The Northern Territory’s Traditional Credit Union has taken out a $10,000 award from Reconciliation Australia for good management practice.
The Indigenous-run banking organisation runs 11 branches in Top End remote communities who hold an estimated $10 million in deposits.
The future of the community store in the Aboriginal community of Beswick, east of Katherine, is in doubt, with reports suggesting it’s insolvent.
The vice-chairwoman of the store committee, Miliwanga Sandy, says the shop has been deemed insolvent, and that means quarantined welfare payments can’t be spent there.
Double Trouble launched last week and rated better than the Olympics, the story, Double Trouble revolves around twins separated at birth.
Double Trouble is a thirteen by half hour children’s television drama series, produced by CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, an Alice Springs, central Australian-based production company.
The show is a lighthearted comedy drama about long separated twins meeting up and switching places. The story’s of a kind familiar to viewers who remember The Parent Trap and a host of other ‘twins’ shows, here given a refreshing twist by the contrast of central Australian Indigenous community lifestyles with life in the big city of Sydney.
‘Double Trouble’ is a very common term for twins. Everybody uses it. Some people talk about double the pleasure, a lot more talk about double the trouble when twins hover into view.
So it seemed the only appropriate title for a show about twins. An old theme, here given an amusing and fresh variation that takes us from the heart of the bush to the big smoke, from Alice Springs to Sydney.
Kids are fascinated by twins. The idea of having a double. Another half. They fantasise about the possibilities and dream of it maybe coming true. Maybe they have a secret twin somewhere.
Twins have their own peculiarities. Twins are special. Twins look alike. Twins think alike. Twins know what the other is thinking. Even if they’re separated, they share an invisible bond, and that connection is at the heart of Double Trouble.
This series is a fast moving comedy drama, loaded with complicated situations and ever changing panics, improbabilities and problems to be solved. It has plenty of bush scenes, plenty of city life, some bush tucker, some painting, some dancing, modern and traditional, some football, and two families bemused by the strange ways of the swapped twins who’ve landed in their new homes.
It’s also a story of different cultures. The white and the black. The city and the bush. Traditional ways of life and modern day thinking. It’s a chance to explore Aboriginal culture without it being a tourist oddity. It is about people living their lives. It is about being exposed to a new and very different culture and having to cope.
In the show, the twins, separated at birth to circumvent an old tradition, one day find themselves face to face and that meeting changes many lives. Kyanna lives on a community in the central Australian desert with her Indigenous mother and extended family.
Yuma has been brought up in the city with her well-off white father, stepmother and stepbrother. When the twins accidentally meet in Alice Springs, they not only find they have another half; they find they have another parent they didn’t know about. And that’s when the fun really starts…
On impulse, the twins decide to swap places for a night. But things go wrong. Yuma finds herself marooned in an Aboriginal community, surrounded by strangers with none of the luxuries to which she is accustomed. Kyanna is taken to the city, a frightening and alienating place, with none of the family and social support with which she’s normally surrounded.
They both discover their new families. But they learn that they cannot reveal the truth of who they are. Each has to pretend to be the other. And when you are living in a strange new culture, that isn’t easy.
Can Yuma and Kyanna find a way to return to their homes before their secret is found out? Can their lives ever be the same again? Would they want them to?
Double Trouble has fun with the idea of twins, separated at birth, who conspire to swap places and experience their wildly different lifestyles. Double Trouble: double the fun, double the adventures, double the trouble…
Double Trouble has been financed by the Network Nine, the Disney Channel, the Film Finance Corporation Australia, the NSW Film and Television Office and the Northern Territory Government via the Northern Territory Film Office, and is distributed by the Australian Children’s Television Foundation.
Double Trouble the indigenous written and produced kids television program has beaten all comers on its first showing on its National T V debut.
a) Double Trouble beat the Olympics in Sydney
b) It also beat Video Hits in every city apart from Melbourne
c) 228,000 households watched the show
Starring aboriginal twins from the Riverland in SA, Cassandra and Christine Glenn and a cast of Australia’s premier indigenous actors ,Doubl e Trouble is the story of sisters sepatated at birth for cultural reasons, reunited by chance and then switching lives to experience two separate worlds in the outback and the city. You can catch all the fun, drama and excitement on Channel 9 nationally ,Saturday mornings, check your local tv guides .
A Northern Territory Aboriginal Corporation says the head of the East Arnhem Shire was involved in the removal of its computer system.
The executive officer of the Rirratjingu Aboriginal Corporation, John Hofmeyer, says the computer system contains private financial information and was removed last Friday night.
The Australian Indigenous Doctors Association (AIDA) says the federal intervention has had a negative effect on the health and emotional wellbeing of people in the targeted communities.
The assessment came in a submission to the Northern Territory emergency response review board.
Premier Alan Carpenter has been accused of failing to consider the impact on native title holders of his proposal to legislate to ban uranium mining.
Mr Carpenter says he will introduce legislation banning uranium mining in Western Australia if he is re-elected.
The federal Human Services Minister says more than three-quarters of welfare recipients in prescribed areas of the Northern Territory are now having half of their payments quarantined.
The measure was one of the most controversial to be rolled out under the Commonwealth intervention, which was launched in response to a report on child abuse in the NT’s Aboriginal communities.
Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson says the Federal Government’s plan to strip Centrelink payments from parents whose children skip school is tougher than the welfare trials currently underway in Queensland.
Legislation is before Federal Parliament to freeze welfare payments to parents for three months if their children are frequent truants.
The general manager of the APY Lands Board, Ken Newman, says miners angry about new legislation to be imposed on them should leave.
Miners in Mintabie, in South Australia’s far north, have described further proposed restrictions on alcohol consumption and police checks for anyone travelling to Mintabie as a breach of their civil liberties.
Video news from : CAAMA Radio Online News