From the desk of the Managing Director in July 2008

Dear friends,

ALICE SPRINGS DECLARATION

Last month 27 talented Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal teachers and students completed a 15-month national project co-sponsored by DKCRC and the Curriculum Corporation to develop national technacy and innovation talent in students.

The project culminated in ‘The Alice Springs Declaration’ which affirms:

We will foster and advocate technacy and innovation capability across curriculum and in teaching practice, in the interest of our common sustainable future.
We also acknowledge inspiration from desert people's ingenuity and the relationship between people, technologies and our environments that as a system offers both sources for innovations as well as challenges for assuring intergenerational fairness.

Coordinator Dr Kurt Seemann says the group considers that the ability of young Australians to wield technology – technacy – will be as vital to them as literacy and numeracy were to Australians who grew up in the 20th century. It was inspired by desert ways of thinking, and in particular by Aboriginal thinking, about technology and how best to use it.

CANADA

Last month I visited Canada to attend an international conference on regional and remote economies in Inuvik, a town in the icy far North West. Here are extracts from my travel diary:

We’ve been in the Arctic Circle for three days - it is amazing! To be where the sun does not set is really an experience. You wake up having no idea what time it is. You also realise all the decisions you make around the sun rising.

The town of Inuvik is rather like Coober Pedy and its population is comparable to Alice Springs in terms of the population mix.

We were privileged to visit several very remote settlements where the winter freeze had just thawed and they were fishing for the first time. We visited traditional dwellings and spoke to the local council about their experiences with mining companies.

We Aussies were very genuinely welcomed. We have met a number of young people who are headed to Australia. There have been some very good connections made and some people may well come to the DKCRC symposium in November.

VALUING ABORIGINAL KNOWLEDGE

The deep knowledge that many Aboriginal Australians have of country, their sense of community, and their creativity should form the basis for a future Aboriginal knowledge economy. That was part of my message to the international conference on remote and regional economies in Inuvik, Canada. I said it was time our Aboriginal knowledge was respected and valued for its significance – not only to a sustainable society in Australia in the future, but also its potential global contribution.

Knowledge is today the world’s most valuable traded good, worth an estimated US$5 trillion. Most countries talk of developing their knowledge economies in fields such as IT or biomedicine.

Aboriginal knowledge too has value, sometimes in very special ways – such as the sense of community, or a spiritual attachment to country; and sometimes in very practical ways – such as knowing what grows and lives in the desert and how the desert works. Our goal is to assist in developing an Aboriginal knowledge economy that will support Aboriginal people and their communities into the future.

RANGELANDS CONGRESS

Four members of the DKCRC team, Board member John Taylor, General manager Craig James, and core project leaders Jocelyn Davies and Andy Bubb, attended the first joint meeting of the International Rangelands and International Grasslands Societies meeting in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, along with 2000 other delegates. The researchers presented papers on the ‘dawning era of “precision pastoralism” management’, Aboriginal livelihoods and WaterSmart Pastoralism™. More information can be found at: http://www.igc-irc2008.org/

SUCCESS FACTORS

Warmest congratulations to Mara West, DKCRC's first supported Aboriginal postgraduate student to complete her studies. Mara did her Honours at Murdoch University with Dr Martin Anda. Her thesis 'Making families and communities strong through small business' received an outstanding report from the examiners. In it she looked at the success factors for small remote Aboriginal businesses and what help they received from governments. She concluded that not a lot has changed in the last 10 years with regards to the latter.

CURTIN CALL

I’m delighted to announce that Dr Kurt Seemann, core project leader for Sustainable Desert Settlements, has been appointed an Adjunct Associate Professor at Curtin University of Technology. He will work with Professor Peter Newman in the sustainability group.

ABORIGINAL ICT

DKCRC invites Aboriginal people to take part in a survey on their use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, the internet, email, mobile phones and other electronic communication devices.

This survey is being run through Curtin University of Technology and DKCRC as part of Guy Singleton’s PhD research. It seeks to identify how ICT can be of meaningful use to Aboriginal people and communities.

The results will provide valuable information on which types of ICT work in desert Australia, which do not, and what needs to change for the technology to be more useful. To take part in the survey go to the following web link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Es2pjEzRkH_2fIEo_2b_2fCUxC0g_3d_3d 

END OF YEAR REPORTS DUE

For those with responsibility for DKCRC end-of-year reporting, please send in your reports as soon as possible. We are trying to get this process wrapped up as quickly as possible so we can focus on our rebid.

We appreciate your support as it is very important to our relationship with the CRC program and the Federal Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.

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