Insight ran an excellent series of interviews with young Aborigines living in Alice Springs last night. The kids opened up and talked about their fights, their drinking, their family problems and their hopes for a better future.

If I have one regret about my book Dragon Bones, it’s that the stories of the Bhutanese people are told in my words, not theirs. It’s now my dream to collect the stories of Aborigines, immigrants and other minority groups in Australia and publish them (in some form) in their own words.

I’ve recently discovered the ‘Sydney Story Factory‘, which looks to be a great way to do that. Thousands of students attend courses and regular tuition on creative writing, with a focus on telling their own stories. All volunteers are screened for working with children so it’s a comfortable environment. Unfortunately, the screenings have always clashed with my other volunteering commitments, so I’m yet to join, but it will happen this year.

Have you ever heard a politician praise the previous government? Adam Giles, NT Transport Minister, gave full credit to his predecessor for ‘the best program the territory government has ever run‘ and vowed to continue it. The program? DriveSafe NT Remote is helping indigenous Australians to get driving licenses. In the Northern Territory, it’s impossible for most people to get around without driving, but few Aborigines have the papers necessary to apply for a driving license, so they don’t bother. They don’t have proper lessons and they have never been tested, but many still drive.

Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be a surprise that on a per capita basis, indigenous deaths are twice as likely as deaths of non-indigenous people in road accidents. This figure alone is enough to show that the society that brought motor vehicles into the country should be make training available for everyone who wishes to use them. But there are side effects that enhance the need. Aborigines who have never had the opportunity for training because they don’t have a birth certificate get sent to gaol for minor traffic offences.

This program, which my employer is taking up for NSW, provides support for indigenous people, helping them get the required paperwork and putting them in touch with volunteer trainers. Check out the facebook page to support them.

Not everyone understands the Australian sense of humour. Sometimes it’s even beyond Australians. Some of my countrymen have complained about the Prime Minister’s recent video declaring that the end of the world is nigh. In one case, a mother of a young autistic man has had to convince her son that the Mayan calendar can’t influence the physical world and the seemingly authoritative video didn’t help. Aside from a few such cases, most Australians love the fact that our leader doesn’t take herself seriously all the time.

Many other cultures, particularly those in which humour is based on word plays or visual misfortune, just don’t get it. Gillard’s video went viral in China, where the reaction was of bafflement that a world leader could believe in the end of the world. When the subtitled version began to circulate, some Chinese accepted the joke (‘oh no, but I haven’t gotten married yet’), but more were horrified that a head of state could be so irresponsible as to push a false message to her people.

I wish that I could explain, in 500 words, why humour doesn’t translate between cultures, but I can’t. Word plays, at least, suffer from homonyms in one language sounding nothing alike in another, and humour based on political or historical context is doomed to fail outside of the original setting. But I never understood why Japanese comedians must perform in pairs or why Asians don’t understand irony. The best I can do, unless you have the time to read a thesis, is to respect Gillard for understanding her own people and to remind the rest of the world that we’re all different.

Last month, the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence launched its own social networking site. The officially named Community of Excellence is known as Black Fella Facebook by its users. Targeted exclusively at young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the site allows youths to share their goals and aspirations and to indicate their support for each other’s posts using a ‘Respect’ button. I really like that the inspiration came from the community and that the Aboriginal youth were consulted in the design process. Who else could design a system to meet the community needs?

I am also impressed to learn that a large non-indigenous organisation like Telstra (through the Telstra Foundation) would commit their resources to developing such a complex tool without, as far as I can tell, trying to influence the design.

I question the NCIE’s statement that this is a new era of digital inclusion, because non-indigenous Australians like me are not invited to join, but this is not a complaint. The service is not designed for me. One day, if it works well, there may be similar respect-based, goal-oriented tools made available for all Australians, but for now, I respect that black fellas want a facebook of their own.

A Japanese exchange student, who joined my school in year 10, kept up with classes by translating unfamiliar words in her electronic translation dictionary. When I saw the same gadget on my first exchange to Japan, I would have bought it if I’d had the money. By the time I went back two years later, you could buy a similar device with multiple dictionaries, and even a calculator, loaded on removable cards. I spent the whole year fighting the urge to buy one.

Soon the idea developed into personal organisers like the Palm Pilot and again I fought the temptation to buy my own. What would I really use it for, once I’d spent the money? I didn’t need a diary or a calculator because I had a computer. Then Apple created the iPhone and soon it seemed that everybody had a smartphone, but still I resisted. I hated being tied to a phone and rarely took my feature-poor mobile out of my bag. Besides, if I was going to live in a developing country a smartphone would be an unnecessary reminder of wealth disparity and I probably wouldn’t have a data connection anyway.

Now that I’ve decided to stay in Australia for a while, I have finally succumbed and I’m loving my Android phone. Fiona teases me for constantly checking facebook, IMDB, movie times, ebay, goodreads and LinkedIn and even more for playing Alchemy and Flow. I even take it with me so I can monitor videoconference equipment when I support meetings at work. My computer is now almost redundant.

So despite my frustration at the turnover of mobile phones (figures say the average usage of a mobile phone is just 18 months), I understand the desire for the latest gadget that puts knowledge in your pocket. I don’t understand, however, why anyone would line up all night to get the latest iPhone. Are these people afraid they’ll miss out if they wait until the following day after work?

One suggestion is that they are app developers and need to have the latest gadget before everyone else to get ahead of the game. Surely that doesn’t account for everyone in the long lines. Unless one of my readers can enlighten me, I may just have to join the line next time to find out for myself.

I was standing in the kitchen of our other Sydney office yesterday, when in came a woman with Downs Syndrome pushing a vacuum cleaner. My boss, who was showing me the facilities, introduced her as Claire and told me that she was the real boss of the site. While we chatted with her, Claire opened the dishwasher to a gush of steam (she had obviously arrived knowing that it would have just finished the cycle) and began stacking away the cups, cutlery and plates. The local staff all greeted her warmly as they came in for a cup of coffee.

I recognised Claire as having Downs because my sister is the same. These days she lives a good life in her own flat in a country town, with carers who come to take her out each day, but she misses doing valued work in the city. Before she moved to join my parents, she was the most efficient clothes hanger in a department store and a much-loved waitress at Vaucluse House Tearooms.

This is all in great contrast to the life of people afflicted with Downs in Sri Lanka. In my whole time there, I only saw one such person. He was a happy young boy whose mother ran the restaurant we were eating at. When I expressed my surprise, she told me that most Sri Lankans were embarrassed by having such children and kept them out of the public eye. She was trying to change that. She wanted the government to provide special schools and facilities for children like hers. Unfortunately, most parents lacked the time or inclination to help her fight – or perhaps they were just too embarrassed.

When I looked for any sign of such support in Sri Lanka, I discovered Diri Daru Piyasa (Special Children’s Unit), which was set up in 2011 near the capital. This seems to me to be a fantastic step forward, but it will likely take many years for similar support to be provided in more remote areas, just as the support for my sister varies by her location.

I rarely go to the butcher these days – I’m guilty of succumbing to the convenience of supermarkets – but last week I wanted to get some quality meat for a hot breakfast. The old lady next to me at the counter was complaining to the butcher that she’d bet on Queensland in the State of Origin, but that NSW had won the match. He commiserated, but quickly responded that he had another tip for her – a horse that had just landed in the country. It struck me as a very Australian moment. Only here would a butcher give betting tips to customers.

I must applaud the NSW government’s new moves to improve education for Aborigines. The biggest mistake the federal government made in the NT Intervention was not consulting Aboriginal elders regarding their plans. Perhaps having learnt from past mistakes, the federal government apparently created the Indigenous Action Plan (probable parent of this NSW effort) following ‘extensive consultation with indigenous leaders.’ While these leaders are unlikely to predict every eventuality of the program in every school selected, they at least should be able to make broad predictions about whether the program will work at all and to identify likely side effects.

That these elders support a program which (as far as I can tell) puts money in a few select White principals’ pockets, inspires me with confidence of positive results.

I also love the flexibility of the approach. Aboriginal people in general can be given education in ways tailored to their needs. But the government takes this even further allowing each school to modify their approach to meet the needs of the local community. Since each school is likely to try different policies and methods, we will see the effect of various techniques, the best of which can then be applied more broadly.

I believe that the chosen schools have a mix of Aboriginal and White students, which may make the work to balance needs more difficult, but it also provides a better environment for testing for issues if the program is deployed more broadly.

While there is a chance that this will just be another failed attempt to improve the situation for our native hosts, the conditions under which the program is being run suggest a better chance of success than previous initiatives.

In 2009 I set myself 4 goals as steps towards a future of providing assistance on locally driven aid projects in developing countries. In their original form, those goals were:

1. Publish a book on Bhutanese culture
2. Complete a Masters in anthropology
3. Buy a studio flat in Australia
4. Invest the rest of my savings to create a modest passive income

I imagined a life as I’d had in Bhutan, where I kept myself entertained with a mix of my own projects and helping develop local talent. In this future, I would collect stories of living and working with locals to tell as part of my mission of building cultural tolerance. As often happens in life, both the goals and vision changed along the way.

Studio flats were more expensive than I had expected and my savings didn’t stretch as far as I had planned, so I ended up buying a one bedroom flat to rent out on a weekly basis. I could then reserve it myself for the times that I returned home. All my CDs and precious items would be accessable from local storage.

But the most important feature of my goals was the flexibility they gave me. I could combine IT, anthropology and writing as appropriate to help local projects. I could focus on writing or on personal involvement in tolerance building activities. Or I could simply enjoy travelling.

Sri Lanka was recognition of my achievement of these goals and a chance to reflect on my priorities. Now I’ve finished my 6 weeks of teaching IT to children from poor families, I know that I want to share my time with someone. So, I’m exercising that flexibility by heading back to Australia to build a life with a special woman. This will require me to go back to income-producing work and it will undoubtedly mean an increase in my materialist desires – smart phone, new speakers.

It doesn’t mean that I’ve put aside my dreams of travel or of writing about culture to build tolerance. I still have a number of posts to write about Sri Lanka and programs like Projects Abroad will provide a good opportunity for quickly immersing myself in local cultures while living permanently in Australia. I also hope to become involved with the Aboriginal community in Sydney and to better understand their struggle to maintain their own culture while fitting into modern Australia. I hope you will follow me into this new future.

Councils around Sydney have been making great progress in developing safe paths for cyclists and are now even advertising them before movies at the cinema. I’ve personally been delighted by the networks, which allow me to get around or just to get outside for some exercise.

The cycleway alongside the M2 has been rerouted due to long-term roadwork, but the temporary signage doesn’t meet the quality I’ve come to expect. Oddly, the signs indicating the detour have been placed halfway along roads rather than at intersections. The result, when I tried to follow the new path, reminds me of a game I used to play in my teens.

The idea of Chalk Chasings was for the leaders to get out and back to base before the hunters (who departed 5 minutes later), but they had to mark their trail clearly with chalk. In order to throw the pack of the scent, the leaders would place X markers partway down a wrong turn, but often only visible once you turned back the way you’d come. You might not know you’d taken the wrong turn until you’d already gone a few hundred metres in the wrong direction. Similarly, you might not know you were on the right track until you were almost ready to turn back.

I don’t know why the RTA has chosen such a frustrating system of signs, but I’m glad for the memories they have given me.