One hundred years ago women met with State resistance for their right to vote and today I am punished for needing the safety net of a disability support pension: There must be many pensioners who have elderly or dying parents in their birth countries who they wish to visit – in the time that is needed, including funerals, but if I leave Australia, I will be paid for up to 28 days from the date I leave. I’m stunned really, my sense of autonomy as a 55year old Australian has been challenged:
If I’m still overseas after 28 days, payment stops.
Consider this my Parliamentary representatives: It would be fairer to consider it like a 3 months Long Service Leave for contributing to the culture, giving birth and creating daughters and now grandsons for the country!
My parents are in their end years and disabled by various health conditions. I could reasonably expect to be called to either of their funerals anytime. I have to be ready to return to my mother-land, like the First Peoples inner calling to Country.
I’m looking for my Australian Citizenship certificate so I can apply for a new Australian passport. I must prove I am a BRITISH BORN AUSTRALIAN – NOT UNDER SCRUTINY FOR MY DUAL LOYALTIES…..like our Parliamentary representatives!
I’ve been asked a handful of times if I would consider nominating for local government or Parliament. Like many British born emigrants being Australian sometimes I feel like a motherless child or like having a left-over limb of your British Empire roast…
It’s inherited from your culture. It was common for family members or neighbours to go and live in Australia. Sometimes they went back like my mother and step-father.
We nearly emigrated in 1970, but my Dad pulled out the day before the Ship was booked. He couldn’t leave not sure of seeing his Mum and Dad, or the town of Selly Oak, he knew so well.
New South Wales was a potential Life-sentence!
It took mum a second marriage to return to the land of Oz. The first time had been torturous being kidnapped by a scheme set up to empty the orphanages after the war. Unfortunately, after 10years her husband wanted to go back ‘home’, even though they had been better off economically i.e. good wages and conditions for their skills and experience in Birmingham, ‘the workshop of the world’!
My sisters and I knew which side of our sliced bread was buttered. Melbourne was our home Port, School and Work, but Mum was the holder of an invisible boomerang: kidnapped by Minister of Emigration for a white (Catholic) Australia in 1950, she returned at the request of a recently married Mother she had been told by the Sisters of Mercy was Dead.
Birmingham Registry Office
There are many of us creating paper-work for the Public Servants gathering evidence of our Australian citizenship, but whereas Mum was punished by the British Government for being “illegitimate” I’m being punished for a chronic bi-polar/mental illness and the tyranny of distance!
Apology to the Child Migrants like my Mum, an event at Qld Parliament.
Held hostage to this Government’s policy.
I was spoon-fed a deep connection to Australia via my mother’s memories when she was transported to New South Wales, as a child migrant from the overwhelmed Orphanages in 1950.
A funny thing happened on my belated honeymoon to former pom, Yorkshire born Roy. It was 1984 at Denpasar Airport, Bali. An officer said we didn’t have a re-entry Visa so wouldn’t be able to get back into Australia!
But we ‘re Australians. We live there! My baby is going to be born at the Queen Vic birth centre in 4 months!
The advice was to go to the Australian Embassy as soon as we settled into our hotel. A kindly official informed us she would issue a temporary visa but we would need an Australian passport with Australian Citizenship even if we had emigrated in 1964 and 1978 on a family passport.
The travel agent hadn’t told us we could be deported. Nobody told us we could be put in a detention centre, deported back to that cramped, grey Thatcherite, brittle society.
The Black Shirts of P.M. Abbott’s Border Force has come to pass, and his comrade Dutton, a Minister of Home Affairs resonating in black and white ideology.
Australian Citizenship but did I renounce my British citizenship? I can’t remember….
In my Dream, an Irish ancestor CATHERINE MURPHY told me,
THE ANSWER, IS AN AUSTRALIAN REPUBLIC – A NEW ANTHEM, NEW FLAG. I see it blowing in the wind… AND I added, Turn a new leaf on the recycled paper to compliment the Commonwealth with a Bill/Charter of Rights…
Inscribe into the social safety net section, every person has the right to not be devalued by Parliamentarians.
Make the young people proud like they are in the Irish Republic, guiding the Australian tourists with Irish roots around the old Oppressor’s administration, Dublin Castle; and this is a portrait of our elected President….
In one night the solution rung true, to rescue our social democracy for our grandchildren’s fulfilment of their dreams – A decent income for your labours in a dream home with a pool in a sunny climate, and enough spare to use your 12 weeks long service leave to visit family and friends stuck in the Mother Country. It’s a basic desire. Natural to a migrant nation. Insc
Revised (c)copyright JMcNeill 2018 all rights reserved
7am Lajamanu kids knock on the door. Here’s Albert.
Before school at our place.
While the Elder women hunt Goanna we sit in shade.
Imagine what we could make this milk carton into.
collected rubbish then made into puppets.
Lajamanu girls give me my skin name, Nungarrawye 1989
Turmite Mount, Tanamai Desert
6am Sunday – ABC Radio National – is part of my daily Bread….GOD FORBID
Today is the beginning of NAIDOC week, celebrating National Aborigines and Islanders NAIDOC week
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At the fore of my consciousness is our family’s tour of the Northern Territory to present husband Roy’s puppet show and puppet-making workshops.
JABIRU SCHOOL learn why “Scraps” the backyard duck is a great recycler in MANY HAPPY RETURNS 1989
Real Fantasy Theatre, formerly Jika Jika Puppets was founded by Roy McNeill in 1981 North Fitzroy, Victoria. Touring was a big part of life as Puppeteers and so it became for our pre-school daughters and Spot the dog.
One tour stands out; a Northern Territory trip including a 2 week residency at Lajamanu Primary School in June 1989.
To: Politicians of Local, State and Federal Governments
BABIES DEMAND SOLAR FEEDS
JM
Campaign created by
Julie McNeill
Origin energy bill is halved by solar hot water and energy panels, and energy conservation mindfulness.
A native timber dry rainforest on 1.5 acres my husband planted and mulched over 20 years.
ENDANGERED SPECIES
Be Honourable M.P.s. What do our babies need to nurture them? A Climate change not above another 1.5 degrees! Global Seas are increasing in warmth, and there are too many naysayers being believed.
For our kids, please Leave Coal in the Ground. The Future is Now with Renewable energy…
Families could thrive below global 2 degrees rise. Protect us. Plant native Trees! Plant Blue gum for the Koalas now!
Save animals in our picture books from extinction. Protect the ecology of land and ocean. Don’t sacrifice our well-being to amoral coal capitalism. Save our Souls from destructive storms and acid seas.
Why is this important?
All our Aussie babies have a Right to develop in a natural environment where wonder and curiosity of life is not destroyed by man-made carbon pollution but harnessing and storing the Sun.
Babies require people to provide a safe place to live, for our Parliamentarians to be ecological public servants for the Commonwealth. Be Honourable!
How it will be delivered
via my Parliamentary Representative, Shayne Neumann MP for Blair(ALP)
Happy Birthday Catherine Willett, my grandson’s 3rd great grandmother. 1st generation born Glengallen Station, Allora nr Warwick, Queensland, Australia – August, 1871.
1876, born at Glengallen Station, daughter of the Stockman, George Willett.
I’ve discovered a branch of my daughter’s ‘ in-laws’ ancestry comes from a long line of labouring, farming stock of Buckinghamshire, England. They were the white foundation Colonialists dreaming of landing a prosperity unobtainable in the Mother country.
Queensland was New South Wales until 1859. Federation of the Commonwealth at the beginning of Queensland’s white history. When Catherine was born on Glengallen Station the big house was being built with the profits of merino wool.
Bounded in the north by the Bunya Mountains, in the east by the Great Dividing Range and in the west by the Condamine River, the Darling Downs area had been home for thousands of years to the Keinjan, Giabal, Jarowair and Barunggam Aboriginal people, who practiced a burning season to manage the grasses of the plains.
The first European to sight the Darling Downs was explorer and botanist Allan Cunningham in 1827, who named the district after Sir Ralph Darling, Governor of New South Wales. He had his first view of the country from the top of the range on 5th June 1827.
ENGLISH ROOTS: BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, ENGLAND. Catherine’s father was GEORGE WILLETT who was 8 YEARS of age when his family boarded the St. Vincent at Deptford dock, London in 1844.
Children were charged 9shillings one way and adults 12shillings. Agricultural labourers were the desired types to develop the black soil of SE Queensland, then part of the colony of New South Wales.
St. Vincent tea clipper sails from Liverpool, Greenock to Sydney.
Opportunity to Learn & Grow & Prosper free from England’s class system.
James Larfield weds Catherine Willett. They farm FAIRVIEW selection in Allora, Warwick, producing 14 children.
CATHERINE’S mother MARGARET DOBBINS came to the Darling Downs via County Armagh, Northern Ireland(Protestant). Survivor of the Potato Famine, and the Voyage to New South Wales. She came as a single female aboard the famous Tea Clipper, CAIRNGORM.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST IN ALL POLICIES!
