The Gypsum Palace Inn
Ivanhoe, New South Wales
The Thoroughbred Rehabilitation Program is one of several animal programs which have vocational and training components for inmates in NSW correctional centres. At the core of all of these programs is the engagement of Corrective Services NSW with community organisations to bring tangible benefits to the public of NSW.
All inmates selected for participation in any of these programs are under the supervision of correctional officers who also have access to training and development opportunities related to animal studies.
The Man in Black
Folsom Prison, 11 February 1968
The Ivanhoe (Warakirri) Correctional Centre, an Australian minimum security prison for males, is located in Ivanhoe, New South Wales. The centre is operated by Corrective Services NSW an agency of the Department of Attorney General and Justice of the Government of New South Wales. The centre detains sentenced and unsentenced felons under New South Wales and/or Commonwealth legislation.
The majority of inmates are Aboriginal. The centre detains up to 55 prisoners who perform cleaning and maintenance tasks, as well as participating in community projects and the mobile outreach program. Inmates may also undertake education programs, including numeracy and literacy, and self-awareness and alcohol- and substance-abuse management programs.
Brown Planet a Collaboration quiltmakers: Norma Schlager & Kathy Loomis
of Danbury, Connecticutimage credit
Following extracts from "Being and Belonging" by Lynn Miller, January 2006
According to Aboriginal cosmogenic storylines, sometime in the distant and indeterminable past Beings traversed the earth along certain routes, tracks or 'strings' instituting the landscape and the flora and fauna related to it.
These Beings, while generally conceived as human in shape, were not bound by the substantial constraints of the life forms which they generated. By their interaction with the Earth and each other, the shape of the physical world was defined and the enduring features of the landscape created.
Dreaming Beings can be conceptualised as 'stimulators and instigators', designing and defining enduring cosmic shapes, places and connections. As Maddock states, the Aboriginal theory of coming into being is one concerning the 'definition of space and time, not of creation out of nothing'.
Sunrise on the Scrub
Road between Wilcannia and Ivanhoe NSW, 2009.
Photographer: Arthur Mostead
Landscape is central to Aboriginal identity and belonging. The process of shaping landscape is integral to the becoming of Aboriginal reality. The Aboriginal metaphysical system holds that all things are shaped or instituted by the Beings of the creative epoch using the process of self-objectification. The methods of self-objectification employed by the Dreaming Beings ensure that landscape, once shaped, remains a vital force in determining Aboriginal being. Munn describes this process in terms of ‘subject object transformation’, maintaining that three types of transformations are prominent:
1) Metamorphosis (the body of the ancestor is changed into some material object);
2) Imprinting (the ancestor leaves the impression of its body or of some tool it uses); and
3) Externalisation (the ancestor takes some object out of his body.)
Of the three the first two are the most common modes.
Jim & Prue Graham,
"Karinya" near Ivanhoe, 2008
At the end of the creative epoch, when the infrastructural work had been done and the Aboriginal world embodied, the Dreaming Beings did not die or disembody, but instead, for the last time, metamorphosed or ‘went into’ the landscape which they had previously shaped. Some became what western thought conceptualises as inanimate objects, such as rocks, mountains or streambeds, waterholes or celestial bodies.
Some transformed directly into plants or animals. In this way the object becomes eternally
bonded to the subject and permanently identified with it. These objects, places or species
are henceforth bestowed with sacred significance. The places at which the Dreaming Beings ‘went in’ and stayed hold the key to Aboriginal understandings and experience of the nature of reality.
Santa in the Desert, NSW
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