Day 8 Monday, August 15 Engaging Communities Conference, Brisbane
Crisis averted! I finally got a call through to the woman in Sydney who had arranged my pre conference tour and she was able to come up with a good looking tour for me beginning Thursday. I have to call her back to confirm it but that should just be a formality. I am tentatively scheduled to travel to Noosa by bus on Thursday, go to the Australia Zoo on Friday, transfer to Fraser Island (the largest sand island in the world) on Saturday, do a full day tour of Fraser Island on Sunday, go fishing on Monday and return to Brisbane on Tuesday. I don't have anything scheduled for the Wednesday other than to pack for the flights to Vancouver on Thursday.
I was also able to finally find the local dial up number to get access to the internet from my hotel room but now I can't seem to make a connection. The technical support people told me that my account may not allow international roaming. What next?! Now I will have to call the technical support people again to find out what I have to do to enable that. If I have to call Canada to do it I will just give up and continue to limp along as I have been. Ridiculous in this day and age. I tried to use one of the computers at the conference but couldn't get it to work either (not to mention that it didn't have a slot where I could insert my floppy disk to transfer the files I had written). Must be internet jinxed on this trip.
The conference day was once again a mixture of good and bad speakers. I am still waiting for an outstanding one although a couple today came fairly close. The aboriginal entertainment was very good. They explained a bit about each dance prior to performing it and even I was able to see some relevance in the dance. There was also an excellent didgeridoo exhibition. It is amazing to me what they can do with those instruments.
I think that I made reference the other day to the term "civil society". It came up a number of times again today so I decided that I should try and find out just what it means. I asked three people including one of the panel members from the workshop where it was used frequently. Not one person (so far) has any idea what it means. I hoped to ask the question to the whole group but there was not an opportunity for questions. I shall continue to pursue the elusive definition. It seems almost always to be used in conjunction with Non Government Organizations and other organizations but as a separate entity.
The panel member above really struck chords with me in his presentation so I sought him out and had a twenty minute talk with him. He works for an aboriginal land title organization and is aboriginal. We found that we agreed on every aspect we discussed and I was able to relate a similar NWT experience for every Australian one he mentioned. Perhaps we agreed too much because we were mostly being pessimistic and cynical about government rather than exploring possible solutions. I wish I had a few hours to spend with him.
I don't propose to review the conference in detail in these pages but will do so in more depth later on when I have time to go over my notes and the loads of paper I am accumulating (some of which I may well discard when packing my suitcases). I also anticipate receiving a conference report at some stage and trust that it will include copies of some of the key note addresses. The former president of Ireland (Mary Robinson) made a very good speech as did the Foreign Minister from Timor-Leste and a gentleman discussing electronic democracy. I found the latter particularly interesting.
One observation I would make is that the conference so far is liberally laced with jargon and a healthy dose of politics at many levels. The people from the United Nations come across as extremely bureaucratic of the worst order and unable to utter a sentence without a raft of jargon. So far I haven't been able to relate to any of them. In general they are all horrible speakers and only read their prepared statements, most of which have to do with internal workings of the UN. They may be "good" at talking the talk but I don't see much evidence of them walking the walk. The UN seems to me to be as bad or worse than any government bureaucracy I have ever encountered. Lofty goals and objectives to be sure but.....
I spent most of the day in a UN workshop entitled "Engaging Indigenous People". For the reasons stated above I didn't find it all that interesting or engaging. In the one breakout session the group I was in didn't accomplish much in my opinion because the facilitator seemed intent on getting our report ready in a superficial fashion, the recorder didn't seem to "get it" and another guy took over, wrote his own version and presented it as the group report. Our group report struck me as a bunch of "pap". There was one aboriginal person in the group with whom I would like to have further conversations if I come across him again. Perhaps I will look around and try to sit with him (or the above mentioned panel member) at the conference dinner.
Lunch at the conference was sandwiches of two different and unidentified types of meat and a salad plus cheese and crackers. For supper I finished the spare ribs and mashed potatoes that I didn't finish in Cairns on Saturday night. Tomorrow night is the conference dinner if I decide to go and since I hauled my suit all this way I suppose I should go. On Wednesday I will probably go to a restaurant rather than go shopping for the sake of one night. I put some laundry in this morning but as of 6:30 when I got back to the hotel it had not yet been delivered. Luckily there is nothing there that I need for tomorrow.