Mid Second Term 2008 Everyone Happy!

The AFL aboriginal week was great.

Our three Tiwi girls starred at the Gabba. they are one two and four on the left, with other Aboriginal kids studying in Toowoomba

The AFL is achieving more than the education system. Three Tiwi kids are playing top level AFL. No Tiwi has made it through School to university.

You can't play top level AFL without dedication, genius and hard work.

Several years back Robert Walls coach of Brisbane would ring the Bathurst Island priest, despairing at getting a sophisticated playing instruction through to a Tiwi kid.

AFL have broken through, after forty years of bringing Tiwi kids down the Education systems have not succeeded.

Downlands enthusiastically welcomes the TAFE initiative for Josetta. If we can get career training underway while a kids is still at school, we will break through the lead ceiling and crack a job that routinely goes to a non Tiwi.

Noel Pearson was talking to Vinnies Kenmore people last week. His message is that the kids have to be encouraged into the elite streams. He described how he only survived through University because he had a Melbourne Jewish Lawyer who believed in him and kept encouraging him to plug on.

We are talking with Christian Brothers Nudgee and Marist Brothers Ashgrove hoping to get other boys started down here next.

If you want to see something of the conditions on the island, see the 4 Corners program Educating Kimberley streamed from the ABC 4 Corners website on: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20080616/kimberly/default.htm

If you are free to help fund this project, go to Vinnie's website: https://www.vinnies.org.au/show_appeal.cfm?table=appeals&parentid=0&id=43