Thankyou regional Australia community partnerships program
Most of my life I lived in Tamworth. The community spirit was always something I loved and valued. When our youngest son Dan was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010 the community supported us.
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When we began a campaign to legalise medicinal cannabis in 2014 Tamworth supported us and helped bring the issue to national attention which ultimately changed the law in Australia.
Twelve months ago my family relocated to Queensland to all be close to each other but the Tamworth community has continued to support the charity I began in 2014 with Dan. Through United in Compassion I have continued to lobby for better patient access and provided education to improve acceptance and prescribing of medicinal cannabis.
The Tamworth community has continued to support this work through the Community Donations Program at the Regional Australia Bank. 2021 has been a particularly hard year with our symposium cancelled due to the Covid Pandemic and then we were the victim of fraud which resulted in a considerable financial loss, so the recent news of a donation was very welcome.
I am now planning for a three-day symposium at the Sunshine Coast in 2021. I would like to thank Tamworth and the RAB very much for the continued support which helps Dan's legacy live on.
Lucy Haslam, Flaxton
United in Compassion Ltd
'Identity is everything'
In agreeing that Identity is Everything (Jacinta Dickens Nov 28 2020), I'd offer my own much valued (by me) identity, Australian by birth, Scottish and Irish by short-term ancestry, English by political tradition, though politically more American than Australian now thanks to my dear Twitter friends, Australian Aboriginal by personal and cultural association, Nepalese and English by sheer personal enchantment, French by national affection and second language, Tamworthian by pub singing and Oxley Vale by residence, Nowegian by friendly and intellectual companionship, African, like all humans, our first identity, which I always take back to little Lucy at Olduvai 1.8 million years ago, and I never swim without recalling my very early marine ancestry going back 400 million years, as evidence. Doesn't the water sometimes feel like our true home? Of my second fractional race, Neanderthal, I don't know my genetics. (Hey, I heard that!)
But identity can prompt caution. That singular identity, which combines only birthplace and its national culture, can be a two-edged sword. Anything like "Chinese" or "Scottish" or "Australian Aboriginal" applied indiscriminately to various people has problems which only start with appearance or accent being so often deceptive.
All such labels are stereotypy. No matter how many thousands of people I call by the same one of those names, or how many billions in the Chinese case, no two of those people are ever actually the same. Every "Chinese", to continue that example, all 1.4 billion, has an individual identity much more powerful than their Chinese identity.
I'll assert that even though China has been totalitarian communist since mid-last century. Indeed, far from doubting the greater power of individual identity, it is more tempting to ask whether "Chinese" etc mean anything, except maybe physical features I commonly misidentify anyway, or the even more ludicrous definition, again for Chinese, of the folk who run the restaurants I frequent in Sydney's Chinatown, or would frequent if I can ever get back to the Maze Backpackers.
Multiculturalism is of course our democratic present and our transitional future. The most confusing thing about it is how the advocates of universal humanity and community imagine we're going to get there except via multiculturalism. We can all have the single identity of "human", "citizen", without losing any culture. Culture's human.
The danger is that while identity labels can be just a celebration of cultural diversity, there are unfortunately folk who seek to use them as instruments of separatism, demoralising oppression, division, and the conflict that serves their purposes.
I mean identity politics. As soon as one of those labels is applied to your group, the potential, though not the necessity, is there for people to define your interest as identifiable only with your group as distinct from the rest of society, with whom they may seek to place you in a competitive, and then hostile, relationship, especially with an allegedly oppressive mainstream.
My suggestion is, watch them carefully. They may want your following, your group following, the moral self-upliftment that comes from patronising you, the leadership jobs, such as that your following will provide, and your vote.
Stan Heuston, Oxley Vale
Who's the turkey now
I saw a photo of the recent Whitehouse ceremony where a turkey was pardoned. It was a bit confusing as the photo wasn't labeled but I know there was a turkey who was a winner and one that was a loser.
A photo is truly worth a thousand words.
Dennis Fitzgerald, Melbourne